Let me state my point up front this time. In my ideal world in which there were no prescriptive gender roles, I would be fine with being called a woman. I have no animosity towards the label itself, and I have no issue with my body parts being what they are. I like my boobs, and my pussy is fine. Hips good, shoulders wide, and I finally have half an ass because of Taiji. I have never felt body dysmorphia or gender dysphoria. I have hated my body for most of my life, yes, but that was because of my mother’s fat loathing/phobia and not anything to do with my gender.
Here is my post from yesterday. Now, let’s get back to the subject.
As I’ve said many times before, yes, I prayed to a god I didn’t believe in when I was a kid to turn me into a boy. I was eight or nine, and I figured if God was all-powerful, then He* could make me a boy. I didn’t think I was a boy or feel like a boy, but I felt so restrained and restricted as a girl. Why? because I had rampant sexism around me. I grew up in the ’70s in America. That’s one vector. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan, a very sexist culture. That’s vector two. The church to which my parents belong was/is SUPER sexist as well.
I was what was considered a tomboy when I was little. I liked to run around, climb trees, etc. I got chastised for it constantly and by the time I was seven, I was severely depressed and hated myself with an intensity that should have scared people.
I thought being a boy would make everything better. I thought it would be better to be a boy because there was no freedom as a girl. Yes, there were rigid gender roles for boys, too, but they were more positive than the ones for girls. They at least allowed boys to do shit other than sit around and be decorative.
When I was in my early twenties, I realized that I was attracted to women as well as men (still in the binary back thirty years ago). I went to a conference for queer Asian women and it was amazing. I mention it because I have a point to make about it. We were playing the ‘place everyone on the butch/femme spectrum’ game which was a thing back in the day. There were roughly thirty of us, and the women were shouting where they thought everyone was on the spectrum. When they got to me, the woman who had been doing most of the guessing paused for a length of time. She finally admitted that she didn’t know where to put me on the spectrum.
Several years later, I got something similar from a big bull dyke (self -description). She said I confused her because I had long hair and didn’t hide my breasts, but I also liked sports and didn’t wear make-up (or care about fashion). She sounded both amused and bewildered by it.
I’m still pleased by these two responses, but it proves that our society is pretty rigid when it comes to gender roles. Yes, they have changed since then, but they’re still there. A year or so ago, I was reading the weekend open thread at Ask A Manager, which skews (heavily) female and (less heavily) progressive. A single woman asked if it was ok for a single woman to be friends with a married man. The amount of women who said only if you had strict rules for the friendship (no doing anything solo with the man, no sharing secrets with him, etc.) was fucking depressing. They tried to dress it up as respect for the wife and the marriage, but what it boiled down to was any man and any woman were inevitably going to end up boinking. Or to be more generous to them, that this was something you always had to be careful of.
I never forget how one woman went off about how she was the queen in her marriage and her man didn’t NEED no other woman! Yes, I’m paraphrasing, but it was that wild. She even went to say that bisexual people didn’t count because something something something not normal something something. Something about how we didn’t understand the gender norms. Or I think it was nonbinary people she was raging on for not understanding gender norms.
Bitch, please. Anyone who is a minority knows the majority better than the majority does because we have to in order to survive. It’s not like those of us outside the binary don’t live in the same society. It’s not like we haven’t been marinated in the same sexist bullshit as everyone else. In fact, many of us have probably gotten more of it because we did not fit society’s idea of what a man/woman should be.
Back to the single woman/married man question (re: friendship). I had the feeling that most people took it to mean the woman met the man after he was married. Not that it should batter, but I was thinking of it as someone who had met the man first and then he got married (which was my situation). Ultimately, though, I don’t think it makes a difference. I don’t think gender matters when it comes to friends. I suppose you can say I have a different view on things because I’m bi, agender, polyamorous, aromantic, etc., and I would not say no to that.
I have two best friends, one man and one woman. The latter and I have had in-depths discussions about gender because neither of us feels our womanhood too strongly. She firmly believes that in her college-age child’s lifetime, the default will be to call everyone ‘they’. In other words, gender will become irrelevant. I don’t agree with her, but I can see that there may be less of an emphasis on gender or more realistically, a broadening of gender that will cause the right to lose their fucking minds.
Both of them were/are married. There is nothing I would not say to either of them based on their gender. There are things I don’t talk about with each, but that’s just because you talk about different things with different people.
Side note: Most of the people answering the question in the forum were straight people. The queer people were much more flexible in their replies, in part because oftentimes, queers remain friends with their exes. In part because queer comunnities can be smallish and it’s difficult to just walk away completely from the community, and in part because relationships are not as rigidly defined as they are in het society (in general).
I think that’s another reason straights are chary of queers; we shake up the status quo. We don’t follow het rules, man, and that’s really hard on people who rely on the status quo. It’s the same when I was in my twenties and would tell the women who asked me if I had kids/wanted them. I would say no and that I did not want them, and some of the women got angry. They said I must think they’re stupid/bad for wanting/having children. Quite honestly, I didn’t think about them at all. That was just them projecting.
*Definitely a ‘he’ in the fundie Christianity in which I was raised.