33. Notes from a girl

Already failing grad school expectations!

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The following is less processed than it sometimes is—a few reflections on a weird experience in class. My thoughts are evolving, and I felt kinda scared to write this but then Friday rolled around and I’m sticking to a schedule so here it is!

In my very first class on my very first day of graduate school, someone they/them’d me. We were going through a reporting exercise of asking our fellow students basic questions about their lives and experiences and presenting what we learned to the class. Something about me, or multiple somethings (alternative haircut, couple tattoos, Doc Martens, queer aura?) got me clocked as “they” and my classmate proceeded to refer to me this way throughout the presentation. 

At first I was surprised and shifted my feet in my Docs to make sure I was the same person I thought I was. (Gave the smallest insight into how it might feel to be regularly misgendered.)

It also reminded me of when I got a pixie cut in fifth grade. I hadn’t gone through puberty, and I dressed androgynously—lots of tie dye. The whole world thought I was a boy, “he/himming” me everywhere I went. It didn’t feel good because it didn’t feel like who I am.

Pixie cut had grown out quite a bit by this point. (Me left. Dad right. April ‘07)

But I’d never been “they’d” before. All throughout orientation I’d been parroting my pronouns: shehershehersheher. That someone took a glance at me and concluded, “Yup. A ‘they’ for sure” was disarming. Then it felt hilarious. Then affirming: a queer rite of passage. My classmate didn’t nail my pronouns but did see me as not straight, which is what I am, and what I’m going for. 

In the second part of the exercise, we had to go back to the person we interviewed and cross-check to see what we’d gotten wrong. “I actually use she/her pronouns,” I said, a little sheepish, despite my amusement at the situation. It felt weird to correct my classmate, not just because of the social awkwardness, but because I didn’t feel misgendered in being called “they.” Something about it felt comfortable. 

I’ve often thought that, were I not raised in a society that so strictly enforces a gender binary, I’d probably feel differently about my gender identity than I do today. I imagine many of us would feel more comfortable somewhere in between “man” and “woman,” considering gender is all made up anyway. 

And yet, I was socialized as a woman, and that has become who I am. For me, it is less about femininity or presentation or sex, and more about the experience of womanhood. Identifying as a woman is as much a political statement as a personal one. It is an acknowledgement of everyone fighting the patriarchy (cringe but whatever), and I feel a sense of community, and hell, we’ll say a sense of gender identity too, in aligning myself with people who call themselves women.

Kathryn Bond Stockton, queer theorist and professor at the University of Utah has written that “gender is queer for everyone,” meaning that gender is strange for all of us, no matter our gender identities or sexual orientations. On the Ezra Klein Show a few weeks ago, Stockton said,

“Everybody, at some point, will fail their gender expectations.”

No matter who we are and how we think of ourselves, we cannot consistently adhere to the rigid (and largely arbitrary) constructions of gender we as a culture create and uphold. 

Earlier in the summer I was on a date with a queer woman I was crushing on hard. We were talking about gender and gay stuff when she asked aloud, “Did our parents actually expect us to be straight?” (our parents, fortunately, many miles from the bar and fully out of earshot). She, braver than I am, had posed that question to her mother years ago. Her mom had responded simply, “There are many ways to be a girl.” 

On one hand, that’s an expansive view: there are many ways to be a girl. Or anyone. But it also presupposes that she is a girl. 

I have long presupposed that I am a girl. And for the most part, the world does too. I am cis. I am (usually) read as cis. I carry an enormous amount of privilege in that identification. And still, that day in class, I failed my own gender expectations. I was sitting in my chair, feeling womanish, but my classmate read me differently.

Of course everyone should be called by the pronouns that feel most comfortable and validating. But the emphasis on pronouns (and the performativity of cis people signing emails with their pronouns or introducing themselves with their pronouns thereby inadvertently forcing anyone who does not use she/her or he/him to out themselves) may miss the point. There are many things we can do to support trans and nonbinary people. And sure, pronouns are important, more important to some than others, but focusing our energy on pronouns alone is not allyship, nor do pronouns make gender suddenly obvious, let alone definable and static.

Being they/them’d felt comfortable maybe because I perceived it identified me as queer. Or maybe it felt comfortable because nothing was at stake for me; in correcting my classmate and saying, “I use she/her,” I defaulted to a system of gender classification that is already ubiquitous and hegemonic. And maybe it felt comfortable because I express my gender beyond my pronouns—clothes, actions, hair (lol)—that feel more validating and euphoric than what I’m called. Indeed, there are many ways to be a girl.

Recently at a party, a friend facetiously said something to the effect of, “I think of gender kind of like astrology signs.” A classification is imposed on you from birth, and people think they understand things about you because of the classification. In reality, for those of us who are even vaguely into astrology, there are usually elements of our birth chart placements that resonate with us, and parts that don’t. (Sag sun, gemini moon, libra rising over here!) My chart doesn’t mean anything serious to me, and yet I still strongly identify with my signs.

I don’t want to trivialize gender—the stakes are significantly higher than they are for astrology, and people experience discrimination and violence for simply being who they are or for the way they perform gender. But in both cases—astrology, the binary—we have created rigid categories that we’re slotted into at birth, as if these categories make us intelligible to each other and ourselves in any meaningful way. And despite all the noise, we still manage to find community and identity not only in the categories themselves, inadequate and inaccurate as they may be, but in how we fail categorical expectation.

Fortnightly Faves

1. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles which is a tiny bit smutty but also so beautifully written. Goes fast. Absolutely recommend.

2. This sweet essay about home, sense of place, and San Francisco. I did not grow up in California, but the elements of leaving to go far away, making new home, and missing old places resonated. 

3. This fascinating read on the increase in myopia (my parents always joked my sister and I were destined to myopes, and perhaps we were, but this article suggests there’s something else going on).

4. Leslie Jamison on “choose your own adventure books” what more could you want??

5. Dock Ellis and the LSD No-No which I rewatched after reading an article on Dock Ellis for my multimedia class. Someone showed this to me in college while we were tripping. Loved it then, love it now.