Neither Man nor Woman, Just a Perhapser
Charles H. Meyer | February 7, 2012
http://cinespect.com/?p=2893When I was a junior in high school, I used to volunteer at a hospital each Sunday as a patient escort. One morning, as I arrived to pick up a patient, a nurse called out to my charge, "Here he is! Or she is! Or, I don't know what that is." My hair wasn't very long, so maybe it was my long eyelashes or my full lips, but the nurse couldn't decide, at a glance at least, whether I was male or female. (Full disclosure: I'm male.) Her bluntness took me by surprise, but I was more amused than fazed. It wasn't the first time that my appearance had caused confusion about my gender, but it was the first time that it hadn't bothered me. As I reflected upon the incident, it occurred to me that I had no reason to feel offended. After all, the nurse hadn't implied that I was ugly, only that I was androgynous. And it strikes me now that there's something humanizing about being seen as androgynous, about looking neither male nor female, but simply human.
Unfortunately, even after decades of progress towards gender equality, many people–whether they admit it or not–still subscribe to the silly notion that for a man to be mistaken for a woman is an insult. Thankfully, though, some people are speaking up and trying to help to end this ridiculous gynophobia. Iggy Pop, for instance, has said, in a quotation that has recently been making the rounds: "I'm not ashamed to dress 'like a woman' because I don't think it's shameful to be a woman."
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Two recent films, French writer-director Céline Sciamma's "Tomboy" and Rodrigo García's "Albert Nobbs," broach the subject of cross-dressing from the opposite direction, as they concern, respectively, a ten-year-old French girl pretending to be a boy and a middle-aged Irishwoman pretending to be a man. Despite their similar themes, however, they are in many ways strikingly different films, divided mainly along lines of naturalism and artifice.
