[Cin]

I don’t think I’ve ever felt internally estranged from my female self. I think outside forces conspired to keep me estranged from a female identity. I think borders are patrolled vigorously. I think there is a natural softening, a certain slippage if you will, around borders, around the edges of identities. These areas must be guarded stringently. There is fear, as there is with all borders, that something from the other side will escape across and morph what we know and change the face of our reality. As a society we have a lot invested in maintaining duality. Right or wrong the need appears to be to keep it simple. If you are not male then you are female. If you are not straight then you are gay. There isn’t a whole lot of room for expression outside of the box. And to keep it that way society sets up defenses along the edges of male and female to maintain the borders intact. Of course we have lots of expression outside of the box anyway because people naturally resist boxes unless they personally choose to sit in one. But I think that our infinite variety of expressions and identities often get confused by the seduction of duality. Identity and gender outside of male and female get lost in translation and is often co-opted without our consent by society’s narrow vision.

I’ve thought a lot about this stuff, struggled trying to understand it, understand me, see where I fit, how I fit. I always felt like I was female. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a guy. However, when I was a kid I wanted the freedom that came with being a boy. As I got older I wanted all the freedom that came from being male. I wanted not to have to worry that some creep was going to rape me. I wanted to have a better shot of walking around at night without being attacked. I wanted to be treated with respect and to have my girlfriend be treated with respect when we walked down the street together. I wanted some of those indulgent smiles that young love always gets from straight people. But I did not want to be a straight man.

As a kid I loved running around shirtless in warm weather. My mother put a stop to that by the time I was 6. Whenever I would complain to her that it was too hot to wear a shirt her answer was a halter top. I hated halter tops. I really wanted the freedom to be topless. And I hated looking like a girly girl.

I wanted to be free from needing to get all dressed up like a doll. I hated dresses. The worse day of the week for me was Sunday. Well, it’s kind of complicated to just say that straight out because there were quite a few years of my childhood that I didn’t live exclusively with my parents. The days I was not with my parents were my worse days period. But when I was home the worse day was Sunday because my mother did everything she could to get me in a dress. I complained, begged and pleaded with her to leave me in my jeans. I explained how I couldn’t have my guns strapped on correctly in a dress. But my mother wasn’t moved.

She spent years telling me the things that little girls didn’t do. I remember telling her once that she had to be mistaken because I was a girl and if I was doing it then clearly girls did do it after all.

There finally came a time when she gave up. At that point I believe she unconsciously stopped looking at me as female. My father was always happy to treat me like the son he never had. So now it was unanimous. I was a boy.

I didn’t want to be a boy really. But now I was subjected to the opposite type of coercion. Now if I had to get dressed up for some reason or other, I would get remarks like “what’s with the dress and the make-up you look like you’re in drag.” It was almost as if in order to fit into society’s gender narrative I had to now be seen as a guy. It seemed this was the only way people were comfortable. Okay, if you’re not a girl then you must be a guy. I didn’t want to be a guy. But I couldn’t seem to be a girl, at least not as defined by others.

Talk about feeling estranged from myself, at that time if I could have found some way to have my sex and gender match society’s definition of it, I would have done it. I would have asked to be made female. At least female as defined by the society I lived in. It was like I was one sex and the world insisted I was another because my actions didn’t align with their gender narrative. It was surreal. It still is sometimes. It’s kind of a mind fuck. Even finding enough clarity to explain the way it feels is difficult.

I remember feeling torn a lot trying to figure out exactly what I was. I mostly ignored my masculinity because to me I was a woman, just a woman who loved women, just a lesbian and yet it felt like that was always being negated. It never felt at anytime in my life that the world ever accepted me as a part of the definition of woman.

It’s odd looking back how woman and even lesbian were held just out of reach. But masculine, male, and/or butch were what defined me to others. And while they tried to deny my version of woman, the keepers of gender who decreed I failed miserably at female, thrust a male definition at me and then turned around and were angry at me as though masculinity was a prize I had stolen or a trick I had played when their guards were down. I was loathed for my masculinity in its female packaging. Like it was my idea to be male. So is it any wonder that I held on for dear life to my right to identify as woman, as female. It always felt I was on the verge of having my sex and gender stolen from me. I spent little time ever nurturing my masculinity. It was always about woman for me.

I don’t see this as an internal problem with my self identity but it feels as though I was estranged from myself. I realize it was society’s narrowly defined gender roles causing my estrangement. And it sounds simple when you say oh well, that’s just society’s definition of woman, you don’t have to buy into it. You can define it for yourself. And while that is true enough, you cannot define yourself for anyone else. So it turns out to be a very lonely definition indeed.

One can even say it’s society’s definition of lesbian that causes my alienation from mainstream lesbians. By defining lesbian exactly as someone like me, someone who is female but looks male, society made me a pyorrhea, a danger, the unwitting anarchist in a peaceful revolution. Lesbian is not made up mostly of women like me. Society’s inference that it is has made many lesbians suspicious of butch women. I can and do own lesbian as an identity but lesbian does not care so much to own me. I am a woman. I am a lesbian. I am a butch lesbian. But even in the margins there are margins. The margin that is defined within the margins.

I figured out that I could decide to just define myself however I choose. I can own woman and lesbian as well as masculine and have that mean whatever I wish. I can believe I have expanded gender roles to include me. But how does that actually work out? And can I own feminine at all and ever make it mine when people look at me and see male? Can I be feminine when every move I make, every wardrobe choice, every interest, every intimate interaction, even my very essence screams man to those who see gender in neat tight little packages labeled man or woman? It always felt to me that I was being told if you can’t be a woman the way a woman is supposed to be then you need to be a man. It tore me up. It made me turn my back on a very important and integral part of who I was. It made me dislike the male part of me even while I had no choice but to act exactly how I was, a masculine woman.

It seems to me the world hates masculine women and feminine men. They loathe them. More than anything else masculinity in a female package is taboo and worthy of disgust. As is femininity in a male package.

I spent so much of my life holding on tightly to my female self because it felt like it was always threatened. I felt like someone was always trying to take my feminine identity away from me. I fought so hard for this that I usually ignored my masculinity. It was just there. It was just who I was. But it was also the cause of my self-estrangement. I regarded it with contempt and distrust. Male bad/female good. It’s still such a part of my unconscious narrative.

I think my feminist ideals further complicated my estrangement from myself. I believed being a woman was the best part of who I was. Followed closely by being a lesbian and a feminist. The fact that my masculinity erased most of this in the eyes of others was difficult for me to negotiate. My feminism further alienated me from my masculinity. I don’t mean to say that I hold my feminism or feminism in general responsible for my feelings. Or that I would wish to be or ever will be anything other than a feminist. I just want to clarify that. I love being female, lesbian and feminist. These are the most important parts of who I am. But there is another part of who I am that always seemed most important to the world in general, while just a part of the whole for me. And that is my masculinity.

I remember when I discovered butch as an identity. That fit. I was a butch. I was a butch lesbian feminist. Finally I could be comfortable in my identity. However to everyone else I was still a wannabe man. Nothing really changed. Different day; same shit. I think that discovery affected me deeply because I began to see a pattern here. I looked at the term LGBT community that was being used frequently. I realized I actually couldn’t see myself reflected in totality within any of those. Then I figured maybe queer would define me best. But that didn’t seem to honor my woman lesbian feminist identity.

It’s been an interesting journey. I doubt it is even close to complete though. Identity is an ever evolving aspect of my humanity. Whether the actual identity changes or whether the language used for understanding shifts I cannot say. But I can say that for me, masculinity has always taken a back seat to woman in my understanding of myself. Yet, masculine as defined by society is such an integral part of who I am. Can I really understand myself if I relegate such an important piece of my identity to the back of my consciousness whenever possible? Actually one could easily say that masculine is the face I present to the world. Yet it is the part of me I least understand, the part I least want to understand. It seems a real loss. I think that is where the disconnect is for me. That is the self estrangement. But that estrangement was caused by society’s obsession to define me by what it termed my masculine behavior. And then to despise and loathe me for my insistence on preserving my identity as woman, thereby presenting to the world an example of the much hated female masculinity.

I think if anything got a raw deal it was my masculinity. I think my masculinity needs its day in the sun.