I Was A Teenage Misogynist (Yes, Really)
This is a hard post to write. I’m a little nervous about how certain friends of mine might take it - especially my female friends. And yet, for honesty’s sake, it’s a topic that needs to be opened up and looked at.
There is always a danger, in choosing to make a gender transition, that those friends of the same apparent gender as you (i.e., the one you are leaving behind) will feel somehow insulted, or even abandoned... like you’re somehow letting the team down. You’re defecting, as it were, to the other side - at best, a deserter; at worst, a traitor to the cause... whether the cause is preserving traditional masculinity in a confused world, or fighting for the rights of women against a powerful patriarchy. Leaving the gender of your birth sometimes feels, to others, like an intentional and possibly insulting dissociation: “I’m not one of THEM.”
This seems to happen especially with transguys, particularly those who were who were active in the Lesbian community prior to transitioning to male. Sometimes these guys seem to be almost bending over backward to prove that they are still allied with the sisterhood they left behind, still strongly aligned with feminist causes, still sensitive to womens’ issues. As Lesbians, they felt like part of a close-knit activist community, which may now be rejecting them as The Enemy. (Sad but true.)
This is not the case with me - because I’ve never genuinely felt connected with any community of women, whether straight or Lesbian. I have the opposite problem; I’ve always felt profoundly disconnected from my supposed peer group. Which sometimes worries me, as I’m afraid to unwittingly give offense, not being as sensitized to the issues as I’m probably presumed to be! It’s not that I did not, or do not, support the causes and rights of my sisters. I have done so for many years and I continue to do so. It’s just that somehow I’ve never really thought of them as applying to me... because I’ve never really thought of myself as female.
I’ve mostly lived in a state which might best be called gender denial. What I mean is that, while obviously I knew I was biologically female, that fact just didn’t get a lot of airplay in my brain on a day-to-day basis. There was a part of my mind that tried to ease my discomfort by simply erasing gender from my perceptions - and largely succeeded, unless something occurred to slap some other part of my brain into unpleasant wakefulness.
I remember once, way back, taking a long walk alone late at night (actually “late” as in early, in the wee hours of the morning) around the dark little residential streets on the East side of the city. I needed to think, and a night walk seemed a fit setting for my musings. Now, I don’t live in a huge city like Boston or New York, but it’s not exactly a small town either. We do have crime, and lone women don’t generally go out for post-midnight strolls in unlit areas. However, that fact had literally not even occurred to me until about halfway through my contemplative little walk... and when it did occur, it took a strange form.
What happened was that my brain woke me up with the proclamation: Hey, dunderhead, you do realize that you’re a girl, right? NOT a reminder that wandering alone on these dark streets might be considered somewhat unsafe for those of my gender, oh no... but rather, a reminder that I had a gender, and might wish to take that into account when wandering dark streets alone at one a.m.
Uhhhhhhh... oops??
Looking back, I suspect that I was probably reasonably safe. In the dark, facial features don’t show clearly, and my overall demeanor has always tended to be more male-ish than female-ish, as is my build. But at the time, it felt like a very odd and rude awakening. I had literally forgotten that I was female and might, therefore, have to worry about little things like, oh, say, getting raped in a dark alley on a moonless night.
This kind of dissociation was pretty normal for me, and in high school it led to what, in retrospect, I can only think of as a sort of twisted misogynistic viewpoint that lasted, I’m sorry to say, well into my mid-twenties. Surrounded by, and thoroughly disgusted with, all of the usual teenage-girl-stuff that I was expected to be (supposed to be) interested in, I reacted by forming a very definite negative set of opinions about females in general - excluding myself, of course, because in my mind I didn’t really have a gender.
It didn’t help, either, that my mom - who wanted so badly to be “like sisters” with me that she used to drag me to the drugstore with her when purchasing hair dye, making multiple (and embarrassing) comparisons to the colors on the packages to find the one that matched mine as closely as possible - well, my mom aspired to be Donna Reed, baking cookies all day and vacuuming the living room in high heels. As a single parent with a 9-to-5 job, it turned out that she couldn’t be that - but she dearly longed to be. It was the height of her ambition to be taken care of by a man, and she felt like a failure because she hadn’t achieved it. I could respect what my mom actually did - go to work and keep things together, if often with tape and paper clips - but I could not respect, or indeed even comprehend, what she seemed to want out of life.
And so, with these as my models, and with the inverted, troubled perceptions of a closeted (even to myself) transgender teen... well, to put it bluntly: I didn’t like women, and I didn’t respect them. I saw them, for the most part, as people who didn’t have a brain in their fluffy little heads. The so-called gender gap was clearly an intelligence gap, or at least a rationality gap. No wonder men didn’t take them seriously.
I pause here so that those of you who would like to kill me, and might in fact be able to, can get yourselves under control. (I am thinking, in particular, of a certain former-black-belt soprano of my acquaintance... uh, Pam, you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses, right?)
Please know, friends, that I am decades and lifetimes away from those early assumptions. I am not that person now, and I haven’t been for a long time. And those old viewpoints have nothing at all to do with my choice to transition - except for the fact that I can now see this extreme reaction as an early indication, if only I had known, of how very, very wrong I felt in the gender I was assigned to. It was an angry, frustrated, confused, and cynical reaction, born out of a forced identification with the wrong peer group - though of course at the time, with a self-absorbed-teenager’s limited experience of the world, I thought it was eminently objective and logical.
Looking back, of course, I can see that I was being utterly reactionary, simplistically labeling every value that seemed inherently feminine - such as, say, any interest in personal adornment - as being fundamentally irrational. Which is obviously ridiculous; one look at a list of mens’ hat styles, or the names of all the various and inventive ways to wear a beard (hey, is that a goatee or a Van Dyke?), should be enough evidence to counter any claim that this is a purely feminine quality! And hey, half of what humans do is irrational, anyway. But we’re talking about the black-and-white world of an overly-protected and terminally-confused teenager here.
I eventually worked my way through (and out of) this stage, thank heaven. But a few somewhat-related issues lingered. For instance, I continued to search, in literature and film and TV, for female characters that I could identify with. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t find any - since what I was looking for was basically a boy in girl’s clothing, so to speak: a character who was female only in the biological sense, and not in any other.
In books I found many smart, savvy, courageous heroines that I could respect... but always there was some element that jarred my ability to fit myself into their images. It almost felt like a conspiracy; I would start to think, hey, maybe this’ll be the one... and then the author would mention that, oh yeah, by the way, this skilled swordswoman kept her long, flowing hair as the one crowning glory of her femininity... or that the lady who ran the railroad enjoyed looking deceptively fragile in high heels and a skirt... or whatever. And I would sigh... not this one either.
With TV and film images, I would inevitably run through an unhappy, jaded checklist of the heroine’s feminine attributes. (The ones that seemed out-and-out unrealistic would really irritate me. How the hell can she even walk in those shoes, much less run fast enough to catch the bad guy? And NO way she could play a string instrument with those long fingernails...)
Of course, I was working with a pretty limited vision of what the whole gender thing encompassed - something more like stereotyped views of masculinity and femininity than actual maleness or femaleness. Again, please remember that I developed these habits of thought as a teenager, and a very sheltered one at that; I’d had few real friends of either gender to make real-world comparisons with.
(Incidentally, the closest I have ever come to really identifying with a female character was with Aerin in Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword. McKinley’s heroines are some of the best anywhere, and I highly recommend her if you’re looking for strong women in non-stereotypical roles in a fantasy setting.)
At any rate, I find myself pondering all of this stuff now because, since I finally came out and recognized myself as being trans and male, the last dregs of that particular related issue have been finally draining away. It’s fascinating. I’ve felt them go.
For instance, while idling in front of the TV during my recent somewhat lengthy respiratory illness, I ended up watching one of those crazy physical competitions that pit competitors against a wildly-imagined obstacle course full of moving parts, forcing them to leap, grab, swing, etc., with perfect timing, great control, and a serious amount of physical strength to get from one side to the other. Needless to say, since upper-body strength is a major component of the necessary skill to get through the course, and height also makes a huge difference in one’s reach, the contestants are mostly men. However, that day, a woman had for the first time made it to the penultimate stage of the competition.
I have to say that she was pretty amazing. She was not a tall woman, nor had she the bulging muscles of some of the male contestants - but with great focus, creativity, and determination, she made her way brilliantly across that hellish course. And in (mentally) applauding her at the finish, I suddenly realized that, while this was exactly the kind of person that, in the old days, I would have automatically subjected to my checklist, hoping that she might actually “pass” - this time, I wasn’t even trying to fit her into that old mental image. I wasn’t trying to ignore the aspects of her that were clearly feminine (her walk, her hairstyle), nor was I deploring them, feeling that they somehow didn’t fit with the rest of her.
To put it clearly: I wasn’t trying to find in her a mirror of some sort for my own constantly-searching self. I felt like, knowing who I was, I could see her for who she was, and appreciate her as such.
It was a huge moment for me - perhaps even as big as it was for her.
I’ve wondered whether (and if so, how) that understanding might change my relationships with the real women in my life... the ones I work with and play with and talk with and sing with. It’s been many years since I stopped subjecting those real women to my silly checklist... but have I still been subtly ignoring aspects of them that I don’t “click” with, looking for them to be less like themselves and more like I imagine they “should” be?
That’s a hard question. I hope that its answer will make me better able to be truly real with my friends, and appreciate them as their own real selves. And I hope that my asking it will be felt as a positive thing, even though the circumstances that make me need to ask it will likely be felt as a negative thing.
The fact is, I know that I haven’t really even begun to unravel the convolutions of gender assumptions and gender expectations that have so strangely wound themselves through my life and my thinking.
But - and here’s something to think about - chances are, neither have you! Because even if you are perfectly comfortable with your gender and society’s image of it, you probably haven’t ever really opened it up and looked under the hood, so to speak.
And so one of my hopes, as I continue to write these blog entries, is that we can think our way through some of this stuff together.
And whether it helps you to better understand folks like me, or merely shows you things about yourself that you never thought to wonder about... I figure it’ll still be an interesting ride, with lots of unexpected twists and turns.
Fasten your seat belts, folks... ;)
There is always a danger, in choosing to make a gender transition, that those friends of the same apparent gender as you (i.e., the one you are leaving behind) will feel somehow insulted, or even abandoned... like you’re somehow letting the team down. You’re defecting, as it were, to the other side - at best, a deserter; at worst, a traitor to the cause... whether the cause is preserving traditional masculinity in a confused world, or fighting for the rights of women against a powerful patriarchy. Leaving the gender of your birth sometimes feels, to others, like an intentional and possibly insulting dissociation: “I’m not one of THEM.”
This seems to happen especially with transguys, particularly those who were who were active in the Lesbian community prior to transitioning to male. Sometimes these guys seem to be almost bending over backward to prove that they are still allied with the sisterhood they left behind, still strongly aligned with feminist causes, still sensitive to womens’ issues. As Lesbians, they felt like part of a close-knit activist community, which may now be rejecting them as The Enemy. (Sad but true.)
This is not the case with me - because I’ve never genuinely felt connected with any community of women, whether straight or Lesbian. I have the opposite problem; I’ve always felt profoundly disconnected from my supposed peer group. Which sometimes worries me, as I’m afraid to unwittingly give offense, not being as sensitized to the issues as I’m probably presumed to be! It’s not that I did not, or do not, support the causes and rights of my sisters. I have done so for many years and I continue to do so. It’s just that somehow I’ve never really thought of them as applying to me... because I’ve never really thought of myself as female.
I’ve mostly lived in a state which might best be called gender denial. What I mean is that, while obviously I knew I was biologically female, that fact just didn’t get a lot of airplay in my brain on a day-to-day basis. There was a part of my mind that tried to ease my discomfort by simply erasing gender from my perceptions - and largely succeeded, unless something occurred to slap some other part of my brain into unpleasant wakefulness.
I remember once, way back, taking a long walk alone late at night (actually “late” as in early, in the wee hours of the morning) around the dark little residential streets on the East side of the city. I needed to think, and a night walk seemed a fit setting for my musings. Now, I don’t live in a huge city like Boston or New York, but it’s not exactly a small town either. We do have crime, and lone women don’t generally go out for post-midnight strolls in unlit areas. However, that fact had literally not even occurred to me until about halfway through my contemplative little walk... and when it did occur, it took a strange form.
What happened was that my brain woke me up with the proclamation: Hey, dunderhead, you do realize that you’re a girl, right? NOT a reminder that wandering alone on these dark streets might be considered somewhat unsafe for those of my gender, oh no... but rather, a reminder that I had a gender, and might wish to take that into account when wandering dark streets alone at one a.m.
Uhhhhhhh... oops??
Looking back, I suspect that I was probably reasonably safe. In the dark, facial features don’t show clearly, and my overall demeanor has always tended to be more male-ish than female-ish, as is my build. But at the time, it felt like a very odd and rude awakening. I had literally forgotten that I was female and might, therefore, have to worry about little things like, oh, say, getting raped in a dark alley on a moonless night.
This kind of dissociation was pretty normal for me, and in high school it led to what, in retrospect, I can only think of as a sort of twisted misogynistic viewpoint that lasted, I’m sorry to say, well into my mid-twenties. Surrounded by, and thoroughly disgusted with, all of the usual teenage-girl-stuff that I was expected to be (supposed to be) interested in, I reacted by forming a very definite negative set of opinions about females in general - excluding myself, of course, because in my mind I didn’t really have a gender.
It didn’t help, either, that my mom - who wanted so badly to be “like sisters” with me that she used to drag me to the drugstore with her when purchasing hair dye, making multiple (and embarrassing) comparisons to the colors on the packages to find the one that matched mine as closely as possible - well, my mom aspired to be Donna Reed, baking cookies all day and vacuuming the living room in high heels. As a single parent with a 9-to-5 job, it turned out that she couldn’t be that - but she dearly longed to be. It was the height of her ambition to be taken care of by a man, and she felt like a failure because she hadn’t achieved it. I could respect what my mom actually did - go to work and keep things together, if often with tape and paper clips - but I could not respect, or indeed even comprehend, what she seemed to want out of life.
And so, with these as my models, and with the inverted, troubled perceptions of a closeted (even to myself) transgender teen... well, to put it bluntly: I didn’t like women, and I didn’t respect them. I saw them, for the most part, as people who didn’t have a brain in their fluffy little heads. The so-called gender gap was clearly an intelligence gap, or at least a rationality gap. No wonder men didn’t take them seriously.
I pause here so that those of you who would like to kill me, and might in fact be able to, can get yourselves under control. (I am thinking, in particular, of a certain former-black-belt soprano of my acquaintance... uh, Pam, you wouldn’t hit a guy with glasses, right?)
Please know, friends, that I am decades and lifetimes away from those early assumptions. I am not that person now, and I haven’t been for a long time. And those old viewpoints have nothing at all to do with my choice to transition - except for the fact that I can now see this extreme reaction as an early indication, if only I had known, of how very, very wrong I felt in the gender I was assigned to. It was an angry, frustrated, confused, and cynical reaction, born out of a forced identification with the wrong peer group - though of course at the time, with a self-absorbed-teenager’s limited experience of the world, I thought it was eminently objective and logical.
Looking back, of course, I can see that I was being utterly reactionary, simplistically labeling every value that seemed inherently feminine - such as, say, any interest in personal adornment - as being fundamentally irrational. Which is obviously ridiculous; one look at a list of mens’ hat styles, or the names of all the various and inventive ways to wear a beard (hey, is that a goatee or a Van Dyke?), should be enough evidence to counter any claim that this is a purely feminine quality! And hey, half of what humans do is irrational, anyway. But we’re talking about the black-and-white world of an overly-protected and terminally-confused teenager here.
I eventually worked my way through (and out of) this stage, thank heaven. But a few somewhat-related issues lingered. For instance, I continued to search, in literature and film and TV, for female characters that I could identify with. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t find any - since what I was looking for was basically a boy in girl’s clothing, so to speak: a character who was female only in the biological sense, and not in any other.
In books I found many smart, savvy, courageous heroines that I could respect... but always there was some element that jarred my ability to fit myself into their images. It almost felt like a conspiracy; I would start to think, hey, maybe this’ll be the one... and then the author would mention that, oh yeah, by the way, this skilled swordswoman kept her long, flowing hair as the one crowning glory of her femininity... or that the lady who ran the railroad enjoyed looking deceptively fragile in high heels and a skirt... or whatever. And I would sigh... not this one either.
With TV and film images, I would inevitably run through an unhappy, jaded checklist of the heroine’s feminine attributes. (The ones that seemed out-and-out unrealistic would really irritate me. How the hell can she even walk in those shoes, much less run fast enough to catch the bad guy? And NO way she could play a string instrument with those long fingernails...)
Of course, I was working with a pretty limited vision of what the whole gender thing encompassed - something more like stereotyped views of masculinity and femininity than actual maleness or femaleness. Again, please remember that I developed these habits of thought as a teenager, and a very sheltered one at that; I’d had few real friends of either gender to make real-world comparisons with.
(Incidentally, the closest I have ever come to really identifying with a female character was with Aerin in Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword. McKinley’s heroines are some of the best anywhere, and I highly recommend her if you’re looking for strong women in non-stereotypical roles in a fantasy setting.)
At any rate, I find myself pondering all of this stuff now because, since I finally came out and recognized myself as being trans and male, the last dregs of that particular related issue have been finally draining away. It’s fascinating. I’ve felt them go.
For instance, while idling in front of the TV during my recent somewhat lengthy respiratory illness, I ended up watching one of those crazy physical competitions that pit competitors against a wildly-imagined obstacle course full of moving parts, forcing them to leap, grab, swing, etc., with perfect timing, great control, and a serious amount of physical strength to get from one side to the other. Needless to say, since upper-body strength is a major component of the necessary skill to get through the course, and height also makes a huge difference in one’s reach, the contestants are mostly men. However, that day, a woman had for the first time made it to the penultimate stage of the competition.
I have to say that she was pretty amazing. She was not a tall woman, nor had she the bulging muscles of some of the male contestants - but with great focus, creativity, and determination, she made her way brilliantly across that hellish course. And in (mentally) applauding her at the finish, I suddenly realized that, while this was exactly the kind of person that, in the old days, I would have automatically subjected to my checklist, hoping that she might actually “pass” - this time, I wasn’t even trying to fit her into that old mental image. I wasn’t trying to ignore the aspects of her that were clearly feminine (her walk, her hairstyle), nor was I deploring them, feeling that they somehow didn’t fit with the rest of her.
To put it clearly: I wasn’t trying to find in her a mirror of some sort for my own constantly-searching self. I felt like, knowing who I was, I could see her for who she was, and appreciate her as such.
It was a huge moment for me - perhaps even as big as it was for her.
I’ve wondered whether (and if so, how) that understanding might change my relationships with the real women in my life... the ones I work with and play with and talk with and sing with. It’s been many years since I stopped subjecting those real women to my silly checklist... but have I still been subtly ignoring aspects of them that I don’t “click” with, looking for them to be less like themselves and more like I imagine they “should” be?
That’s a hard question. I hope that its answer will make me better able to be truly real with my friends, and appreciate them as their own real selves. And I hope that my asking it will be felt as a positive thing, even though the circumstances that make me need to ask it will likely be felt as a negative thing.
The fact is, I know that I haven’t really even begun to unravel the convolutions of gender assumptions and gender expectations that have so strangely wound themselves through my life and my thinking.
But - and here’s something to think about - chances are, neither have you! Because even if you are perfectly comfortable with your gender and society’s image of it, you probably haven’t ever really opened it up and looked under the hood, so to speak.
And so one of my hopes, as I continue to write these blog entries, is that we can think our way through some of this stuff together.
And whether it helps you to better understand folks like me, or merely shows you things about yourself that you never thought to wonder about... I figure it’ll still be an interesting ride, with lots of unexpected twists and turns.
Fasten your seat belts, folks... ;)
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