At 30, I Realized I Had No Gender

I spent this morning as I spent every Saturday morning, I went to the cafe. Instead of reading, I spent most of my time working on an article and after found that I had a lot of trouble focusing, so after the second cafe I went for a walk. I meandered around DC until I realized I was at MLK Jr. Library and I went in and started to wander the aisles and eventually saw this on a shelf. It was right next to a big graphic novel about building an atomic bomb, which a friend had sent me a picture of at some point. A lot of weird circumstances went into putting me in a place to pick the book up.

I sat there in the library and read this through. It is a nice little graphic novel written by an intersex author about the frustrations of gender and navigating them.

Something that occurred to me while reading, though not for the first time, is how gendered language for beauty is, and how constrained some words seem. Handsome for men, cute for kids and younger people or people of a certain “look” (I've no idea how to define this); pretty and beautiful for women. This has frustrated me a little because I often think people presenting as masculine look very beautiful or people presenting as feminine look quite handsome. (What even is the difference? It's all vibes.) Even writing about it begs for a stumble, because language tries to box you into man/woman, masc/femme. Like a lot of the things the author spends time processing in this book, it's a bit annoying and is much about social construction.

Several years ago I was having lunch in a Mexican restaurant in rural Illinois with a Russian psychologist. This is true. I was a (younger) person learning about mental health professions and practices. We were discussing the process of diagnosis. In a sort of bizarre turn, my social work mentor thought of this as closer to a science, and took the statistics part of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders relatively seriously (though not rigidly). The psychologist had a much different approach, perhaps because she'd been educated first in Europe (who knows?) – she viewed it as firmly an art. My experiences over the past 8 years or so align many things in the social world as much closer to art than science. I don't think these two worlds exist outside of each other, and I think that's a fallacy that gets us into trouble. Anyway, I think gender is closer to an art than a science. I have no idea the temperature of that take.

This book is split into a series of chapters, each exploring a concept or process of decisions. Things like living with someone, the words you use to refer to yourself and your significant other, attraction, body image, etc. An underlying theme is that of hypervigilance / hyperawareness. I loved this. In one chapter, the author is talking about the stress of driving, something he has not done often. The stress is in how he presents himself when driving. I was thrown back into high school reading this. My high school car was a 1997 Ford Ranger with a camper shell (I loved the camper shell). I was always so stressed driving, because I did not know what the right way to look was. I was incapable of being relaxed (ever), and so I was always at 10 and 2. One day someone said they'd seen me driving and it looked like I was white knuckling the steering wheel. Funny, how some things stick with you.

I was also too paranoid of sounding feminine to order my favorite treat at Dairy Queen, the Mocha Moolatte, because I thought it'd out me as gay. Gee whiz.

There's a chapter all about buying glasses – something I did recently. I really loved this! So much thinking into something as small but as big as a few ounces of plastic and glass.

Probably the most profound question in it, at least for me, someone that is relatively unbothered by his gender but is sometimes frustrated by the social demand to categorize people, is on page 95: “If you had been born a girl & lived your life that way–what kind of life would you have lived?” I am a social worker, a ‘female' dominated profession. A friend asked me the other day if I have many female friends, and I realized I have mostly female friends and have since I came out, more or less. How different would my life be? Would I still be a social worker? Would I be working in the policy world? Would I make the money I do? Would I still be here? I don't know. It's quite a thing to think about. I have never even considered the question until now. Not even when I was in high school, and desperately lovesick over a cute straight guy, did I ever think about this.

This morning in the cafe a few people sat at a table adjacent to mine and there were a few little toddlers in high chairs. One of them was in the phase of tiny childness that means they like picking things up and dropping them. They were playing with their shoe and dropped it and it landed a few feet away from them. The child kept leaning over their high chair and reaching for it and the adults didn't notice. The child looked at me several times. I thought about getting up and walking over to hand the shoe back, but I thought this would be an aggressive violation of space and social custom. I thought about going to the bathroom, which would have put me in the walking path and made it incidental. I thought this, too, would be bizarre in the extreme. I distinctly thought that if I were a woman, it would not have been even thought about for me to do a thing like that. Perhaps I was too far in my head. The dad eventually got up and found the shoe, after the child sent their little picture book after it.

As far as a chance read, I really liked this!