“There’s no difference between boys and girls.”
It’s a sentence I would repeat innumerable times throughout my childhood, over and over until I could no longer believe it. Sometimes I said it in exasperation to a girl, trying to teach her that saying “Boys are dumb” was just the sort of nonsense that made you feel powerful while undercutting you. Sometimes I yelled it in righteous fury at a boy as he ran away shouting “Cooties!” Many times I asserted it to a teacher who told us something like “Girls aren’t as good at algebra,” or “Girls are better at keeping things organized.” Every time I heard about some supposed fact about boys or girls I was filled with frustration, because no one seemed to understand the self-evident truth that the only difference between a boy and a girl was in their body. I used to tell people, “I would be exactly the same if I was a boy.” “I would be thinking this same thing, except I would say that I would be the same if I had been born a girl.” “The only time your gender should come up is when you go to your doctor.”
Gender and sex meant the same thing at that time, or at least they seemed to. But if I had the vocabulary then that I do now, I think I would have said that gender was a made up thing, more of a worldview than any meaningful category of being. Reading Judith Butler’s subversive piece of theory, Gender Trouble, was a large part of being able to develop that vocabulary. It was as inscrutable as all the absolutely contradictory statements I’ve heard about gender. I didn’t know what it meant, but I had a vague, shadowy idea of what it was supposed to mean. Unlike gender itself, though, I loved Gender Trouble. It was absolutely vindicating. I had spent so many years telling people that nail polish is not the outward effect of something innate in a person’s core, something that causes them to gravitate toward pink and pretty things. It’s ridiculous. Why do women like makeup? Because we are told our worth depends on how we appear to others, so makeup gives us a temporary feeling of self-worth. Why are women more emotional? We aren’t, we are just called out more. Judith Butler agrees. She is a tenured professor and she wrote a book that might as well be written in another language just to back me up.
I was eventually forced to concede that there were some behavioral differences between the two sex- groups that I knew about, but I still didn’t believe in gender as something innate. “If boys and girls act differently,” I thought, “it’s because we are treated differently.” Going through puberty was an especially heinous time for a person with this thought process, as many class periods were devoted to telling us all that our personalities and worldviews were entirely dependent on our estrogen or testosterone. This news was better received by boys than girls, of course, since testosterone is a positive signal marker in our society. Not true with estrogen. Estrogen was used to demean us. Any boundary we set down or frustration we aired was responded to with a cruelly dismissive, “She must be on her period,” or “Why so hormonal? Calm down.”
Gender must be something. I say this because it means quite a lot to my trans friends. I never believed in gender until I met someone for whom it was such a big deal. Now the evidence is undeniable that gender is something. I don’t know what it could possibly be, but I know it’s something important. Otherwise it wouldn’t be so important to my friend. I have this feeling that if I just figure out how to read Gender Trouble, Butler will help me figure out what gender really is, or more precisely, where the desire for gender comes from. Gender is whatever you choose to perform as gender, I think, but why do people choose to perform something that causes them constant pain, puts them at increased risk of death by attack or medical malpractice, and that they haven’t been socialized toward? What could possibly make gender so important to someone when, to me, it’s simply a performance?
I am a feminine person, which is an external expression. This does not have internal implications, as a feminine person can be male or a masculine person female. Femininity does not have internal implications for me in particular, because I still feel that I would be as comfortable in a male body as I am in this body; that is to say, not especially. Being feminine was a “choice” I made, but I had few options, and none of them were good. My internal experience of being a feminine person is shaped and probably caused by my desire to succeed in the expectations foisted onto me. I have been taught that being sexually and romantically desirable (particularly to men) reflects and in fact determines my worth. If I am gender nonconforming, I will be less widely desirable. Therefore, my internal feelings of worth are largely based on my external appearance of femininity, despite the fact that my appearance is entirely performative and internally meaningless.
The female gender seems to exist only to define the male gender. Females are weak so males are comparatively strong and so forth. If I was good at something, I wasn’t truly good at it, but I was good at it “for a girl.” If a boy was good at something, the sentence ended there. Maleness seems to be the default, the inherent gender of people. Femaleness is the auxiliary gender, not so much defined as defined against. As I went through puberty and watched a gap form between my upper body strength and that of my peers, I began to realize that my weakness was taken as emblematic of my gender, always compared against the strength of men. I was much weaker than my female friends too, but that was never brought up as a defining characteristic of my identity. Characteristic personality traits are even more indicative of this power structure, because I cannot count the number of times I have been told that women and girls are manipulative, insecure, and irrationally emotional and then been told that every woman I know is simply an exception to this actual rule. I have heard “Men are more logical and women are more emotional” so many times I cannot count them up, even though I have not experienced that to be the case. People rarely even define how rational or strong or whatever men and women are. They simply assert that men are better at the thing in question than women and let that be enough of a parameter to consider the issue fully understood.
I uphold the gender hierarchy because it is the best way for me to comfortably succeed in society, but when I stop and think about the fact that I’m doing this, I’m doing it just a bit less. Compulsory heterosexuality is a phrase I very much appreciate because I see examples of it all the time. I remember the moment I first recognized that I was attracted to girls as well as boys, and looking back at earlier times in my life I realize that the evidence was always there. I had crushes on female friends, I watched Who Framed Roger Rabbit? over and over again, absolutely fascinated by Jessica Rabbit, and so on and so forth. When these behaviors were directed at boys, nobody questioned why I did them. It was assumed that any fascination with a male friend or character was a crush. In fact, these assumptions were often wrong. I was obsessed with Captain Jack Sparrow, but not because I wanted to be with him. I wanted to be him. These feelings are less distinct with Jessica Rabbit. I assumed I wanted to be her, and so I did. She was the most desirable female character, and therefore the best. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to be her because to be her would be to be better than I was. The way my behavior was received shaped the way I understood myself. I am still more likely to date men simply because their desire is validating in a way that women’s desire is not. If a man wants me, I have value.
Learning that my self-worth was this flimsy was uncomfortable. Lying in my dorm room reading Gender Trouble and thinking about all the ways in which gender has troubled me, I had no clue what to do with the information that most of my self-image is based on a facade. I have always known that my own gender was a facade, and I have always felt that everyone else’s mostly was too, but then I had to realize that this meant my relationship to relationships was so messed up because it is built on the frail construction that is gender. Compulsory heterosexuality causes me to focus more on dating one gender than the rest, despite the fact that I am not fully convinced gender really exists. The effects of gender obviously exist, but not necessarily gender itself. After all, if I am not the object of a man’s desire, there’s no subject to determine my worth. If I am not seen as female, will I be seen?