Wow. My transmasc buddy and I (transfem) LOVED reading this. One thing he said in the wash up that stukc with me is "I didn't avoid wearing short skirts because I was afraid of femininity. I avoided them because I was afraid of being harmed".
In my case, I avoided wearing anything but baggy disguise because I too was afraid of being harmed.
Norms curtailed our imaginations but violence curtailed our experimentation.
Reading this just fully burst my bubble after literally just finishing an article about how I leaned into toxic masculinity as an attempt to pass as a man. It makes sense that I am now at my happiest embracing my naturally camp and fruity self that I was as an afab child, rather than trying to lean into masculine stereotypes that have nothing to do with my actual personality. Fantastic article🙌
Beautiful, thank you for writing. I really relate a lot to this and never really knew how to describe it, nor ever related to all those feminine socialized stories and expectations.
Similar experiences as a child of (traditional & upwardly mobile + upper caste) immigrants. There was some culture clash between western femininity and family expectations because what it meant to be a girl to my peers was very commercial and about access to specific consumer products, while what it meant at home was more about modesty and patriarchy. Wearing makeup, or leggings, or other things considered part of American femininity was considered whorish, attention-seeking, demeaning, and unacceptable for 'our women'. On the other hand, celebrities on TV or my peers would be doing all of these things without much comment. I don't think this is unique, since there's obviously a lot of contempt for anything associated with women even in the dominant culture that coexists just fine with pressure to be a woman.
However, both experiences were very cruel about body and facial hair, because hair is deeply racialized and masculinized, so the combination of being brown and having visible body/facial hair evoked a lot of disgust both from my American peers and family members with the same features. I only began wearing makeup once I moved out, but the fact that I was wearing makeup was actually rewarded as conforming once I was an adult and it wasn't associated with the potential for deviant teenage sexuality anymore.
Possibly because I'm intersex I felt a strong draw to transfeminine, femme lesbian and fem gay experiences and other experiences of nonconforming/punished femininity over that of transmasculine or butch experiences. The disgust people feel in reaction to bearded women is something close to home for most of these groups, and feels impossible to disentangle for me from my experience of racialization.
I think the real takeaway here is that there are masculinities and femininities that are both (openly!) rife with contradiction and in one of many waves of changing values and associations. I know other people with the same background from the same area who had largely non-overlapping experiences of growing up 'as a girl'. Even the kind of girl I was considered to be (and the treatment this produced) varied situationally and based on others' preconceptions of me.
Gender is one of those stories we produce by telling it. While writing this I've been self conscious of falling into rote ways of talking about gender or immigrant culture that flatten out difference, but I don't think there's any way to concisely summarize personal experiences that doesn't get this gloss. There isn't a singular gendered socialization you can talk about that isn't the writer's failure to imagine lives wholly unlike the set of personal experiences they've extracted and labeled as 'gendered' - a process that inherently strips nuance and misses dozens of other contradictory experiences. This comes up a lot with queer people or feminists trying to make broad and abstract commentary about the nature of the world or oppression! While trying to come up with a unified theory of things is admirable, a lot of grounding and information is lost in the generalization, and the conclusions you can draw from vague foundations don't have much explanatory power or clarity to offer.
Wow. My transmasc buddy and I (transfem) LOVED reading this. One thing he said in the wash up that stukc with me is "I didn't avoid wearing short skirts because I was afraid of femininity. I avoided them because I was afraid of being harmed".
In my case, I avoided wearing anything but baggy disguise because I too was afraid of being harmed.
Norms curtailed our imaginations but violence curtailed our experimentation.
Reading this just fully burst my bubble after literally just finishing an article about how I leaned into toxic masculinity as an attempt to pass as a man. It makes sense that I am now at my happiest embracing my naturally camp and fruity self that I was as an afab child, rather than trying to lean into masculine stereotypes that have nothing to do with my actual personality. Fantastic article🙌
Beautiful, thank you for writing. I really relate a lot to this and never really knew how to describe it, nor ever related to all those feminine socialized stories and expectations.
Similar experiences as a child of (traditional & upwardly mobile + upper caste) immigrants. There was some culture clash between western femininity and family expectations because what it meant to be a girl to my peers was very commercial and about access to specific consumer products, while what it meant at home was more about modesty and patriarchy. Wearing makeup, or leggings, or other things considered part of American femininity was considered whorish, attention-seeking, demeaning, and unacceptable for 'our women'. On the other hand, celebrities on TV or my peers would be doing all of these things without much comment. I don't think this is unique, since there's obviously a lot of contempt for anything associated with women even in the dominant culture that coexists just fine with pressure to be a woman.
However, both experiences were very cruel about body and facial hair, because hair is deeply racialized and masculinized, so the combination of being brown and having visible body/facial hair evoked a lot of disgust both from my American peers and family members with the same features. I only began wearing makeup once I moved out, but the fact that I was wearing makeup was actually rewarded as conforming once I was an adult and it wasn't associated with the potential for deviant teenage sexuality anymore.
Possibly because I'm intersex I felt a strong draw to transfeminine, femme lesbian and fem gay experiences and other experiences of nonconforming/punished femininity over that of transmasculine or butch experiences. The disgust people feel in reaction to bearded women is something close to home for most of these groups, and feels impossible to disentangle for me from my experience of racialization.
I think the real takeaway here is that there are masculinities and femininities that are both (openly!) rife with contradiction and in one of many waves of changing values and associations. I know other people with the same background from the same area who had largely non-overlapping experiences of growing up 'as a girl'. Even the kind of girl I was considered to be (and the treatment this produced) varied situationally and based on others' preconceptions of me.
Gender is one of those stories we produce by telling it. While writing this I've been self conscious of falling into rote ways of talking about gender or immigrant culture that flatten out difference, but I don't think there's any way to concisely summarize personal experiences that doesn't get this gloss. There isn't a singular gendered socialization you can talk about that isn't the writer's failure to imagine lives wholly unlike the set of personal experiences they've extracted and labeled as 'gendered' - a process that inherently strips nuance and misses dozens of other contradictory experiences. This comes up a lot with queer people or feminists trying to make broad and abstract commentary about the nature of the world or oppression! While trying to come up with a unified theory of things is admirable, a lot of grounding and information is lost in the generalization, and the conclusions you can draw from vague foundations don't have much explanatory power or clarity to offer.
this was such a good read! thank you for teasing out the intricacies of this delicate topic. i appreciated the multiple viewpoints you presented.