Posts tagged growing up
Posts tagged growing up
As we age, the web tightens. The gender transgressions of infancy are no longer as amusing or accepted in childhood; childhoods are increasingly unwelcome by puberty; and the gender experimentation of puberty must be abandoned by early adulthood, when all young men and women are expected to be… men and women.
And only men and women. This ostensibly “natural” progression, inexorably producing men from males and women from females, consumes an extraordinary investment of social resources. Others devote time and energy regulating our gender, and we spend an even greater amount learning, rehearsing, exploring, and perfecting our gender. By adulthood, our role is inhabited so completely that it feels inevitable. And should the experimentation of childhood inadvertantly re-emerge, we find it awkward, embarrassing, and even threatening.
Excerpted from Natalie Reed’s blog:
Growing up amidst male socialization when one’s gender identity is not consistent with it is a horrifying and traumatic experience. Nothing about it is in any way a privilege, and one does not internalize or adapt to it in a manner at all similar to how a cis man does. Rather than it being a means through which one develops confidence and a sense of power and entitlement, eventually taking one’s vantage point for granted, it is instead a painful, self-erasing performance one has been forced to adopt. One has a constant inner checklist of the behaviours and mannerisms you’re supposed to display in order to avoid being seen as girly and consequently ridiculed or beaten up. Instead of gaining the benefits of being the “superior” class within our cultural gender dynamics, you’re instead experiencing an extremely harsh, constraining prison of gender’s unspoken rules and regulations. Instead of internalizing a sense of being the default, favoured, normal gender, you internalize scripts, shame, self-hatred and the need to police your own gender- police your expression, your personality, your interests, the ways in which you interact with others, anything that could end up with you getting “caught” and revealing how you’re not normal, you’re inferior, broken and wrong.
This is painfully accurate.
It finally dawned on me that I had not been able to grow up fully because I was never going to be an adult woman. I knew that the only way I could grow up - really be an adult - was to become a man. I needed to go through a puberty to which I could relate. I needed to move beyond the restrictions that I had placed on myself - and that others had placed on me - because of the opposition between my gender identity and my physical body. I needed to balance my body and my psyche so I could leave that struggle and that lie behind and move forward in my own life.
