#wereboy

The first female ideal that really fit me was that of the witch, as reclaimed by the modern pagan movement : femininity as knowledge, practical and dirty, as intimacy with the world and all living things, femininity as liminal, cunning and subversive, femininity as taking power in your own hands by whatever means. This was a woman I could be. The really empowering idea that you create yourself…I then developed interest in the sacred feminine but with that came a lot of gender essentialism and I gobbled it all up. It felt like an antidote to all the devaluation of femininity I saw around me and felt wounded by. All through my teenage years I had this idea of the ideal Woman as wise, ethereal, self-sacrificing and shouldering the weight of the world with grace, but by striving to reaching that ideal I denied a lot of myself. I meditated a lot, tried to be always calm and helpful, despised all things fast and flashy, spend hours being the friend people could pour their problems out to, repressed all forms of anger and desire in myself, and ended up with chronic depression.

At that point I have to say that my family -probably like most- is full of gender-related emotional trauma. Many of my female ancestors were brilliant women who were forbidden to pursue their dreams of being doctor, journalist, sculptor, scientist, etc…because of social norms, and several started to develop mental health problems, or manipulated and criticized everyone around them. My father and other male family members are emotionally numb to a really unhealthy degree and were trained at the youngest age to pour all of themselves into hard work. (I regularly have to remind my dad I’m not one of his employees and capitalism is not a sound education method…Sigh). The gender lines were clearly defined around work division : on one side, emotional labor for the group at the cost of sanity and personal power/intellectual development, on the other, social and economic power at the cost of any emotional life and sensibility. All I saw growing up were those people who grew up artificially incomplete, forced to cut away parts of themselves, it all felt awfully wrong.

I grew up surrounded by women and their deep friendships, with defective/absent father figures, and idolizing my somewhat emotionally abusive mother : another of these smart, elegant, unfulfilled women who turned bitter and manipulative. Who had a habit of over psycho-analyzing me to death : she had this theory that any time I did something ‘boyish’ or with my father like watching car races it was because of my ‘unresolved oedipal complex’. (I had nightmares about Freud as a kid. Fuck you Freud.)

At some point I started to become a little bit of a misandrist, seeing femininity as something inately pure, spiritual, superior…and hating myself for being unable to live up to that ideal. Now it’s true there is something pretty toxic about how masculinity is constructed in this society, and I didn’t have many enviable examples of masculinity around. But I was still neck deep in  gender essentialism bullshit. Thank god at some point I took a class on Gender Studies, found Tumblr, acknowledged my own bisexuality, found some friends who flouted gender conventions, and things started to move forward.

One of my big revelations was that I did not have to find a man to be happy, so I didn’t have to force myself in the complementary role. I could, I don’t know, be with a girl, or someone who was neither or both, or with several people. So it didn’t make sense for me to be this weary of boys as if in their presence I was automatically defined as ‘possible breeding stock’. Those brutal experiences of older men sexualizing me I had as a young teen were not a commentary on my own designated value, but of these men’s inability to see women as actual human beings. Coming into contact with queer masculinities was also wonderful for me, as much as discovering queer femininities. I realized that first and foremost we are all human beings and love is about solidarity and comes in myriad forms and just…awesome, it made me believe in love again, to finally have the proof of something I long felt alone in perceiving - that those awful gender and sexuality norms were not human nature but the product of a bankrupt, limited social construct.

It took more time for me to realize I’m somewhat gender fluid, that there’s a part of me that’s not really female. It’s complicated to determine for me because by saying ‘this is not female’ I feel like I’m putting a whole gender into a box…I have to remind myself it’s a personal definition. To be honest I really don’t find myself in either definitions of current ‘traditional femininity’ and ‘traditional masculinity’…I’ve always experienced femininity to be about power, knowledge, influence and a more acute perception of the world, alongside empathy and cooperation and emotional intelligence because I don’t believe emotions and thoughts are actually all that separate in the real world - emotions drive our thought processes and vice versa. It’s a sort of mantle of responsability - I do believe that today in many ways femininity is an education to a different and very necessary form of leadership, the ability to take into account complexity and intersecting paradigms and working with representation and different layers of meaning. Opposite to that masculinity is…simple, really, linear. The capacity to cut through bullshit, to focus on one thing, on bringing a project to fruition, to execute something well ; as well as the capacity to care and protect. I mainly see gender as different educational paths, different competences and symbolic realms that however keep intersecting and feeding upon each other - the view of gender as complementary opposites is toxic in my point of view, this idea that both genders cannot be both strong and vulnerable, or sensitive and powerful at the same time, etc. Of course gender construction is endebted to power dynamics so it’s pretty logical that it serves to limit and cage people in the actual state of things. I’m trying to keep my own gender definitions somewhat outside of that, all the while recognizing the necessary imprint of oppression and privilege on those definitions and the work that needs doing. It’s not an easy balance.

On the feminine side there is a need to unlearn a heritage of twisting myself into absurd shapes to please, self-objectification, the tying of vulnerability and emotions to manipulation ; but on the other hand I do have to recognize that this venomous, battle-ready, seductive pragmatism is very useful from time to time and it’s a part of me as well. It’s a matter of using it in the right circumstances at the right time. Few things can make you more cruel than overloaded empathy, which gives you the exact knowledge of where and how to hurt, and the survival instinct to do so - getting used to gnawing off your own leg because it feels like the universe is continually grafing you those new limbs in the form of people to care for -

On the masculine side there is this fear of being predatory linked to queer desire, not knowing what to do with this energy and anger and agression, feeling guilty to go after what I want, this need of building and material realization for so long undirected, the competitiveness and drive for intellectual domination…it’s complicated. Instead of being taught which parts of ourselves to cut off in order to be fit for social interaction, we should be taught how to bring to the light those ugly parts of ourselves in ways that are honorable and respectful.

Thankfully, it’s not all painful inner work, it’s joy also. I realized I’m attracted to people who, likewise albeit in other ways, fuck with the gender binary : sensitive pretty men with doe eyes and long hair who look fragile, women with muscled arms, strong jaws, stares of steel and vicious tongues, or a mix of infinite combinations. The thing that turns me off in anyone is agressive macho bullshit - the very thing I’m expected to like by society - and it makes me gleefully happy to know this of myself. I see all these dapper and fabulous people on the internet experimenting with their own image and I realize how much I’ve still got to explore and discover and I can’t wait really.

I am a genderfluid young woman - I like to think of myself as a ‘wereboy’ - that is, I’m a woman but there is more under the surface and sometimes it comes to the light. It’s transformative and somewhat monstrous, unexpected, and very healing for me. When I go into ‘boy’ mode I allow myself things I wouldn’t otherwise - to be carefree, wild, and bold, to let go of unnecessary details, to listen to my most basic needs. Presenting more masculine some days is a challenge in letting go of feminine mannerisms I’ve taught myself to fit in : making myself smaller, fidgeting, avoiding to be confrontational, being overly vague, apologizing all the time. It’s a challenge to assume my own autonomy, stop the self-sabotage, make myself taller, listen to my inner animal, take up my space. And then, when I shift back to my woman self, I am closer to who I really am as a woman without any of the society bullshit, translating this experience into a new level of awareness and confidence : taking up my space and being bold, while also being empathic, nurturing, and looking for cooperation. I am closer to being the gender neutral story protagonist I felt I was inside growing up, the universal human. I know what of femininity is actually me and what is bullshit. And it allows me to grow my masculinity into a different shape than what I was taught it would take if I let it out : masculinity as smoothness, gentlemanly charm and care, rough-and-tumble joy of life, groundkeeper compassionate carer, with still a fabulous sense of style.