Reclaiming Lesbian Pride

[CherylNYC]

Originally Posted by Martina

One of the reasons gender studies started investigating masculinity -- and this was at least twenty years ago -- was that the masculine and the male were considered the baseline, the ur gender, the the model of humanness. There needed to be an historical and cross-cultural understanding of how masculinity and maleness were constructed IN ORDER to destabilize the binary, in order to understand that the idea of male identity, especially in psychoanalysis and medicine, was not a stable social fact.

Those who began by investigating the construct of maleness seem to have ended by fetishizing it instead. It's quite clear to me that although the intent may have once been to destabilise the gender binary, gender studies have had great success in promoting it.

Is there something transgressive about a female bodied person claiming that they are male because they resemble traditional males? Isn't that just saying that those who look and act traditionally male must BE male? What happened to dismantling assumptions about traditionally gendered behaviours?

I've been a gender transgressor for my entire lifetime. When I was six years old I boycotted the Flintstones, refusing to watch them because of the ridged gender stereotypes the show promoted. I started riding motorcycles in 1981. I instruct riders at the racetrack. I've made a living at various times as a carpenter and general contractor. Without any friends or family in the business, I earned a union card in the Stagehands Union in the mid 1980s. It's an infamously sexist and bigoted union, and 1986 was an inauspicious time for that sort of pioneering.

I've fought that war with my own body, too. I've been the object of unwanted sexual attention from men from my earliest memory. When a strong beard sprouted on my chin in my mid twenties, the attention magically disappeared. What a relief! I suddenly was free from daily verbal rape. I unselfconsciously wore my beard, along with my hairy legs, with my vintage dresses and high heeled shoes. I reasoned that anyone I wanted to know wouldn't care about my beard, or they might even admire my courage. I didn't shave it off until I was in my early 30s.

I did all of the above AS A WOMAN. I did the above declaring loudly all the while, "THIS IS WHAT A WOMAN LOOKS LIKE".

That's what it looks like to dismantle the gender binary in my world.