I've been sitting on this topic for years struggling with the question if I should even write this. I've written about it in my journals. It's been a struggle for me since I was in elementary school. Socially, I didn't fit the roles expected of me as a girl.I was branded a tomboy with the expectation that I'd grow out of it. I tried to fit in with my peers but severe bullying made it difficult. It didn't help that there was a lot of blatant misogyny in my parents' household that just got worse over the years.
As I came of the age of menarche, the bullying became far worse. With the onset of my period being terribly unpredictable due to my having polycycstic ovarian syndrome, I had several instances where my period began with out warning at school. Pretty much immediately after that I was shunned and treated as though I was the most disgusting and reviled of creatures by my peers. They threw ketchup on me, laughing. They spat on me and told me that I was little better than a dog because I couldn't control my period. At the same time, my mother was harassing me over the fact that she felt that I was being lazy about tracking my period and being excessive in my use of menstrual products. At one point, she and I had a 'discussion' about how if I was going to continue to be 'irresponsible' about keeping track of my menstrual cycle, I was going to have to pay for my own menstrual products. I was nine, living functionally in the middle of no where and I didn't even get allowance or some pittance for performing chores around the house so I could theoretically have money to pay for my menstrual products.
At the same time as all of this was going on, my body began to develop body hair and other secondary feminine sex characteristics. I was harassed about my breasts being small by other girls who were developing at a different rate. I was harassed mercilessly about my facial hair. The fact that my voice actually dropped in pitch netted me harassment as well. So, the message from my peers was that I wasn't as femme as they and I had no hope of ever 'catching up'. It was brutal. Because it wasn't just quirks of anatomy that didn't make me fit in well either. As I mentioned at the beginning, I wasn't good at performing the typical 'girl' behaviors. I was socially awkward and sensitive, perhaps a bit more than others. I didn't know how to shave my legs, so changing in the locker room for gym got me more harassment. (One person called me a hairy ape because I had not shave my legs, armpits, or my face before that day's swimming lesson. They went on a long tirade about how I was disgusting and an 'evolutionary throwback' because of my body hair) I didn't really know about how to apply make up.
One would theorize that my mother would have been willing to somehow assist in this. She consistently mocked my efforts to learn on my own. She declared me to look like a cheap harlot, a circus clown, and a bad mockery of a drag queen at various times. When I attempted to develop my own sense of clothing style, I leaned towards femme looks and my mother berated me for it. The conservative looks got the accusation of being a prude. The more modern looks got me the accusation of looking like a cheap whore or an attention seeking slut. (Just a few more lines and you'll see the bitter, bitter irony of these accusations.) The times where I ignored convention and attempted to come up with my completely own style of dress netted demands that I change into more 'normal' clothes because I looked like an embarrassment to the family.
My parents made it very clear that they were disappointed that I was born female. They weren't quite as beligerant about it until I hit that magical age of puberty. Then my father became distant. Then my mother all but accused me of trying to sleep with every boy in town, except for the fact that I didn't do anything other than go to school and come home. That didn't stop her from calling me things like a 'prick tease' and telling me that I was acting like a tramp. So, I defaulted to jeans and a t-shirt, the most gender neutral clothing I owned, for a long time. It still got me comments but it wasn't as frequent as when I decided to dress up for school.
When I got my first boyfriend, my mother basically treated me like a living doll. I was getting ready for my first date and she told me I was doing everything wrong. At which point she painted my face with vivid makeup and had me change my outfit to something more revealing. I was extremely uncomfortable with this, but it was the first semi-normal 'mother-daughter' interaction we had in a very long time. As that relationship persisted, my mother was invested in my appearance. She bought me clothes that were revealing. She bought me my first pair of high heels and taught me to walk in them (which was a highly unpleasant experience because she made me balance a book on my head as I did so and swatted me with a fly swatter when my posture wasn't proper). It's funny, in a dark way, that my mother's overboard jump into 'we're going to make you a proper femme' pushed so hard into the territory where I looked like I was older and made me a target for more sexual harassment.
At the same time as this push to make me more femme in the way that my mother felt I should look femme, I developed a mild eating disorder. Mom praised me for being so thin. She made noises about how if I could just get myself to 'look and behave properly' I could have a career in modeling. I knew that she was trying to live vicariously through me. I also knew that she was trying to make me into wife material at fourteen. I think she knew that N- was older than what he told me his age was. My parents had the infamous 'What are your intentions regarding my daughter?' conversation with him shortly after our first date. N- must have fed them a line that they approved of because my mother's initial rejection of the concept of my having a boyfriend turned into her trying to mold me into the perfect girlfriend material.
I also knew that I wasn't good enough in her eyes no matter how much I played along with her efforts to make me more femme. I knew that the lifetime of being told I had to be more masc to be approved of by my parents undercut the 'be more femme' and lead to Mom making sharp commentary about how I was terrible at being femme and that I really needed to care more about my appearances. In the midst of all this, I was enduring an abusive relationship where my boyfriend regularly sexually assaulted me and hurt me in other ways. But, I had the pressure to fit in as femme take off my shoulders briefly because I had a boyfriend, which didn't make me a complete freak in the eyes of my peers who were cycling through boyfriends like nobody's business. Instead, I had the pressure to maintain this relationship that made me automatically fit into the femme category.
It was one of the worst periods of my life. I lead this life where I hid so much of myself because I knew that it wasn't going to be approved or accepted. Additionally, I struggled because I realized I was bisexual and the entire situation was hostile against that. My boyfriend of the time at one point made a comment about how 'gays' should be beaten for existing. He looked to me for some kind of fawning agreement with his comment.What he got was horror and silence. He punished me for that later, declaring that it was my job to laugh when he was 'funny' and to agree with him when he was 'right'.
When I broke up with N-, he was stationed overseas. N- had gone into the Navy upon graduating high school with the promise that he was going to marry me when he finished his first tour of duty. When I broke up with N-, the harassment got going again. I was despondent over so many things. I felt like I was a failure because the relationship between N- and I was so horrible. I blamed myself for the fact that he raped me. I blamed myself for the fact that he battered me and emotionally abused me. I said to myself that if I were more of a 'normal' girl then those things wouldn't have happened.
So, I gave up on trying to be a 'proper' girl. I did my make up in the minimalist way that I could figure out on my own. I wore clothes that tended towards gender neutral most of the time. Being hurt from presenting as more femme made me gun shy of the concept though I dearly wanted to do it. I went off to a women's college concerned that I wasn't going to fit in. Fortunately, the anonymity of being one person on a large campus and the fact that most of the other people were too busy with their own shit to give a damn about me helped me adjust to being in that environment. My anxiety about not being femme enough was put on hold except for when some kind of event requiring fancy dress came up. Then my friends came to the rescue to help me figure out how to do up my hair and such. It felt like wearing a mask but I could do that all day long thanks to my experiences.
It was in my mid to late 20s that the anxiety hit me again full force. I had graduated the safe haven of college and found myself interacting again with a mixed population of genders on a regular basis. At one point, I found myself seriously questioning my gender. All of the pressure that my parents had put on me to perform as masc left me ill quipped to deal with the social pressures of being femme. It was an agonizing half year. I feared that my Beloved would leave me if I weren't femme enough. He told me something that blew my mind. He would have loved me the same if I were a man, transgender, or agender. When I revealed that I was bisexual, he laughed and said that he was as well and clearly that was the reason why we got along together so well.
I don't know where I fall on the gender spectrum. It causes me some anxiety. I am a woman but with strong masc traits. I struggle with the typical femme behaviors, even now. My education in womanly behavior is based in a weird place that is almost cultish in its nature. I struggle with a good deal of internalized misogyny. I've gotten better about it, but it is still a struggle due to how long I had to live with it. I still worry that I'm not femme enough despite the fact that I have birthed children and I dress more femme than I did in the past.
I see my transgender friends and I see their struggle. I open my heart in solidarity. As someone who was raised with the expectation that they were supposed to be male up until puberty hit and then they were denigrated for being female, I can see some parallels between our journeys. I see you. I acknowledge you and respect you. You are enough just as you are. My mistake is sometimes I let other people's definition of being femme override what I have known about myself for my whole life. Don't let other people define you. Only you know yourself well enough to define and apply labels. ♥
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