Gender is a Social Construct
Gender is a social construct. A concept widely acknowledged by the LGBTQIA+ community but outside of the safety and acceptance of queer spaces, and sometimes even within them, people are often misunderstood and gendered for the sake of mainstream society. What happens when you remove the pressures of society and allow people to live their lives without the constructs of gender norms and stereotypes?
Sitting in a tiny underground bar in Melbourne’s CBD, listening to Oliver Reeson discuss gender and toxic masculinity as part of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival, I looked around the room and saw every external presentation of gender identity represented. This was a safe space and people came in droves to have their perceptions challenged, their minds opened and, most importantly, to feel seen. A lack of intellectual safe spaces in Melbourne, and indeed Australia, means that when an opportunity like hearing Oliver speak arises, the queer community flock and hang onto every word.
Gender is a social construct and while I have been on this earth for thirty years and have identified as various intersects of queer for fifteen of those years it is only now as I enter my thirties that I have started to let go of my preconceived notions of gender. Your thirties are said the be the time of your life that you stop caring so much about societal and familial expectations, this is true of my experience and I have begun to acknowledge and resent the strict limitations that society has placed around gender and sexuality and how this has shaped my life.
I am a queer cisgender femme lesbian. This is how identify. These are the labels that I have placed upon myself and it is only now that I realise that they have been inserted into my identity in order for me to be able to better explain my way of life to a main stream society that has no interest in understanding me or my culture. We attach labels to our identities in order to communicate with our community about our sexual preferences but when it comes to gender identity the labels we place upon ourselves serve only to help us adhere to a white cisgendered view of what gender is. We are trying to make ourselves more palatable in order to be more widely accepted when all we are really doing is to squeezing ourselves into a box in which we were not born to fit.
This idea of there being two genders stems from a post-colonial society where gender roles were entrenched into white culture in order to maintain an order and function within the Monarchy and the home. AKA so that men could run the world and women could make the babies. This is not to say that physical or emotional characterises of being femme or masc were non-existent but there was no language to describe such notions without it occurring as offensive rhetoric and individuals were actively discouraged from straying from heteronormative gender roles so to not disrupt the equilibrium. Tick a box; man or woman, anything in between is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.
When discussing gender society loosely accepts two labels; cisgender and transgender. Two labels that heteronormative society can quantify without challenging it’s own ideas of gender and facing that perhaps the whole construct should be thrown out the window. This is not to say that they are welcoming of transgender people but transitioning from one gender to another means that mainstream society is still able to pigeon-hole you into a stereotype. Unlike our non-binary siblings with whom society is still unsure about and needs constant reminding of the basics such as pronouns.
I cannot speak on the trans and non-binary experience but as it applies to cis lesbians we attach words like femme and butch to the term lesbian in order to inform society in which box we belong. I’m femme so it stands to reason that I am the woman in the relationship while my butch or masculine of centre partner must be the man. This stereotype was so ingrained in me from childhood that I truly believed that my role, even in a lesbian relationship, was to bare children and make a home. So much so that I would feel threatened later in life when my partner would say they wanted to carry any potential offspring. Society had taught me that this was my role and without it what was I?
During the course of Oliver’s discourse they posed this question “What is masculine and feminine and who gets to decide?”. Who does get to decide and when a name is presented I would like to speak with them because gendered personal characteristics have plagued my life in its entirety.
I miss childhood where gender was not a yet a concept that we were familiar with. I was a strong willed and confident child with little to no regard for gender constructs (if they existed at all). I broke my mother’s heart by cutting my hair into a bob when I was seven. I wore the ‘boys uniform’ to school with the waist band of my pants placed far too high above my navel then was fashionable but it bothered me not. We were happy children with no knowledge that we were being groomed to conform to a gender role that many of us would not fit into and would actively rebel against.
My first recollection of forced gender roles as a child was at the age of ten. I have a distinct memory of visiting family friends on their farm and being invited to ‘play house’ with the other little girls while the boys played in the yard. It’s not that I didn’t play with dolls but in that moment I would’ve much preferred to be outside playing with motorbikes in the dirt. I stared at the baby doll in its crib resenting the lack of choice presented to me. I did eventually succumb to peer pressure because the mums in the room were looking at me in a way that suggested that there was something wrong with me. I remember the smile and relief that spread across their faces and the physical tension that they released as I picked the doll up out of the crib and conformed to behaviour that they deemed appropriate for an eight-year-old girl. Twelve months later I sold all of my barbie dolls and used the proceeds to buy a guitar.
As a child I was always ‘one of the boys’. I liked sparkly things and pink and I participated in dance classes but I always had more friends that were boys than girls. Having lived in a bigger body my entire life, as a child, I rarely felt dainty and petite like little girls were supposed too, so I found solace with the boys who emanated a similar more robust energy. Even now as an adult I have very few femme friends and automatically gravitate to more masculine of centre people despite my love of wearing heels and makeup. But who’s to say that my brand of feminine is not feminine?
As cis women it is ingrained is us from a young age that women are expected to live a certain way, to present themselves and speak in certain ways. Traits that are typically seen as masculine are discouraged as possessing these characteristics would actively repel potential male mates. Women are to be timid and mild-mannered, to be subservient and loyal. Characteristics such as outward confidence (particularly in business), independence, sexual prowess or original ideas and concepts are to be discouraged, they are not attractive qualities for a woman to possess.
I have always found my gender identity difficult to describe as while I am a cis woman and femme, there are many aspects of myself that I do consider masculine and proudly so. It is difficult for me to find the words to describe the energy that in my core is not all masculine or all feminine. However due to my feminine exterior many people find it hard to comprehend how I could possibly see myself as a masculine person. What’s more infuriating is the knowledge that society sees my ‘masculine characteristics’ but refuses to acknowledge them as such. Instead I am too dominating or confident in the workplace, I have poor manners because I don’t sit like a lady, I have BDE, I am unabashedly sex positive. Small examples because even now I struggle to find the words to explain my masculinity because I have been told for long that I am not and could not be masculine.
I have a fire inside of me that I can’t associate with femininity but why are these traits masculine? Why must they be assigned to a gender at all?
Gender is a spectrum on which we slide up and down throughout our lives. I am a person. At this point in my life I hold more importance in my Aries Sun than I do the fact that I have a vagina. I will live my life in the clothes I choose, with makeup or bare skin, in heels or docs and emit the energy I wish to radiate at the time. And I have come to the conclusion that society will just have to keep up. I am continuing this journey of self-discovery and gender exploration one day at a time and while I still feel the pressure of societal expectations daily I feel safe in the knowledge that my community will support and accept me no matter who I am or how I identify.
There is no one way to live. There is no right way to be a woman or a man but there is a right way to be a person; be kind, courteous and open-minded and remember that you are perfect just the way you are.
Lacey-Jade Christie
Originally published at http://laceyjadechristie.com on October 4, 2020.
