The other day, I had my sister come visit me at school (it was under the pretense of free grilled cheese afterwards, so I was all for it). After the small 2-room tour of the entire apartment, we came to my room and settled in for a chat. Nothing serious, just the normal “How are classes going?”, “How are things at home?” type of talk. However, a few minutes later, her eyes glanced over to my open closet where a few button up polos and some sweatshirts were the only hanging garments.
“What are those?”
It was an awkward silence as the 26 year old Disney princess who never grew up crossed my room and started going through the shirts.
“Oh.” It was a good thing that she was looking away because I’m fairly certain my face was a bright shade of red. “Those are Phil’s.” Phil just happened to be one of my close guy friends within the major that I knew she had met in the last 4 years. After a bit of talking, it became clear that my sister thinks that I routinely have a boy over at my place and have his clothes in my closet.
The reason why my sister freaked out about my wardrobe wasn’t hard to deduce. I have two X chromosomes, I have breasts and once a month, my body decides it’s angry that I’m not pregnant so it bleeds constantly for roughly 5 days. By all accounts, I’m female. Why would I wear male clothing if I’m obviously a woman?
A person’s body is a blank canvas ready for a person to express themselves, however it does not define them. This difference is hard to think about at first. After all, you dress the body to define yourself. But what if your body doesn’t fit your mental image of yourself?
Then you take upon the quest of making your transforming your body to help it reflect the true self within. Whether it be simply a different gender or even a different species, the body displays to the world whatever you want it to convey. While my body may say “woman”, my inner self says “man” and through dressing and acting differently, I can rearrange original thinking.
My body does not define myself. I define my body.
I think the narrative form of this post really works well with your message. I think GWST classes are so awesome, because they allows us to participate as ourselves (not separate our experience from our knowledge), and to learn from each other’s experiences. Your point of view is extremely important in class, and I think your voice–especially in this post–is conveyed really well. I don’t think the value of this text is limited to our class, though. A lot of people face similar problems when it comes to controlling how their gender (or simply their identity) is perceived by others. Having to repeatedly come out to people is extremely stressful and exhausting. This narrative is super important for people to know they’re not alone, and to feel empowered in their identity formation.
This is a very interesting post it made me reflect on a personal experience. I had a friend who had all the physical features of a girl but was mentally a man. For many years I thought she was just confused because of the environment I was brought up in; thinking you were other than what the physical features declared you as was strange. Years upon years she was judged by the school population and marked as being that weird girl who was going through a lot; but she was just an ordinary teenager trapped in a body and a society that refuse to acknowledge her as other because of her physical features. It’s quite interesting how hermaphrodites are accepted more by society if they choose to be other than what the dominant physical features declare them to be but a person who is heterosexual who chooses to be other is regarded as “confused”. Many people have this struggle of being accepted and I do agree that physical features should not be used define a person.