Hi, I'm Erika! I'm super-confused and am therefore going to ramble for a bit. Um, sorry.
This is how I feel about my sex: I'm female, and I'm perfectly content with that, and have no problem being recognized as such. On the other hand, I don't find anything objectionable about the idea of being male. (At the risk of TMI, a couple of nights ago I dreamt that I was turned into a man, and my dream-reaction went something like: "Huh, interesting" and "Oh hey now I can find out what it feels like to jerk off with a dick! For science!" At no point did I feel "wrong," nor did I feel any overwhelming compulsion to switch back. When I woke up, I figured that reaction seemed about what I'd expect from myself.) Biological sex doesn't feel like anything that dictates my identity; I regard it about as indicative of who I am as a person as the color of my hair. It's just a thing. Whatever. If society wasn't so wackadoodle about gender, I would probably find my biological sex literally meaningless.
This is how I feel (felt?) about gender: it's a social construct and I fail to see how anyone could think that one's disposition or aesthetic leanings or whatever have any relationship to one's genitals. Like, I resent the whole notion of gender. It feels like an arbitrary, patriarchal binary to me; I don't find it particularly relevant to me personally, so it just reads like a plan to subjugate women instead. Part of that perception probably comes from the fact that "feminine" traits are less valued by society, but at the end of the day, I've mostly always felt that my physical sex has little to no bearing on my sense of self, except perhaps things that were too strongly socialized.
This is my history with gender, at least as far as I can piece it together: There are these pictures of me, age 1, drifting from the back door into the kitchen, and I'm wearing my dad's coat (like, a spring coat, not like a suit jacket) and tie, and I'm carrying his keys. I'm pretty obviously acting out my dad's exact "home from work" routine; those pictures are some of my favorites. I didn't really do anything similar with my mom's clothes. I threw some pretty spectacular fits when my mom tried to make me wear dresses to church. I think I eventually had to be bribed into them most of the time, but I remember one fit in particular, just screaming my lungs out and bawling as I stood in front of the full-length mirror in the hallway wearing a dress, feeling irrationally upset about what I was looking at. Eventually she learned about dress pants, and I remember the palpable feeling of relief when I was allowed to start wearing them.
If I got to lunch late in elementary school sometimes, I had to sit at the boys' table. I was horrified (cooties or something!) until I realized that I fit in, which mostly meant enjoying the experience privately but admitting nothing. Fourth and fifth grade was my hardcore tomboy stage; I started refusing to shop for clothes in the girls' section (well, shirts, at least; jeans were jeans) and played a lot of basketball, which was dumb, because I'm literally in the first percentile of height for females and I have always played and been better at other sports (softball, soccer, tennis). (This was when Michael Jordan + the Bulls hype was at its peak; needless to say, I had a lot of Bulls shirts. And a Michael Jordan jersey!) Oh and I got a skateboard! I wore baseball caps backwards and sideways. The late '90s were great.
If I played any kind of game where I could make up a name, I pretty much always went for "Alex"; I was really big on the idea of unisex names. One weekend I stayed at a friend's house and convinced her to play a game where we pretended we were boys. Mostly we rode around on our bikes a lot, but we also played tackle football with some of the boys down the street. The parents were all weird about us participating, and I remember being like, "uh, I'm wearing a helmet; I'll be fine, and also this is awesome!" Nail polish and makeup have always skeeved me out, as have noticeably high-heeled shoes and, as previously alluded to, dresses and skirts. I resisted wearing a bra for as long as I could because they creeped me out, and then pretty much only wore sports bras until high school. I tried to shove all my stuff (credit card, cash money $$, ID, keys, chapstick, etc.) in my tiny girl-jeans pockets whenever I went out until, like, halfway through college, when I realized my aversion to purses didn't extend to cross-body bags. My friends are mostly guys, and though that wasn't always the case, it has been since I graduated high school.
Some of that probably means something. Some of it maybe doesn't. I don't know.
This is why I think I might be androgyne: I've always been kind of boggled by gender. I don't feel "feminine," although I certainly have some traits that would be called feminine, and while I often joke that I'm totally a dude on the inside, I wouldn't describe myself as "masculine," either. I frame the way I feel as: I just feel like a person. No gendered baggage necessary. So my instinct has always been that gender is 98-100% social construct, but that doesn't reconcile at all with you know, the existence of transgendered people. Plus, things like the John/Joan case provide pretty strong evidence that gender isn't necessarily entirely a social construct. I've been rationalizing this by assuming that the socialization of the concept of gender is just much more insidious than most people realize, and I, I don't know, through some combination of nature and nurture, managed to evade that socialization, along with any suggestions from society that a personality like mine also requires a dick.
It's occurred to me, of course, that maybe I'm framing the situation the wrong way: it's not that gender doesn't exist, it's just that it doesn't exist as a binary, but along a spectrum. I've dismissed that in the past, though, maybe because the information I found was wrong or incomplete; I couldn't 100% relate to any definition I found of "genderqueer," because I present pretty obviously female (if tomboyish; or, as one of my students put it last year, "sporty"), and I really don't have a problem with that. Like, I have pretty much no desire to screw with my presentation, and I don't feel like a guy deep down, and I don't feel like sometimes I'm a guy and sometimes a girl, and I don't feel like I'm necessarily part one thing and part another, but I do feel pretty muddled. But maybe, though, it's not just "society" making me feel that way, and it really is my brain that's weird? I think that maybe makes more logical sense (although society is not entirely off the hook, not by a long shot), but...I don't know. I don't feel like I fit in any neat box. I don't feel like I fit into any, like, messy box, either. But the other day I stumbled across some articles about androgyne identity and I thought...okay, maybe. Fits better than anything else I've found.
Does any of this sound familiar? Relatable? Or is it just like...hey maybe you should stop thinking so hard about this; you're obviously confusing yourself?
tl;dr: Hi! Gender kind of baffles me. It's all like...what? I think I may also have an abnormally flexible perspective re: biological sex? I might be an androgyne, or maybe I'm just weird. I don't know, because I remain honestly mystified by gender!
