Quote from: Nero on January 01, 2008, 09:54:47 AM
Honestly, Pica dear, I feel it's a difference experienced more by the female-bodied. I've experienced people's entire demeanor and manner of speech change within but an hour of conversation with me. They don't know they're doing it. But suddenly, they're speaking with me as if I were just another guy. But upon first shaking hands, they spoke to me differently. This is annoying. I wish I could be taken at face value. There is sort of a dismissive attitude towards females.
I've had this experience, too. I think that Pica's original post would indicate this as an instance where gender doesn't matter -- the person gets to know you for an hour and begins to see you as who you are and treat you accordingly.
That first hour is annoying, but what's intolerable is the times when it just doesn't happen at all, or happens in a really minimal way -- an hour of talk and I have moved from 'that girl' to 'that adventurous tomboy girl,' but not achieved the 'female, but not a woman,' or 'one of the guys' gender(less) status that I get from friends.
The genderless status thing can be frustrating in itself. My man-ness is low-key and minimalist, but present, while I lack woman-ness entirely (barring the physical facts of my female body). What people who see 'female, but not really a woman' are responding to is someone who is minimally woman and zero man, the opposite of my inner experience. It's more comfortable than people thinking I'm a normal woman, but it's not exactly my true self expressed and observed.
Those who see the tomboy are even more frustrating. Adventerous Tomboy Girl, as an archetype, has a positive value for essential femininity and a positive value for an outward pseudo-masculinity that does not reflect man-ness but is often an expression of the feminine as active, independant and practical. Quiet Gentle Bookish Boy and Adventerous Tomboy Girl are very dissimilar archetypes, I in fact feel more unrecognized when classified in this way than when smashingly blind people treat me as Basic Woman.
I wonder if you won't change your mind about this one as you age, Pica, 'cause of what I said about people treating me like I'm younger than I am. I expect you'll get the same thing, and probably do to some degree already. I want respect as an experienced adult, because I am one, but find it withheld from me. As a female-bodied person I am supposed to display womanhood to be an adult, and I'm incapable of that, so I'm a thirty-three year old kid and tired of it.
