Gender Apathy
Disclaimer & Context: I have made it a goal in March to write in my blog 5 days a week. My plan is to use my morning contemplative time to isolate a thought or idea I would like to flesh out a bit more and then write a blog about it. I’m not giving myself a lot of time to write the blog because this challenge isn’t about the quality of my writing. The goal of this challenge is to work on my conversion process of idea to blog. I have noticed I have dozens and dozens of insights and ideas every day but rarely do I flesh them out and share them. This is a challenge to help me strengthen that muscle. So it’s important you and I both know I’m not specifically trying to make these posts 100% true, educational, or helpful to you at all. If it’s any of that: frosting.
Today,… I’m going to talk about my gender apathy. Yesterday I had a date night with Adam. First time hanging out since I returned to Minnesota from my road trip. I learned a lot on that trip that I’m sure I’ll be unpacking in the next 31 days via these posts. But suffice it to say, I’ve been learning that in all these 39 years, I have never really felt or known my sense of Self. That’s a loaded statement, I know. Can we all really agree on what Self is? It’s a whole discussion to establish that. But my view on it is basically summarized in this post on The School of Life about self-knowledge. So if you need that context first, check it out. So, I would say that this journey I’ve been on since doing shrooms in 2020 has led me to understanding what is Self and how to interact with it, and consequently, I’ve learned that I was lacking a sense of Self due to many, many, many factors. It’s like realizing I was an animal. I struggled to use any higher conscious thinking. I functioned out of echoes of traumatic experiences throughout all of my life. People would talk about projections, trauma, trauma stored in the body, all that stuff, and I thought, ha, yeah those are romantic notions for pop psychology. I think, foundationally, I was a bootstrapper and a neuroelitist or something. Anyways, they were right. I feel very clearly now that I am a human computer and my early experiences created my subjective reality and without proper instruction and support, I would never find the Self that could be experienced underneath everything the brain had documented in the dark. But here I am. Thanks to me. All this effort. Has helped me see who I am and how to be that more.
That’s all to say that I have been exploring the dark caverns of my mind, now trusting that what’s in there is something useful and relevant. And it’s revealed a lot of things about how I behave, what messages from my distant past influence my present experiences, and some “truths” about me.
Here are some truths:
I remember from a very early age being turned off by hyper-feminine culture. Even then I could tell it was bullshit. I never really jived well with the girls who ate it up.
I loved wearing my older brothers’ clothes, being in his room, playing his guitar. I loved pulling my hair up into a hat, dressing in boys’ clothes, and walking around my neighborhood with my BFF, trying to convince our neighbors we were boys.
I remember DEEPLY preferring to hang out with the young boys in my neighborhood over the girls.
I remember feeling both rejected and disgusted by the interactions of boys and girls in high school. It felt like the boys were okay to harass the girls and the girls were expected to be flattered by the attention. I remember never finding the energy inside of me to try to mimic anything near the feminine aesthetic that other girls around me were showing.
I remember my peers trying to get me dressed up for a fancy dinner in Mexico. I only brought skirts to Mexico for attending conservative churches. I’ve never liked styling my hair. I don’t like spending a lot of time drying my hair. I don’t want to throw away a bunch of money to paint my face. I just don’t really feel like what I wear on my human body has a lot of meaning to me other than practical comfort.
I stopped using a purse once I figured out I could get a phone case with a credit card holder in it.
Once I quit my full-time, in-person, corporate job in 2019, I gradually started changing my wardrobe. Without a requirement of “professional attire”, I’ve begun to remove obligatory clothing from my closet and replace it with everything I find to be cute and comfortable.
I’ve literally invited people in my life out to coffee just to probe them on what the HELL is flirting? Without hyper associating myself with feminine forms of flirting and sexuality, I didn’t know what to do. Moreover, I didn’t see how I fit into being attractive in a binary and gendered world.
I’ve always preferred to just be straight forward. Doesn’t mean I have been. But it has always bothered me that our culture is so passive aggressive. Particularly complicated when it comes to sex and the messages that were socialized into me about how my gender is supposed to interact with those situations.
I remember calling myself a tom boy when I was a kid. I wore a weird newscap in high school and collared shirts with nametags like “Bob” on them because I enjoyed the irony.
I cut my hair. I don’t even know how many years it’s been now. Long hair has never really made sense to me. But I never cut it shorter than my shoulders because I believed it would remove the one feminine thing about me: a feminine face. Plus, I felt like my big nose, double chin, egg head, and fatness would look terrible with a short haircut. Update: turns out it doesn’t and I get complicated all the time on my haircut.
People regularly misgender me in public if they can’t see my face. I wear gender neutral clothing often and I think people make quick judgments. I thought I would be offended by that. I would have in the past. But now I laugh. Particularly when the person in question starts tripping all over themselves, apologizing. I couldn’t care less. I don’t care about this game.
I am aware that I’ve felt a bit of distance from the LGBTQ+ community. Because they still have a strong sense of some kind of gender (at least most of them anyways; I know agender fits in there). But I don’t feel a need to express anything particular about my gender.
I have habitually gotten frustrated when I share about a life experience and whoever I’m sharing it with turns it into how I am X because of being a woman. Or when people ask for my opinion on something “as a woman” or to “get the woman’s perspective”. I can most certainly tell you what it’s like to experience the last 39 years in a culture that has defined my womanhood for me, yes. But I don’t have an opinion “as a woman”.
All of this is great, right? I’m reading it and I’m like, yeah, Marie, I get you. I feel you. Gender is whack. However, this epiphany came about last night because of my being aware of my subconscious processes from practicing more mindfulness in my life. It came about because of all the shadowed pains that I’m seeing for the first time inside of me, now that I know where my Self is. Now that I know how to function from a higher consciousness (neocortex vs. back/base of brain). I’m glad for the clarity. But it’s showing me how I have been outwardly (lately, at least) behaving in accordance to the best sense of who I am. However, underneath that performance is an incessant, subtext, shadowy, visceral sense of rejection, not being enough, being a joke, not having anything to offer because I don’t fit into the gender energies and displays. And this has always been true. I haven’t been terribly feminine throughout my life. So it’s not that I have something to express that I haven’t been expressing. I’ve been expressing it. But I think I’ve been feeling a dissonance and rejection current underneath it that robs me of the satisfaction of dressing and behaving in accordance to what feels best to me. So with Adam last night, I admitted that I think a significant part of the foundational concrete in my romantic/sexual insecurity comes from feeling like I don’t feel any kind of attractiveness mold. I’m not even “an ugly woman” or a “fat woman”. I abstain from a lot of the woman-centric aesthetics. So what am I? I don’t feel trans. I don’t imagine feeling better if I leaned harder into masculine traits. I’m really fine where I am. I just don’t feel a lot of identity around gender. I feel really gender apathetic. And I like that I feel that way. I think that’s a very rational way to feel. However, it’s been plaguing me at a very deep level for decades that because of my gender apathy, I have no energy that attracts others. Now, that has been disproven time and time again as I date people and they love me and are intimate with me. And I’m not sure how my brain justifies that other than believing that I’m somehow controlling how they perceive me by masking little spurts of feminine energy here and there. Trying to sit nicely, trying to lose weight, trying to speak in a certain way, or make eye contact in a certain way. It’s all been a crap shoot. I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just a kid playing dress up in a woman’s body. Not a clue.
And so that puts me in a very exciting position. AWARENESS. This was all true about me yesterday and all of my personal history; however, I never said it out loud until last night with Adam when I started shuddering at the realization of how taxing it’s been on my mind and body to perform for the patriarchy. The patriarchy can never be pleased. And it makes sense I’m exhausted by it. But now I am aware. And I can start to explore accepting the idea that my partners have already seen me. They already know what they got into. They already know I don’t talk about feminine or women things. They already know I’m not going to be wearing a dress. They already know I’m not going to be doing some kind of feminine sexy dance for them. They already know that I will call them out on their shit. They already know I am fat. They already know I have a big nose. They already know I won’t be wearing makeup. They already know that I am not going to be smaller for them. They already know that I am more concerned with growth and Self than I am with being compliant to an image expected of my gender. I want to explore that this has been true of their perceptions of me since we met. These people would not be into me if they were only attracted to hyper-femininity. So clearly, there are other forms of attraction that do not sit neatly on the binary. Next step. Get to know ME… my attraction… my energy… and lean into it. No longer do I need to feel like a faker, trying to exude a sufficient amount of femininity in order to have at least one partner, feeling precarious about our connection since I know I fall way beneath any kind of standard.
Ooof,…. anyways. I wrote longer than I meant to, but this was a big thing from yesterday and I wanted to get into words. This was an excellent post. I am damn proud of it and I’m damn proud of me and my human heritage.
