What you talkin' 'bout Willis?

[boogieshoes]

Notions of Gender 
 
Sometimes, I want to write JD Dunne, the youngest character in the main cast of Magnificent 7, as a girl. Specifically, I’d like to take the Little Britches AU, where JD and Vin start out as street urchins rescued and later adopted by Buck and Chris, and write kid!JD as a little girl, not a little boy. But I want the adults’ initial assessment to be that she’s a boy, and I want JD zirself to insist that she’s a boy. I’ve even got a scenario dreamed up wherein Vin or JD’s mother told her to pretend she’s a little boy around other people, because it would keep her safer from perverts. (Whether or not this is actually true, I can see someone saying this to a little girl living on the streets.)  And maybe JD’s a bit tomboyish, or never really figured out why there are things like ‘girl clothes’ and ‘boy clothes’ and ‘girl toys and boy toys’, especially because she likes to play with all the tonka dump-trucks, too.
 
And I want to do this because it would open all sorts of issues up for discussion – issues like what really makes a girl a girl, and a boy a boy? What really is masculinity and femininity, and when we talk about gender being a social construct, how does that relate to the fact that the majority of my friends are comfortable self-identifying as the same gender as their phenotype whether or not they’re hetero-, homo-, bi-, pan-, poly-sexual, or butch, femme, manly men or whatever? 
 
I want the adults in JD’s life to struggle with the notion that if they insist she’s a girl, they might seriously damage her sense of safety. I want them to struggle with presenting a modern interpretation of being a girl, and why it’s ok to be a girl, and what it means to be feminine or masculine, and why one or the other is appropriate. And I want JD’s therapy and therapist to struggle with why JD should change her behavior – or at least her insistence on boy-ness – when JD herself is clearly comfortable in her own body. And as she grows up, I want JD herself to face the struggle of how to define oneself as both true to her inner being, and attractive to men, in the face of people teasing her about probable sexual preferences.
 
In short, I want to use it as a chance to document my own journey and struggle with this notion of ‘gender’. And this is where I am too cowardly to write these stories, because my journey hasn’t ended yet, and I still don’t have a good idea of how the notions of feminine and masculine apply to me, or why, or even how, objectively, these things work at all. And I don’t want to make a mistake on such a touchy subject, one in which I have a lot of unresolved issues myself. And I don’t want to come off as making this struggle of somewhat dubious importance, because if I was true to my own story, the end result is that I’m fairly content presenting outwardly as a tomboyish girl, even if that’s not quite what I feel inwardly. And I’m not sure how to work through all of those presentation kinks and present a story that speaks to a lot of people. And I wish I did know, because I don’t think I’m the only person who is, functionally, cis-gendered and straight who struggles with the question of what it means to be a male or a female, and how I fit into that.
 
Some time ago – during my pursuit of my bachelor’s, if you must know – I realized I didn’t ‘feel’ like a girl – I couldn’t identify myself as female, because the only notion of 'female' I really fit was the physical dangly bits part. I liked ‘boy stuff’, was good at ‘guy things’, got along better with guys than girls, thought frilly and feminine stuff and make-up was boring at best, gross at worst. I have a sneaking suspicion my body language can present itself as male on occasion, which probably confuses people subconsciously in how they’re supposed to react to me. I *know* that my online communications often present as masculine, and people who haven’t met me in RL often make the mistake of thinking I’m a guy until I identify my gender. And yet, saying ‘I’m female, by the way’, frequently feels like a lie. A little white lie, because I really don’t want to go into a long discussion of what gender really means, how it works, and all the things that go into it, all of which I’d have to do to explain the ‘real’ answer.  But a lie, nonetheless.
 
I’m not trans, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t feel like my body is wrong, that I should have a penis. I don’t feel like a guy, even though I like a lot of ‘guy things’. See, I’m not fond of a lot of sports, and I’m not really competitive with others. I do have a competitive streak, but I most often compete against myself. I like video games, and shoot ‘em ups, but I prefer the old arcade style games to the new stuff. And Castle Wolfenstein, because for pure shooty goodness, it’s hard to beat the classics. My eye-hand coordination sucks. I have an eye for details, and a love of carpentry, but I lack that nearly instinctive understanding of how things are put together, brace each other, respond to the tug of gravity. I’m not into life-size cars, except for what they can haul for me. I don’t memorize stats or check out every member of the appropriate sex that walks by. I actually like to talk, just not about babies and clothes… or cars and sports and girls.  The notion that I might be a guy has been considered - and discarded.  It doesn't feel right, either, because I'm not *enough* of a guy to *be* a guy. 
 
I self-identify as a-gendered. Not asexual, which to me implies having no libido. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve definitely got a sex drive. And definitively male bodies get me going. But I don’t identify as a male person *or* a female person – I just am, and I’ve never figured out how to get beyond the ‘I am’ part of self-definition into the ‘I am a…’ part. But this leads to all sorts of fun questions and issues.
 
Not so long ago, but I can’t remember where, there was a discussion about female voices in writing. I can’t remember all the particulars, but one comment that stood out to me because of how very *wrong* it felt to my experience was that ‘of course we are all expressing feminine opinions – we’re all female!’ And the context was such that it was certain the person was speaking of everybody with the correct dangly bits, plus trans women going in both directions. And I felt completely cut out of the discussion – just like that, my voice was silenced, and I disappeared. Because I don’t identify as even having a gender, and yet the possibility of such androgyny was completely dismissed. 
 
I imagine it’s what bisexuals feel when discussions of orientation come around, and bisexuality isn’t addressed or even acknowledged. And I don’t think the speaker in question was deliberately being insulting or suppressing, but all the same, the sudden disorientation of being othered in a gripe-session of togetherness was frustrating. It’s so difficult to explain to people how I feel, and how I feel that I’m not trans, even though neither am I cis-gendered. I’m not even in a transitional *state* between male and female. I just am.
 
This makes the question of if I’m sufficiently feminine to be attractive to men somewhat fun. I remember a few years ago, my therapist sent me to Bath and Body Works to pick out some scents that I would like to wear. Not necessarily buy them, but note them down. The idea is that women tend to like and buy florals and things like cinnamon and vanilla. Men tend to like and buy more piney scents, or musky ones. Presumably, people are attracted to things that enhance their attractiveness to the opposite gender. I went straight for the ‘manly’ scents, because I like piney scents over floral ones. I also wear Old Spice antiperspirant because of the way it smells (and I’ve kind of been looking for Old Spice soap on a rope, because I *really* like the way it smells). And yet, I’m not attracted to other women, which one might presume from the choices I made. Based solely on this experiment alone, in the context as I understand it, undiscovered lesbianism might be a reasonable conclusion. Reasonable, but wrong. I’m still not sure what this says about me, other than the fact that I evidently don’t react in a traditional manner to scent options. 
 
Then there are things like the discussion we had yesterday in baenbarchat about beauty. Beauty, to me, is purely a physical concept. That’s not to say that what’s on the inside is irrelevant – like most sane people, I view a person’s personality and character traits as much more important in the long run than what they look like. It’s just that those things don’t figure into the notion of ‘beauty’ for me – they’re in a separate category altogether. But anyway, we had a discussion that went something like this: 

 
Me: I’m not beautiful, though. 
 
Femalefriend1: What’s your ideal of beauty? If you could have plastic surgery, would you do it? And if you did, would you be content? 
 
Me: My ideal of beauty is my mom and my sister. I don’t look anything like them. I’d have to have extreme amounts of plastic surgery to get even close to that, and it still wouldn’t help unless I also had a complete genetic re-work. But I’m happy with myself, mostly. Would like to lose some weight, but to be healthy, not to be prettier. 
 
Malefriend1: Don’t be swayed by Hollywood. What you see there isn’t normal. 
 
Me: But my mom and my sister *are* normal. And by normal, I mean ‘mainstream’, not Hollywood. They’re not an unreasonable ideal.  
 

They’re also not a realistic goal for me – I look like my dad. I look so much like my dad that people often think my mother isn’t even related by blood to me. So if my ideal of beauty is ‘Mom’, and I look like Dad, it’s completely logical to me that I’ll never be beautiful. And sometimes I feel like it is an issue of self-esteem, and sometimes I don’t. Dad’s not ugly, and I could do worse. 
 
And this leads to more gender/feminine/role confusion, because in my mind ‘beauty’ equates to physically attractive to the opposite sex, in a sexual manner. And I’d like to be attractive to men. But I don’t know how to do that. By my own logic, I can’t be beautiful, so I have to do or be attractive in some other fashion. I know that males are attracted to females, which means that somehow, I have to figure out how to signal ‘Hey, I’m a chick!’, despite not feeling much like an actual female. Experience tells me that just having boobs isn’t enough. The most logical path is to acquire some feminine traits, but that leads me back to – what, exactly, *is* the definition of feminine? And can I somehow acquire *some* “feminine” traits, enough to do what I want, without betraying who I am on the inside? All the usual stuff – makeup, dresses, heels, etc – all that stuff tends to feel like I’m lying about who I am, and I don’t think that’s fair to do – it’s leading a person on to make them think they’re getting frilly, when I really like grubby.
 
In the end, I feel confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, and completely boggled by the relationships between gender, orientation, and sexual relationships in and of themselves. And that’s why I think it’d be great to write a story about kid!JD as a girl, exploring these issues and confusions and frustrations, because I can’t be the only one out there with these bewildering questions and issues. And that’s also why I’m scared of trying my hand at this, and ‘doing it wrong’ – because my own solution the majority of the time is a sort of confused withdrawal from even trying, coupled with a sort of resigned hope that someone will notice me, and overcome any barriers I might be unconsciously projecting. And really, that’s possibly the worst cop-out I could ever come up with in a story, but I truly haven’t got any idea how the journey ends, or where. 
 
-bs, noodling