cobalt drgn (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cobaltdrgn) wrote2021-01-12 02:13 pm
cobaltdrgn) wrote2021-01-12 02:13 pm
Entry tags:
musings on draconity, and gender-gatekeeping kids' access to nature
Lately I've been trying to describe my gender and how it relates to my draconity, partly using a really cool resource that one person came up with for framing gender in non-binary terms: this thread/zine by frogwatching.
I got as far as filling out one blank diagram, but the more I tried to clarify, the more I felt like I was just tying myself in knots, trying to explain something that was just out of reach of the structure I'd been given.
Then, I had an epiphany. Well, several, but here's one.
When I was a kid, I had almost all the "signs" of being transgender, as cis society frames it. When I was 2 years old I rejected dolls, and said I only wanted animal toys. I hated having my photo taken. My mother stopped trying to get me to wear dresses at age 5, and from then on I only ever wore trousers or shorts; when she said I'd probably grow up to have big breasts because it ran in the family, I immediately began planning to get them reduced as soon as I was older. (I didn't know about top surgery; I later did get it, in 2010, and it's the happiest I've been with my body since I was a kid.) My mother would "joke" with the woman who ran the corner shop, whose AMAB kid loved to play with dolls and rejected "boy toys", that our kids should have been born in each other's bodies. I spent a good portion of my childhood running around in the woods, and wishing I could be in the Cub Scouts instead of the Brownies, because the boys got to do cooler things. Like many young boys, I loved dinosaurs, and I tried to keep bugs and frogs as pets.
Looking back at all that, I realise now: there wasn't anything gendered about it. For the first 15 years of my life, I didn't think of myself as having a gender at all, except when it got in my way. It was all about my species dysphoria.
Girls, in the society I grew up in (the UK in the 80s), were expected from an early age to fuss over their bodies. They were (and are) supposed to enjoy looking cute, and picking out cute clothes, and getting attention for being cute. (And yes, that's pretty gross on its own, even without any dysphoria coming into play.) Boys were expected to focus less on their bodies, and be more interested in interacting with the physical world: running through nature, catching bugs, jumping, wrestling, building things. Cub Scouts got to go camping, and learn how to track animals and identify birds by their calls; they got to be in a Pack, and got called after animals! How cool was that? Brownies, at least where I grew up, were much more focused on indoor activities, going to church, and instilling "hostess" skills. (We got to go camping once. I cooked my own hot dog and burned it slightly. It was the best hot dog I'd ever tasted, including the soot; I can still recall the flavour.)
Simply put-- I never realised this before, but girls are deprived of nature. Either by their parents, their neighbours, their schools and social groups (like Brownies), or by media and ads, girls are told to put most of their efforts into looking like pretty humans, and taking care of human babies. They're expected to turn their energies inwards, and not roughhouse or tread in mud or do anything that would get them dirty or messed up.
So of course I wanted to be a boy! I was dysphoric about being a girl because I was dysphoric about being a human, and being feminine meant drawing attention to your humanness. It meant not getting invited to nature trips or cookouts. It meant staying indoors and playing with stick-thin ugly human figures, by dressing them up in flashy clothes and making them do things like "go to work" and "put on a fashion show". And later in life, it meant the attentions of gross men who saw you had boobs and were instantly turned into slavering zombies by the thought of touching them. It meant wanting to play Magic: The Gathering because of the gorgeous art and dragons, but having your presence in the group be as a sexual figure for human men, not an equal who was there to play the game. I was reminded at every turn that my body was the only thing people saw about me, when the last thing I wanted was to be identified with my body at all.
(...It's actually sort of hilarious, when I look back on it. Imagine being a dragon who shows up to the library to play card games, and some gamerbro gives you a rose because they think they're seeing a human woman. And then you have to figure out what to do with it while your brain is just going "...bweh?")
None of this is to say I'm not transgender; I don't identify with femaleness, and I do feel far more comfortable in a body that's been stripped of one of the big signifiers of womanhood. But it feels like I'm coming at it from a different direction than most people, and that trying to view my dysphoria through the lens of gender is part of what's obscuring the truth. It's the difference between "I don't want facial hair because it's masculine" and "I don't want facial hair because I should have scales, wtf".
I got as far as filling out one blank diagram, but the more I tried to clarify, the more I felt like I was just tying myself in knots, trying to explain something that was just out of reach of the structure I'd been given.
Then, I had an epiphany. Well, several, but here's one.
When I was a kid, I had almost all the "signs" of being transgender, as cis society frames it. When I was 2 years old I rejected dolls, and said I only wanted animal toys. I hated having my photo taken. My mother stopped trying to get me to wear dresses at age 5, and from then on I only ever wore trousers or shorts; when she said I'd probably grow up to have big breasts because it ran in the family, I immediately began planning to get them reduced as soon as I was older. (I didn't know about top surgery; I later did get it, in 2010, and it's the happiest I've been with my body since I was a kid.) My mother would "joke" with the woman who ran the corner shop, whose AMAB kid loved to play with dolls and rejected "boy toys", that our kids should have been born in each other's bodies. I spent a good portion of my childhood running around in the woods, and wishing I could be in the Cub Scouts instead of the Brownies, because the boys got to do cooler things. Like many young boys, I loved dinosaurs, and I tried to keep bugs and frogs as pets.
Looking back at all that, I realise now: there wasn't anything gendered about it. For the first 15 years of my life, I didn't think of myself as having a gender at all, except when it got in my way. It was all about my species dysphoria.
Girls, in the society I grew up in (the UK in the 80s), were expected from an early age to fuss over their bodies. They were (and are) supposed to enjoy looking cute, and picking out cute clothes, and getting attention for being cute. (And yes, that's pretty gross on its own, even without any dysphoria coming into play.) Boys were expected to focus less on their bodies, and be more interested in interacting with the physical world: running through nature, catching bugs, jumping, wrestling, building things. Cub Scouts got to go camping, and learn how to track animals and identify birds by their calls; they got to be in a Pack, and got called after animals! How cool was that? Brownies, at least where I grew up, were much more focused on indoor activities, going to church, and instilling "hostess" skills. (We got to go camping once. I cooked my own hot dog and burned it slightly. It was the best hot dog I'd ever tasted, including the soot; I can still recall the flavour.)
Simply put-- I never realised this before, but girls are deprived of nature. Either by their parents, their neighbours, their schools and social groups (like Brownies), or by media and ads, girls are told to put most of their efforts into looking like pretty humans, and taking care of human babies. They're expected to turn their energies inwards, and not roughhouse or tread in mud or do anything that would get them dirty or messed up.
So of course I wanted to be a boy! I was dysphoric about being a girl because I was dysphoric about being a human, and being feminine meant drawing attention to your humanness. It meant not getting invited to nature trips or cookouts. It meant staying indoors and playing with stick-thin ugly human figures, by dressing them up in flashy clothes and making them do things like "go to work" and "put on a fashion show". And later in life, it meant the attentions of gross men who saw you had boobs and were instantly turned into slavering zombies by the thought of touching them. It meant wanting to play Magic: The Gathering because of the gorgeous art and dragons, but having your presence in the group be as a sexual figure for human men, not an equal who was there to play the game. I was reminded at every turn that my body was the only thing people saw about me, when the last thing I wanted was to be identified with my body at all.
(...It's actually sort of hilarious, when I look back on it. Imagine being a dragon who shows up to the library to play card games, and some gamerbro gives you a rose because they think they're seeing a human woman. And then you have to figure out what to do with it while your brain is just going "...bweh?")
None of this is to say I'm not transgender; I don't identify with femaleness, and I do feel far more comfortable in a body that's been stripped of one of the big signifiers of womanhood. But it feels like I'm coming at it from a different direction than most people, and that trying to view my dysphoria through the lens of gender is part of what's obscuring the truth. It's the difference between "I don't want facial hair because it's masculine" and "I don't want facial hair because I should have scales, wtf".