This piece really resonates with me; thank you for posting it.
I haven't taken gender seriously in a long time; as a kid I was always getting mistaken for a boy (short hair, no other obvious sexual characteristics) and it used to make me furious. My response to that was to grow my hair as soon as I was bat mitzvah (and thus considered 'old enough to decide for myself'). But by that time, I'd realized that I really don't care what gender people take me for. I'm lucky enough that being female has never, even in the smallest way, prevented me from doing anything I wanted to do. It's perhaps a consequence of this good luck that gender doesn't really mean very much to me.
Now that I have long hair (and breasts), nobody thinks of me as other than feminine; again, I'm lucky that I've never had problems with this. I've always got away with being outspoken, extrovert, anything but subordinate (what's the opposite of subordinate? insubordinate? dominating?) etc; except when I'm specifically considering the question, it doesn't normally occur to me to regard this as 'unfeminine'. Also I seem not to fall very often into situations which require otherwise, though I know such situations exist.
As for remembering that my gender excludes me from certain rôles, the concept even fazes me when said rôles are obviously gendered, like father, bachelor, brother and so on.
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Date: 2003-11-04 11:44 am (UTC)I haven't taken gender seriously in a long time; as a kid I was always getting mistaken for a boy (short hair, no other obvious sexual characteristics) and it used to make me furious. My response to that was to grow my hair as soon as I was bat mitzvah (and thus considered 'old enough to decide for myself'). But by that time, I'd realized that I really don't care what gender people take me for. I'm lucky enough that being female has never, even in the smallest way, prevented me from doing anything I wanted to do. It's perhaps a consequence of this good luck that gender doesn't really mean very much to me.
Now that I have long hair (and breasts), nobody thinks of me as other than feminine; again, I'm lucky that I've never had problems with this. I've always got away with being outspoken, extrovert, anything but subordinate (what's the opposite of subordinate? insubordinate? dominating?) etc; except when I'm specifically considering the question, it doesn't normally occur to me to regard this as 'unfeminine'. Also I seem not to fall very often into situations which require otherwise, though I know such situations exist.
As for remembering that my gender excludes me from certain rôles, the concept even fazes me when said rôles are obviously gendered, like father, bachelor, brother and so on.