20 “What are you? A f*ggtt or something?”: Identity Pressures in the Heteronormative Society

I realized at a young age how badly I failed femininity. Being born an identical twin, it was constantly evident; a perfectly feminine version of me always standing by my side. My “tomboyishness” felt fairly accepted until fifth grade when I started expressing my masculinity more publicly. Prior to this, I almost always wore the same clothes as my twin and I almost always hated it. The pressure I felt of needing to appear identical to my twin paired with my discontent with her feminine choices had been brewing for some time. But as a child who was quiet and meek, I tended to keep my feelings about it to myself. Gabriel, on the other hand, was passionate, bold, and determined. And so, who led our twinship game of “follow the leader” was always clear.

My gender nonconformity had been evident to my family starting in early childhood. This is when I started expressing a strong preference towards masculine-coded toys, clothes, activities, and behaviors. Having four gender-conforming children, this was unfamiliar terrain, and my mother wasn’t sure what she should do. My mother and maternal aunts discussed whether or not they should allow me to wear boys’ clothes and put the issue to a family vote. Thankfully, the majority voted “yes”. But there were some implicit and explicit rules. Boys’ clothes were not bought, they were hand-me-downs from my elder brothers and cousins and were categorized as “home clothes”, not to be worn in public. In public, my twin and I were perfectly dressed in identical and outlandish feminine outfits.

Right before starting fifth grade, I was at the mall with my mother and twin buying ‘first day of school’ outfits. I hid in the parallel changing room, trying to hide away from the eyes of the women trying on clothes as Gabriel put on the outfits which she picked out for us. She would come out of the changing room and pose, and with a nod or shake of the head, I would express my opinions on how I liked her choices for us. This is a routine we had become immensely familiar with. On this day, Gabriel came out with a bright pink shirt covered in flowers, and denim bell-bottom jeans. Her smile stretched across her face, “Mom, I love it”, she said with a twirl. My eyes started to well and my throat felt tight, I tried to choke down my tears to avoid any attention drawn to me. Through my stifled cry, I looked her up and down and said “What are you trying to do?! Kill me?!”.

This day was different. Seeing how upset I was, my mother took me aside and said, “you don’t have to buy what she buys, let’s look at the boys’ section for you”. The girls’ section was embarrassing, but the boys’ section was completely nerve-racking. My heart was pounding, and my face felt flushed. The social expectation to assimilate into the heteronormative/cisnormative society is deeply ingrained in childhood, so this public display of gender nonconformity was terrifying for me. I tried to look disinterested as my mother held out clothes and asked quietly “what about this?”, briefly looked up from the ground to nod or shake my head, before returning my gaze to the dusty off-white floors. We left the mall that day buying Gabriel her floral shirt and bell bottoms and myself a red basketball jersey and baggy boys’ jeans. As soon as we reached the car, a feeling of euphoria fell over me, this was the first time I felt the extreme joy that visibility could bring. It felt like being so close to danger and getting away, unscathed. Even at a young age, children are aware of the risks of non-conformity. This feeling of euphoria wouldn’t last, as this was the year that I became acutely aware of my “otherness” and the danger that visibility holds. This was the year I inherited a new name from my classmates and the older children at school: “He-she”.

By the time I was thirteen, my androgynous look made my gender perplexingly unidentifiable to others, which was quite infuriating for them. This is when a new name began. The first day I was called “f*ggot” I was skateboarding to my grandparents’ house after church on a beautiful spring Sunday. I turned the corner and across the street, there were three middle-aged men sitting together outside. As I skated, I could feel their eyes looking at me up and down, inspecting and scrutinizing my gender expression. As I got closer to their house, one of the men stood up, eyes locking on me, and yelled “fucking f*ggot!” I skated faster and avoided walking that road for a long time.

As I reached my mid-teens, I desperately tried to find a cause to explain why I was different. I imagine that the pressure I felt to categorize myself is something that many other queer folks can relate to. When you refuse to assimilate into the “norm” of the majority, society demands that you provide an easily digestible answer as to why you are not the same, to define yourself in contrast to the dominant society. I decided that I must be a lesbian. “Lesbian” seemed like a very plausible answer: I was assigned female at birth, was rather fearful of men, and had an intense discomfort with presenting femininely. Neatly gift-wrapped as an insult, this identity had been offered to me countless times by others to explain my difference. Perhaps, I thought, they were on to something. Although “lesbian” never felt like home to me, I embraced the answer to my “otherness” as confidently as I could.

Inspired by the badassery of the riot grrrl movement, I listened to Bikini Kill on repeat and adopted their man-hating/ ‘fuck you’ attitude. Whenever I was called a “f*ggot”, I would lock them dead in the eyes and yell back “actually, I’m a fucking dyke!”. It was a public service act, as I understood it since they were obviously unaware of a more accurate insult to use. In my mind, calling me a f*ggot was illogical. My idea of gender was highly based on anatomy and since I didn’t have a penis, I couldn’t be a “f*ggot”. With the frequency of this word directed at me, it became akin to a nickname and before long, I started to like being called it. I took pride in the possibility that people saw me as a young queer boy, not a lesbian girl. This was not an option I thought was available to me. I started to keep a notebook to note down whenever I got called this word. I would log the details of what I was wearing, how I was moving, and how I was talking so I could intentionally set out to replicate these moments. Renegotiating my self-presentation, I inadvertently started a secret self-driven effort to conform to the “queer man” category.

When I was twenty-two, my discomfort about gender had still not gone away. I was living with my long-term girlfriend, Victoria, while working as a teacher at a daycare. At the daycare where I worked, the children at the school were instructed to call me “Miss”. And every time they did, it felt like a kick to the gut. Though I had hinted at my discomfort with my gender throughout the years, I finally began talking more openly about the confusion I was experiencing toward my gender.

Opening up to my girlfriend, I told her that I took pride and could relate to the experience of being a woman but that I didn’t really feel like one. I told her that I wanted to look and sound like a man, but I also didn’t want to be a man. I felt disgusted at this desire, but I was tired of hiding this confusion. The more we talked about my gender, the more we began to fight. One afternoon while we were driving home from running errands, this argument became particularly heated. Victoria thought I was hypocritical and told me that I was a transman and that I couldn’t claim affinity with womanhood if I wanted to be that masculine. As we pulled into the driveway, Victoria said “you can’t be both, so just fucking pick one”. Her words hit me hard, and I stayed up late into the night searching the internet, hoping the web would have answers for me. And it did. I found an article about the terms ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’. I was both overwhelmed with emotions and honestly, a little petty, imagining the ways in which I would use this “I told you so” moment in our next fight.

Before this time, identity scripts available to me were quite limited: straight, gay, lesbian, woman, man. I did not feel that I belonged to any of them. Having a category, a name, that could encompass some aspects of my identity was a great relief. But I am not sure that I would have felt the need to have a category to identify with if it were not for the pressures of the external world. Claiming identities works in this way, to create social equilibrium by conforming to something when we refuse to assimilate into the majority. Naming my queerness and non-binary gender identity helped me, and others, see that my feeling of who I am was legitimate and valid. Yet this pressure to define me and my identity wasn’t entirely internally motivated. It was in response to a world that expects heteronormativity/cisnormativity and demands an explanation for any non-conformity. I found that aligning my identity into a neat category made my difference more palatable to others. I truly believe that our identities are unfixed and ever-changing in relationship with and response to the external world. I wonder how these narrow identity categories can ever feel right for us as they are unable to hold the complexity and ever-changing nature of our being.