"The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. 'Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked. 'Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, 'and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'"
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1) When did you first think you weren't like other guys?
Among my earliest childhood memories, I vividly remember crying myself to sleep every night, dreaming, wishing, hoping, and praying to God that when I woke up I would wake up right: as a girl.
Sure, everybody treated me like a boy and I looked like a boy, but I knew inside who and what I was really supposed to be. That being said, I’m not sure that I ever thought that other boys were any different than me. I remember thinking that all boys must want to be girls because obviously it’s just natural to be a girl and being a boy just doesn’t feel right. Nonetheless, I clearly understood that boys weren’t supposed to talk about feeling like a girl or wanting to be a girl, and that was just part of what it meant to be a boy. And anyway, I figured that I’d get in real trouble, not to mention be made fun of and picked on, if I ever broke the Boys’ Code and told anyone that I was really supposed to be a girl. I never wanted to shatter anyone's expectations and everyone seemed to want me to be a boy. I never wanted to disappoint anyone and to be a girl or tell people how I felt seemed like it would be a major disappointment to everyone around me.
The same went for wanting to identify/align myself with the girls. When you are perceived to be a boy, girls just understand that you aren’t interested in girl stuff. So even if I would have asked to play with them, I figured they wouldn’t have been able to understand why I was interested and why I wasn’t playing with the boys. And that made it embarrassing and difficult. I wished that I could explain to them that I was really a girl too, if only they could just see it. Attending all-boys schools from first grade through high school didn’t help me much either. That’s not a comment on whether or not sex segregated schools are a good idea, I’m just making the point that being physically separated from girls and only interacting with boys served to eliminate the possibility of discussing my feelings with anyone and reinforced the need to repress, deny, and disacknowledge my own core gender identity and expression. In general, having grown up in the orthodox Jewish community made me believe that the way I felt, and who I was, was just impossible, and how do you acknowledge something that is impossible. (I’ll probably talk about this some more in a later post).
Over time, a considerable amount of subtle (and not so subtle) societal positive and negative reinforcement was layered over my core gender identity. This reinforcement left my core intact, but fairly inaccessible and obscured, and perhaps protected in the shelter that all those layers of masculinity provided. As a result, my solidly masculine gender expression served to fend off any suspicion of what lay underneath. And my own denial and disacknowledgement were tools that served to protect my vulnerable core from exposure and threat. If you start to believe your own story about being a boy, there won’t be any questions from other people. And denial means that some form of knowledge exists, but that when it surfaces, even if it’s clear that there really is an issue, the recognition of the knowledge is pushed back under the surface.
Trying to repress, suppress, and disacknowledge my gender identity was like those horror movies where the monster is chasing the heroine, trying to force its way through the door to engulf her. It gets its tentacles through but the heroine slams the door repeatedly until the hideous beast slowly retreats and oozes away only to come back when it’s least expected, and has grown more tentacles, regained its strength, and become more powerful than it ever was before.
To describe it another way, its like trying to catch a wildly swinging 100 foot tall jack-in-the-box and then using all of your might to stuff it back down, only to have it spring out again as the wheels of time rotate the handle, as they inevitably do.
Kids are delighted when the smiling jack jumps from its box, but the thrill of it is that they never know when it will. They know its coming but the surprise of it is what makes it fun. But I had to believe that it never would. And I made myself believe that it never would. Even though the macabre music kept repeating itself incessantly. Even though the handle kept turning and turning. Because I thought that if it ever did POP my life would EXPLODE with it in a mushroom cloud of darkness and destruction. And in some ways I may have been right.
So I had to use all of my strength to force it down and bury it out of sight. Not just out of sight from everybody else, but perhaps most importantly, out of sight from myself. (But that burying took a progressively mounting toll...)
And it did POP. It did EXPLODE. Suddenly, unexpectedly, and with a tidal wave of starkness and intensity that made all of the feelings that I ever had in the past seem like a lazy river on a warm summer’s afternoon. And when it did, I knew that the heavily buttressed dam that I so painstakingly constructed had been obliterated in the swell of the rushing flood and that I could not hold back the waters any longer. And as the current surged around me all of the layers holding my masculine construction together were obliterated, or were at least cracked and damaged beyond repair. My feminine core was left standing, pristine in its delicate nascence, released from the crushing weight of the male mold that had been built over it.
To be continued…
