Sex from Scratch by Sarah Mirk

Author:Sarah Mirk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Microcosm Publishing
Published: 2014-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

4.

Gender

is

Messy

Even kids know that gender isn’t simple.

We’re taught when we’re young that boys only do boy-things and think in boy-ways and girls only do girl-things and think in girl-ways. But for as long as I can remember, those rules rubbed me the wrong way. As a kid, I felt like a girl, but I thought it was silly to act only in girl-ways. I liked being both girly and a tomboy. I liked to wear dresses and I liked to roughhouse. I often played with the dolls and I never crossed my legs. I didn’t want to be a princess, but I didn’t want to be a prince, either. My role models were girls who went outside the roles of their gender, women who were a little “weird”: Pippi Longstocking, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harriet the Spy.

We spend our lives mixing and matching, learning to craft our identities for ourselves—and, often, wishing that being who we want to be involved less hassle, less unlearning, and fewer dismissive encounters. I’m a woman and I’ve always identified as a woman, but performing my gender has often been tricky: I rarely want to behave the way women are supposed to behave—but when my desired behaviors do line up with the norm, I resent myself for being so traditional. I feel good about myself and my body these days, but I frequently wish gender were easier.

That feeling of confusion and insecurity about how I’m supposed to be a woman becomes especially acute while dating. When I’m going on a date with a new guy, I worry over whether I should be more feminine—I’ve always wanted to be one of those girls who smells nice and has the perfect shoes and I know that’s never going to happen. In long-term relationships, the problems get deeper as I start to recognize how expectations around gender affect my behavior and my partner’s behavior in big ways. A major part of learning how I want to act in relationships has involved realizing that those childhood set-in-stone gender rules are actually very fluid. What an exciting discovery!

An invaluable resource for me as I think about my gender has been conversations with transgender friends. To get to the point where they can identify with a gender their parents’ didn’t expect, or with no gender at all, each of my transgender friends had to do some deep thinking. They’ve had to examine big, scary ideas of sexuality and gender roles and learned how they want to build their own unique identity.

Our conversations make me realize how gender rules are just stories I’ve been told over and over again. Not coming into conflict with those stories has been a privilege for me in many ways. For all my frustrations over how society expects women to be pretty and polite, every day I take for granted the dozens of ways that I conform to other peoples’ expectations of how a woman should behave, including how I look, what I wear, my demeanor, and the sound of my voice.

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