Oh, don’t get me wrong- my gender was always firmly assigned as “F.” The clothes I was given were always from the girls’ section; if I was lucky my shoes were unisex but they were usually from the same place. But as I look back, someone was doing some gender subverting in my raising, and—hint—it wasn’t the feminist in the family.
It was my dad.
While I was always his little girl, and he still relates to me as that little girl no matter what (and I kind of like it, because I don’t get treated like a little girl very much anymore), he sorta kinda raised me as the son he never had. Instead of Barney, we watched old Japanese Godzilla movies together, and he bought me a mountain of definitively un-girly Godzilla toys. The same with my obsessions with knights, Lord of the Rings, Captain Hook , The Call of the Wild, and various other “boyish” subjects: I was always fitted out with the accoutrements proper to my favorite games and imaginary pursuits. To be fair, my mother was usually the one who provided the costuming, and once she collaborated with my grandfather to make what was and still is my favorite toy ever: a four-harness miniature dogsled (she made the leather harnesses, he made the sled) that I could hitch my stuffed wolves and dogs to and pull around the house.
But my dad was the one who took me shooting for the first time when I was eight, propping the smooth, beautiful .22 rifle on a pile of sandbags, teaching me with care how to hold it, how to handle it, how to sight my target, how the squeeze the trigger in a smooth, unhurried motion rather than jerking it and throwing off the aim. He also taught my sister and me safety exhaustively, and once, when my sister ventured under the partition between the standing areas and the range to look for particularly shiny pieces of brass, he became furious, yelled at her, and took us home immediately, because she had violated one of his primary tenets: NEVER go beyond the firing line while the range is hot. We weren’t shooting at the time, but we hadn’t called a cold range.
Shooting became one of our “male” bonding activities, and it was often accompanied by Dunkin Donuts and avoiding church—in a manner of speaking, because we often referred to our trips to the range as attending the “First Church of the Bang-Bang.” But throughout my entire experience, safety was tantamount. It was more than technique, more than speed, more than aim—it was everything, because our safety was everything. It was eyes on, ears on, wear a hat so that hot brass doesn’t fly onto your head and burn your scalp. It was ALL GUNS ARE LOADED and must be treated as such, even if you have just removed any possible ammunition from a gun yourself. You must also never point a gun at something you don’t intend to destroy. When I was younger, he had me pretend that there was an invisible laser beam emanating from the barrel of all guns at all times that would destroy anything it was pointed at.
It wasn’t just guns, though that was a big part of it. In general, I was expected to be a boy. I was given boy chores: unloading and loading the dishwasher, mowing the lawn, doing yardwork. If I fell down and skinned my knee, I was allowed to cry but not bawl. When I got into fights at school, it was somewhat expected of me—I had always shown a warlike disposition as a kid, and while they didn’t say “boys will be boys,” they said “Jackie will be Jackie.” For most of my childhood years, at least with my dad, I was an incurable tomboy—and he liked it.
When puberty started, however, and my long war with my mother over my femininity, or lack thereof, began, my dad became…bewildered, I think, is the best word for it. I remember reading in S. Bear Bergman’s Butch Is A Noun about what hir father wanted for hir as a woman, to be strong but feminine too, equally capable of changing a tire and choosing the right outfit for the right boy for the right date. I know those women; I’m dating one of them, and my mother is one of them. I am not, however, one of them; the femininity is lacking. I can fix my tire pressure or mow a lawn in under an hour, but put me in a dress and I look like a drag queen who’s not making much of an effort to pass.
And that is what bewilders my dad, I think. He looks at people like my mom or my girlfriend and sees what he thought he was raising me to be. He doesn’t understand what got lost in translation, and indeed it seems like, these days, we’re speaking two different languages. And it’s painful, this language barrier where none used to exist. We used to speak the same timeless language of fathers and sons, relating to one another in few words but many actions that displayed our care, our enjoyment of each other’s company. And I feel as though I’m still speaking that language, but it’s not being recognized; there’s an error of computation somewhere in there, and just when I need my dad to be Daddy he can’t understand what I’m saying, because it’s coming out of the mouth of someone who should be a girl.
I want to ask him about girls, about how to tell if a girl is mad at you and what to do about that. I want to talk about clothes; I want him to take me out shopping for ties and dress shirts and dress pants and dress shoes, and eventually my first suit (which I am not looking forward to paying for all by myself, but such are the pains of being a butch). I want him to nod and smile at me in approval when I come out of my room, dressed to the nines, everything polished and buttoned and tied properly. I want to find Godzilla cufflinks (like he has) in my stocking come Christmas, and have him smile in the way that lets me know they were all his idea. I want his ideas on the perfect gifts for the women in my life, because if there’s anyone who can lay claim to being the Master of Gift-giving it’s him: I’d say his crowning achievement is tickets to the Metropolitan Opera for him and my mother (and bear in mind, he HATES opera) and an utterly gorgeous dress to go with them. I want him to help me put the finishing touches on my tux on my wedding day, and he can even walk me down the aisle if he wants to. I am 99.9% sure that this hypothetical wedding will be gender non-conforming after all; why stop with just the bride and the “groom?”
But all of these things are in a far-distant future, if they’re possible at all. Because we’re still working with that gap in communication, and right now it seems a gulf too impassable to even think about.
But I’m working on it.
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