“Okay, this might sound awkward, but I have to ask, what gender do you identify as?” That was the first time someone politely asked me the question looming over my head.
So many times it’s been asked crudely or like they were making fun of me. Never before had it been asked in a non-ignorant way. Never before had it actually sounded like a stranger cared about who I was, not what I was made of.
When I was little, I always expected to grow up and be like my brothers. Strong enough to lift a couch and tall enough to get the Goldfish box off the top shelf of Walmart. I didn’t expect that at 10-years-old I would be force to recognize I had a woman’s body, and there was nothing I could do to change it.
There are three basic categories defining gender: biological sex, gender identity and gender expression.
Biological sex is the physical trait that someone has either an XX chromosome or an XY chromosome. Unless dealing with a doctor, most people would not need to know this.
Gender identity is the most prevalent category; it’s what gender someone sees himselves. An aspect of the mind, there are over 10 common types that most people should learn. Cisgender, when a person identifies as the gender his body is. Transgender, when someone identifies as the gender opposite his body.
On good days, I’m not comfortable per se; it’s more of a truce between the war the body and mind are stuck in. But bad days are the ones that hurt the most. Feeling that your insides won’t ever match up with the outside, your body is a prison with your mind as the guard.
It’s not a choice. I didn’t choose to be born into the wrong body, I didn’t choose to identify as someone different from my body. But this is more than just my story of a teen breaking out of their gender roles and confined prisons forced upon me and countless others.
I hate that because I’m seen as a girl, I have to conform to these standards people uphold for women: to be skinny, weak, pretty, dainty and countless others, when I’m not like that. No one is like that.
While yes, I am small and not the strongest person around, there is more to strength than just physical aspects. That goes for guys too; men don’t have to be the strong burly man their grandfathers were back in World War I. They can be so much more than that if the just knew that there’s more than the pink and the blue. There is the purple in between too. There is more than just a gender binary because it is a gender spectrum.
