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This is me
CW – gender, performative femininity, stuff that might be triggering from trans women, cis woman angst about gender, self pity, an essay as long as war and peace
This is another of those posts that might go down fairly soon. I’m mostly just typing to get it out of my head.
*
I got feedback from an interview today which was basically ‘you did not perform ‘woman’ well enough’. I mean, that’s not what they said. They said I came across as a little aggressive. When asked for more details, was told ‘no, that’s not quite right. It was a tone thing. Nothing you said. You were just very direct and forceful and it made the panel feel a little uncomfortable. It was all in the presentation. You were much better after the first ten minutes when you’d settled down and you had a lovely rapport with the panel by the end but it was a bit too late.’
*
Female socialization is a thing, and for some reason, I think I missed bits of it. I’m not sure how to why. A house full of sisters and a 70s feminist for a mother, maybe? I don’t know.
I know I never owned anything in pink until I was old enough to buy it myself. I know I was given gender neutral clothes as a kid and owned no barbies, no girls world, no ‘make yourself pretty’ toys. I had My Little Pony (by the score) and a billion dolls in national dress that my dad bought back from every business trip (I am still upset that the native American woman doll vanished at some point in my teens when she was MY PRIDE AND JOY. She was dressed in buckskins and went on many many imaginary hunting expeditions. She and her Welsh sidekick in a bonnet carried out some pretty daring rescues of imaginary princes in towers as well), Playmobile (where I ran horrific murder mysteries), and a lot of animal toys.
I wore dresses twice a year – birthdays and Christmas.
I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney films. We didn’t have a TV until I was about 9. I wasn’t allowed to wear make up until I was 16 or have my ears pierced until I was 18. I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs until I was 14 (which was traumatic). I got bullied a lot at school for that. I was 5’7” by the time I was 14, with hairy legs, and no make up.
People used to call me ‘Sally the bloke’.
It didn’t help that I didn’t really act like a girl either. My natural inclination is fight rather than flight. I don’t get physically scared instinctively and when I do, I don’t like to be touched or comforted. Put me on a rollercoaster and if it’s fast enough I go quiet rather than scream. If I do scream, my instincts tell me to punch at the same time. I have a loud voice and I was taught to argue my point rationally but relentlessly from early childhood.
I am not always good with emotional narratives. People talk about the male privilege of ‘let’s not use our feelings’. When I was a kid, the rule was that I could talk about anything to my parents, as long as I could be calm and rational about it. If I wasn’t calm or rational, then I could talk about nothing.
“Give me facts, not adjectives, Sally” was one of the rules.
I mean, I know this stuff doesn’t define womanhood, but it does tend to be used for code.
*
I often get very frustrated with the narrative that gender is just on the inside and if you identify as X then you totally are X.
Maybe it’s the way the world should be, but jesus Christ, it isn’t now. And I’m not very convinced that I believe in the notion of ‘true and authentic identities unrelated to how the world treats you’.
I’m a cis woman – I was born with female biology – and I’ve lived my life being painfully aware that I have to work to try and count as ‘female’. It was really bad during my early to mid teens when the ‘Sally the bloke’ or ‘Sally the tranny’ hilarity was in full swing. I remember writing tearfully in my diary ‘but I feel so much like a girl’ one day and ‘I don’t understand how to be a girl’ the next.
I also get frustrated sometimes with the recent burst of Tumblr femininism which says that saying ‘I’m not like the other girls’ is an appalling statement and is a response to a straw man woman who never existed and actually we cis gendered women were always part of the same team all along. I mean, I sort of agree with it, but it sometimes bothers me when I know that I never said “I’m not like the other girls” because I thought I was better – because I thought I was a scrappy cool tomboy. I just thought that womanhood didn’t want me. I thought I’d failed the entrance exam.
I wasn’t like the other girls because I was too tall, too broad, too strong, too loud, too argumentative, too loud, too hairy, too ugly, without the right emotions. I wasn’t like the other girls, not because I didn’t like pink and pretty dresses, but because pretty dresses didn’t fit me – they were too tight across the shoulders, too short, didn’t hang properly because I couldn’t get a waifish teenage girl figure.
I mean, I wasn’t treated as a guy either. The guys mocked me hugely for having exactly zero sexual currency.
I dealt with it all in what I increasingly realize was a thoroughly rational way.
I developed an eating disorder, got my body down to a size 10 (which at my height and build is bloody hard work, let me tell you!), and basically never said “no” to any boy who wanted me. I wore make up every single day and learned to not show anger in public and instead walk quietly to the nearest toilet and cut up my thigh.
People tell me that it’s healthier to not have an eating disorder and self harm is bad, but I’m gonna put it out there. I’ve never been so popular as the years when I was a bulimic self harmer with a desperate urge to please and inability to express sincere emotions. I’ve never been so universally accepted as a ‘real girl’. I liked being a real girl. Except when other girls wouldn’t date me because they said I was clearly a straight girl playing games. That sucked.
But I did get to be a girl and no one complained about my inability to perform.
*
It’s easier, of course, to reject performative femininity if you physically match the profile of a ‘woman’. Basically, I guess you have to pay your dues to be accepted as a woman. If you are lucky, those dues can come simply in your ability to fit the physical hole that society has made for you – about 5’4” tall, with minimal or very fair body hair, and a soft voice. If you fit that, you’ll get fewer questions about whether you’re really a girl.
If you’re 5’8” tall and broad, you gotta play the game. It’s harder if you’re taller, I know. I don’t have it worse than a load of women I know. But I am just big enough and broad enough that I need to play the part.
In my experience, being accepted as a woman, not making people uncomfortable, comes down to the following:
• Make up. Always wear make up. The natural look is too blunt, too heavy.
• Body hair is a no-no. If you’re small and blonde, body hair is a sign that you’re rebellious. If you’re big and dark haired, it’s a sign that you’re not necessarily human.
• Eat less. Always eat less. The thinner the better. On a subconscious level I sometimes think people have a maximum amount of physical space women are allowed to take up.
• Say less. Speak gently. Smile more. Listen more. You’ll achieve less in terms of jobs, projects etc, but people will like you more. The one exception for this is female coded work which is basically logistics and facilitating others.
• Never be angry. Ever. Anger is coded male.
• Add in a lot of careful round the houses qualifying statements every time you speak. Always suggest, never tell. Explain you might be wrong, constantly. Confidence is coded male. Be hesitant. People like hesitance. It means they can lead you in. I mean, they’ll only lead you to the edge of the conversation but that’s sort of where society thinks you belong anyway. Never tell anyone they are wrong. If you’re going to ask a question, build up gently and make it a sign of your own gentle uncertainty. Never tell anyone to do anything.
• Dress carefully – use your clothes to shape the kind of silhouette people associate with ‘woman’. Baggy jeans and a jumper are cute on overtly femme people. They are confusing if you’re not. But you also can’t wear heels as that increases height so there’s a complicated balancing act.
• If you’re fat, make jokes. People like a jolly fat bird.
• Clean. Tidy. Cook. No one judges a man who doesn’t do those things. They will judge you.
• Never ask for anything. Most people think they are already giving you a break by accepting your existence when you don’t quite fit.
• Never express sexual desire. What is complicated here is that you have to very gently let people think that of course you are absolutely grateful and appreciative for any kind of sexual attention they pay you, but you never need to be seen to want it, or ideally consciously notice it. Bigger or not overtly femme women expressing sexual desire is threatening. The job of a woman is to receive, never to demand.
• Pretend to care about everyone’s feelings. Even when you don’t care about most people’s feelings.
There’s probably more. Trans women, of course, get the full force of this. I sometimes think the reason that women can be so transphobic is because the existence of women who can’t buy their entrance price to womanhood by fitting through the small dainty waif sized hole society has made for us is that it makes them notice that the entrance fee exists. They are either angry because they don’t want to feel guilty about having got a free pass, or they are angry because they resent having to pay the stupid lipstick and silence price and shout because they want the entrance fee to be something simple like ‘ovaries’.
But it’s never been about ovaries. Not entirely.
*
As an adult, I am still not very good at being a girl.
Some of it is physical. Some of it is the social role women are meant to fill.
I don’t get physical fear responses as often as most.
I’m tall. I’m broad. I’m fat (and fatter since my thyroid stopped working) and even if I lose weight, I am not slender – I need to be hard core disordered eating to get below 12 stone. I’m just not built for a good BMI.
I’m loud. My instinct is to push my way into conversations if I’m being ignored. I am direct. I terrier at stuff. I am not super empathic, even when I try to be. I have more of a fight than a flight response. I ask direct questions and then remember I wasn’t meant to. I am not a quiet voice.
I’m not good at being a girl. And sometimes that is shit.
*
I will get over this soon. I’ll probably delete this post after a bit, because I know I’m lucky and privileged and have so much in this world that is good and I know no one needs a long whiny pile of posh white girl trauma.
But I wanted to say somewhere that this sucks and it’s sucked my whole life and I just wish it didn’t some days.
This is another of those posts that might go down fairly soon. I’m mostly just typing to get it out of my head.
*
I got feedback from an interview today which was basically ‘you did not perform ‘woman’ well enough’. I mean, that’s not what they said. They said I came across as a little aggressive. When asked for more details, was told ‘no, that’s not quite right. It was a tone thing. Nothing you said. You were just very direct and forceful and it made the panel feel a little uncomfortable. It was all in the presentation. You were much better after the first ten minutes when you’d settled down and you had a lovely rapport with the panel by the end but it was a bit too late.’
*
Female socialization is a thing, and for some reason, I think I missed bits of it. I’m not sure how to why. A house full of sisters and a 70s feminist for a mother, maybe? I don’t know.
I know I never owned anything in pink until I was old enough to buy it myself. I know I was given gender neutral clothes as a kid and owned no barbies, no girls world, no ‘make yourself pretty’ toys. I had My Little Pony (by the score) and a billion dolls in national dress that my dad bought back from every business trip (I am still upset that the native American woman doll vanished at some point in my teens when she was MY PRIDE AND JOY. She was dressed in buckskins and went on many many imaginary hunting expeditions. She and her Welsh sidekick in a bonnet carried out some pretty daring rescues of imaginary princes in towers as well), Playmobile (where I ran horrific murder mysteries), and a lot of animal toys.
I wore dresses twice a year – birthdays and Christmas.
I wasn’t allowed to watch Disney films. We didn’t have a TV until I was about 9. I wasn’t allowed to wear make up until I was 16 or have my ears pierced until I was 18. I wasn’t allowed to shave my legs until I was 14 (which was traumatic). I got bullied a lot at school for that. I was 5’7” by the time I was 14, with hairy legs, and no make up.
People used to call me ‘Sally the bloke’.
It didn’t help that I didn’t really act like a girl either. My natural inclination is fight rather than flight. I don’t get physically scared instinctively and when I do, I don’t like to be touched or comforted. Put me on a rollercoaster and if it’s fast enough I go quiet rather than scream. If I do scream, my instincts tell me to punch at the same time. I have a loud voice and I was taught to argue my point rationally but relentlessly from early childhood.
I am not always good with emotional narratives. People talk about the male privilege of ‘let’s not use our feelings’. When I was a kid, the rule was that I could talk about anything to my parents, as long as I could be calm and rational about it. If I wasn’t calm or rational, then I could talk about nothing.
“Give me facts, not adjectives, Sally” was one of the rules.
I mean, I know this stuff doesn’t define womanhood, but it does tend to be used for code.
*
I often get very frustrated with the narrative that gender is just on the inside and if you identify as X then you totally are X.
Maybe it’s the way the world should be, but jesus Christ, it isn’t now. And I’m not very convinced that I believe in the notion of ‘true and authentic identities unrelated to how the world treats you’.
I’m a cis woman – I was born with female biology – and I’ve lived my life being painfully aware that I have to work to try and count as ‘female’. It was really bad during my early to mid teens when the ‘Sally the bloke’ or ‘Sally the tranny’ hilarity was in full swing. I remember writing tearfully in my diary ‘but I feel so much like a girl’ one day and ‘I don’t understand how to be a girl’ the next.
I also get frustrated sometimes with the recent burst of Tumblr femininism which says that saying ‘I’m not like the other girls’ is an appalling statement and is a response to a straw man woman who never existed and actually we cis gendered women were always part of the same team all along. I mean, I sort of agree with it, but it sometimes bothers me when I know that I never said “I’m not like the other girls” because I thought I was better – because I thought I was a scrappy cool tomboy. I just thought that womanhood didn’t want me. I thought I’d failed the entrance exam.
I wasn’t like the other girls because I was too tall, too broad, too strong, too loud, too argumentative, too loud, too hairy, too ugly, without the right emotions. I wasn’t like the other girls, not because I didn’t like pink and pretty dresses, but because pretty dresses didn’t fit me – they were too tight across the shoulders, too short, didn’t hang properly because I couldn’t get a waifish teenage girl figure.
I mean, I wasn’t treated as a guy either. The guys mocked me hugely for having exactly zero sexual currency.
I dealt with it all in what I increasingly realize was a thoroughly rational way.
I developed an eating disorder, got my body down to a size 10 (which at my height and build is bloody hard work, let me tell you!), and basically never said “no” to any boy who wanted me. I wore make up every single day and learned to not show anger in public and instead walk quietly to the nearest toilet and cut up my thigh.
People tell me that it’s healthier to not have an eating disorder and self harm is bad, but I’m gonna put it out there. I’ve never been so popular as the years when I was a bulimic self harmer with a desperate urge to please and inability to express sincere emotions. I’ve never been so universally accepted as a ‘real girl’. I liked being a real girl. Except when other girls wouldn’t date me because they said I was clearly a straight girl playing games. That sucked.
But I did get to be a girl and no one complained about my inability to perform.
*
It’s easier, of course, to reject performative femininity if you physically match the profile of a ‘woman’. Basically, I guess you have to pay your dues to be accepted as a woman. If you are lucky, those dues can come simply in your ability to fit the physical hole that society has made for you – about 5’4” tall, with minimal or very fair body hair, and a soft voice. If you fit that, you’ll get fewer questions about whether you’re really a girl.
If you’re 5’8” tall and broad, you gotta play the game. It’s harder if you’re taller, I know. I don’t have it worse than a load of women I know. But I am just big enough and broad enough that I need to play the part.
In my experience, being accepted as a woman, not making people uncomfortable, comes down to the following:
• Make up. Always wear make up. The natural look is too blunt, too heavy.
• Body hair is a no-no. If you’re small and blonde, body hair is a sign that you’re rebellious. If you’re big and dark haired, it’s a sign that you’re not necessarily human.
• Eat less. Always eat less. The thinner the better. On a subconscious level I sometimes think people have a maximum amount of physical space women are allowed to take up.
• Say less. Speak gently. Smile more. Listen more. You’ll achieve less in terms of jobs, projects etc, but people will like you more. The one exception for this is female coded work which is basically logistics and facilitating others.
• Never be angry. Ever. Anger is coded male.
• Add in a lot of careful round the houses qualifying statements every time you speak. Always suggest, never tell. Explain you might be wrong, constantly. Confidence is coded male. Be hesitant. People like hesitance. It means they can lead you in. I mean, they’ll only lead you to the edge of the conversation but that’s sort of where society thinks you belong anyway. Never tell anyone they are wrong. If you’re going to ask a question, build up gently and make it a sign of your own gentle uncertainty. Never tell anyone to do anything.
• Dress carefully – use your clothes to shape the kind of silhouette people associate with ‘woman’. Baggy jeans and a jumper are cute on overtly femme people. They are confusing if you’re not. But you also can’t wear heels as that increases height so there’s a complicated balancing act.
• If you’re fat, make jokes. People like a jolly fat bird.
• Clean. Tidy. Cook. No one judges a man who doesn’t do those things. They will judge you.
• Never ask for anything. Most people think they are already giving you a break by accepting your existence when you don’t quite fit.
• Never express sexual desire. What is complicated here is that you have to very gently let people think that of course you are absolutely grateful and appreciative for any kind of sexual attention they pay you, but you never need to be seen to want it, or ideally consciously notice it. Bigger or not overtly femme women expressing sexual desire is threatening. The job of a woman is to receive, never to demand.
• Pretend to care about everyone’s feelings. Even when you don’t care about most people’s feelings.
There’s probably more. Trans women, of course, get the full force of this. I sometimes think the reason that women can be so transphobic is because the existence of women who can’t buy their entrance price to womanhood by fitting through the small dainty waif sized hole society has made for us is that it makes them notice that the entrance fee exists. They are either angry because they don’t want to feel guilty about having got a free pass, or they are angry because they resent having to pay the stupid lipstick and silence price and shout because they want the entrance fee to be something simple like ‘ovaries’.
But it’s never been about ovaries. Not entirely.
*
As an adult, I am still not very good at being a girl.
Some of it is physical. Some of it is the social role women are meant to fill.
I don’t get physical fear responses as often as most.
I’m tall. I’m broad. I’m fat (and fatter since my thyroid stopped working) and even if I lose weight, I am not slender – I need to be hard core disordered eating to get below 12 stone. I’m just not built for a good BMI.
I’m loud. My instinct is to push my way into conversations if I’m being ignored. I am direct. I terrier at stuff. I am not super empathic, even when I try to be. I have more of a fight than a flight response. I ask direct questions and then remember I wasn’t meant to. I am not a quiet voice.
I’m not good at being a girl. And sometimes that is shit.
*
I will get over this soon. I’ll probably delete this post after a bit, because I know I’m lucky and privileged and have so much in this world that is good and I know no one needs a long whiny pile of posh white girl trauma.
But I wanted to say somewhere that this sucks and it’s sucked my whole life and I just wish it didn’t some days.
no subject
But I absolutely recognise the hole you mean and a lot of the coping mechanism you've listed. Some I've adopted consciously... Some I've never put into words, but know how to turn off. I still remember my husband's face when I put on my "inoffensive, easily impressed ingenue" face on at that one tabletop session.
I think you've made some very accurate and pretty heart-wrenching observations. I am so sorry that the world is shit. I hope I can make our little corner better, but I hate that you still have to deal with people like this. You are one of the most amazing people I know and I am incredibly grateful you call me a friend.
no subject
I've never fit very well into "man" growing up (and was also bullied for it a lot). Very glad that I don't encounter that as an adult.
And I totally agree that you were being judged there for not fitting into the woman box enough.
In your situation I'd want to ask if they'd have been so negative about a man with the same behaviours. But I recognise that that wouldn't have gone down well either!