So, this is my life's story -- cut for time
Gender politics! You've been warned.
So, I'm I guess what you'd call a cisgender(?) lesbian. I genuinely don't like that word, but I'm a believer in the power of labeling, especially after one particular experience in college.
The experience: I took an Interpersonal Communications class. Our teacher was very well-intentioned and tried to be inclusive and tried to avoid labeling. She would ask every now and then whether or not something she'd said was okay, sort of checking with the class's PC police. But there was still a sort of pervasive assumption that I'd gotten used to: everyone in this class is white (I'd say I was in a class with maybe five non-white students for the entirety of my post-elementary scholastic career; you go, Colorado :\), everyone in this class is straight, everyone in this class is cisgender, the whole nine yards. We talked about anything else in kind of a footnote-y way -- academically, if you'll pardon the pun. It was hard to put my finger on, but it made me uncomfortable and I didn't feel like I could be myself, honestly, in response to any of the vague ideal-mate/relationship/whatever questions.
And then I had one class with a substitute, the other Interpersonal Communications teacher, and it was the strangest breath-of-fresh-air experience ever.
He was white and middle-aged. He was a he. He seemed to be teaching his classes in the more traditional way for Colorado -- high on theory and low on practical application. I don't think I could have predicted that I would have felt more comfortable in his class, but he managed it, and he managed it by doing something I'd never experienced before:
He labeled. The second he started talking about relationship dynamics, he told us that his example was a heterosexual couple -- and he kept saying heterosexual. He must have said it about eighty times during that lecture. Specifying, always, that his example couple was heterosexual, in a heterosexual marriage. It was so simple, so easy, and it made me feel so much less marginalized and "other".
Because he made it so that heterosexual was not the default: it was not the assumption, it was not "normal", it was clearly labeled and stated over and over again throughout the course of his lecture. And I had never realized how much it was hurting me, each time our regular professor would start out using gender-neutral language only to reveal, possibly halfway through class, that she was making heterosexual assumptions.
I think she expected us to all raise our hands if we weren't heterosexual and protest. I think she wanted to believe her classroom was safe enough for that.
I don't think she had any idea how difficult that is to do in a room full of strangers you'll have to sit with for the next four months.
And for the record, I did try to help her at the end of the semester. I wrote a long, detailed explanation on my anonymous feedback card, where it always asks if there's anything that could have been done to improve the class. She probably knew it was me, but it doesn't matter now that I never have to see her again, you know? And even so, it took a lot of nerve for me to write that out.
Anyway.
Back to the subject at hand: I feel like a girl. I always have.
But, just because I feel like a girl, doesn't mean I don't have issues with what that means in our society.
I grew up playing with Barbie and My Little Pony. I also grew up playing with Ninja Turtle action figures and dinosaurs. (I loved the action figures that came out for Jurassic Park; they were so cool and fierce-looking!) I was never really interested in G.I. Joe, though; I think I saw them as a less-interesting version of Barbie, possibly because their uniforms were hard plastic and possibly because they were in uniforms to begin with. (I was never, ever interested in playing "house" or in baby dolls; I did enjoy stuffed animals.)
Anyway.
As a little girl, I did two things that I think are important, gender-role-wise. The first was that I decided my Barbies could rescue themselves from the peril I put them in. (Not too unusual, I imagine; there were never enough Ken dolls to go around even if you were a fan, and I was not.) The second was that I decided, at one point or another, that Donatello was a girl.
I don't know if it was the name (there's an episode where Donatello gets accepted to an impressive graduate program, as "Donna Tello") or the purple. I know I didn't really think Donatello was a girl, but I felt like he ought to have been. Or, more specifically: there ought to have been a girl.
This didn't automatically make Donatello my favorite turtle, either; I've always waffled a little between Raphael and Leonardo. (For the record, I do not waffle when Raphael is an angry little angstmonger, as in the live-action 90's movies and the newer cartoons. I liked the relatively-lighthearted, snarky Raphael. I never thought there was any real question about who should be The Leader, even when they did episodes wherein Leonardo was too much of a boy scout and got in trouble for it. Perhaps this is related to my love for Tales of Vesperia's Flynn.)
And it definitely wasn't that I didn't like April O'Neil or rejected her as a damsel, etc. I thought April was very well-handled, most of the time; the show used her curiosity and determination to its advantage, and she was rarely just the damsel in distress -- even before the newer incarnations decided she needed to be a brilliant scientist or a ninja herself. (Side note: I always thought April was pushing thirty, in the original cartoons. She was a grownup. (I mean, she has her own apartment. It's even more obvious if you compare her to Irma: there's just no way these are supposed to be teenagers.) What is with our need, these days, to age everyone down? See also: Peter Parker, who went from being a friggin professor to being a high school student. What?)
But April wasn't enough for me. I was, even at like ten years old, very conscious of the gender disparity and I wanted more girls in my favorite show -- and more girls doing different things, too.
In summation: I feel like a girl, but I'm often conscious that there isn't enough space in the stereotypical notion of "girl" for who I am. I played with so-called boys' toys, too. And sometimes I wonder how many people out there who don't feel like girls or don't feel like boys would be more comfortable with their physical sex if society didn't keep cramming such a narrow idea of what "boy" and "girl" mean down our throats.
This entry was originally posted at here, via Dreamwidth. Feel totally free to comment there using OpenID!
So, I'm I guess what you'd call a cisgender(?) lesbian. I genuinely don't like that word, but I'm a believer in the power of labeling, especially after one particular experience in college.
The experience: I took an Interpersonal Communications class. Our teacher was very well-intentioned and tried to be inclusive and tried to avoid labeling. She would ask every now and then whether or not something she'd said was okay, sort of checking with the class's PC police. But there was still a sort of pervasive assumption that I'd gotten used to: everyone in this class is white (I'd say I was in a class with maybe five non-white students for the entirety of my post-elementary scholastic career; you go, Colorado :\), everyone in this class is straight, everyone in this class is cisgender, the whole nine yards. We talked about anything else in kind of a footnote-y way -- academically, if you'll pardon the pun. It was hard to put my finger on, but it made me uncomfortable and I didn't feel like I could be myself, honestly, in response to any of the vague ideal-mate/relationship/whatever questions.
And then I had one class with a substitute, the other Interpersonal Communications teacher, and it was the strangest breath-of-fresh-air experience ever.
He was white and middle-aged. He was a he. He seemed to be teaching his classes in the more traditional way for Colorado -- high on theory and low on practical application. I don't think I could have predicted that I would have felt more comfortable in his class, but he managed it, and he managed it by doing something I'd never experienced before:
He labeled. The second he started talking about relationship dynamics, he told us that his example was a heterosexual couple -- and he kept saying heterosexual. He must have said it about eighty times during that lecture. Specifying, always, that his example couple was heterosexual, in a heterosexual marriage. It was so simple, so easy, and it made me feel so much less marginalized and "other".
Because he made it so that heterosexual was not the default: it was not the assumption, it was not "normal", it was clearly labeled and stated over and over again throughout the course of his lecture. And I had never realized how much it was hurting me, each time our regular professor would start out using gender-neutral language only to reveal, possibly halfway through class, that she was making heterosexual assumptions.
I think she expected us to all raise our hands if we weren't heterosexual and protest. I think she wanted to believe her classroom was safe enough for that.
I don't think she had any idea how difficult that is to do in a room full of strangers you'll have to sit with for the next four months.
And for the record, I did try to help her at the end of the semester. I wrote a long, detailed explanation on my anonymous feedback card, where it always asks if there's anything that could have been done to improve the class. She probably knew it was me, but it doesn't matter now that I never have to see her again, you know? And even so, it took a lot of nerve for me to write that out.
Anyway.
Back to the subject at hand: I feel like a girl. I always have.
But, just because I feel like a girl, doesn't mean I don't have issues with what that means in our society.
I grew up playing with Barbie and My Little Pony. I also grew up playing with Ninja Turtle action figures and dinosaurs. (I loved the action figures that came out for Jurassic Park; they were so cool and fierce-looking!) I was never really interested in G.I. Joe, though; I think I saw them as a less-interesting version of Barbie, possibly because their uniforms were hard plastic and possibly because they were in uniforms to begin with. (I was never, ever interested in playing "house" or in baby dolls; I did enjoy stuffed animals.)
Anyway.
As a little girl, I did two things that I think are important, gender-role-wise. The first was that I decided my Barbies could rescue themselves from the peril I put them in. (Not too unusual, I imagine; there were never enough Ken dolls to go around even if you were a fan, and I was not.) The second was that I decided, at one point or another, that Donatello was a girl.
I don't know if it was the name (there's an episode where Donatello gets accepted to an impressive graduate program, as "Donna Tello") or the purple. I know I didn't really think Donatello was a girl, but I felt like he ought to have been. Or, more specifically: there ought to have been a girl.
This didn't automatically make Donatello my favorite turtle, either; I've always waffled a little between Raphael and Leonardo. (For the record, I do not waffle when Raphael is an angry little angstmonger, as in the live-action 90's movies and the newer cartoons. I liked the relatively-lighthearted, snarky Raphael. I never thought there was any real question about who should be The Leader, even when they did episodes wherein Leonardo was too much of a boy scout and got in trouble for it. Perhaps this is related to my love for Tales of Vesperia's Flynn.)
And it definitely wasn't that I didn't like April O'Neil or rejected her as a damsel, etc. I thought April was very well-handled, most of the time; the show used her curiosity and determination to its advantage, and she was rarely just the damsel in distress -- even before the newer incarnations decided she needed to be a brilliant scientist or a ninja herself. (Side note: I always thought April was pushing thirty, in the original cartoons. She was a grownup. (I mean, she has her own apartment. It's even more obvious if you compare her to Irma: there's just no way these are supposed to be teenagers.) What is with our need, these days, to age everyone down? See also: Peter Parker, who went from being a friggin professor to being a high school student. What?)
But April wasn't enough for me. I was, even at like ten years old, very conscious of the gender disparity and I wanted more girls in my favorite show -- and more girls doing different things, too.
In summation: I feel like a girl, but I'm often conscious that there isn't enough space in the stereotypical notion of "girl" for who I am. I played with so-called boys' toys, too. And sometimes I wonder how many people out there who don't feel like girls or don't feel like boys would be more comfortable with their physical sex if society didn't keep cramming such a narrow idea of what "boy" and "girl" mean down our throats.
This entry was originally posted at here, via Dreamwidth. Feel totally free to comment there using OpenID!