I’ve been musing about tradition for several posts, and I want to continue that gravy train. When I start thinking about something, I keep going until I am beyond tired of the subject. Then I think about it some more until I’m ready to drop it and never speak of it again. I’m not there yet with this topic so let’s roll!
I’ve talked about several topics that opened my eyes to the fact that what I was raised with wasn’t necessarily what I believed in. The one that really stands out, even thirty years later, is having sex for the first time. I was very much a wait-until-I-get-married gal when I was young. That was what I was raised with and it was what was pounded in my skull in my church. Sex is evil, bad, and will put your soul in eternal damnation. Until you get married and then it’s pure and holy. Angels will sing as you have sex, but only for procreation reasons!
By the time I entered college, I was what I called a TV–technical virgin. I had done everything with a man except P-I-V (or P-I-A, but that wasn’t even a possibility to me back then). It really was a matter of inches at that point, and I became less and less convinced that it mattered. To be clear, I never really believed in the Christian God with a capital G. I tried really hard, but I could never truly believe. Which made me feel crappy, obviously. i thought there was something wrong with me that I never felt that connection to God. It didn’t occur to me that maybe there was no connection to feel.
I prayed for God to change me into a boy when I was seven. Every night before I went to sleep, I prayed that I would wake up a boy. If God was that powerful, then it should be a breeze for Him, right? It never happened, obviously, and I would wake up, bitterly disappointed to still be a girl.
To be clear, it wasn’t that I felt as if I were a boy; I did not. I never have. I am not a man. I am very clear about that. However, because of all the shit I got as a young female-shaped person, mostly from older Taiwanese women (internalized misogyny is a bitch, yo), I thought the only solution was for me to be a boy instead.
“Girls don’t _____” was a recurring theme in my childhood. Fill in the blank with climb trees, play roughly, sit with your legs open, laugh loudly, and the list went on and on. It was some toxic, retro bullshit, even for the time, that I didn’t recognize was firmly not my problem.
As a result, I was very unhappy to be a girl. And I felt as if I was failing at it because I didn’t like any of the things normal girls liked. I didn’t like dolls or pretending to be a mother to them. I didn’t imagine getting married and the only thing I made my dolls do was have sex. I didn’t want to play house or have tea parties or anything like that. None of that interested me in the slightest. I’d rather run around outside and play sports, and the latter was a tricky one. Many of the women in the Taiwanese church DID play sports. Tennis, softball, and ping-pong, specifically. So it wasn’t frowned on for the women to be physically active. However, there was still an unspoken rule that it only went so far. The women who were TOO competitive were subtly snubbed.
It was confusing as hell for me. I was supposed to be good at sports, but not too good. I should be able to play them with the boys, but never be better than them at the sports. I still remember before I had ever had a date, my father gave me some advice on how to get a boyfriend. He told me with much gravitas that I needed to raise my voice a few octaves (I have a VERY deep voice), let a boy beat me in sports, and ask a boy to teach me something (like changing the tires on a car). My father, in case you can’t tell, is a raging misogynist. I am proud that even at that age (15 or 16), I looked at him and said, “If that’s what it takes to get a boyfriend, I’d rather stay single for the rest of my life.” Which I still stand by!
Once I had sex in college, I realized what a big sham Christianity was. Or at least the purity culture aspect of it. It was the most amazing thing I’d felt up until that point in my life (and I’m still a big proponent of sex), and I could not reconcile that this was what was going to send me into eternal hellfire. Not murder. Not embezzlement. Not the systemic eradication of a planet. No. It’s the genitals of two (or, gasp, more) people interacting that is the epitome of evil in the brand of Christianity I was raised in.
There is no going back after that. There really isn’t. The problem with pushing a lie like that is that once it’s uncovered, there’s nothing you can say to ameliorate the fact that it’s all a fucking lie. it’s like DARE and drugs. Marijuana is the gateway drug! One puff of the cannabis, and you’re gonna end up in a gutter with a needle of heroin stuck in your arm.
That’s not how any of this works, and it’s often how tradition is pushed upon us. Like a woman has to have children to fulfill her duty as a woman. Once I realized that this was a lie (also that it’s so wonderful to be a parent. It might be for some people, but it definitely would not be for me), it was such a weight off my shoulders. The day I realized I did not have to have children was the best day of my life. Until the day I kicked death in the ass twice, but that’s tangential to this post.
Also, once I realized I didn’t have to have children, the bogeyman of ‘you’re defective as a woman if you don’t have kids’ held much less sway over me. I had women who were angry at me for not wanting children because they thought I was judging them for having children. One in particular said I must think she was stupid for having children. Um, no. I don’t give a fuck if you have children or not. It’s nothing to me.
That’s the problem, though. I didn’t just go against the norm (the ‘tradition’) of having children–I didn’t give a shit about the whole idea at all. It meant nothing to me. I don’t even like calling myself child-free because it’s still giving some importance to that status where there is none for me. It would be the same as me saying I’m harp-free or dog-free. Both of these things are true, but I don’t feel the need to clarify those things about me because it’s not taken for granted that I should have a harp or a dog. With kids, though, there is still the expectation that a woman will have them. Even now, in 2022. Which is disappointing.
It took me a decade to realize why some women got so angry at my simple declaration that I did not have kids nor wanted them. And, as always, I feel the need to clarify that I never brought up the subject myself. I only answered when people asked me about my child-having status. I always answered in the neutral (I don’t have kids/I don’t want to have kids), but some women took it as an attack.
It’s because they didn’t want kids, but didn’t feel that was an option. they had kids because it was expected of them and then I came along. Not only did I not have kids nor did I want them, I didn’t have any difficulty making that decision. Around the same time, I read a book about women who chose not to be mothers for one reason or another. I was eager to read it because it was the only book I found on the topic. Imagine my disappointment when it was about women who wanted children, but chose not to have them for one reason or another. Every one of them hastened to assure the reader that she loved children and planned to be involved in the lives of children in some way, just not as a parent.
It was as if they had to preempt the negativity they anticipated receiving for their decision. Which, I get it. It’s still taboo and considered a strong negative. A woman is selfish if she doesn’t want kids–which, maybe? But isn’t it better to be selfish in that way than in having children when you don’t want them and then resenting the hell out of them? I don’t particularly like children. I don’t hate them, but I don’t go gooey at the sight of them, either. I can interact with them just fine, but I prefer the teen years to the under-ten years, if I’m going to be perfectly frank.
This, apparently, makes me a monster. It’s one reason I seriously considered my gender identity before going into the hospital. A lifetime of being told that I’m not a real woman (and by far, mostly by women), messed with my head. This is one of the downsides to tradition. When it’s really rigid, it doesn’t allow for individual expression. And I rejected the whole label woman because it was so suffocating.
After surviving my medical trauma, however, I’m not sure I’m ready to cede the label to the normies. But I’m also not sure it’s a fight I care enough to fight. For now, I’m using genderqueer as a placemarker. It’ll do for the time being.