Part I

Blue eyes determined my gender. I was a little boy until adults got a close look at my “baby blues and long lashes” and decided I was a girl. My gender switched so much when I was a child. Perhaps it’s why I refuse to pick one now. I never protested when people called me a boy. I never felt my gender was important enough to lay claim to a side like war, a battle waged for centuries that no one wins.

I wanted to claim qualities kept from little girls, like secrets. I wanted to be bold, strong, fearless, big, loud, and sure. I didn’t realize I was attaching myself to male characters and men in my life to achieve this. I didn’t see the conditioning happening; I was a child. I didn’t express gender; I expressed a preference for Self that became gendered as people interacted with me. How I chose to dress or style my hair or play with my friends seemed dissonant to the girls around me. My phenotypic traits were arbitrarily prescribed as femininity by those around me, despite the absurdity of such a task, but I didn’t make this easy for them. They were left with things like my blue eyes and long eyelashes. For years, I didn’t make this easy and only offered my soft voice to confuse their gendered assumptions.

Bathrooms have always been one of the worst places to be gendered. Anytime it is obvious someone is sizing you up feels perilous, but there is something particularly frightening about the exposure you face in a bathroom. It is not simply that you are half-naked that is vulnerable, but also that you have made a declaration of Kind. You have stepped into a room dictated for the use of one sex and one sex only. You may think that you are the sole judge in determining which sex applies to you, but the truth is that everyone gets to form an opinion and express it should they so choose. In bathrooms, no one cares about your blue eyes and long lashes. They need a soft, lilting “hello,” to reassure them that we are all females here, no matter how we present.

Gendering happens everywhere. Unconsciously, every moment people determine the sex, they assume someone to be based on their gender performance; people determine their gender performance based on the sex they were assigned. Charlotte Witt writes about this “uniessentialism” of gender within our culture. She says gender is a great unifier for our social understanding of ourselves and others. Gender becomes the lens through which we see and judge others. This act of labeling is an attempt at understanding it’s not evil, but it is limiting, even when acting against it. Witt makes this assessment of the world not to prescribe how things should be but to draw attention to how they are. Like Marilyn Frye and her birdcage, Witt believes you must see the whole system to understand the oppression. You must see how gendering occurs to know why it is limiting to everyone, not just those on the periphery.

As a child, I could not see this cage but could feel it. I knew the identity people forced upon me was wrong, but I couldn’t articulate why. I couldn’t make them understand that I wasn’t a girl. That I didn’t want to be a girl. I didn’t want to be a boy, either, but my limited understanding of gender supplied me with only two options: boy or girl. I chose accordingly. I was left to fend for myself without the language or safety of queer space. Left to make a decision that I was only half-informed about. I didn’t have the whole picture and wouldn’t for many more years.