Fuck cisheteronormative patriarchy
[A post inspired by International Women’s Day and the sometimes simplistic ways of thinking through patriarchal oppression these events inspire.]
My mom opened the Planned Parenthood in my hometown. Now she votes for the party that fanatically attacks the organization and all instances of women and girls trying to control their bodies.
My first girlfriend got her birth control at this same clinic. Her step father verbally and sometimes physically abused her. I think he taught her how to show love, because she eventually showed me in the same way. I took it for years, and sometimes I participated in the abuse. That was also my first poly relationship, and we stumbled over our parameters and hurt each other.
I had my first boyfriend when I was with her. He emotionally cornered me into having sex with him, and not only one occasion. I liked him a lot and wanted to look past this stuff, but eventually couldn’t. I left him and he stalked me. The part that scared me the most is that I was afraid it would be obvious to my neighbors that I was dating a man. At the time, I would rather have a clandestine stalker than be out to the people I lived around.
That wasn’t my first experience with sexual coercion. In middle school, a female friend tried to force sex on me at a party, and ran off with my clothes when I managed to struggle away. I liked her, but I felt like she only wanted to have sex with me to prove to our classmates that she wasn’t a lesbian. I knew her for years, and that made me really sad and hardly aroused. I looked her up a few months ago, and she’s now married to a woman.
In high school, my sister had an abusive boyfriend and an eating disorder. Now she intensively genders her children to the point where her son looks like he’s having an anxiety attack if his sisters or female cousins ask him to play with them.
Seeing my nephew reminds me of growing up and appearing like a boy and feeling very differently inside. My first sexual experiences were when I was eight, with a neighbor boy. I’ve never felt like a boy, and was always drawn to girl culture. I was way more into my sister’s Sassy magazine than she was. To this day, I look very different from how I feel. I wonder what I would look like today if I saw acceptance of trans and queer people around me and in the media when I was growing up. I find women’s apparel appealing. One of my girlfriend’s likes to dress me up in her clothes when we’re hanging out at her house. I really like it and sometimes resent that I’m not brave enough to wear them outside.
Growing up, my gender was policed by parents and peers, the latter with occasional violence. I turned that same aggression on others. I remember making fun of a butch girl classmate in middle school and hating myself for it at that moment and every day since. It probably didn’t save me from the additional bullying that I thought it would. I knew at the time that each one of those beatings had everything to do with me not being the right kind of boy.
Teachers and other adults sometimes witnessed me being attacked. I remember a female teacher in second grade telling me not to be a sissy when I asked her to stop me from being punched. In high school, the football players would gay bash me even though I had a girlfriend. Maybe they knew more about me than I did. Once, I defended myself when one of them attacked me. I got suspended, he didn’t.
I’m fucked up, and so is pretty much everyone I know.
