At birth we are wrapped in pink or blue blankets, depending on our assigned sex. From then on we are socialized as boys or as girls. We are taught how to look like them, to act like them, to think like them, to feel like them, to be them.
What happens, though, when that just doesn’t feel right? What does it mean when a female just doesn’t really feel like a girl? Well, if she feels like a boy, she may later seek to change her body to better fit how she feels. We start using male pronouns, and he starts using male restrooms. Yet, what if that female doesn’t feel like a boy but doesn’t feel like a girl either?
Growing up I had the oddest combination of interests. I would play dress-up with my sister but then go outside to set up intricate forts and play war with the neighborhood boys. I would garden with my mother and work on cars with my father. I taught ballet and then became a firefighter.
Throughout all of my childhood and my adolescence, none of those activities felt wholly right for me. I didn’t feel like the neighborhood boys, yet something certainly set me apart from the girls, too. I knew this my entire life, but I could never name it. I never had the words to explain how I felt.
Over the past two years I became more involved in the transgender community. I began to understand the social structures of gender and the binary gender system–“boy or girl.” I began to realize that it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to live our lives as one or the other. I learned I did not have to identify as one or the other.
I learned of the term “genderqueer,” and, after many discussions with genderqueer-identified people, I decided to use that term for myself. For me, it means that I feel like neither a girl nor a boy but rather something else entirely. I reject the binary gender system for myself; I will not live in prescribed boxes.
My expression varies. I enjoy wearing different articles of clothing and expressing different pieces of me. Some days you may see me with my chest bound down, wearing baggy jeans and a baseball hat. Other days I may wear a skirt and pink tank top. I often blur the lines, expressing even more androgynously. Whatever my outward expression, though, my feeling of my gender on the inside always remains the same.
Here at USM, I am fortunate. There are other genderqueer-identified students that understand the way I feel. The GLBTQA Resource Center provides a supportive work environment for me. My friends at Portland Hall accept me and try to learn more about my identity. I am no longer hiding my feelings about my gender as I did in high school. I am able to live a more liberated life now that I not only understand my gender identity but that I have the support I need as well.