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laila
sevendials
21 November 2005 @ 10:17 pm
"This is just the way I am..."  
I've come to the conclusion that I'm not really cut out to be a woman.

It's not that I mind being female. Hell, I like it. The clothes are more interesting. I can cover my multiple multifarious blemishes and complexion crimes with goo and end up looking a lot better as a result. I get to have long hair and nobody says a thing, let alone tries to convince me to cut it. I couldn't imagine being anything other than a girl and I'm perfectly adjusted to the fact that I AM a girl. It's just that in a lot of ways I don't really feel like I fit the template.

I've tried, honest to God. I just can't get my head round girls' stuff. I think that in a lot of ways I think male. Every time I test the gender of my mind on those quizzes you can do about it I always get told the same thing: that when it comes to my brain, apparently I'm a bloke who just happened to end up with two X chromosomes.

... Okay, I admit it - I like being a girl but at times I've wished - and wished quite fervently at that - that I was a boy. Never mind that I don't want to be, I'd still like to be. Just for a little while. And simply for the frisson.

Why am I thinking about this? A close encounter with the Harvey Nichols catalog. I've decided I do not like Harvey Nichols. I think Harvey Nichols is a waste of time and I dearly wish it would go away. I was complaining about the fact that it seemed to assume that not only did I have a grand or so lying about I could randomly spend at five seconds' notice, but that I would want to spend said spare grand on a jumper costing £280, a skirt costing £550 and a bangle costing £210. Sorry, but NO article of clothing is worth THAT much money. I don't care what said 280-pound sweater is made of, how prettiful it is or who made it. At the end of the day it's just a goddamned sweater.

Anyway.

I complained about it. Then I realized I was bitching about the price of women's clothing and how stupid people were to pay that much for anything whilst wearing a pair of (oh-so-comfortable) boys' trainers and sitting in a highly undignified sprawl. With my feet on the table. And looking about as ladylike as something which wasn't very feminine at all.

... I sit like a guy.

In fact, I sit like a guy to SUCH an extent that a (gay male) staff nurse on one of my placements asked me if I was into girls.

Huh?

I consider the stereotype. I consider my own nonconformity. I have long hair, an almost pathological inability to go out without make-up on and a fondness for skirts - albeit worn with heavy boots rather than dainty high heels, but skirts nonetheless. I do not exactly look like the cliche butch lesbian. In fact I think I look like pretty much any other average-looking woman out there. With an Eastern European peasant figure, of course (I'd have made a great farmer's wife, I really would have. I've sure got the forearms for it) - but if some guy I work with can ask me that there's obviously something about me which seems masculine. Horribly so. I can't figure it out. Do I move like a guy? Talk like one? There's got to be something, right?

(In related news, my MOTHER used to discreetly hassle me about not defining myself too early. Translation? My mother thinks I'm gay. Hang about... isn't SHE then the one who's trying to define ME?)

And I have no idea how these people can be so sure about something that still baffles several shades of Hell out of me. I mean I'm the one in here, for heaven's sake. I'm not transgender, I know that for a fact. Perfectly well-adjusted to the idea of myself as female. These days, I don't consider myself as having a sexuality - I'll end up with the person I end up with (though I have a feeling said person is more likely to be a woman than not) and I don't see how it matters what they are as long as I like them. I just don't know if I'm really cut out for this 'girl' thing when so much of the girls' stuff out there leaves me cold at best.

Which I guess makes it a good thing that there's no right or wrong way to be female, and I'm perhaps thinking too hard about this, but I've been up since half past five this morning, so indulge me. Please. I've had a long day and I'm not really in the mood to be profound about gender relations and my own relation to them. I'm just in the mood to rant on about it for a little while.

The Moral of the Story: You will never see laila in Harvey Nichols.
 
 
Current Music: you make me want to be a man - hikaru utada
Current Mood: happy
 
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[identity profile] maxineofarc.livejournal.com on November 22nd, 2005 01:19 am (UTC)
I hear you. I spent some time thinking I might be transgender, but it turns out that my other-than-girly moments are just *really* not girly.
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[identity profile] sevendials.livejournal.com on November 22nd, 2005 01:54 pm (UTC)
My mother used to think I was transgender. I have a very strange relationship with my mother and during my oh-so-vulnerable and weird teens she kept teasing me about wanting to be a man. I didn't want to be a man, I just wasn't totally sure I wanted to be a woman, because so much of the stuff women-capital-W are supposed to like, want, be into and aspire to become just seems almost totally irrelevant to me. I stopped reading women's magazines at age fifteen, for a start, because they said nothing that was even remotely relevant to my life. I'll occasionally read a magazine like that if it's lying round the place now, but would never consider buying one and can't read said free magazine without something in my mind starting to jump up and down and loudly protest the stupidity of so much of what is contained therein.

I think I'm just not particularly feminine, but I have no problems with being female. Just as long, of course, as the rest of the world lets me get on with it in my own way and doesn't keep insisting I'm seriously deviant for failing to be remotely interested in celebrities, babies (one of the nurses on the unit I'm placed at brought her baby in a few days back; I really hope I didn't come across as too essentially uninterested), the Family and the color pink.
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[identity profile] maxineofarc.livejournal.com on November 22nd, 2005 01:57 pm (UTC)
I actively hide if I hear someone bringing their baby into the office. I don't get babies; they make me uneasy, as do most small children. I never know how I'm supposed to talk to them. There are a few that you can converse with like a normal person, but even they make me anxious.
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[identity profile] sevendials.livejournal.com on November 22nd, 2005 02:18 pm (UTC)
Yeah, I would have liked to make my excuses, but I was eating my lunch at the time (I must have been the only woman in that room who didn't want to hold the baby). Even so, there are better places for babies to be than the nurses' break room on an Intensive Care wing. I have problems with babies. And children. I... oh, hell, since it's cards on the table time and I'm weird enough as it is, I don't actually like children. I certainly don't want them myself.

... and god, do I hate being young, female and saying that.

Oh, you'll change your mind when you're older, dear, everyone says, as if the possibility doesn't even EXIST that I won't. You'll meet the right man and settle down... as if it was impossible for me to know my own mind, or actually mean what I say when I say I don't actually like being around children for more than a few minutes at a stretch. Why do people feel so threatened (and even personally affronted) about a young woman saying she doesn't want kids? Nobody bats an eyelid if a young man says HE doesn't want children. Oh, hooray, it's a double standard. How lucky we are.

Look world... first off who says I have to settle down. Second, who says I need to find a MAN to do it? Third, there are more than enough kids out there already. The human race is not going to spontaneously combust if I personally decide to opt out of reproduction. I have nothing against people who want to have kids. If that's what they want to do, fine. I just wish people would stop acting like I personally was seriously deviant for not wanting to do anything of the sort.

/ranting
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