School, Part 3

In middle school, I was very conflicted between wanting to fit in and wanting to be myself.  I just wanted to wear military surplus clothes all the time but I feared the consequences of emphasizing my masculinity.  I was already butch enough that I could not get through a single school day without my gender being commented upon by someone.  I developed a crush on an older girl.  She had short hair, wore camouflage pants to school and still managed to have friends.  I didn’t see how it was possible.

At my mother’s insistence, I attended weekly religious classes at a Lutheran church.  The class was a miserable collection of pre-teens, every last one of us enduring the drudgery because of our parents.  I doubt there was a single kid in that class who actually believed in god.  At the end of a year of old testament education, one of the this boys in the class asked me with sincere curiosity, “So why did your parents give you a girl’s name?”  Sometimes I tried to make light of these situations.  And every time something like this happened, I wondered: Why is it that when somebody gets your gender wrong they are never the ones who look stupid? 

What I learned in middle school were rules and taboos.  There are rules for being a man and there are rules for being a woman.  And then there is this big fat taboo against ambiguity.  I understood that my gender issue was unspeakable because the pronoun accidents and misunderstandings were never addressed directly.   In a 7^th grade math class, a substitute teacher asked me, “Are you in the right seat?  A girl is supposed to be sitting there.” She was not apologetic, she simply moved on.  I was the one in the wrong, even though she had just broadcast to the class that she thought I was a misbehaving boy who had stolen the seat of some good girl.  Laughter ensued, and if I had my way, I would have smote her on the spot.  Instead, I grew out my hair.

These experiences solidified my belief that while I did not belong among regular people, I also did not want to belong among them.  In response to my gender, people proved to be incapable of permitting the slightest deviance from stereotypical gender roles.  Each time they opened their mouths to me, I could see their frustration and inability to understand who or what I was.  It made them angry and impatient.  I did not have these words at the time, but I knew I was failing their expectations and frustrating them.  I also knew there were only two gender options and somehow I was ill suited to both.  On top of that I observed how deviating from gender roles produces disgust in others, real physical revulsion.  It was inconceivable to the adult denizens of my childhood that I could be a butch girl, so instead they looked at me and saw either a boy, or a disgusting girl, or an immature tomboy who needed to grow up already. That was a lot for a kid to deal with, so looking back now I understand how I spent a few years being fairly well shut down and distant from everything.

A friend’s mother literally asked, “Couldn’t she try to be more feminine?” I alternated between sharing their disgust with myself and being filled with rage at the confinement.  Folks proved themselves to be severely limited in their imagination and limited in their ability to see gender rules as just rules.  All I could see were rules, rules I could not keep.  Seeing gender as a set of made-up rules was one of the pivotal understandings in my life thus far because it shone a bright light on all the other norms that are taken for granted in our culture.  And it wasn’t just that others pressured me to obey the rules, it was that no one else seemed to understand that the rules were rules.  I imagine they thought, “This is just the way things are and always have been and always will be.  Girls don’t act/look/think/talk/dress/walk/behave that way.”  Sometimes the messages were direct and sometimes they were subtle.  Yet there was such universal agreement to these rules that usually no one even bothered to write them down.  So it wasn’t just that I was disobedient of gender rules, it was that I didn’t make any sense.  Men are like this, women are like that, anything else does not compute.  Anything else evokes disgust.  Becoming queer was not a matter of declaring my attraction to women, but more a permanent disengagement from following a given gender track, the simplifications, the either/or choices, the rules.  It felt liberating to realize this, but it also felt disconcerting and alienating.  But once that light came on, liberating, disconcerting or come what may, there was no turning back.   And I could not help but see that when the rule keepers weren’t criticizing me, they were busy attempting to control the bodies and sexuality of other girls with a similar set of rules about who is a whore, who is a slut, no abortions allowed, who is too fat, etc.

Later on in high school, we periodically held pep rallies to celebrate our treasured sports teams.  At the last pep rally I attended, this boy spit on me from the bleachers above where I was sitting by myself.  I do not remember if any words passed between us.  I only remember realizing there was spit in my hair, the long hair I had been growing since eighth grade in order to stop being mistaken for a boy, in order to minimize my surface differences from other girls.  When I think about simply walking out of the school building at the start of each subsequent pep rally, I feel these quiet exits capture the essence of my high school experience.

My senior year, I was awarded a scholarship based on my standardized test scores.  The corporate sponsor of the scholarship was the company where my father worked.  There was a dinner to be held at a nice restaurant with the principal of my high school, my parents, and some people from my father’s office.  Ordinarily, my parents barely noticed or commented on my clothes.  My mom had taken me dress shopping a few times because I had to dress up for orchestra concerts.  I hated having to wear a dress and always wore what ever I wanted outside of my time with the viola.  When we were getting ready to leave for this scholarship dinner and I came out in a black blazer I had bought for myself in the men’s department at macy’s.  I thought I looked OK.  My father insisted that I wear a dress and he was so mean and angry about it that I don’t even think I objected.  I very well may have, because we argued all the time back then, but what stands out most in my memory is the clarity of his contempt.  He was disgusted by me and ashamed for his colleagues to see me.  Now I understand that this was his problem and not mine. But at the time I absorbed it and felt disgusted and ashamed of myself too.  I wore the dress.  I barely spoke at dinner.  Instead of refusing the shame, I had made it my own and believed that I deserved it. 

Recently I told this story about my father for the first time, over dinner with a married friend and sometimes mentor.  He was asking me why I do not want to marry my girlfriend and I was attempting to talk about my coming out process with the gender police and the confinements of normalcy.  I described how walking away from traditional family values was a commitment to myself to make the best life I could imagine.  But another detail slipped out in the telling, which I had not previously articulated to myself or anyone else:  Growing up, I never really knew for sure if I was going to make it.  It was interesting to me that this came out spontaneously in the conversation, because I have consciously been working on ways of talking my past and simply telling the personal stories I haven’t told before.  It came out of my mouth as an additional detail, an unsightly little mess that plopped onto the dinner table.  I felt like part of me left the table for a few minutes to observe what would happen next.  I had admitted to uncertainty about the prospects of my living to adulthood. 

One of the reasons for my uncertainty was a lack of options I could live with.  Living a regular life, with a regular relationship and a regular gender was unattainable, repressive and ultimately undesirable.  So I never sought to broaden or revise regular to include me.  I never wanted to redefine normal.  I just wanted more options.  Now I know queers need to live in this world, not in an imaginary perfect world.  People need to live in this world without their bodies and genders and relationships being questioned and scrutinized and criticized and examined constantly.  Or even debated...  It feels like shit to have the substance of your reality subject to debate.  Queers need rights and protections under the laws we have now, not just the laws we imagine in a revolutionized future.  And yet to this day there remains no clearer or more persistent theme in my life than the need for more options.