Perhaps the very earliest sign that I was going to have gender troubles was when I announced – unprompted, at the age of eight – that I hated box hedges.
I stand by the sentiment. Here you have this plant, these hundredfold fingers straining for life, but for some reason you decided that it should be square. It should be square, so you made it square, tying its growing body to posts and trimming its curves. Cutting away every part of it that didn’t fit with your geometric prophecy. Even in grade three, the whole thing glinted of fascism. I’d seen what plants did when you let them grow freely, and it wasn’t that. So why box them in?
Eventually, as the word ‘nonbinary’ slowly morphed from theory into home, the same questions would occur to me about gender. Why did I grow up with my body tied to a pole? What made it so important that my sun-hungry branches get trimmed and trammelled into the shape of a boy?
Why did it take me so many years to encounter femininity as something I could aspire to, rather than as something to flee?
*
Femininity isn’t a stable concept. It itches to be unpacked, like a twitching Christmas gift from a demon. All of the traits historically associated with the feminine – everything from nurturing to pliant to pretty – have been things that it suited patriarchy to tell women that they have to be. To be a good woman has traditionally meant being feminine, and being feminine, for most of its history as a concept, has mostly meant being amenable to the machinations of men. As patriarchy has wanted to instil it, femininity means being what men want you to be, and keeping out of their sight what they have no interest in seeing. It means having your flesh be theirs, and your souls not be their problem. I genuinely understand first-wave feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft who wanted simply to be rid of femininity. After all, what are the odds a demon has gifted you with anything but a curse?
But then, in what is either a miracle or a joke, femininity turned out to contain most of the best features of humanity. The patriarchs consigned to the spit-bucket of femininity everything they thought was dumb and trivial, but which they also – begrudgingly – realised was needed to keep their societies running. As they tasked women with all the vital things they didn’t want to do (the raising of children, the maintenance of social ties, the manifold practices of emotional work), ‘femininity’ became more and more derided, but also more and more integral. As they scooped up everything fun and egoistic for themselves, they tossed most of the real work of human community to the side, where it would be reclaimed, quietly, as femininity.
If binary gender cleaved the ship of humanity in two, femininity is clearly the half with all the lifeboats. There’s no eternal feminine essence that makes this so; it’s just historical happenstance. “We have not wrecked railroads, nor corrupted legislatures, nor done many unholy things that men have done,” wrote the suffragist philosopher Jane Addams in 1910, “but then we must remember that we have not had the chance.” The qualities demanded of women are ruinous in the degree a sexist society prescribes them – too much empathy and you lose yourself completely; too much forgiveness and you’ll forgive your own annihilation – but they’re still as vital as any moon’s planet, or any planet’s sun.
The fact is: the constellation of qualities that have been associated with femininity have been the ones most responsible, on an individual as well as on the collective level, for the continued survival of human beings. The way I encounter it, femininity is nurturing, caring, and healing. It’s the act of disarmament that allows us to experience connection with others as a strength, rather than as weakness or as acquisition. It’s the intelligence to want that, and the bravery to provide it. Femininity is the individual declension of community. It’s the literal caretaking of life.
*
I was raised to be a boy, which means that for a long time I had a less-than-careful attitude towards life. I spent most of my childhood inside video games, and most of the rest of it wondering how I could get back to video games faster. I was ‘smart’, but in the Martin Princelike way that makes you the villain of other kids’ stories. I had friends, but it never occurred to me to talk with them about anything that mattered. I was prone to airy intellectual experiments, until one of them ate me alive and changed everything.
I was 14, and procrastinating from maths homework, when I began wondering about a girl in my class. I’d never really thought about her before. She was bigger than the others, with freckles and frizzy brown hair, and was incredibly shy. In four years of classes together, I’d never once heard her speak. For whatever reason, at the kitchen table that night, I started wondering would it would be like to be her. I put down my pencil, closed her eyes, and really tried to imagine what her life would feel like from the inside.
After about six seconds, my dopey little brain was broken. She was so ignored. By everybody. She did her best to take up as little space as possible, and we all acted as though she wasn’t even there. Hers was a kind of social nonexistence that I’d never even considered. I was an unattractive outcast in school too, but I was at least allowed other metrics of value. People accepted me excelling in matters of the mind, as having eccentric interests and a weirdly moralistic view of the world. They accepted me as having other things going on, which was a luxury she didn’t get. By virtue of being born a girl, her social value at school was entirely determined from her physical attractiveness, and that had made her a nonperson in everyone else’s eyes. It had made her a nonperson in my eyes.
It’s a very basic revelation, but I think back on that night a lot. Clearly, I assumed too much. I knew very little about her life; maybe she had a close-knit group of friends and was in reality less alienated than I was. The part that stung, though, was my own blithe disregard of her. If the experiment began with the pose of masterful scientific inquisitor, the results pretty quickly destroyed my confidence in that pose. I knew so much less than I thought I did – not even because I lacked the necessary experiences, but just because I just hadn’t paid the right kind of attention to the ones I’d already had. ‘What else have I missed?’ I wondered, panicked. ‘What else is happening beneath my feet?’
As silly as it might seem, this was the first time I ever really saw the seams of gender showing. This was the first moment I connected our shapes to our straps – our lives to the world’s gendering of us – and felt my branches make a break towards the feminine. I’ve never really known how to ‘feel like a woman’ or ‘feel like a man’; I’ve never felt like either. What I have felt is the honey-coloured “YES” when the ropes break, and the satisfaction of growing into the feminine qualities that were blocked in me by boyhood. What I have felt is the glow of private empiricism (testing out different ways of interacting with the world, and following what feels good) and the tenacity of public utopianism (pretending we already have the unconstrained freedom to be the fullest versions of ourselves, and stubbornly willing that optimistic fiction into truth). What I have felt is better, ever since.
The way I encounter it within myself, femininity is largely a choice. It’s the choice to be soft where I could be sharp, and adaptable where I could be rigid. It’s the choice to be attentive to feelings, and patient with people’s trying. It’s the choice to sacrifice dominance for connection, and the safety of fortresses for the movement of rivers. There’s no essence to it, or terminal destination – just the collective arc and current of a life’s worth of decisions, and the willingness to keep making them.
Not the plumbing of an unrippled pool, but the effort of creating a current that can take me where I need to go.
*
Significantly, this hasn’t meant – can’t mean – abandoning every quality associated with masculinity. I didn’t flee a total wreckage. Self-assertion is vital, as are independence, desire, ambition, and other putatively masculine qualities. When you isolate out these traits and put them in endless cyclonic competition with each other, the result is predictably toxic and murderous, but that doesn’t change the fact: there are real gifts whirling around in that vortex. Whatever else being socialised as a boy did to me, it gave me a sense that I was allowed to defend my own boundaries. It gave me a belief in my capacities, and a sense of ownership over my possibilities. It gave me a confidence – largely unearned – that when there’s a problem, I’ll probably be able to fix it. I can’t dismiss the value of any of this. Not when I see the cost people pay when they weren’t raised to believe these things about themselves.
The truth is: I get to love femininity more fully, and less complicatedly, because I wasn’t forced into it. I came to femininity without it being externally imposed on me, which means that it was never an exhausting charter of rules and expectations on which my safety and acceptance depended. For pretty much all people raised to be girls, femininity is at the very least tainted with the coercion to be feminine, and at the higher end can be wholly identified with it. From my vantage point, that coercion isn’t part of femininity – the coercion is the part patriarchy built to serve itself – but I recognise how tinny and theoretical this point can sound when you’ve lived your whole life trapped under their synchronicity.
I read a lot of advice columns, and it’s hard not to see these vast gender-cleaved differences roiling underneath them. When cis women write in, their questions nearly always hinge on the struggle to cultivate some associatively masculine quality that they were never allowed to develop growing up: self-assertion, or competitiveness, or a stronger sense of entitlement to what is theirs. When cis men write in, their questions generally hinge on the inverse struggle: the need to develop better empathy, better perceptiveness, and better practices of care.
(They often don’t always know that’s what they’re asking, of course. A lot of the men’s questions are framed as, “How can I get these baffling people to just do what I want?” And a lot of the women’s questions are, “How can I find more of myself to give?” But still you can see these shapes underneath them.)
Two kinds of plants, both trying to escape the shape they were pushed into. Two kinds of people, struggling to grow inside themselves what the world’s gendering of them deliberately starved of water and oxygen.
*
There are more angles of feeling here than we have words for. Touch can sometimes see us in ways that eyes can’t. Femininity can be swum towards with just a fluctuation in tone, or a holding of space. Dysphoria can be absent when you’d expect it, but suddenly overwhelm you when you weren’t, like a sneak-attack spritz of perfume at a department store. (There I am, moved to sudden shuddering tears by a “what would you look like as the opposite sex?” facebook app. There I am, flushed and furious with myself for answering ‘yes’ when a shop attendant asked me if I was buying that skirt for my girlfriend. There I am, trying to believe those who say they see my body differently, hoping that one day I will too.)
When I tutor students – first‑year philosophy; anxious penguins flapping around Descartes – they don’t see past the man‑drag I wear to university. And why would they? They don’t know about my poetry either. They don’t know about my cooking, or my fears, or my running game of Dungeons and Dragons. Some things are just tucked a little deeper in the layers of a person. Some things aren’t neatly encoded in the seams of a person’s pants. My students can see enough of me that I can help them in the extremely limited role I have in their lives. For now, that feels like enough.
Gender, of course, doesn’t cooperate with this instinct towards compartmentalisation. People’s perception of your gender changes how they receive everything you do. My voice gets me listened to. I get more credit for doing emotional labour than those the world treats as women. I hold myself back from gushing to the author of a lesbian comic I loved, because I’m terrified that my identification with it might be received as alien and unwelcome. Things get complicated; the world intrudes. I just put my head down, keep making those small internal decisions towards femininity, and keep pushing the current towards where and who I want to be. That’s all it is, and all it needs to be.
Yesterday, I was playing a deathmatch in Overwatch (a multiplayer online video game with bionic cowboys and icicle-guns), and someone in the chat window asked, “How do u get over a breakup?”
Overwatch chat windows are usually replete with jokes and trolling, but this seemed different. It’s just sad and plausible enough that a boy would feel he had nowhere better to go for breakup advice than the seven strangers grouped up with him in an online battle arena, so I began typing a response.
“Reconnect with friends, pursue your own interests and projects, and give yourself the time and space you need to grieve.”
My onscreen avatar was killed by a flurry of headshots, and respawned in a different part of the map.
“Ultimately, it’s about reconnecting with the things you like about your life that don’t have anything to do with that person.”
Killed again, this time with a meat-hook.
“It can feel like your whole life is over without them, but it isn’t. You’re still you. And moving on from them can feel a whole lot more doable when you think of it as reconnecting with yourself.”
“Thanks man,” he replied, as rockets rained down on me. “That helps.”
ada connor 