Gender

Mama always wanted a girl. I’m told that she swung a pendulum over her belly - boy or girl and after the fifth try turning out with boy, she finally managed to get it to say girl. I am told that she bought lots of beautiful pink frilly things and so for the first year I wore them.

I am told that I was originally to be called Pan Demian De Luna but mama changed it to Devi (goddess) to push me that way as well.

I have always wanted to be a woman.

Teenagehood brought it to a crisis. Gender was utmost in my mind as I struggled with who and what I was to become. I spent hours practicing walking properly in a skirt - learning to roll my hips and swoosh side to side, rather than stride as so many women seem to do to my great dismay. Hours in high heels. Walking skipping, running, backwards - and mastering a thousand little mannerisms as if it is this that makes a woman who she is.

I hit crisis - and made a decision. I was given a male body for a reason. It was a gift from the gods, a temple where I might reside. This body had it’s strengths and advantages I would embrace this body and use it to its fullest potential.

So I set out to become a man. With no real role models I made up a version of masculinity all my own. I defined it simply as what works well as a man. Masculinity is success in a male body - using your male body and male mind to the best of its potential. Masculinity is then the most powerful place you can be  with a male body.

---

I had an ex girlfriend who told me once that the times she felt most feminine were when she was doing some feat of strength. She was a strong woman - once carrying me across a sharp beach barefoot (I later carried her and it hurt!) The most physically capable woman I think I know.

But that idea sat right with me. I found her femininity in her strength as well.

Then she told me that some days she didn’t feel like a female. She began defining herself as a she/they sometimes female and sometimes . . . human. I accepted it, as a good Evergreen student does, and moved on - but something didn’t fit.

This year my partner is the same. Sometimes female, often times not. A familiar territory for me, but the same question nags. What question? I thought perhaps it was that they were defining the obvious - of course you’re human. Of course sometimes you feel more like a person than your gender - so do I - why literalize it? But that had an easy answer. I’m a storyteller. Why act out any story save to learn something deeper about yourself? This is their story.

But something was wrong.

---

I’m dancing when it occurs to me. Dance where I think about masculine and feminine more than any other place. Dance where the dance of the sexes becomes literalized. Story made understanding.

I define not just masculinity as the best use of a body - but femininity the same. Feminine is when a woman is powerful, and yes -that- woman is powerful there swaying her hips in that magical way, but she’s also powerful when she’s solving a problem with that feminine mind. Powerful when she uses that body to climb a tree.

Is truckdriving feminine? I wonder. Not the act inherently. It uses a lot of upper body strength of the sort men are gifted with. It uses a male body well and is thus masculine - but a woman can make truck driving feminine. When it is woman’s strength that is lifting that box when it is a woman’s mind solving that engine problem in a woman’s way - that is femininity in all it’s beauty.

One of my biggest complaints about my current partner is the lack of physical power - outside power. They’re not strong, don’t climb trees, balance over ravines, eat everything, roll in the mud, always healthy, never tired. They’re not feminine in the way the last one was.

One of my greatest joys are those moments when they are. When I watch them dance and all that physicality is used beautifully. When they run and fight off Zombies with a spear. When they flirt, laugh, dress well. When they command power.

Same problem with trans people. Some of the trans men I know are the most feminine people I know. The hormones lend physical strength, the changing of a body has embodied them. Perhaps on full transition that translates over into masculinity - but I always feel bad for seeing the beauty in that part of them.

Why do they try so hard to be weak? Useless? Powerless? Why when I am attracted to strength does my partner insist that they are not strong?

I watch two women. One is dancing her dance, and it’s beautiful. All that emotion coursing through her, and channeled by this vessel. I find it attractive. I try not to stare but I’m trying to memorize everything about her, about this dance. She’s moving from powerful thighs, whole body echoing, sweat trickling down every inch of her body, glistening in her short cropped hair. Feminine.

Beside her is a friend who is daintily bobbing her little knees, up and down, up and down. She’s wearing a frilly little pink dress and has her hair done up ontop of her head. She’s pretty I suppose but my eyes go right over her. I dismiss her as not feminine - merely another human who happened to have been assigned female at birth.

And then it occurs to me that I might have a different definition of feminine than all those friends. That culturally femininity often means weak, physically inept, delicate, all done up in frilly pink dresses. That this woman who I dismiss might be the epitome of “femininity.” That the men and women in whom I see and value femininity might be fighting against the very same thing I am, we just happen to call them different names.

Perhaps. I’ll have to talk to them. Maybe this will get us started.