School

The first thing I learned in elementary school was that I was different, and not in a good way. Adults and other children regularly attempted to correct my gender. The way I looked, dressed, talked and even walked were constantly being subject to scrutiny and comment.  Every day I was given direct feedback about the specific ways that I was failing to be a girl.  A steady stream of negativity came in the form of verbal correction, looking at me too much or not looking at me at all.  I was struck by the barely concealed disgust that my body, my clothes, my mannerisms, my interests and my whole self evoked in adults and children alike.  I got the message that I was distasteful, and I understood that I should be ashamed of myself.  And I was ashamed.

But at the same time I simply could not live with the idea of becoming more feminine.  My efforts were lackluster at best.  I would not have even known where to start.  What they wanted me to become was entirely alien to me.  I could try to be a normal girl and fail, or I could try to have some kind of integrity and be true to the self I felt I was.  So I made a commitment to gender nonconformity as a very young child, long before I had any concept of sexuality or desire.  No one called me a Lesbian until I reached middle school but every day I heard about how I was not a Real Girl.  My mother had put me in a dress for school pictures, and I heard about it a year later when one of my classmates recounted the only time she had ever seen me in a dress.  She detailed the color and material and everything about the dress I had worn the previous school year, while I was somewhat stunned because I could not recall what she had worn the previous day.  Even in a case where I was not being corrected, the scrutiny made me want to disappear.

Deep down I didn’t really want to be a girl, at least not in the way I saw all around me. I decided just to be smart instead.  Smart was an identity I could live with, although it certainly did not win any points with other kids.  With each new shitty experience, I became more determined to find my own way.  Being smart was a clear decision for me, rather than some innate quality.  I just had to concentrate and be willing to work hard, so I set my mind to do it. I pushed myself more than any teacher ever did.  Being smart was a way for me to get positive feedback from adults and a way to live with myself being different.  But mostly it provided a reason for me to continue to show up at school.

I rejected what others girls did and wanted, from dolls to dresses, from marriage to children.  Long before I had any concept of sexuality, I swore that I would never get married and never have children.  I knew this years and years before I knew I was queer.  I also started to formulate ideas about how if all the adults in my world were wrong about gender, they very well could be wrong about a whole host of other things too.  Even as a little kid, I could tell that a lot of the adult world was forced, in the same way gender was being forced on me.  I started to become suspicious about institutions like God, racism, sports, the mall, the giant TVs and the fenced-in homes, and every other suburban idea and aspiration.  My earliest desires included a desire to escape, get out of there and get away.

But there was more to my childhood masculinity than just failing to be a girl, more to it than wanting to be my own self.  There was also misogyny. Misogyny complicates this story by tainting my freewheeling nonconformity with a real aversion to all things related to being a woman.  It spoils the fun of this tomboy liberation narrative with a sexist distaste for the feminine. Sexism and boyish freedom mixed together in my young mind, and in the culture I saw how being smart was associated with being masculine.  It would be a long time before I could sort them out, but as a kid, I knew with certainty which side of the equation I wanted to be on.  I was ashamed that I had been born female but determined to never be a typical, normal woman.  This typical woman did not exist of course, but was the product of hateful statements my father made about helpless, ditzy women and admiring statements my mother made about men and what ever they said or did.  Well, my parents were simply acting in accordance with the sexism that was polluting the air, floating in the drinking water and blaring from the TV.  Within my childhood self existed a complicated mess of shamefully wishing I could be more of a girl, defying suburban girl conformity, and a creeping belief that women were inferior and irrelevant anyway. 

So this is only partially a story about me against the school, or the suburbs, or the world.  The truth is that I still do not fully understand how I made it through school.  I do not remember any moments of respite where I really believed that one day it would be OK for me to not be a regular girl.  Mostly I remember not being able to stand the expectations of me to be a girl, not being about to stand the disapproval of me not being a girl, and generally not being able to stand the scrutiny.  Instead of a story about how I courageously defied expectations and triumphed over the evil forces of suburban conformity, the truth is a much less flattering story about how regular old sexism cannot be extracted from my earliest rebellion against gender.  I was a nerdy tomboy who thought all girlish things were stupid, and that was the best I could do.