A note: My internet is being really shitty this week. Every day, it blinks in and out in clusters for about an hour. Then it’s fine for several hours. Then it does it again for another hour or so. This happens two or three times a day. One day, instead of that, there was an actual outage that lasted an hour. Honestly, I prefer that to the blinking off and on. That’s way more frustrating, and I don’t know if it’s my equipment or ComCast’s fault. I know I’d rather blame them, but it may or not be the case. Oh,excuse me. xfinity.
Note 2: It’s hot as fuck here. 94 ‘feels like’ 102. The last few days have been brutal, and I’ve been cranking the air like nobody’s business. Normally, I have it on 78 and turn it down to 75/76 when I’m doing my Taiji in the morning and before I go to bed at night. In the past two days, though, I’ve been keeping it at 75 pretty much constantly.
It’s not just the heat. It’s been humid as well. I hate heat of all sorts, but it’s even worse when it’s humid. I hate it so much. We’re supposed to drop to ‘only’ the ’80s tomorrow. Which is still bad, but much better than what it’s been the last few days.
Anyway. Back to gender shit. Here’s what I wrote about it yesterday. I talked with my Taiji teacher about it today (we’re friends as well as teacher/student. We have similar history with being ridiculed for the way we woman, but we had a very different response.
I was saying it’s difficult because I have completely rejected almost everything feminine. Not on purpose, but because it’s just not me. We were talking about makeup, and she said that she wears some of it because it makes her feel younger, more awake, and that she’s caring for herself. Which, on a personal level, is fine. But as I tried to explain, when 90% of women in society do that for the same reasons, then it because a societal expectation that is a burden to other women.
I wrote a post yesterday about gender rending. I want to continue on with that today. The reason I want to talk about it is because I kind of have the feeling this is like the kids things. What I mean is that I don’t have kids, I didn’t want kids, and I have never wanted to have kids. I never played mommy when I was a kid because it never occurred to me. I had no desire to do it. Just as I had no desire to play ‘getting married’.
Side note: I have heard that this is supposed to be a thing for young girls–planning your wedding, I mean. I never knew that as a kid because my brother and I were pretty isolated from American culture. We didn’t watch much TV and we certainly did not go to the movies.
Still, I somehow managed to know that I was supposed to get married and have children. My mother embodied all of this to her very being. She had my life planned for me from the beginning. I was supposed to excel at school, go to college, find a husband in church, then get married and have two children. I did the college thing, but I put my foot down on the marriage and kid thing, much to my mother’s deep dismay.
I did have a crush on a boy from the time I was in first grade until sixth grade, and then various boys (very heteronorm in those days because Idid not know better), but that was more about beingdesperately lonely and wanting to be loved. That was the only kind of love that I knew back then, and now, it’s so far down my list of things to seek out.
Back to my point. I don’t have an innate biological clock. I never have, and I doubt I ever will. When I was twenty, I was with a serious boyfriend. He said that if I got pregnant, he would want me to have an abortion, even though he thought that was murder (he was a Christian). Putting aside the problematic nature of that statement, it actually opened my eyes to something–I didn’t want children. This may sound strange in retrospect, but the elation I felt when I ealized that I didn’t want children was the best I’ve ever felt in my life. I’m not being hyperbolic here.
I did not want children. More to the point, I didn’t have to have them! No one could make me (ideally). I felt this so deep in my soul that as much as my mother tried to manipulate, guilt, bribe, and almost force me into having children, I stood strong. Still the best decision I ever made in my life.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my mother’s full-court press to get me pregnant was the beginning of me questioning gender. Not mine, but the concept of gender. It wasn’t until I was fifty that I truly realized that gender, for me, was bullshit.
A few months before my medical trauma, I was pondering my gender. I haven’t felt like a woman in ages, but I’m pretty sure I am not nonbinary, either. I am definitely not a man–that’s the only thing I can say with confidence. I’ve been told I’m not a woman all my life, so at some point, I decided to embrace it. It’s funny because I’ve had this conversation with my Taiji teacher who was told similar things as she grew up.
Her response was very different to mine. She was defiant in embracing the term woman. She wasn’t behaving like a woman in the eyes of many? Well, fuck it. She was going to show them exactly why she was a woman and there was nothing they could say or do about it. I get it and honestly, that’s my second choice. It’s valid and we need to push back on existing strictures that are no longer applicable.
However, I don’t want to be in a group that does not want me and has shunned me at every turn. after a quarter century of women telling me why I’m not a woman, well, fine. Then I’ll go be something else. What that something is, I’m not sure but it’s not being a woman.
I would like to note that it’s mostly been women who have gate-kept me being a woman. It started when I was a child and the women in my very conservative evangelical Taiwanese church who tut-tutted at me. I was too loud, too brash, too not girly for them. I wasn’t supposed to run around or climb trees, and I was supposed to keep my voice down. I should sit with my legs crossed and I should be the perfect little girl. I wore dresses my mom made me, and I hated it because they restricted my movement.
When I was seven, I started praying to a god I didn’t really believe in that he would make me a boy. I did this every night before I went to sleep. I reasoned that if he was all-powerful as I had been taught, this would be no problem for him. I prayed in earnest before I went to sleep, then woke up disappointed that I was still a girl.
I didn’t think I was a boy, mind. I knew I wasn’t. I just didn’t want to be a girl because everything I liked to do/was was prohibited to me based on my perceived gender. Think about that. At seven, I hated my gender enough to pray that it would be changed.
When I was in college, I had mostly male friends. I hung out with guys because I was more comfortable with them than I was with women. I liked sports, disliked fashion and makeup, and I was just more masculine in many ways. I was the cool chick, laughing with t he guys about those silly women who only cared about their looks. I didn’t realize that I was in the group on sufferance–if I showed any indication that I was like those other women in any way, I would be kicked out.
It’s hard because I truly did groove more with dudes at the time. I still do get along well with guys. My boyfriend at the time said it was because every one of my male friends wanted to sleep with me, but I don’t think that’s true. Maybe many of them did, but I truly just did get along with them. One of my female friends complained that all the guys liked me, but it was because I treated them like human beings. I didn’t act as if they were foreign or a different species.
I will say that I know it’s partly my charisma. I have that thing that draws people to me, plus I’m really good at reading people. And I can remember details about people (though it’s a little harder since my medical trauma) that others would forget. I’m extremely observant about human nature, which coupled with my charisma and big tits, well, let’s just say that I can draw people to me. And, yes, I think the big tits are relevant in some circumstances.
Here’s the thing. I don’t like people in general. They exhaust me, and I can only take them in small doses. However, I’m fascinated by individual people and what makes them tick. That makes them feel as if I’m interested in them as a person, which I’m not. It’s a fine distinction, but it’s there. There are very few people I care deeply on a personal level. Then, there’s a larger group of people I care about on a personal level, but not as in-depth. Then comes the “I’m fascinated by you on a sociological/psychological perspective level” which is most people.