Intro to Pride Month: gender identity

This is something I have had in mind to do for a long time: going through and exploring my gender identity, my sexual orientation, and my sexuality, terms that get conflated a lot.

The necessary spoiler alert is that I remain CIS, straight, and chaste. Nothing is going to be that exciting. It may still be valuable.

The seeds of the idea were planted long ago by pop culture journalist Brett White talking about connecting with his masculinity as a gay man. There were visions of masculinity that did not work, but there were others that did. Bob Newhart became an influence for him.

My underlying theme throughout all of this is going to be that we need to quit dictating how others should act. So, if a gay man wants to be understated rather than flamboyant, that should be allowed. (I mean, being gay is sexual orientation, not gender, and not personality.)

I have not been particularly feminine in many ways.

There were two frustrations (at least) for my mother when I was a child. One was that I had very thick, hard to manage hair. I also underwent a change at around 5 or 6 where I only ever wanted to wear jeans.

It was specifically my introduction to denim. Previously every pair of pants that I had was scratchy polyester, so I only wanted to wear skirts. Mom preferred skirts, so she related to this. 

Jeans felt great, and then that was all I wanted. (Variety in dress has never been a big deal for me.)

One vivid memory is Mom getting my hair cut into a pixie cut, which was much easier to comb, but between that and the jeans I was mistaken for a little boy and mortified.

I still cut my hair short many times in the future, but that was always that was always more of a practical thing. I always hated what salons did, and started cutting my own hair. When you can't really see the back... anyway, once I started it usually just ended up short. Now my hair has its own preferred length, I like wearing it in a ponytail, and that's just how it goes.

I also generally can't stand wearing makeup. I guess it's a texture thing, but I feel it on me and don't like it.

So that feels like a lot of the hallmarks of femininity are things that I ended up ignoring for various reasons, not really playing around with appearance and prettiness. There is a darker side to that.

I did completely buy that girls were supposed to be pretty and attractive; that we owed that to the world.

Learning early on that I was fat and therefore undesirable, the way I survived that was separating myself from it. Someday I would lose weight and then everything would be all right, but until then, just keep your head down. (I have used that strategy in other areas.)

Yes, I would periodically try and fail to lose weight. Yes, sometimes there would be some kind of event and I would try shopping for something nice, and those were the moments when I was most filled with despair. 

Did I get into that "I'm not like other girls" mindset? I don't think so. I knew a lot of girls who were really mean, but I also had good friends of varying levels of attractiveness. I mean, I knew we weren't a monolith, and it wasn't just me who had this problem, but it didn't quite free me from believing that as a girl I should be attractive and this was a painful failure.

Looking at all of that, it seems like I could have had some doubts about whether I even worked as a girl. The thing that saved me, though, was that I knew I was smart, and boys were so infernally stupid.

That is another gender stereotype, which I don't really approve of. It was also because boys acted in ways that were crude and cruel that was based on other gender constructs and what they were told they should be, but I found it repellent, even with some attraction to it (but that's next week).

Ultimately, I am okay with whom I am. It took letting go of a lot of perceived expectations, but it is a good place to be. 

I can't rule out that shopping for a formal gown would still be very hard on me, but that doesn't come up so much now, and I will take that.

Perhaps a better point is a lot of the ugliness and meanness in life comes from telling people how to be with very flawed ideas, much of which is based around gender.

Let people be who they are.