For Them

Negotiating an understanding of my own queer gender has been much more difficult for me than negotiating an understanding of my own queer sexuality. Sexuality is easy, conceptually. We all know what sexuality is, for the most part, and there is a goodly amount of shared understanding about it in the culture. The concept of gender is far more complicated. Honestly, I'm still not very good at talking about it from a personal standpoint. I do the theory better.

A lot of people have a lot of rigid ideas about gender that boil down to nothing more than arbitrary bullshit, but they are alarmingly resistant to letting them the fuck go, and gender is connected to people's core sense of their identities so when this stuff slips into an argumentative space it tends to heat up very quickly. Gender transgressions are still pretty damn deadly, so I am very careful about that space. I think for a lot of genderqueer people, there is a background track that runs through your head underneath everything else: "How much of myself can I be here and not get killed?" Depending on one's gender presentation and one's physical sex, the question is often modified: "How much of myself can I be here and not get raped and/or killed?"

Anyone who's genderqueer to a degree sufficient to force self-examination over it knows that you can break gender into a lot of pieces for analysis, but that the two that seem to come up most often are the one about how a person identifies their own gender inside of themselves on a emotional/psychological level, and the one about how the culture perceives one's gendered body and thus how others tend to treat the person.

To this point, whenever I've posted pictures of myself as a child on this blog and elsewhere on the net, I've posted pictures that were taken when I was with my mother, who was very strict about my appearance adhering to gender norms. My gendered behavior was let to slide whenever it was convenient for her, or too inconvenient to argue the point with me, so as you might imagine I influenced those contexts as often as possible in my quest to control my own non-traditional identity expressions. As soon as I was out of my mother's reach, even as a very small child, there was a drastic change in my appearance. Here I am, about age 7, on a trip to Key West without my mother's supervision:




It's not that I wanted to be a boy. It's just that I wasn't comfortable being categorized as a girl either. Neither category seemed to fit me. I couldn't look at the entire breadth of the cultural implications of either label and go, "Yeah, that one's close enough." I could not just pick, because the choices being presented to me were only two, and neither was right, and at the same time, there was a huge amount of pressure to pick the choice that lined up with my genitals. With all that cultural pressure, a vulva, a name like Jennifer and a mother who fought me hard on plenty of gender norm deviations, it was a difficult feat to even attempt to stake out a territory somewhere in the mushy middle of it all, where I could mix and switch at will, and was the only place that felt even remotely comfortable to me.

This "dressing like a boy" thing wasn't about being a boy, for me. My identity, even at that green of an age, was already firmly set in some kind of "neither/both, none of the above, all of the above" manner regarding gender. And my behavior didn't change a whit depending on how I was dressed, but when you couple it with the change in appearance, you can start to imagine how differently I must have been treated:




A kid who "looks like a boy" doing this is treated like a little man, like a future Cool Guy, whereas a kid who "looks like a girl" doing this attracts an entirely different sort and form of attention. It is generally negative attention even when it masquerades as positive, by which I mean, it's commonly focused around reminding the girl that boys won't like her if she "acts like a boy", but even when the adults are trying to be nice about it and say things like, "Wow, you shoot really good for a girl!", that's some highly offensive shit going on right there. The culture is so thoroughly saturated with toxicity about sex and gender, it is hard to escape it. I figured out pretty early on that people being confused by my gender was often going to be as good as things got.

My mother refused to let me have my gender. She wouldn't let me cut my hair short (which I did without her permission, several times, even though I knew I'd get in huge trouble every time), and she laid an endless series of very heavy gender conformity trips on me about "looking and acting like a girl". She constantly sabotaged or ignored my sports career, which was tremendously important to me as a kid -- and I was good, too; I won spots on all-select soccer teams that had sponsors to pay for us to tour Europe, and my mother wouldn't let me go because she thought it made me "too much of a jock". She was not above using frequent violence and verbal abuse to force me to conform to her gender expectations.

So when I watched this week's episode of FX's new show, The Riches, which includes a genderqueer child as a character*, I totally fucking cried at this one scene where Minnie Driver, who plays the kid's mom, is trying to scam the kids into a private school and winds up telling the genderqueer kid -- who is very blended in displaying both masculine and feminine signifiers -- that the kid is going to have to pick.

The kid's face falls to sad and a little helpless when she says it. And she hastily adds, "Oh no, not for me. You don't have to pick for me. Never for me. For them."

omg, if my mother had ever said anything like that to me I think I'd have exploded from the joy. My genderqueer experience has been so similar in certain ways to the way they're playing this kid's experience. The mixing, the overlap, the blending, the both/and, the neither/nor, all of that, that's me, that's for me. The adherence to what doesn't represent me, the disconnection, the repression, the coverups, the pretending, all of that, that's for them. Goddamn, I still can't even really imagine having a parent love me and accept me anyway, but it's amazing to watch.

The show itself is about stealing The American Dream. Part of the kid's dream, of course, is to have an authentic self that includes the expression of femininity. Cast as the kid's father is genderqueer performer Eddie Izzard, who says in that Advocate article that I linked that he's playing his character almost like a version of his own father when it comes to dealing with the genderqueer kid, which is difficult to watch but the whole thing is compelling as all hell to me.

Even setting all the genderqueer stuff aside, this show has a lot going for it with a great cast, very good writing (so far), and a really fun concept. It looks to be a fun show on a lot of levels, many of them about identity in various ways, and since identity is one of my pet theory things, I look forward to watching them explore and expand on all of them. Highly recommended.

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*hat tip to the always lovely Freakgirl for the link to Advocate article.