I have always felt, for the most part, like a boy. When I was little, I was the most incorrigible tomboy. All my friends were boys, and I didn’t have a Barbie bone in my body. To show my distaste for such gifts, I tended to dismantle them and leave the pieces strewn all over the house. Having tripped over enough of these gruesome little displays, my relatives soon learned not to get me the latest Barbie that my cousins always wanted. Everything was knights and pirates and interstellar space wolves (don’t ask) with me. When, at a Ren Fair at about seven years old, the champion of the joust attempted to award cute, blonde little me the crown of flowers on the end of his lance, I thought he was challenging me and attacked the tip of his lance with my plastic sword. My greatest wish was a pair of zip-off cargo pants, but my mom said she’d only buy them for me if I could find them in the girls’ section. Oh, and I reviled pink, like any good tomboy.
Then puberty happened and, much to my horror, I didn’t stay slim-hipped and flat-chested. Other girls of my age were budding too, beginning to glory in tight clothes that hugged their curves, and lip gloss and makeup and doing their hair, and I stared at these hyperfeminine creatures and wondered how I could ever measure up to them. I seemed to have missed some “Femininity 101” class that they’d all passed with flying colors. For many years I tried to make myself care about such things, and would buy makeup kits and nail polish and let my friends give me makeovers, but a week later the makeup would be gathering dust in my closet and I would no longer be imagining myself on the cover of YM or 17. Femininity, like my clothing, just fit wrong, being too small or its sleeves and pant legs too short, and I felt like a pig in a skirt and blouse. My hair, blow-dried into an hour or two of wave, hung limp and stick-straight to my shoulders. I grew to hate girls my age for having femininity come so easily to them. Its performance seemed exhausting to me.
Especially since I had nothing invested in it: I looked at the boys and envied them their slim, sure, athletic bodies, their pants that were more often too long than too short, their Oxford shirts that didn’t cling to what uncomfortable body fat they might have as if screaming, Look! She needs to lose ten pounds! Plus their shoes were cooler too (shoe whore that I am, of course I noticed that). But put me in a clothing store and I wouldn’t even glance over casually to the boys’ section, so afraid was I of being suspected to be anything but normal. Of course, my peers had already figured it out. It was in the way I walked, the way I didn’t wear makeup, the way I twitched at my mother’s “business-casual” clothing selections, the way I only felt happy and comfortable in my gym clothes, on a sports field.
And then Cari happened when I was sixteen: what I thought of as my first girl crush. She was on my field hockey team (of course) and had the nastiest temper ever, and the crushes I’d had on boys were like candles compared to her bonfire. I’d had crushes on girls before—my field hockey captain when I was eleven , for example—but I called them off as “fascinations,” and thought them odd, and squashed them as fast as I could. But here, now—this was more than I could ignore. It was as if the combined weight of all the fascinations had broken a dam somewhere inside me, and came pouring out for Cari.
Nothing happened. I struggled with it for a week then fell easily into the category of bisexual, and worked hard on repressing it, rationing how often I looked at her, how often I spoke to her (though that wasn’t hard; I was always bashful around people I liked, and she never gave me the time of day), trying not to talk about her. I was good at it. Nobody, especially Cari herself, had any clue, as I found out years later when I came out to my best friend at college. But that was high school, essentially: always wanting people, never getting them. I might as well have been a sexless individual for all the attention my peers gave me.
At college, I was still trying to be feminine, but as I met more and more girls who didn’t care to conform to the rigid, preppy standards of my high school, I let myself, finally, begin to indulge. It helped that I had great role models of course: first the (relatively few) butches who walked around in cargo shorts and topsiders, and then the genderqueer hipsters in their skinny jeans and flannels, and the shapeshifters, wearing motorcycle boots and leather one day and gorgeous, flowing dresses the next. These creatures were strange, wild, wonderful, and everything I had ever hoped to be. Following their example, I began to look at the books of the “Lesbian Immortal” class out of the corner of my eye; I fell in utterly burning, hopeless, wildfire love with my field hockey captain (of. Freaking. Course.), and I started looking at the men’s section of American Eagle online, albeit clandestinely. I adored the cargo shorts, the men’s jeans—their cuts, their washes, the easy way they sat on the models’ hips, the way they broke at the models’ feet. I felt a burning need to wear them, to look like the models inside them. It wasn’t too long before I guessed my waist size and inseam and bought my first pair.
They were a disaster. I’d botched my measurements (they made me feel fat) and they were the wrong cut for someone with my hips and waist. They looked like mom jeans, and they hit my dorm’s free box as soon as I’d gotten them off me. I was disgusted with myself…but not so disgusted that I didn’t immediately rehash my measurements and go in for shorts, jeans, and T-shirts, all but wiping out my miniscule savings account, because while my parents usually bought me clothes, I knew very well that they would not pay for these.
But it was worth it, worth every inch of fabric, of cotton and jeanscloth and Oxford cloth. Because when I looked in the mirror wearing what I have on today—dark wash, low rise bootcut jeans and a blue and white checkered Oxford—I saw a beautiful young man, a handsome young woman, and one damn fine alternatively gendered thing. I saw Jackson on the outside for the first time, and for the first time I liked what I saw.
That’s not to say it was always easy. Tune in later for “my masculinity, part two: gender wars!”
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