This and the accompanying essay were featured in the third issue of the University of Florida's Queer literary magazine "Subtext." Here is the essay if any one is interested.
I tried really hard to remember the absolute first time I
felt like a girl but in reality from the first time I knew I was a person I
knew I was female. The thing was I never liked or conformed to “traditional”
feminine gender roles. I never wanted to
pretend to be Spice Girls or paint my nails or talk about how cute Justin
Timberlake was with the other girls. The only kind of makeup I ever had an
interest in was face paint and that was for its artistic merits. And so in elementary school all the girls hated
me, and it didn’t help that I was giant with bigger feet than my teacher in
second grade. At the tender age of eight
I was already bemoaning my existence and wondering why I was even alive. Kids
can be cruel, mostly because they haven’t learned to hide it behind smiles and
backstabbing words. That kind of thing comes in middle school. Fortunately with the advent of Pokémon and
Yu-Gi-Oh I found common ground with the boys in my grade. At first they were
wary but then I proved that our interest in video games, trading cards, and
soccer were similar enough for me to be welcomed in to the fray. And so I
talked trash and shoved and kicked and played Bridge Troll Invasion instead of
Britney Spears Concert (who I liked but couldn’t talk to the guys about).
And it was great. I
knew I was a girl but I wasn’t a prissy wimpy little bitch like my sister. I
was just as badass and awesome as any of the boys. But there came a time when I
realized I wasn’t as manly as I thought.
It was the first time I felt like the female gender stereotype that I
had come to loathe.
It
was the fourth grade on a cold slushy day in the middle of winter. There was
too much snow on the ground for the teachers to let us play on the playground
ground equipment but it was warm enough for us to be outside for recess anyway.
And so they made us go play soccer and four square in the side parking lot that
had already been plowed several times. I remember drifting away from a game of
H.O.R.S.E. because I was bored when I spied the class jerk, Richie, giving one
of my friends a hard time. Sammy got picked on a lot because he had a high
girly voice and acted fairly feminine. To my shame I’ll admit that I wasn’t
immune to making fun of him for acting gay either. But even so he was a friend
and if any one besides my group of guys made fun of him they were in for it. I
had decided several years earlier that if I was going to be a hated outsider I
might as well be a force for good and justice, like Batman. And so I had made it a personal mission to stand
up for kids who were being picked on or ignored, mostly because I wanted some
one to do the same for me. Also it was
really just the right thing to do. So I
went up to Richie who was throwing ice at Sammy and calling him a “faggot” and
said for him to leave Sammy alone. I believe my line was something cliché about
picking on some one your own size. And so Richie did stop harassing Sammy and
moved over to me saying, “What do YOU think you’re going to do it?” I can’t
remember my exact words but I know they were a threat to bodily harm because
the next thing I know he punches me as hard as he can in the stomach. It wasn’t
like how I imagined it was going to go, mostly that I got the air knocked out
me and I went down like complete loser.
I remember lying on the ground gasping for air and the sound of some one
yelling for a teacher. But really nothing else mattered except the fact that I
had failed epically. I was a lightweight girl who couldn’t even stand up to a
bully properly. I felt weak, helpless, and painfully stereotypically female. I
had to go the office to explain what happened but I was completely in the right
and all the kids on the playground backed me up on it. But the damage was
already done. When I got home my Mom knew about what had happened because the
school called but mostly what she relayed to me was that all of my guy friends
had called while I walked home. She said they were all asking if I was okay or
if I wanted them to beat up Richie for me tomorrow. I muttered to tell them I
was fine and that they didn’t need to do that. That was really the icing on the
cake. Not only had I discovered I wasn’t invincible but now all my guy friends
were treating me like a damsel in distress.
It took a long while for me to regain my self esteem and I ended up
spending most of my time in middle school kicking guys in the nuts to prove to
them they weren’t invincible either. I tried to remain strong and tough and not
fall prey to anyone, let alone a boy, ever again. But by High School I had
started to realize that one could like girly things, like girls themselves, and
still not be the stereotypical weak, emotional, woman figure. That really even the super dainty looking
girls could be just as badass as any superhero, maybe more so and that acting
stereotypically feminine didn’t mean you were weak. Girls could come in varying
degrees of toughness and still never be the weak incessant creatures society
had taught me they were. And because of that belief had made me hate them. But
like most stereotypes, that woman doesn’t really exist. And she never has.
