My family moved to Newark, New Jersey a few months before I was born, to an apartment building we called the Colonnades. It was a Mies van der Rohe building on Clifton Avenue (right there at the Clifton Avenue exit off 280 for all you Garden Staters), that attracted a diverse mix of young, middle class families. I made my first friends in that building, a lot of whom also went to the same Montessori primary school that I did.
Two of my best friends were a little blond boy my age named Adam, and, once he got old enough to not be annoying, his younger brother, Kevin. We were creative kids who loved doing silly voices and making up songs, plays and “radio shows” we recorded on cassette, and, after my dad got me a Super-8 camera, my very first movies. These frequently-not-entirely-in-focus opuses generally cast us opposite our favorite stuffed animals in parodies of tv shows and commercials, to which we told ourselves we’d add sound later (I say this judging by the way our mouths are constantly moving with no way to tell what we were saying, in the admittedly shitty version of the films I now possess: files, digitized via my VX2000 from Super-8 transferred to DV at Rafik, which those of you who went to NYU might remember as the cheap and dirty student option none of us would ever have patronized if we’d had more money and the internet). I think my favorite piece we made together employed stop-motion animation of stuffed animals attacking a Fisher Price bus to create a political smear parody, alleging that under Mayor Ed Koch, New York saw “an average of over 5” similar attacks a week, making our signature shaky but impressive use of the zoom lens for dramatic effect, and ending with the tag line, “Think about it.” I don’t remember the exact ads we were making fun of at the time, but with hindsight, given that it was the 70s, I can say that they were probably pretty racist, so seeing them turned into something so profoundly silly is gratifying on more than one level.
But when I watch these old animated movies, there is a point at which Adam and Kevin disappear, and then it’s just me and my toys and claymation (although that period of my oeuvre did spawn the classic, Indipanda Jones in Raider of the Lost Perk, in which a tiny bear toy makes a treacherous journey to find what lies inside an old drip coffeemaker). At some point, once we all had moved to the nearby suburbs, I started looking over my shoulder every time we got together, to make sure nobody else I knew would see me playing with them. This was because, when I started third grade at my new suburban school, it quickly was drummed into my head by my new classmates that girls and boys playing together was something that was simply not done. Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention, the rules about all that had changed.
I’d never been good at following those rules to begin with. My mother is a second-wave feminist of the highest order, who hardly ever wore skirts or make-up when I was growing up, and as a kid, I was strictly tomboy. I rejected dolls and refused to take an interest in my hair (other than to categorically reject those barrettes with the little streamers) or wear skirts, ever, since they were clearly not practical clothing for anything I liked to do. And truly, in the 70s and 80s, there was plenty of evidence for why I would want to run away from girliness. Women on TV and in movies were mostly homemakers or sex objects, with the occasional, hapless and harried working mother thrown in, and I didn’t sure as hell didn’t want to be any of those things.
Add on to all that that suburbia and I were having issues. Yes, I loved having a yard, and having other people’s yards to roam through with the kids in the neighborhood, and being able to play games in the street, all without adult supervision — it was an independence and freedom that I hadn’t been given as a 7-year-old in the city. But when I started at my new school, I started to feel like things were…off. More specifically, I was off. Not only was my mom not buying traditional femininity (which even extended to her taking up pipe smoking with my dad when they both gave up cigarettes, something that embarrassed the hell out of my brother but I just thought was normal), both my parents had never really cared about appearances of any sort. They’d both grown up poor and felt like, if everyone was clean and our clothes fit, we were all hunky dory. Well, in the suburbs, that shit mattered, as did the general idea that conformity was good — and I did not conform. I was a new kid in a school where most of the children had known each other at least since kindergarten. I was also a year younger than everyone else in my grade, and was often separated out from the other kids because I was moving faster academically. I quickly learned how not to act from seeing how “brain” was a slur applied to the other over-achiever in our class, a boy who took pleasure in showing how smart he was, but I didn’t really have a good role model for how I should act, particularly as a smart girl. Basically, once I moved to suburbia, I felt like I was constantly playing a desperate game of catch-up in terms of trying to fit in.
So when the girls I was trying to make like me started acting like boys were icky things that you had to avoid, I didn’t understand it, but felt compelled to obey. It wasn’t enough that Adam and Kevin and I went to different schools, I eventually stopped wanting to hang out with them altogether. Yes, I was a shitty friend, but I was honestly terrified. Girls who talked to boys got mercilessly teased with that awful singsong that still makes the skin of every Gen Xer crawl, “Betsy and Adam sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”, which somehow, in kid logic, ends with, “Then comes Betsy in the baby carriage. Sucking her thumb, wetting her pants, doing a hula hula dance!” Even though this is clearly nonsensical and also sounds vaguely xenophobic, it’s kind of a fascinating study in what was perfectly designed to antagonize kids at the time, goading them into staying in their gender corners by accusing them of having sexual feelings they’re not ready for, while also kind of calling them babies in the most embarrassing way. Basically, it nailed the two things that this socially immature 7-year old was most frightened of, and the only choice seemed to be to just jump on the “Eew, boys” bandwagon, and make that my mantra. So I did.
This seemed to work for a few years. I certainly wasn’t popular — hahahahaha — but I had friends and went mostly un-teased. Until, that is, the great and terrible hormonal rubicon of junior high. It didn’t help that I was in a gifted program which separated us out from all of the other kids, practically tattooing the “weird smart girl” label to my forehead. I was also a chubby 11-year-old in a new, larger pool of 12-to-14-year-olds, and my sartorial choices — including frequent overalls and the full purple sweatsuit I wore to gym which made me look like a baby eggplant— only accentuated that. And to top it all off, I had what I considered a so-slight-as-to-be-undetectable, which was in fact was a perfectly-detectable-for-a-7th-grade-girl-looking-for-an-easy-target, lisp. So I guess it shouldn’t have been a surprise when someone who needed such a target — a Catholic school girl now thrown into public school, who’d previously been my friend — started picking on me, but, as usual, I was caught off guard. My tactic was to try and blindside her with a quick rebuttal about a Catholic school boy that I knew she was friends with.
“Is he your boyfriend?” I sneered.
Yet instead of shriveling up and hanging her head in shame like I expected, she shot back, “So what if he is? I like boys and they like me.”
Whaaaattt? My great shame had been that I’d been having crushes on boys since 2nd grade, and now we were allowed to say it, out loud?
The rules had changed again.
And this would continue to happen. In high school, all of my friends wore oversized, preppy clothes — which we thought was fashionable and not in any way because we were self-conscious about or afraid of our bodies, noooo. But when I got to college, one of my friends pointed out that she’d had no idea what my body shape was until she saw me in the shower, and I thought, Huh, maybe if I want guys to look at me, I should stop wearing clothes that are three sizes too big...So I slowly started doing that. Then, in my early 20s, when I was getting ready to go out with friends one night, I asked one if putting a sweater over my little dress (that’s right, a dress!) would be too preppy, and she said, no, it looked good because, “Cleavage is never preppy.” I hadn’t realized I had cleavage, much less that this was a good thing. Huh, I thought, are we now *supposed* to look slutty? It was the 90s, and the answer was yes — although it probably took me another ten years to fully process in terms of how slutty I, personally, wanted to look, or wanted to be, and even then, it was a trick question. It still is.
Because, here’s the thing: the rules are fucking stupid. This is true about a lot of rules that only exist to enforce conformity, but it’s especially true when it comes to rules about gender. When I look back on the things the culture taught me about being female — be friends with the boys, don’t be friends with the boys, you can’t be smart and pretty, okay you can be smart and pretty as long as you’re not smarter than the boys, speak up for yourself but not too much or you’re “bitchy,” look good at work but not too good or people will think you’re not serious about your job, be sexual but not too sexual or you won’t be respected, date boys (and definitely not girls) but don’t have sex with them, have sex with them but not too many of them, have sex with as many as you want as long as you’re in control aka don’t care — it’s all a ridiculous series of arbitrary contradictions based on, if anything, a history that we should be fully glad is in the past because it sucked for pretty much anyone who wasn’t a straight cis white dude. This is exemplified by the poster child for gender conformity, the baby with a bow on its head. I mean, just, Why??? Your baby doesn’t care if people think it’s a boy or a girl, why the hell does it matter so much to you? Maybe give it the chance to figure out for itself what kind of person it wants to be. Because the only thing the rules about gender have ever been designed to do is keep people in places they didn’t fit into or didn’t want to be in, for the sake of people who are afraid of losing those rules, because then they won’t know who they are. Which is why many of us have been trying to break them down our entire lives.
Now we have the ultimate enforced gender conformity sweeping conservative states across the country in the form of a whole variety of anti-trans laws. Again, the only question is Why?, and the only answer is, Stupid, stupid rules. You don’t have to look too deeply below the surface of the groups writing all of these bills for conservative state and federal legislators (which is why they all look so much alike) to see, right there looking back at you, the same frightened 12-year-olds turned mean who terrorized me in junior high. The main motivation of the Family Policy Alliance and hilariously named Alliance for Defending Freedom (designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center because is supports the criminalization of being LGBTQ+ and has supported European laws requiring forced sterilization of trans people) is the conspiracy theory that there is a “homosexual agenda” to undermine their fundamentalist Christian, my-way-or-the-highway version of family. Terrified because our country is changing in ways they don’t understand that will make them the ones who stick out like girls in purple sweatsuits, they’re trying force the rest of us back into slots so narrow that they never made sense for most human beings, and certainly don’t now that most of us are old — aka educated — enough to know better.
It’s time for these groups and the people in them to put on their big-person pants and face that the future is a place where people can choose who they want to be, rather than being forced to conform to nonsensical rules that don’t work for them, just BECAUSE RULES. All I can say to them is, Aren’t you ready to graduate from the gender identity version of 7th grade, so that you, too, can find out who you really are?
The rules of gender are indeed stupid and so junior high as Betsy has stated. But once you realize this, you can move forward and live life free of these restrictions.
Thanks Ma! ❤️