Androgyny

Visiting my aunt in her idyllic coastal community in Western Massachusetts in late summer is infinitely lovely. There's the early morning walks along country lanes lined with quintessential New England rock walls, the boat-dotted Westport River bordering the family property, where you can see approximately two hundred shades of blue reflected in a given day, falling asleep in the room upstairs watching the lights on the fishing boats as they go out at night, waking with the sun as it slices through the curtains and the feeling that you're in a sunny, salt-scented library with all of my aunt's dusty books and family heirlooms... in short, it's heaven.

There's always the requisite cousin barbecue and family gathering while I'm there. My aunts like to say that I'm their favorite niece to which I like to reply, "I'm your only niece." It's endearing because they say it with a lot of pride. All of my cousins on my dad's side (the only side I ever see) are male - all five of them.

I feel more aware of my assigned femininity around certain people, like my cousins, but it is in those settings that I also become aware of how wrong that assignation feels. I've been thinking lately about how I am often drawn towards androgyny, which I see as a jumping-off point to examining the limitations of gender. Another seemingly unrelated observation: as I've gotten deeper into my thirties, my parents and other boomers I interact with have begun to ease up on asking me about my career and family-building aspirations. I'm not sure if this is because they feel less responsible for guiding me now that I'm off on my own or if the challenges they face in their current stage of life have become more pressing. I'm grateful to have people who care, but as they think more about their own mortality and less about whether I will have children or not, I feel a greater sense of freedom to be a fuller version of myself in conversation and to connect with them on deeper issues.

I find it interesting that, at the same time that I am approaching an age where my fertility is starting to decline, I am thinking more about my gender expression. This makes sense: I have always felt that child-rearing is, on a deeper level, an expectation of performing femininity, so asking myself whether I genuinely want to skip out on the experience of having a human child or not brings up questions about gender itself. I've never wanted a human child but lately I've felt a deepening sense of importance in my role as a cat mom. I expect people to smile and say this is cute and not really understand the depth of my feelings here. That's not really OK - pet parentage is just as valid as human parentage - but I'll let it go for now. Being Gibbous's mom is one of my core identities in life right now and one I take very seriously. It doesn't necessarily undermine my questioning of the gendering of parentage either. I can claim the role of Gibbous's mom and also reject traits of motherhood that other people assign to me. For instance, I don't think that I've ever felt that there is anything instinctual about parenting. This is my first time assuming full responsibility for another creature's life and it's been a steep learning curve figuring out how to balance her needs and mine.

Gibbous aka "bunny" at her fourth birthday party with friends.

Nurturing feelings may not be exclusive to AFAB (assigned female at birth) folks but I have always observed a greater interest in how I am fitting family planning into my life goals than with my male friends. I have always thought that the decision to have a child ought to take a lot of consideration and doesn't make sense for everyone. It should by no means be seen as the default choice. I've felt little twinges from time to time but I have also made a decision that aligns with my lifestyle, life goals, and personality. Obviously some people didn't get to make a choice one way or another and I am not trying to cast judgement on anyone who finds themselves in that predicament. I used to judge people who intentionally had children, but I came to see that there were problems with those views and now I feel relatively content to live and let live. Ultimately, I believe that having a child is a very personal choice one has to make for themselves, not a moralistic one with a 'should' attached. Given all the pressure to fit into gender roles and the insane amount of weight we put on this constructed aspect of our identities, it makes perfect sense that people don't often get the chance to explore their genuine feelings about gender until much later in life.

While I have often felt pressure from older generations to hit traditional milestones like buying a house or having a child, I see a similar rigidity and moralizing with members of my own generation and especially Gen Z-ers around the  "correct" way to present and think about yourself in conversations. I feel a pressure to claim an identity and present it to the world that feels very social justice performative. For instance, I have had more than one partner for the past five years but I don't like identifying as polyamorous or making that into my whole identity. Like with gender exploration, it's more something I do, not what I am. I don't want to be a role model or a spokesperson, I don't need cool points, and I reserve the right to have complicated feelings about it - and to even reject that as part of my identity if I so choose. I don't think you can get to the more interesting points in conversation or your own self-discovery if you're always measuring your life by what others are saying and doing. I think authenticity can really only be found through years of figuring stuff out for yourself. And the figuring stuff out part never really ends.

For my own exploration, it's been helpful to realize that I can reject some things about gender roles and still identify as AFAB. If that's what feels right, then that's OK. Being cis doesn't make me less cool. I'm not sure that I'm ready now or will ever be ready to land anywhere in particular on the gender front, I'm just at a point of noticing my preferences and what feels right to me - and Jodie Comer in the suit pictured below and just her whole character in Killing Eve definitely feels right. I love how in control of her image she is. I'm all for tabboo-breaking and don't want to shame anyone for finding power in revealing and accentuating any part of their body that they want, but I also have SO many hang-ups with female fashion and the impracticality of it. There's something so symbolic and striking about a woman taking that power back by looking so damn suave and handsome. Part of my hangups originate from growing up with a costume designer mom whom I love very dearly and admire for her insane amount of creativity but who also dressed me up in typically feminine attire into adulthood and, to this day, chastises me for not wearing clothes that accentuate my figure. Don't get me wrong. Some days I feel very feminine and want to present that way but let me define my femininity for myself and praise me when I'm feeling like a handsome boy too (meme cred. below to the Insta account: killing.eve_fans__). 

I sometimes think about the contextual events in my life that might have laid the foundation for my gender exploration. Femininity has long felt like the default, masculinity the ever-present pull and the everything that lies beyond a place I go to mostly when I'm on psychoactive drugs (although increasingly I am realizing it is something I feel more often than that). My parents only had one child and only ever intended to have one child. They tried before me, but the boy was a stillbirth. My dad reportedly had wanted a son, and my mom likes to say that, when I came out, he asked, "will she still want to go hiking with me?" For the record, my dad has always loved me to the fullest. I don't think he was one bit disappointed in having a girl. If anything, they were natural wonderings parents have over how their children will turn out that are, yes, a little influenced by gender stereotypes. That information on its own hasn't caused me to want to represent both girl and boy at the same time; that kind of duality has appealed to me for a long time. Call it my Libra moon or early love of Greek mythology. I am forever seeking to connect with my Platonic half-self (according to Plato's theory, which many say was satire, humans were originally four-armed, four-legged, two-faced all-powerful beasts until the gods decided they were too powerful and split them in half, condemning them to forever search for their other masculine or feminine half. We can give at least some credit to Plato for including same sex searching in that theory.) 

Despite his alleged initial desire to have a son, my dad has never been hyper-fixated on gender performance, at least not in my experience with him. I knew that he grew up around very strong and sometimes domineering women, but he never brought those hangups to our relationship and in fact just tried to give me the skills to be self-sufficient. All of us have been in countless situations where a prescribed gender identity is put on us. In the best light possible, I see it as a misguided, but very human striving for balance. 

I think gender is ultimately pretty silly as a categorization tool but, for the time being, I'm curious as to why I am drawn to soft, elegant features on men or like to cultivate what some would call my more masculine qualities. I don't express myself in a particularly androgynous way - I don't usually put a lot of thought or effort into my appearance, which I guess can be seen as tomboyish - but there are other ways in which I sometimes feel androgynous: in both the forms and personalities I find myself attracted to and how I see my own personality. 

Women bear the brunt of negative gender stereotypes. Sensing that from an early age, I tried at every opportunity to perform "masculinity": toeing the line of being a tomboy, cultivating my more logical side, doing things that men might feel more safe to do like solo traveling around the world, taking on leadership roles when possible, opening doors for people (because fuck Southern chivalry)…etc. The list isn't too long because, at a certain point, these reactions started to feel as absurd as being in a Shakespearean gender bender. I used to view the idea of "woman" through the lens of what I am not - not a mother, not into shopping or accessories or hobbies that go with the stereotypes of what women like... As much as I try to come off as confident and badass and, frankly, masculine, a lot of people still look at me and assume I'm a vegetarian Christian college student because of my physique, young face and temperament. People or more ready to ascribe a quiet and soft-spoken disposition to gender rather than introversion or some other reaction to formative situations and circumstances. I don't think I can change that image people have of me too drastically without completely becoming a different person. I feel like I've moved on now and don't care enough anyway.

I hear the term gender dysphoria used a lot more often than gender euphoria. What would it feel like to wear a suit jacket that made me feel the way I feel watching Jodie Comer in Killing Eve? What would it feel like to truly uplift and celebrate masculine softness and elegance? I know gender is generally looked down upon as a bad thing keeping humankind down but what would it feel like to handle it with more playfulness and ephemerality? We need to play with these ideas more to begin to understand all the nuances and complexities of our own experiences,  but, to do that, we need to stop putting such rigid boundaries around how exploration is supposed to look. I just want to remove the moralism from the expression of my identity and figure out what makes me feel good.