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.