I’ll never leave that place you made me when heaven bloomed in your eyes.
I cannot keep you, but may I still call that haven mine?
You are light and heat.
Didn’t I know that you deserve a million and one heavens,
And most of all the one you seek?
I really enjoyed writing this assignment on how I understand my gender identity to have developed. I’m posting it because I hope that the insights and resolution that arose from recounting parts of my life and my growing awareness of my personal gender is helpful to someone who stumbles on it. Landmarks along my journey were waking up from the dream/nightmare of media influences on ideals and goals. The conscious effort to think critically about expectations that society holds us to, and that we hold ourselves to. The development of a new, self-reflective and accepting consciousness. Negotiating pressure to make a difference and fill the shoes of pioneering women who pushed gender norms…and finding that while I was finding myself and defining who I am in relation to gender norms, I learned what will help me find my way: be critical of what I desire and whether ideals are self-generated or adopted from external forces. I find strength and wisdom when I push back on expectations pushed on me, unearth my instincts and follow them.
My gender has been the big pink or blue elephant in the room. For me, gender was not really considered until recently, even though it’s a defining aspect of my daily life: normative gender roles define a part of who we are through our adherence or rejection of what’s expected of us. Still, the times that I was aware of my gender growing up were few and far between. In some cases, I did not consider my gender identity because the pressure to live up to gender expectations was/is so strong. Another reason why I didn’t reflect on my gender identity is because many arenas of life purposefully overlook gender to ensure equality, in the classroom and college race, for instance. My gender identity developed while I was sleeping, it seems. When I awakened to find that my set of ideals had been pushed onto me, I was exhausted from rigorously trying to fulfill them, and began rising to think for myself about gender expectations and norms. When I push back on the expectations I’m inundated with, the strength and wisdom that develops is invaluable to understanding my gender identity, and my identity in general.
Early ideas about Gender
The first time I might have considered gender was when the girls in my class and I enacted a game we called, “kiss the boys”. We’d run around the playground, chasing the boys and pecking them on the cheek when we caught them. The boys did not like this game. They had an equal dislike for the weddings we staged. We, the girls, laid out our towels to form an aisle, designated someone as the flower girl and orchestrated a ceremony. There were two marriages, and both grooms were bribed to participate or just gave in so we’d stop bothering them. I suppose, though I didn’t know it, this is when I first thought about social differences between males and females. My understanding back then was that girls reach out and boys just want to play.
My friends and I thought it was funny how shy and disgusted the boys were when we tried to kiss them. We had begun a battle of sexes in our class of twenty that continued up until our graduation in eighth grade. Friendships and even romances developed all the while, but when an argument between girl and boy arose, we gathered to rally and lobby for the contender who was a member of our sex. In fifth through eighth grade, my concept of gender continued to look for differences between males and females, and there were many differences in our social worlds. Aggression was acted out differently. Boys got into fistfights and even starting a boxing circle a la fight club. Girls ruthlessly waged emotional harm in what we called “bathroom talks” where a girl was singled out, summoned, and picked apart. Affection and friendship were expressed differently, with girls displaying more physical contact and less teasing than boys. Both girls and boys cared about their personal appearance, as well as the appearance of crushes, boyfriends and girlfriends. Girls wanted to develop breasts and we played with make up, high heels, belly button rings and hair styles, to the exclusion of a few girls in my class. Boys valued tallness, trim body types and neat hair, because those who didn’t fit this phenotype, or hadn’t yet grown into it, were the butt of all jokes. By eighth grade graduation, my concepts for male and female genders were gathered from my experience of the social world of my class, and the social pressure that we were unknowingly influenced by in our behavior and goals. Only with hindsight can I identify the external influences, from media and all around us, that drove our identities. Back then, I didn’t think about whether our choices were freely made and never questioned why we were how we were.
There was in the midst of that time of stolen or obscured agency a shining moment of self-reflection for the girls of our class. In eighth grade, one girl threw a birthday and slumber party. Every girl in the class was there. Late at night, we somehow decided to hold a round circle discussion about our insecurities, our dreams, and why the hell we were so mean to each other in the years before. We cried and expressed deep remorse for hurting each other. When we moved to compare appearance ideals and insecurities, most everyone confessed that in their appearance they wanted long legs, big boobs, and a tiny waist with a flat stomach. For our futures, we wanted love, happiness, and success independent of our husbands. If anyone secretly didn’t rank having a husband or marriage at all as personal goals, it was left unsaid. Looking back, I’m proud that we orchestrated that talk and supported and challenged each other. Two paths were left untaken, and maybe weren’t even seen by us: the exploration of our sexual orientations and why our ideal for appearance was the same for all of us. We talked about our perceived flaws, our mistakes, and our goals, but these aspects of our identity did not surface in our conversation, and didn’t surface in my mind until years later.
A wake up call in high school
In high school, where the pressure to be a beautiful, sexy, smart young woman was heightened, I labored to fit the prototype rather unconsciously. It was apparently my mission to gradually became more skinny and blonde, euphemisms for anorexia and bleached highlights. I developed a healthy athletic build at first, running track and playing varsity volleyball, getting great grades, enjoying my friends and falling in love for the first time with my boyfriend by junior year. By senior year, I had shrunk to a size zero and deeply worried everyone in my life besides my new boyfriend. Most everyone tried to enlighten me. My mom sat me down at a computer and shared information from websites she’d gathered about my disorder’s risk to my health and self esteem. Friends made snippy comments about my tiny portions and proportions, but were largely too scared to confront me about it. I was playing Evelyn Nesbit in the musical, and the costume designer kept having to adjust the proportions of my corset, one day shouting in frustration and concern, “stop losing weight!”
Meeting my best friend one afternoon was the ‘A-ha moment’ when it dawned on me how awful I looked and felt. The months past had felt like a foggy dream turned nightmare. I awoke from the strange fantasy confused, ashamed and searching for answers. I went from constructing my appearance, largely absent of self-awareness and thoughtful reflection, to searching for where I got the idea that the skeletal frame I’d ‘achieved’ was desirable. I began to finish what my eighth grade friends and I had started, identifying my ideals, and now unearthing the wisdom that can separate healthy and unhealthy. In conversations, mostly with friends, we worked to understand why our consciousness so narrowly and rigidly valued thinness. We concluded that we were still tempted to see ‘beauty’ as a desirable social tool that would guarantee happiness and acceptance in proportion to how closely we resembled models strutting past us in Soho, or featured as sex icons in magazines. We watched blockbuster sensations and popular television shows all featuring fit as a fiddle to very thin women, and made conscious efforts to challenge our habitual reactions. So the scare of getting so skinny compelled me to work toward rejecting that framework and cultivating acceptance for myself and others. I was angry that changes in my thinking and reactions came slowly and stubbornly. Still, I challenged myself to deliberately look critically at the information around me, and how I absorb it. I began the process of stepping back and seeing myself as both the subject and the object, a feeling person vulnerable to manipulation by the forces I was recognizing.
My gender as a young adult and future ‘fill in the blank’
In high school and college classrooms, teachers and male and female students alike discussed and explored ideas together, and gender was not apparent to me. In the classroom, gender is largely invisible thanks to responsible and forward thinking teachers and classmates. When my gender identity comes into my thinking about my education and where it will lead me, it’s when I feel that I have big shoes to fill. Though I know that my mother was a female pioneer in her firm and paved the way for my generation; for me, the meaning of what my mother had actually accomplished in law and family life didn’t register until recently. My mother never pushed the significance of what she did, never boasted her achievements, which stand for themselves. She also never pressured my sister and I to “make it big”. Her advice to us has always been to involve ourselves in what makes us happy. Still, I would be satisfied to make a difference in the way women are viewed like my mother does.
She challenged the status quo, became the first female partner at an old NY law firm, and all the while is a warm and present mother to five kids. In a word, she is Superwoman. I aspire to be what she was to us and to the world. Being a lawyer, however, is one of the last things I want to do with my life. I’m a lucky product of bourgeois life. I took singing and piano lessons when I was young, and played music with my stay-at-home father (who was a pioneer in his gender identity himself, retiring when my parents began having kids). My summers were happy and carefree with plenty of time on my hands to swim, hike, and write songs and poetry. With time and resources, I developed a passion for music and have my compass set on Music Therapy as a career, and making albums in my free time. My parents are thrilled that I’ve honed in on a profession in an area that brings me so much joy, and can provide service to people in need. My instincts tell me Music Therapy is one fabulous choice for me that I seem to be made for. Still, there’s a large part of me that feels insecure that Music Therapy isn’t doing enough to solve the social problems that I notice and learn about. Meanwhile, my friend Roshelle is having second thoughts about pursuing work with battered women because she’s not sure she can withstand the stress and pain. I want to help enact changes in the ways women are viewed and treated and provide help to physical victims and psychological casualties of discrimination and violence, but I also want to be happy and comfortable. Gender is present in my thinking about my future because as a woman, I want to make the best use of the education that my mother made possible for me. I want to make choices that add myself to the list of empowered, successful women, and all the while ensure my happiness and satisfaction as well. It’s a tall glass of water, but if I learned anything from my mother, it’s not to dwell on what hold us back, and simply follow through with my passions. Sometimes it feels like I’ll explode with all of the dreams that I have, but I must be careful to take the lessons of my gender development with me: be critical about my ideals and trace for outside influences, seek community and support and take it day by day.
