A Digression on the Subject of Gender

Today I ran across a friend’s link. She and I have different (read, polar opposite) political views, so I wasn’t too surprised to see that it was an article protesting gay marriage. The catch was, it didn’t attack the idea of gay marriage from the ‘eeew, gays? Groooosssss, amirite?’ angle I’d expected it to. Instead, it was more a protest of androgyny and the ‘erosion’ of gender roles in society. One of its main points was that a marriage without distinct gender roles assigned to the ‘correct’ gender was a bad marriage.

Which got me thinking. You see, my gender identification is far from clearcut. After learning that gender was more of a spectrum than a binary structure (male/female), I spent quite a bit of time wondering what exactly I was, because I knew I’d never entirely identified as female. For a while, I wondered if I were gender fluid, that is, moving between identifying as male or female. But I couldn’t remember ever distinctly identifying as male, and feeling uncomfortable in my body. Rather, all the things that made me wonder if I were gender fluid were cultural, not biological. I was happy being female and feeling female, and being attractive as a female, but I was not happy with the cultural expectations that went with being female.

As a responsible feminist, I recognize that I should not let the culture around me dictate my gender identity, which was the main reason that I realized that I was not truly gender fluid. Instead, I now identify as biologically female but culturally male. That is to say, I am happy with my biological gender, but that I assume a more classically ‘male’ cultural role and am happier adopting male etiquette and mannerisms than females. Etiquette is one of the more distinct demonstrations of this: I stand when someone enters the room, I take my hat off, I hold doors, and am more comfortable bowing than curtsying. When it comes to dancing, I am far more comfortable (if I know the dance) leading than being led. I feel really weird when people treat me as a lady. It’s not that I resent being treated as delicate (in fact, I don’t resent it at all--I realize that people are being highly polite, and I appreciate that), it just seems wrong.

I suppose all of this is a really fancy grown-up way of saying that I’m a tomboy who hasn’t grown out of it yet. I suppose that this can also be read as me trying to jump on the genderqueer bandwagon. Honestly, I’m not sure either, but this is as close as I’m going to get for a while to a conclusion.

I find that article especially disturbing because not only is the author demonstrating a disregard of gay rights and an intolerance toward the LGBT community, but they’re unhappy that some people might have different gender roles than they do. It’s clear that they have never experienced uncertainty about their gender identification, and so want to exclude people who have.