a rant about gender, parenting, and childhood
an informal rant about gender in middle and elementary school as a repressed catholic trans boy with autism i guess
Bonding with your parents is so... gendered.
Watching my mother and my sister, a recent teenager, talk about nail polish and trying out fake nails, going shopping for crop tops and short shorts, watching women's sports and going out for coffee/hot chocolate, I can't help but feel jealous. It got me thinking about why.
I liked nail polish, I liked makeup, I liked shopping, but it was always tinged with bitterness. I went to Hot Topic for a skirt two years after coming out(and then going back in) to my parents and bought a skirt and tights I was excited about in theory. I put it on and hated myself, but I wore it the rest of the night to please my parents and never wore it again. Despite going to the mall as a 13 year old to try out fashion being staple of growing up, it never really clicked with me. I left feeling suicidal and doomed to live forever like this.
Some of my fondest memories of my childhood are throwing the ball around with my father. Learning how to hold a football, the right way to swing your arm when you throw it. Going back and forth in the backyard while the dogs ran around on a sunny spring day after I changed out of my Catholic school uniform. How to oil a glove, something my grandfather taught me. I can't remember if it was before or after his amputation. We threw the ball around- he played in high school, and he was always talking about his "baseball buddies". When I was 11, barely in 6th grade, my mother or father and I would stand 10 or 20 feet apart in front of the house and throw a ball back and forth in our bare hands. After a while, I stopped having to pay attention to what I was doing. Throwing and catching felt like an instinct.
I've never been a sporty kid.
Throwing a ball around with your dad is the staple of a young boy's childhood, at least, that's what it seems like to a lot of us. Sometimes I cling to those small things- when I got my first really short haircut and my dad told me that just because I didn't need to wash or brush it so much, I still had to do it sometimes. When I played basketball in elementary school, awkwardly keeping up with my teammates.
In every movie I watched with a tomboy main character, she played sports, baseball or track, and she had to fight to be one of the guys. Every movie I watched about boyhood, there's a secret club or scout troop or something distinctly male. In Young Sheldon, Missy Cooper first starts bonding with her dad by asking him to teach her how to throw a baseball to impress a guy. It leads to her joining a boy's baseball team, but struggling when all the girls start calling her Mister Cooper and the boys are afraid of being both better or worse than her at the game. Her dad has her back the whole time.
I look back to being a kid, two photographs of me in blue jeans shirtless in the backyard, running around in the mud and showering with my clothes on with my neighbor friend. In one photograph I'm staring at the camera, climbing around in a plastic wood cabin, in the other I'm just standing awkwardly. I look like a boy with long red hair. At the time, I really liked Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young and wanted to be them. I remember reading a story about a girl knight who pretends to be a boy, growing disinterested when he/she embraced her femaleness.
It's hard to look back on my childhood. I think I cling to things like these, examples of boyhood that I'm sure my parents hardly remember. Recently I connected to an old friend, who told me what being a lesbian was and introduced me to their trans brother in 4th grade. Their brother was fresh out of the hospital and they told me he had a self harm problem. They asked me out and I remember thinking that was weird- if they were a lesbian, why did they like me? I didn't have a sense of gender.
That's a long way to say my experience with gender as a child was complicated. I only wore dresses until almost 3rd grade, when I left Catholic school and got myself a t-shirt with a football logo on it. I'd never got to pick out my own clothes before. Goodwill and Kohls was mind boggling to me. I'd only worn hand-me-downs from my mom's friend's kids. I collected horse and unicorn figurines, I played with ponies with my dad. I was a wolfgirl. In my room I had pink laced curtains and a pink desk lamp and a purple desk and purple walls. I had American girl dolls. I was a perfect all american bitch(lol).
As I got older, gender got harder. I finally convinced my parents for a short haircut in the 5th grade, and I cried when someone asked me if I was a boy or a girl. I didn't know why. I asked my parents if I could get clothes from the boys section, blue and green striped shirts from the Gap. I wrote in my journal that I was ecstatic when a homeless man I gave money to told my mother she had "such a nice son"
My relationship with my parents grew strained. When I started to realize what feeling like a boy meant, I came out to them after 6th grade as trans. I had no resources outside of our local library's gender section, smushed between books on feminism and books on raising kids. I couldn't articulate myself. My parents were on board for getting me a therapist for a few weeks until they were convinced it was a contagion, it was misogyny, it was the autism they thought I had but couldn't say, it was anything but what I was telling them.
Even though my extended family knew, no one said anything. My uncle awkwardly gave me a book about the wild west he said my male cousins enjoyed.
I don't know if my dad was trying to do "male bonding" with me. I certainly wished for it. We went every Sunday to a pizza place with my sisters to watch "the game", and for a year or so I understood football before the place shut down and I forgot it all. I got into skateboarding for a bit, I got into all the very male punk bands he liked growing up. I tried to emulate him. Sometimes he got it, but sometimes he'd ask me if I wanted to get a bra from Victoria's Secret and I'd laugh, thinking he was joking, before realizing he was dead serious and then he'd get pissed. I still have no idea why he asked, why years of having a male presenting child who actively despised femininity might give you the idea to randomly bring up bra shopping.
With my mother... it was weird. I couldn't get in on all the things she wanted for her daughter. She made me go bra shopping, I picked out one brand of sports bra and removed the padding and didn't get new ones for years, swapping them out for a binder my friends bought me. Like I said, I bought that one skirt. I would do my makeup, emo eyeliner and shitty black lipstick. I reverted to black nail polish before even that was too much. Now I wonder if I was only convincing myself I was fine with femininity under the guise of "trans boys can be feminine too!" but all I know is that I'd rather die than dress the way I did back then.
Now I watch the way my sister interacts with both my parents individually and I notice a difference. They're both raising a daughter, so they do daughter-ish things with her.
She's gender conforming, feminine in a slightly tomboyish way, so my mom and her paint their nails. She shows us crop tops and baggy jeans with patterns printed on them. With my dad, she watches Marvel and tells him about the drama in school. They treat her like a daughter and, because she is one, she meets those expectations and a bond forms. I can talk about sexism and misogyny and the social construction of femininity and how its forced onto young girls, but that’s not the point. How come she likes this and I don’t? We have the dame DNA, the same childhood, we’re close and all of that. Where’s the difference?
That's why I think so many transgender people have such odd relationships with their parents. The way kids are raised is so heavily gendered, and even when they don't try to be, the cisgender heterosexual gender conforming parents raise them differently. My dad, when we weren't playing princess and ponies, was perfectly happy to play catch with me and pretend to be soldiers. My mother always wants to take me out bra shopping, she always was excited whenever I wore makeup or nail polish. I'll never forget how repulsed I felt when my dad asked me if I wanted to shave in a Cosco, because I was his daughter and he wanted me to do daughter-y things. Nevermind that I cut myself on my mothers razor attempting it by myself, but the idea that shaving was a thing girls did to be part of the girl club made my skin crawl. I didn't want to be put in the girl's club. I wanted to stay where I was, never changing.
Even if I liked any of those things, there was an incongruence between how we saw them. Even if my mom and I were both listening to the same riot grirl band, she wanted to enjoy them with me as women in a patriarchal society. I wanted to enjoy them as a man who has a stake in the feminist world with my mother, a woman, but also because the guitar fucked really hard. I wish I had painted my nails with my mother, but I don't think I would've liked it.
I don't know what the point of all this was. Reflecting on my childhood seems like a never ending problem I find myself stuck with.
It's like if I analyze how my parents raised me, if I analyze the bands I liked, the feminine or masculine things I did, the movies I liked and the games I played, maybe I can get to the root of what made me like this.
Was it the way I felt inclined to be a boy and, through repetition of language and social cues, I've constructed my own reality of manhood? Was there something subconscious leading me towards a male social and biological group, something genetic that was shaped by society? If you detached my brain from my body and society, would I go around feeling like a boy? What if I never heard the word trans? More importantly- why do we as trans people constantly have to put our whole lives under scrutiny for an ounce of respect when all cis people have to say is "I'm fe/male"?
I'm jealous of my sister. The way she doesn't think of all this, the way she paints her nails or watches TV with our parents, bonding because there is no incongruence to reconcile. She has no childhood she needs to scrutinize to understand herself, no inexplicable yearning for understanding. I’m glad she never has to deal with the things I have to deal with but I’m so, so angry.
We as trans people constantly have to go back on our childhoods and, the way I outlined in my last article on historical fiction and greek myths, put a modern understanding of ourselves onto old versions who didn’t have that foresight. Revising and recontextualizing and analyzing until there’s nothing left. We can never just be as we are, can we? I always have to academic-alize my life
Living in a gendered society is fucked. You're telling me the way I connect with my parents is so heavily impaired by my gender identity vs the way they perceive my gender and therefor treat me that I feel alienated from my entire childhood and teenage years and can only now recontextualize them through the lens of psychoanalysis and fucking music? Fuck off lol.