I may be having some success in finding things for Sparkly. I’m going to make a big list and then maybe weed it out a bit.
If anybody wants to help, what I’m looking for is people writing, giving advice, etc. about dealing with gender presentation– how you think of yourself as feminine or manly or neither, expressing that, dealing with other people’s expectations/stereotypes, how you want to present vs. how your body looks.
Today I’ve been wandering the internet in search of links for Sparkly. I think she was sort of joking when she asked me to find her advice about queerness, but I’m going to try, at least!
Sparkly has all these conflicted feelings about gender and while I can be sympathetic, I don’t really understand.
I want to try and summarize what she’s told me, for my own benefit.
She doesn’t like how androgynous she looks. She likes being a woman, but she wishes she was curvier so she could look more attractive in a feminine way. On the other hand, she really likes masculine fashion, but she doesn’t feel like she looks masculine enough to look really good in it. She doesn’t want to be a man. She doesn’t want to have to deal with all the negative attitudes people have about manly women.
What I want to find is someplace that’s welcoming and… normalizing? about various gender stuff. Someplace Sparkly can feel more normal and like she has more options.
——-
I cut Sparkly a lot of slack when she’s awkward about other people’s genders because I know she has all these feelings about her own.
I’m not sure how her worrying about my gender fits in, but I’m sure it does somehow.
that there would be less people who give credence to the idea of gaydar.
Okay, here’s the context: RDG introduced us to a friend of hers who is genderqueer. She didn’t say that in the introduction, though. And apparently multiple people assumed he was gay, based on him being apparently male with a sort of gentle, feminine part to his personality.
I wasn’t so surprised when people at my college were all like “oh, N is asexual? I guess that makes sense. He has a kind of high voice and cares about fashion, but he’s not so stereotypically gay.”* Sigh. I was like “face, meet palm,” but I wasn’t really surprised because they were all straight and didn’t really know any queer people well besides him and me.
But when four out of seven people in the room are queer women and none of them look particularly like a lesbian stereotype, you’d think we could get past this. (For the sake of thoroughness: RDG, the host of this party who we’ll call M, and I are bi; Sparkly doesn’t like labels but obviously is in a relationship with me; RDG’s sister Bee is straight; Cool Hair Guy describes himself as heteroflexible, which I guess means he’s theoretically open to having sex with men but not extremely interested; and then there’s J, the genderqueer one.)
Is this another unfortunate effect of attending an all-women school, or am I unusual for not buying into this thing?
Maybe I should be thanking certain parts of the internet, for introducing teenage-me to queer people of every description imaginable. That probably helped.
* The “Oh, that makes sense. He’s sort of… well, you know.” was actually said out loud; the rest is my assumption about what they were referring to.
Some Open Space 