User:Sandra M. Lopes

I've lost track of what gender I'm supposed to be.

I'm definitely male-assigned-at-birth: that's what my ID card says. That's what my parents intended me to be. Physically, as far as I'm aware of, I fall neatly into the average look of people who have been assigned male at birth. My very early education, mostly by my mother (my father did his best to complement — never contradict! — my mother's choices), was as close as 'genderless' as possible — my mother deeply believed that both boys and girls should have the same education, play with the same toys, and so forth. Unlike other children of my age and assigned gender (uh, starting around 3 or 4?), I learned how to sew dresses for my Snoopys (I had many!), my doll, but also the G-Men Action Figures I had (those basic sewing skills were quite useful during the mandatory military service, decades later! — I used to sew everybody's clothes in my unit). I played with Lego blocks and electric trains; I glued model airplanes together; I had water guns; but I also knitted things out of wool. I was not particularly good at any of those activities. In general, my parents didn't forbid me (or my brother — same education, but he identifies as cisgender heterosexual) to pick whatever toys I wanted to play with, neither did they label those toys as 'male' or 'female'. For me, they were 'just toys'.

At kindergarten, things became a little awkward. Even though I just had a brother, I was used to some girls — my cousins and a neighbour — who had similar educations to mine. But the kindergarten teachers had different ideas: there was 'gender segregation' from the very beginning. For me, that was confusing; I started by sitting down with the girls because they would always talk about interesting things, while the boys were more eager to engage in physical activities. I wasn't particularly strong so I didn't really 'like' those games; those of the girls were more appealing.

This was in the early 1970's, when boys and girls started to dress pretty much in the same way — they all had jeans and T-shirts. Sure, some girls were allowed to have nice hairstyles and I envied them for that; because I had a tendency to hit my head on sharp corners, my forehead was always full of bumps and scars, so my mother insisted that I'd get a 'Beatles' haircut, with bangs to hide my forehead — a style which I thoroughly hated and that seemed to be unfair, I was just 'unlucky' with all my accidents. Surprisingly, I never broke a bone (up to today in 2020!), even when at some point I managed to break in two a marble table with my head. My parents glued it together and it remained at their place until I left — probably as a reminder at how careless and accident-prone I was. I still have some scars on my knees from some of my 'accidents' (including punching a pair of scissors through the knee skin — fortunately, without going too deep, just enough to bleed a lot and make a permanent scar).

Because I've got a very tolerant personality — which is probably a trait I was born with — I found all this 'segregating' behaviour very strange, but I accepted it without complaining. I also remember very vividly that during those first days at kindergarten it seems that anything I wanted to play with was 'forbidden' in some mysterious way; eventually I spent some time playing with a wooden train with wooden tracks. There was a girl who liked to play with me; and although I was glad to have someone to play with, I wondered why the girls were allowed to play with the boys (if they wanted), while the reverse was not true. It seemed quite unfair!

During elementary school, my hobbies were mostly 'non-gendered': reading, painting (no talent whatsoever), writing (I wrote a lot!), later on playing a musical instrument (I started with the violin but switched to the piano after a year). This only changed dramatically at age 12, when I bought my first computer in the early 1980s. This was during a transition phase — until the 1970s, all programmers were women (software), while men would work on the hardware instead. But in the late 1970s things started to change, as a generation of 'nerds' and 'geeks' — white males such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs — starting looking at computers and find them 'cool'. By the mid-1980s, popular culture excluded women from computers at a point where, when I entered university in 1986 to study computer science, males outnumbered females about 10:1, and we all felt that to be 'normal'. The few women around were nerdy, usually 'outcasts' who did not 'fit' the female image of the time, but there were a few exceptions to the rule.

But let's get back to the late 1970s/early 1980s first. Around 9 years of age or so, I started to feel very strong romantic attraction to girls. I had no idea how 'sex' worked (it was not part of the curriculum — most certainly not for middle school, anyway!), but the passion I felt was often overwhelming. However, the girls didn't want to have anything with me. For some reason, at the time wholly unknown to me, I had no luck in getting a girlfriend, while other boys started to brag about how easy it was to 'be in love' with a girl who would 'love' them back. Still, the majority of boys and girls were not interested one in another and kept separate at the playground. Again, I envied the 'girl games' and the time they would spend together just talking about all sorts of things — yes, even about the books they read! — while boys, well, just wanted to play football/soccer, or run around playing pranks, or, well, fight each other. In retrospective, I'd say that a huge proportion of my childhood colleagues were perfect stereotypes of what 'boys' ought to be. They wouldn't let me into their groups (I sucked at soccer and hadn't any physical strength).

There were a few exceptions, 'boys like me'. Well, perhaps not exactly like me, but boys who also longed about girls, and were not really excited with the 'boy stuff'. We made our own gang, the 'Outcast Gang', the 'boys that did not fit in'. Occasionally, we had a girl or two in our groups as well — those who were outcast by the girl groups for whatever reason. One might imagine that those girls would be the ones liking sports, hating 'girl stuff', and so forth; but no, those 'tomboys' would get easily accepted by the boys groups. We got... the weirdos. It was very, very confusing for me. But I trace my overall gender confusion — gender in the sense of a 'social role' thrust upon us without our explicit consent — to those days: it seemed that I wouldn't 'fit' anywhere. Even the 'Outcast Gang' (we actually never called ourselves that name; the closest we came to give it a 'name' was much later, in our teens, when we were fond of fancy words, and we sort of jokingly called ourselves as the 'non-aligned' group — those who were not 'aligned' with any other group) was a sort of 'last chance' grouping of those who would not fit anywhere else — but that didn't exactly mean that we had that much in common. We had something to work with, but it was clear to me — and that became increasingly clearer as I grew older — that I would not really 'fit' even in the 'Outcast Gang'. I just pretended that I'd fit, so that at least I had someone to talk to!

At age 11 or 12 there was a unique event that would shape me forever. My memories of all those years are confusing (according to my psychologist, this is typical of many gender-nonconforming persons), but I remember a few key elements. By that time, boys and girls, while still 'segregated' to a degree (our classes were mixed; it's just that outside classes boys would play with boys, girls with girls; the same during sports classes), would pretty much dress exactly in the same way: it was the fashion of the late 1970s/early 1980s. Girls would return to school after the long summer vacations (around 10 weeks in my days) having their hair cut very short — which would make me cringe. I remember being literally in tears when seeing how the loveliest girls in school would start wearing oversized sweaters and T-shirts, non-gendered jeans, and cut their hair short. Sometimes very short indeed — not really 'skinhead' short, of course, but as short as what boys would have. I had, by that time, a very strong fetish towards long hair (something that I still have), which I thought to be the ultimate symbol of femininity. Remember, this was before puberty, and it was practically the only way that we could tell boys apart from girls — especially as the clothes were one and the same.

When I see videos of how they typical school looks today — with 12-year-old girls dressing in top fashion, with exquisite hair styling (as long as possible!), wearing makeup, having their fingernails perfectly manicured, having all sorts of accessories — well, I think that I'm actually lucky. I wouldn't be able to 'survive' (psychologically!) if I had all those ultra-feminine girls around, all the time. I'd suffocate. It would be too overwhelming, I guess.

Instead, I lived in a world where boys and girls looked the same and dressed the same. And the last remnant of femininity — long, luxurious hair — was being abandoned. The 'new' hairstyles weren't even very 'feminine' (there are certainly lots of short styles which are uniquely feminine), they were not much different from the (few) styles used by boys back then.

This lead me to weird dreams. I had recurring nightmares about my latest crush having cut their hair — and, invariably, that would happen. I can imagine that many girls cut their hair only due to peer pressure — it was, after all, the fashion of the day. I can even guess that their mothers were shocked, but, as always, parents want their children to 'fit in'. And I imagined that many girls would cut their hair 'against their will' just because of that peer pressure — but, to my astonishment, they certainly behaved as if they liked their new hairstyles! This was utterly incomprehensible for me, and my dreams, at that time, became weirder.

Instead of dreaming about what girl would cut their hair next — leaving me utterly disappointed, even depressed — I started dreaming about myself as a girl with long hair, who would be proud of being allowed to wear long hair in public and therefore do so.

Remember, I was just 11 or 12, with zero understanding about 'gender' or 'sex'. For me, what 'defined' being a girl was being allowed to wear long hair in public (because, well, boys weren't allowed to do so), since they did basically everything that boys also did — if they wished. In fact, I truly envied the girls, for all sorts of reasons, the main one being that they had the choice of 'being as they wanted to be'. They could wear long hair in public — if they wished. But they could cut it as short as the boys — if they wanted. The choice was theirs. They could play soccer if they wanted to do so — but boys weren't allowed the choice to participate in the girls' games. First, because the teachers didn't allow us to; later, due to social pressure.

Boys who wanted to play with girls were 'sissies'.

Now, I had obviously no idea what a 'sissy' was, but I knew one thing, which was that 'sissies' weren't supposed to 'like' girls. Instead, they were supposed to like boys. For some reason, this was utterly revolting for me. I can't explain why, but I felt nausea just at the idea of 'liking boys' — and when I started to understand a bit more about homosexuality, I reacted physically with homophobia. Just the slightest idea of 'becoming a sissy' (as if that's something one could 'become' — but back the I had no idea that it was not a choice!) would make me cringe. No, I had no doubts that I was deeply attracted to girls and nothing else; I was just extremely disappointed that girls would look more and more like boys, year after year. After all, if I wasn't attracted to boys, why would I be attracted to girls who looked and behaved like boys? It was a huge mystery for me. Later in puberty, when girls started to develop physically — but still stuck to their boyish fashions — I even wondered what other boys saw in those de-feminised girls. The most confusing thing of all, for me, was that girls remained interested in girl stuff — in spite of presenting themselves as close as possible to a boy. By that time, for instance, girls absolutely refused to wear skirts or dresses, and would exclusively wear non-gendered sneakers. They would be laughed at by everybody (girls and boys) if they wore a skirt, even if it would be for just one day, for some special reason (say, they'd have to attend a birthday party of an older sister later on). They would be publicly shamed; wearing such absurdly feminine attire was anathema and not 'tolerated'. It was thought that 'skirts and dresses were for our grandmothers'. By that time, even our mothers would abandon feminine clothing in general, and opt for more gender-neutral fashion instead. My own mother, who had been a 'tomboy' in her time (she wanted to become a professional hockey player — which my grandmother forbid! — but, in her time, there wasn't a professional female hockey team yet. The first one was established just a few years after my mother finally gave up the idea and complied with the wishes of my grandmother. Still, she was an excellent skater, and she taught me all I knew about rollerskating back then), even cut her hair much shorter and started to wear pants (with some grumbling from my father, who was more traditional and conservative, but my mother had her way). My much elder female cousins, of course, had long before cut their hair and stopped wearing skirts or other feminine attire.

[To be continued...]