Diary of a snarky queer woman: Woman. White. Middle Class. Queer.

Lets play spot the girl child!

I don’t really remember being aware of being different from my brothers until I started school. Up until that point, we played with the same toys, my brother and I wore the same matching skirt and pant outfits, to ensure everyone else we were twins and I was the girl one, and he was the boy one. Gender was the first marker I had after my own name and “twin”. Everyone always told me how awful it must be for me, having only brothers, being the lone girl in a pack of hellions. They didn’t realize I didn’t conform to my gender expectations, and ruled my brothers’ lives with a lot of rough housing and carefully plotted schemes. I don’t think my parents fully understood the downside of having a child with a wild imagination until it was years too late to “forget” me at Ross.

1995, or the year I convinced Andrew this guy was living in the bathroom. Oops.

In Candace West and Don H. Zimmermann’s “Doing Gender” delves into the world of gender norms and how they align with sex, and sex category (the way one asserts a display of masculine or feminine. “Sex categories suppose sex, but are not necessarily determined by it.” I was born biologically female, and at an early age there are photos where I’m dressed up in frilly pastel dresses. My father still reminisces about the bow they used to Velcro to my head so they could tell my brother and I apart. By the time I could dress myself, I was completely over dresses; they were impractical, allowed cold air in, and I hated tights with a passion. It’s hard to pilot the Millennium Falcon in a Daisy Kingdom dress. School changed everything.

The most violent picture of a little girl I could find. Really.

When I was 4, my brother and I were in the same preschool. I was the dominant twin, a common theme in having twins; one is always the dominant, bossy, and protective one. My parents feared he’d never fend for himself, if I was always taking care of him. There was a boy, the resident bully in school, Keith, who made fun of my brother for playing with me, because I was a girl. He thought it said something about my brother for lowering himself to play with me. I didn’t understand why this was bad. All I understood was that Keith terrorized my brother, and thought I was beneath him. I did what any rational, angry four year old would, and punched Keith in the face. A recent study in the Department of Psychology at the University of California found that while there are many studies done on “conduct problems” with children, most studies fixate on little boys, so relatively little is known about girls in comparison. “Compared to boys, who exhibit higher rates of overt conduct problems (e.g., physical aggression and bullying), girls are more prone to relational aggression and covert conduct problems (e.g., spreading rumors, lying) which may differ in antecedents, correlates, and outcomes… Longitudinal studies suggest that significant sex differences in the rate and severity of conduct problems emerge around age 4, when conduct problems in girls decline wheras conduct problems in boys increase or show little change.” Time and time again, girls are encouraged from a young age to internalize issues, while violence is encouraged in young boys, but often it is attributed to a difference in sex instead of the way we are socialized as children. My parents chose to combat my unladylike conduct with more girly clothing, and babydolls, leaving me to bitterly covet denim jeans and a Micromachines City Bus.

It opens up to be a WHOLE CITY and it should have been mine!

Paige Schilt’s Stilettos, Sissy Boys, and the Limits of Gender Neutral Parenting, Schilt states that to allow real gender exploration, there needs to be more done than just allowing children to play with “opposite gender” toys. Surrounding children with people who stimulate their minds, and engage them in questions and conversations teaches them about the many, many options they have to explore. “If we provide the tools, young children are quite capable of sussing out inequalities and analyzing gendered messages,” writes Schilt. The problem lies within our institutions reinforcing differences as norms, determined by whatever genitals it can be safely assumed exist in our pants. As girls are punished for scuffles, and boys are told not to cry over hurt feelings, there is a constant barrage of information about faillling into gender codes, to avoid humiliation and bullying. Around the time I entered the school system, my mother felt it best we learn about prejudice and class as well.

Overt racism I understood, but covert didn't come til years later.

I didn’t learn what racism was for a few years within the school system. As a spindly white girl in a white community myself, I hadn’t ever been aware of racial differences. Few people I knew had varying skin colors, and my biggest grasp of this was switching out crayons for the different portraits I skillfully crafted. My mother was always a reader, and sat us down one day to teach us another sneaky lesson using the written word, about a little girl named Ruby Bridges. That was the first time I knew anyone could be mean over another person’s skin color. I thought prejudice was something in storybooks, that we’d already overcome, and in whatever part of Vancouver where black people lived, I hoped no one was mean to them there. I didn’t realize how privileged and sheltered things were until I was in fourth grade, and I heard my friends talking about black people like they were unicorns, wishing they could grow up and be black too, because everyone they saw who was black could sing, dance, play basketball, and was probably on TV, too.

Evidently the suburbians I knew were not alone.

“On average, children watch 3-5 hours of television per day. Therefore, television has often been referred to as a “window on the world”… While older children and adults are more skeptical about the media content, young children are likely to view media content as a glimpse of reality, and thus they are more likely to be influenced by it.” (Vittrup, 2011).

It’s not so unbelievable to think I might have developed how I saw people of color as different. I didn’t consciously realize until recently that I latched on to children of color at my mother’s church, thinking already they were infinitely cooler than I could ever hope to be. I learned to be white by following the plethora of examples set before me, on the 73% of television on air, in my home and family, and within the school and church institutions I spent most of my formative years in. When I was teased for having almond, “asian” eyes (or “chink eyes” as someone so lovingly bestowed upon me), my mother spent years telling me if I just wore silver or gray eyeshadow that they would appear bigger and rounder. I know how to be white because not being white has been marketed to me as something to avoid, or something to play up to look more “exotic” when I was modeling. It’s never enough to just be, if you don’t fall into an obvious category.

Nostalgia at its most honest.

Christianity and my mother taught me about class. My father and mother were in their forties when they were raising myself and the misfit group of children that constantly inhabited our house. There are very few consecutive years where I don’t remember having some kind of babysitting/parents-on-drugs/parent-sick sibling in my midst. My father was starting his own business as an optometrist, and my mother’s shopping habits meant a lot of coupon clipping and off-brand products, but until I was a teenager I never knew what it was like to worry about food or shelter. My grandmother helped my parents put us through a Christian school with children on $80/week allowances, while I picked weeds in my parents’ back yard for a penny per weed. I thought my $13.00 was going to buy me a Barbie, or possibly a Mach 1 Mustang. My mother sent me to school with extra school supplies we had picked out for the little boy who came to school in the same holy t-shirt several days a week. I spent my sixth grade year raising money for girls in brothels. But I never learned about what any of that meant. I knew I didn’t wear designer brands so I wasn’t rich, but my clothes were clean, so I wasn’t poor. My mother grew up with cardboard in her shoes, and raised me to be so overly caring for everyone else that I ignored warning signs on dangerous people who appeared to “just be poor and misunderstood.” Christianity taught me that we are all equal, but along the same lines as Animal Farm, some are more equal than other. Money ultimately became the difference between suspension and a stern talking to with new scoreboards in the gym. Money broke up the class system in 5^th grade, with girls and boys who never wore the same article of clothing twice leading the system.

And more inclined to clothesline you in the throat, FYI.

I learned to be a woman through the class system, taking care of everyone ahead of myself. I had crippling social anxiety as a result, and still cringe myself to sleep at night over interactions that don’t result in me “doing enough” for other people. Class is something that seems to be learned in tandem with gender. Girls who dominated everyone in school had the wealthiest parents, and were listened to over boys who came from average income backgrounds, in my experience. Privilege falls onto a scale for master status, almost creating a point system to put everyone in their respective groups in relation to the straight, able bodied, middle to upper class, cis, white male. In a study, Adolescent Health and Harassment Based on Discriminatory Bias, Brian W. Koenig et. al. analyze a study that combines factors such as race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, and disabilities, as opposed to “general harassment.” The study matched the findings of the CDC, that those were bullied with a bias against who they are were more likely to be depressed, more likely to be victims of past violence, and were twice as likely to have contemplated or attempted to commit suicide (Koenig, 2012).

Who cares?!

In conclusion, I’ve learned more about gender, race, sexuality, and class in the last five weeks than what I’d imagined I would. Even writing this paper, I’ve learned more about myself than I thought I could. The critical knowledge of how to identify and “take pleasure in gender” as Paige Schilt wrote, while still keeping the spectrum of gender open is invaluable, and a constant learning process. I learned to be a woman through the constant policing, I learned to be white through constant policing, and I learned class under the guise of caring for others. I learned sexuality through years of repression. Years of being told it was a disease to not be straight, that it was something you catch from z100, from other queer people, it wasn’t something I could have been born with. Heather Matarazzo’s As We Are mirrors my own experience with coming to terms with my sexuality. It took meeting one queer, sex-positive person to know that all the propaganda I’d heard couldn’t be true. Being 15 years old and realizing that crush on Princess Jasmine I was still slightly harboring wasn’t the end of my life was a huge realization that took years to process. As I’ve been in a closet, very out of a closet, and in between, I’ve learned to shut the closet, walk out of the room, and just be. It’s tempting sometimes to go back and hide; it’s easier to take the path of least resistance. Family doesn’t pressure you to come out as gay on a regular basis, and if my sexuality is already a topic of conversation men feel entitled to, it’s more so as a queer woman. But the path of least resistance would have me in a closet with blinders on, and I’m looking for more than a glimpse of the world around us. I’m not four anymore, and it’s going to take more than a well-placed punch to the face to be the change I want to see.

Or not?

Citations:

Brian W. Koenig, et al. "Adolescent Health And Harassment Based On Discriminatory Bias."American Journal Of Public Health 102.3 (2012): 493-495. Academic Search Complete. Web.

Brigitte Vittrup, et. al., “Exploring the Impact of Educational Television and Parent–Child Discussions on Children's Racial Attitudes.” Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy Vol. 11. (2011): 82-104. Blackwell Publishing Inc.

Matarazzo, Heather. "As We Are." The HuffPost Gay Voices. The Huffington Post, 2011. Web.

Schilt, Paige. "Stilettos, Sissy Boys and the Limits of ‘Gender Neutral’ Parenting." Queer Rock Love. Wordpress, 2012. Web.

Tung, Irene, James J. Li, and Steve S. Lee. "Child Sex Moderates The Association Between Negative Parenting And Childhood Conduct Problems." Aggressive Behavior 38.3 (2012): 239-251. Academic Search Complete. Web.

West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society (1987): 125-151. Print.