i mean i spent the years from 12 to 18 wanting to kill myself for being a fundamentally broken type of person with no understanding of what was even wrong with me, but im sure it would be just as bad to have a mid handjob. fucking sure
This is an example of transmisogyny.
The first time I saw this, I thought to myself “I don’t think too much would’ve changed to my specific childhood if I had a girlhood besides maybe getting to experience having a childhood lesbian awakening? Getting to experience Black Girl childhood moments like learning how to do your hair right? Getting Misogynoir instead of just racism growing up?” and wasn’t thinking too hard. I wasn’t one of the dolls who “always knew”, for reasons I’m realizing are intrinsically tied to what I’m about to talk about, and how it would’ve deeply and fundamentally changed my whole life.
I was a dancer. I was a professional dancer. I still am a dancer, if not to the capacity I once was. I started dancing when I was 2ish, and became too disabled to continue anything professionally at 21-22. Most of my professional work was in either classical or contemporary ballet, and my own choreography was often a fusion of contemporary ballet and hip-hop.
Gender determines a LOT in ballet, to a degree that no other “formal” dance style really does outside “Ballroom” (not the queer kind) styles such as tango, waltz, etc. generally, only women learn to go en pointe, and men are trained from young ages to partner with ballerinas and be an accentuation, being able to support all sorts of lifts, holds, turns, etc. Additionally, men are viewed as a rare resource for this, and well-trained/competent ones are often scrambled after outside of major dance hubs.
What this meant as a homeschooled Black “boy” growing up in early 2000s Montana, a state that was over 90% white and 0.2% Black, was that I was often not only the only Black person around, but that I was also often the only “boy” my age around as well. As I got older and spent more time in the dance studio each year, it meant more and more time in a space for which I was, quite literally, being Trained To Be Male despite doing something perceived by the outside world at large as extremely feminine or “for faggots”.
So I also ended up with a reflexive aversion to the idea of being anything but a straight man, because it would “prove people right”. I started having Thoughts about being Not A Guy as a teen but suppressed them hard, because of how much of the main driving force in my life depended on Being A Guy.
But thinking now of being able to have been a girl from the jump, to not have been simultaneously isolated and singled out and expected more from my whole life, thinking of how much more, dance-wise, I could’ve had access to. Even if I had ended up only being mediocre or average by women’s standards, I might’ve had a life where I had actual friends, where I wasn’t treated as a pariah, where I wouldn’t have to fight to be included like everyone else naturally was.
Having a girlhood and having that be normal would have changed so much about what I view as one of the most important things about me. Fuck.
