Coming Out and Going Home

I am pansexual. I have known this from a very young age, around 5. In August I finally came out, as a political move, to my parents. My parents are both very conservative, religious, and straight. It was quite shocking and foreign to them that the struggles of the queer community could effect anyone they cared about. Or that they should care about those struggles at all, much less from a personal perspective. My coming out angered my father who insisted that I “stay open minded and don’t make any decisions yet,” a sentiment my maternal grandmother later shared with me over Thanksgiving break. Over the course of the last year I have come out to most of my extended family, only excluding my paternal grandparents neither of whom I am very close with. It was shocking to me that my own family would think that I am ‘close minded’ for being open to anyone as far as who I can love. It was also surprising to me that none of them suspected. It’s not exactly hard to pick up on the fact that I’m not straight.   

Going home for breaks and the holidays is by no means time off when it comes to my family, especially since coming out. My parents have become hyper focused on queer representation and blocking it, my mother is constantly pointing out “nice boys” who I should, of course, unquestioningly go on a date with, and my little sister likes to throw the word lesbian at me like a knife. In short, home is not a comfortable place to spend extended periods time in. However, my family has allowed me to stay with them, they continue to support me and send me to college, and they are there to lend a helping hand when needed. I by no means am unlucky. I know people who have been kicked out, cut off, and even beaten by their family for being who and what they are. And for them, the holidays are anything but a time of celebration.

The fact that in this day and age there still needs to be resources specifically for homeless, queer youth who have been kicked out of their own homes, whose parents tell them that they are dead to them or that they would literally rather they lost a child than had a queer child, the fact that conversion therapy is still legal and acceptable to practice. It’s outrageous to me. It’s unacceptable to me. For me, it’s heartbreaking that these people, my friends, are not safe in their own home with their own family. I think things are changing but not as fast as they should. I hope someday to provide a safe home for my own kids and their friends, for children less fortunate who have been kicked out. For now it is enough to volunteer, donate, petition, and raise awareness for (homeless) queer youth. Please remember to keep them in your thoughts these holidays and do what you can.  

Story Time! (and heteronormativity)

By all accounts, my grandmother was the perfect housewife in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. She was a debutante and got a major in home economics at her college and married young. She had two kids, stayed at home, and cooked meals and sewed and supported the family.

And then somewhere in the eighties or nineties, she got a divorce and went back to college and became an accountant in Dallas and owned a ranch with horses. She had a successful financial planning business whose specialty was figuring out the budgets of professional athletes who would then do her a solid and help her move furniture when she moved from house to house. She ran what she called a home for wayward cowboys on her ranch, where she would say that a carton of cigarettes and a case of beer would get a hell of a lot done.

She and I were sort of pen pals where every now and again I’d send those precious crayon atrocities that four year olds make and she’d send back little letters and gifts . After she died her special friend Maureen picked up the habit for a few years. It took me a long while to figure out that Maureen was my grandmother’s girlfriend.

Tracking out her life is a little complicated because my family doesn’t exactly bring her up since she died when I was four. It’s taken longer than you’d expect for me to piece together even this much information about her, honestly, and in writing this I am in a way reminded of Middlesex and the winding scope of family sagas and family secrets. Because she died when I was young, no one is particularly inclined to talk about her, and since she had divorced my grandfather, he wasn’t interested in having that conversation either.

Her life sounds like a hell of  a good story, though, even though it’s not what is expected by any means. The end of this story could easily be her in a Florida retirement home, or teaching knitting to a community college, but instead she decided to live on a massive ranch with horses and her girlfriend. But we don’t talk about that, and my uncle still doesn’t accept that his mother could ever have been gay.

But for a long time she prescribed to what was expected of her and lived the life that she was supposed to, likely because she had limited options, based on the way she seems to have been funneled from high school to college to a respectable marriage.  And then eventually decided to say fuck it and did what she wanted and got a “real” education and to some extent got out of the closet and away from the required heterosexuality in her life and live how she wanted. Which was honestly in a way that’s pretty stereotypically “masculine.” She owned her own business and owned a ranch and too care of her own shit and decided what exactly she wanted to make out of her life, even if it 

took until she had college-age children.

Point is, live your life and be gay if you want to be.

There's nothing millennials love more than complaining about people who complain about millennials

We all love to blame the bigotry of old people on their age and upbringing, saying “they’re from a different time,” as if that makes it okay. What it should mean is that we can feel the fuck free to ignore it because it no longer applies.

Recently, at home, my brother and I were trying to explain to my parents that we don’t really care what’s in our friends’ underwear, and my dad couldn’t grasp that a person can use different pronouns to refer to themselves than they have been using without having had an operation or hormone replacement therapy. “What, so, so when do you call her a him?” he asked. We looked at each other, rolled our eyes, looked at him and said “When he asks you to call him that.” He sputtered a little and my mom interrupted him with “Honey, I think this is one area where our kids know a HELL of a lot more than we do. Shut up.”

That gives me hope. I don’t know close to anything about being transgender, but I have listened carefully and tried to adjust my thinking and behavior. My parents don’t have a lot of experience talking to transgender men or women. My grandmother has none. But they have, for the moment, accepted that they need to shut up about it.

I know that not everyone is so lucky. I know people whose parents have cast them out, who haven’t come out for fear of being cast out, or whose parents don’t even acknowledge their gender identity or sexual orientation. I recently heard from my best friend’s mother, “Well how can she come out as queer if she hasn’t dated any girls? What does queer even mean? It’s so vague,” but she saw the looks on our faces and followed up with, “If that’s how she wants to identify, that’s up to her, though.” I have a little bit of hope that our parents and grandparents will learn to shut up and listen to those of us who have been silenced. I have more hope that our generation will learn to live unapologetically, since the opinions of people from another time are irrelevant in the present. The biggest hope, to me, is that there is a present that is different from the past, and that we are learning, so one day our children will be explaining to us things we can shut up about.

See, SOME people already knew this stuff back in the day. If you've lived through almost a century of civil rights movements and your behavior hasn't changed, you need to SHUT UP. Bricks were not thrown in 1969 for you to run your mouth about dumb shit in 2016. Marsha is coming for you.

Barbie Doll-- have we really changed since the 70s?

The poem “Barbie Doll” hit me hard on the second line, because in my childhood I was the very proudest owner of Potty Training Kelly. The “dolls that go pee-pee” from a poem written in 1971 are not so far away as we’d like to think. In 1971, my mother was seven years old, probably playing with her own potty training doll and pretend diapers. I wish I could say that she had been more progressive with me, but I was raised and potty trained like Kelly, and raised and potty trained my own Kelly doll. The way we stereotype male and female children comes from deeply rooted ideas about gender, sure, but haven’t we progressed since then? Perhaps not. We raise little girls by teaching them how to raise other little girls, reinforcing the beliefs about how they should act in their youth and adulthood. It’s not always permanent, and it’s not as rigid as the 70s may have been, but it’s there. Now I have a petrifying fear of raising children, but the persistent thought that I should has never left my mind because it was put into my head so early as part of what it meant to be a girl. I’ve done a lot of babysitting, and I’m happy to say that the little boys and girls I’ve taken care of are less formal about their gender roles, though I still see adults imposing it on them. My favorite kid, Collin, begged me to paint his nails and give him my lip gloss, and his mother adored it, but when he stayed the weekend with his grandmother the nail polish came off and he didn’t ask me to redo it. Collin loved trains and baby dolls, and brought them along to the bathroom while we worked on potty training, but he never thought of himself as the parent, like the little girls I have looked after usually did. His mother stayed at home, taking care of his infant sister (severely disabled, so she had to be supervised 24/7) and his father went to work (at his high-paying job, which he couldn’t leave like his mother could leave her teaching job) and though they each had tangible reasons for what they did, they were quite apparently staying with what their respective gender roles offered them. I can’t help but fear that even with different toys, with Collin’s sister playing with all his trucks and he tending to his babies, that we have not sufficiently created an environment for children to explore their identity as people or their gender identity as male, female or nonbinary. Collin is now in Cub Scouts and soccer, and from what I can tell, has grown into his identity as a young boy, but I hope it’s because he is truly comfortable that way and not because his grandma confiscated his lip gloss—and I sure hope the lip gloss hasn’t been handed off to his baby sister, either.

My favorite Barbie before I beheaded them all in a fit of rebellion. I liked to put yellow water in her bottle for realism. I was upset she didn't poop, like my rich friend's baby doll that ate and pooped plastic food.

So, like, are those boobs real?

            One of my friends in high school was born intersex, she confided in me once, and her parents decided to raise her as male. Her given name was Padraig, she went by Paddy, and when she came out she chose the name of the Norse god of beauty for herself: Freya. The week following her announcement, I heard a lot of my friends say “I’m still going to call him Paddy,” or “I guess this explains why he likes wearing a bra. How does he have boobs, though? He's a guy.” I learned later that her parents were fairly accepting of her announcement, having known she was intersex from a young age, but that it wasn’t exactly what they wanted, either.

             Reading Middlesex, my thoughts kept floating to Freya, specifically how it differed for her to come out as female from Cal’s coming out as male. I don’t mean to say it was easy for Cal to come out as male, with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome, with his parents never bathing him “all over,” but it was certainly different from Freya’s experience as a female in 2012. I can’t say with any certainty what kind of person has a more difficult time with anything, but I can say what I observed.

            So far, in Middlesex, we have seen glimpses of Cal’s adult life and the struggles he experiences with Julie and with Calliope surfacing, “a little like being possessed” (41). We have seen Desdemona’s prediction that Tessie’s child will be a boy, and we have seen the boy assigned female at birth. We have not yet seen the struggles he experiences in ‘transitioning’ from publically female to male, but we get the sense that Cal is doing alright in Berlin as an adult. “After what I’ve been through, some overcompensation is to be expected,” he says (41).  He mentions he uses the stalls in bathrooms, never the urinals, and showers at the gym in the men’s locker room.

            I am curious to see the bridge between Cal’s childhood and adult life, because Freya’s was fraught with her transition and the stress of being female. Cal is “not androgynous in the least,” whereas Freya is often complaining of feeling too masculine but not wanting to be “overcompensating” as Cal does. Freya is fairly androgynous, and she knows it and is ashamed of it because she feels her identity is shameful, as well as being accused of only pretending. She is quadruply fearful—as a woman, as a lesbian, as a transgender woman, and as a woman of color.

            Cal has not yet expressed these fears. I have no doubt they exist, but I can’t help but wonder how his life would have differed had he been born with, say, androgen insensitivity syndrome, where he would be genetically male but living as female. Our society has long expressed that it is more acceptable for women to act like men than it is for men to act like women, because it is more acceptable to be a man than it is to be a woman. Men acting slightly feminine, like Cal, are thought to be gay by characters like Julie, while Freya has been called a monster because of her jawline and shoulders. I have the deepest sympathy for both Cal and Freya, because I know that being anything other that cissexual is incredibly hard in our society, but I wanted to highlight the double standard that I have seen even within the harshest bigotry. Cal, troubled as his life as been, so far seems to be doing alright buying his suits in the 20th century. Freya gets harassed the minute she steps into Sephora in 2016. Is that really the same struggle?

Women Are Smarter Than Men, Act Like It

“I can’t do this because of this.”

“I’m not suppose to do this because it’s frowned upon.”

“This happened because I’m this and they’re that.” 

“When I do this this happens.”

Who gives a fuck?

            Throughout this class I’ve noticed the same theme “I can’t do this because I can’t/shouldn’t.” Over and over, day in and day out I hear that you can’t do something because someone else say’s you can’t. Why not? Why can women not go into the business field? Why can’t you speak up when you’re disrespected? Why can’t you assert yourself in a room full of men? Why can’t you wear, look, and do whatever you want? There’s no reason other than fear. 

            I’m not saying there isn’t sexism. I’m not saying there aren’t men that would love for you to stop talking and make sandwiches till you kill over. What I’m saying is it doesn’t matter. If you put forth undeniably good work it will not matter. People succeed because of what they do, not because of the parameters or limits put around them. I understand it’s uncomfortable being different from the rest but having an elementary education major and then whining about how there are more men in the business field than women, is not helping the problem. If it is so important why don’t you lead the charge? Yelling that there are fewer women than men in the sciences will do no good. Women chose different majors and professions than men do. Women make different career choices than men do. Men and women are not making the same decisions. I’m not saying it is good or bad, it is just a fact.

Just look and bear with me

http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2009/12/do-men-or-women-choose-majors-to-maximize-income

            I truly believe women are smarter than men. Women’s ability to plan, fore see possible outcomes, be compassionate, and be more detail oriented are all places men fail and women excel. What women are currently failing at is the personal belief that they can’t take the jobs of men because we might be a little taller and little more obnoxious.

So women, you are now at a time in history where you have more rights, more support, and more possibilities than ever before. Take those opportunities. Stop letting some idiot guy or outdated housewife tell you what you can’t be or what you can’t do. Stop blaming “the system” on being against you when in reality it has never been more in your favor. Stop giving up on math degrees because there are more men in the class. If you act and show that you are better than men, you’ll see many of us already know that. Go into the field you want, be better than the men who are already there, and require validation from no one. Eventually the idea that “it’s a man’s job” goes away and the workplace stops becoming a man’s world.

It's always been too masculine

I’ve always been too masculine as a girl, regardless of what I’m doing. When I was in Academic Decathlon, we did interview training, which is essentially supposed to teach a bunch of not confident nerds how to appear confident. Now, at this point, I already had a background in competitive speech, and I’ve always been a confident person, if a quietly confident person. So when we started the training, it was mostly about how to walk in and seem confident, how to shake hands with confidence etc. etc. things that I had already figured out how to do. We were doing rotations and when my turn came up I got critiques that I had never, in my whole life hear. “You were too aggressive” “Your hand shake is too strong” “You seem intimidating when you walk in”. When I heard these comments, I was immensely offended. What do you mean I was ‘too aggressive’? I walked into a room without slouching and hiding my space. What do you mean my ‘hand shake is too strong’? I just shook your hand and matched your grip. How was I intimidating? I didn’t walk in with a weapon, I didn’t come in teeth bared and hands clenched in a fist, I didn’t curse the world, I didn’t do anything other than walk.

In martial arts, it’s expected of you to act ‘masculine’. You need to have the wider stance of a man, and the broad shoulders of a man in order to compete with men. And if you didn’t, you were ‘wimmpy’ according to my master. 

I remember one specific instance where this kind of sexism couldn’t have been clearer to me. I was a black belt and I was sparing with a lower ranked belt student. He was about half my size in every way possible (height and weight) so I wasn’t pushing him as hard as I could have, but I also wasn’t giving up ground. He got fed up with it, and made an illegal kick to the midsection of my thigh (it feels very much like if you were to run full force into a table corner and hit your thigh). So I doubled over in pain, and my master saw. He walked over and made sure I was okay, while the kid I was sparing walked me back, essentially taking all of the ground that I had gained in our match. So I retaliated by showing him just how much I was holding back. Yet when I did that, my master ended the fight because I was being ‘too aggressive’ in a sport based on aggression.

I guess what I learned from this is that I can’t make people happy with any level of aggression and confidence without offending someone.