Mutually Exclusive
I had a teacher in high school who loved to throw out problematic statements without even realizing what it was she was saying. She was my calculus teacher, and she frequently told our class that boys were smarter than girls at math and science. It pissed me off, but she was the only AP Calc teacher in the school, and I was not going to let her keep me from getting credit. At the beginning of the year, when we were learning about probability and combinations, she described the term ‘mutually exclusive’ to us as “boys and girls are mutually exclusive. You’re either a boy or a girl, and you can’t be both or neither.” The word girl had two syllables, because the school was in rural Georgia. I knew that what she said was wrong, in a fundamental way, but I hadn’t yet discovered its relationship to me personally.
I was born a woman, and today I still am a woman. Most days I wake up, shower and get dressed, completely fine with my breasts, my hair, my hips, my vagina. Hell, I love my breasts most days, but I love breasts in general. But other days I wake up and think “I want to be a man today.”
Now I think it’s pretty normal for people to muse about being a member of the opposite sex, and for people to believe they were meant to be a member of the ‘opposite’ sex. But I don’t feel like that every day. I only want to be a guy on some days. I want to be both, and go between the two at will. I want to wear a pretty dress and makeup and jewelry some days. Other days I want to bind my chest, put on a pair of boots, chop my hair off and drop my voice an octave lower.
I don’t though. I don’t bind my chest. I keep my hair short, but still fluffy and feminine. I usually try to make my voice a bit higher, in a desperate bid to emphasize my femininity. I’ve never felt girly, and on my “girl” days, I don’t usually feel the need to try to be more of a woman than I am every day. On my “guy” days though, I don’t know what to do. I know so many transgendered people that I don’t want to come off as disrespectful by “playing at” being genderqueer. So on my “guy” days, I usually either look as grungy as possible, trying to cover up everything that feels like it shouldn’t be there, or dress extra-feminine, with makeup and jewelry and dresses, to cover up how uncomfortable I am.
Being a human being isn’t enough of a qualification for a person. Life is full of check-boxes: male/female, white/African American/Asian/Hispanic/Native American/other, Christian/Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Agnostic/Atheist/other. If you don’t fit into a box with a name there’s always other, for most things. We don’t have an “other” box for sex or gender though, even though lots of people certainly feel like an “other” when it comes to sex and gender. I am not an “other” every day, but on some days I am. On some days I am female, and on some days I am male. It’s hard to explain to people sometimes. I’m already “bisexual,” so clearly I can’t decide who I want to have sex with, and now I can’t decide on a gender? Obviously I’m just indecisive really.
Being privileged enough to attend Agnes Scott College and to be a part of the community at Agnes Scott, I have been able to really think about my relationship to gender. Some people know from early on that their biological sex does not match the gender they feel they are. Some people think about it, and genuinely feel that they are cisgendered, that they identify as the sex they were born with. Most people, however, probably don’t even think about it. There is nothing wrong with being cisgendered, transgendered, or multigendered. I personally feel, however, that there is something wrong with never actually thinking about what gender you are.
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