"but all girls feel that way"
(from Shira Lipkin’s The Changeling’s Lament:)
When I was little,
I asked my alleged mother,
what’s a girl?
She said
you,
you’re a girl,
and she laced me into dresses
(that I tore off in the school parking lot,
in line for the bus).
Laced me into ballet shoes
that left blisters
and bloodied my feet
until I had calluses.
Which she had filed off,
beauticians pinning me down,
because it’s not beauty
if you don’t bleed.
(read more)
So a while ago shadesong's poem “the changeling’s lament”, from the September 2011 (Mythic) issue of Stone Telling, went viral online. It gained a mind-boggling number of hits. The poem is based in Shira’s experience as a genderqueer person, but it hit a nerve for cis women as well; and one of the comments I got about it as a queer poem was “well, but all girls feel that way.”
My brain’s been poking at that comment ever since; it’s problematic because it was erasing/failing to comprehend gq experience, but I feel it’s also important in that it highlights a common aspect of cis femininity: so often even to cis women, femininity isn’t a comfortable/well-fitting category. It’s imposed from outside, and so much of it is based on harmful patriarchal notions.
At the time I said “Sure, but it’s not the same, because Shira isn’t just/always a girl.”
Because, baseline: If a category doesn’t fit, you can a) exist uncomfortably with the label, b) reject the label, or c) change the category. And while a lot of cis women go for (c), because traditional constructions of femininity so often SUCK, and that work is important - that doesn’t mean (b) matters less. For some of us the label, the whole category, is just wrong no matter how you change it.
And I’m comfortable making that argument for other people. But. For myself? Eh for me it’s not that simple either. I exist between cultures - I have to ask which femininity, which culture’s girl, woman, other, which categories. And my between-cultures experience has always been marginal - I’m accepted into any given culture on sufferance. I’m not a “real” Indian to a lot of people, including plenty of family members, but nobody will mention it unless I’m “difficult”. So what happens if I try to change their category of femininity or reject it? “Shee so Western Shweta.”
And there goes any validity anything I say might have.
And IDEK, how do I coexist with western categories and cultural patterns without whitewashing myself? When I try to speak out about the categories - again, we’re talking with family, close family friends, etc, my life offline - I get marked as the outsider, the person who isn’t really American or British, and again, any comment I make is invalidated.
The cis women I’ve spoken to about this have told me I can claim-and-change femininity, and just feeling alienated by the category doesn’t mean I’m genderqueer. Because, y’know, all girls feel that way. But how could I claim either/any of these femininities enough to change them? To me they’re languages not my own, which I learned to speak because I had to, and now they come to my tongue more easily than anything else and any language I could call my own is made mostly of silences.
(Nor is English mine, though I think in it; it is a language of necessity, and it never gives me the joy that even a stumbling sentence in Tamil makes me feel. And there again is a problem with the word, whether the word is woman or genderqueer or genderfluid or all of them, they’re all English, all Western-centric, all relative to only some of the femininities I’m juggling.)
I’ve been doing (a), uncomfortable silent existence, all my life. Because it’s just one of the things I gave up for safer existence on the margins. And, well, I can manage “woman”, it’s not that uncomfortable for me, some days I barely even notice the hat doesn’t fit. So I’m left, still with two questions. Is it worth rejecting the label & dealing with added marginalizations? And, is it even accurate to reject the label if the reason I feel I can’t change the categories is cultural outsider status rather than gender outsider status?
It has taken me ten months to ask the questions. I’m not so worried about answers, but more - are they even the right questions?