Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story

PART I

Kiddo

Chapter 1

The Girls Next Door

As a child, I had absolutely no shame about my gender or about my body. None. Just zero. To the degree that it was kind of a problem.

To illustrate this, my mom loves to tell me a story, one that I don’t consciously remember. There are a lot of stories like that. Our childhood memories are fickle, flighty birds; always flapping around and morphing and transmogrifying. They’re like one of those floating dandelion tufts that blow by you when you stand in a sunlit field. They run away if you so much as breathe; to catch them requires the greatest delicacy, the most serene approach.

This isn’t one of those memories. Thankfully, I didn’t have to catch this one, because my mom won’t let me forget it.

The story goes like this. When I was around three or four years old, after I’d already been potty trained and learned to pee standing up, my parents would frequently catch me peeing outside. And by outside I don’t mean far back in the woods behind a tree where no one could see me, I mean straight up in the front yard in plain sight of the neighbors. It wasn’t that I was an exhibitionist or that I was deviant or anything—I was just doing what came naturally to me. And when I was playing outside and found myself with a full bladder, what came naturally to me was dropping my pants right where I was and relieving myself.

When you think about it, there really isn’t a logical reason for human beings not to pee outdoors. Pooping outdoors (something I never did unless I was camping with the Boy Scouts) is another matter, because it’s an issue of sanitation, but peeing outside is completely natural and harmless. Urine is a naturally sterile fluid, it doesn’t really damage anything, and it certainly can’t transmit any diseases. In urban areas, like New York City, it makes sense not to pee outside, because there are just too many people and the city already smells enough like piss. But in the suburban sprawl of Cary, North Carolina, the reason I wasn’t supposed to pee outside came down to one thing: modesty.

We expect children to be modest with their bodies. We culture our children to be ashamed of nakedness, but there’s nothing natural about that. Most kids have no problem whatsoever running around the neighborhood buck-naked and giggling. I was no exception to this rule.

One day, my mother caught me, and she was not thrilled about it. Her edict was simple: Jacob, you are not allowed to pee in our yard!

The next day, she sent me outside to play, but not without a reminder.

What did we talk about yesterday, Jacob?

Don’t pee in our yard.

Yes. Thank you. Now go play.

Twenty minutes later, when my mom came outside to check on how I was doing, I was nowhere to be found. She checked the front yard, looked over to our neighbor’s house, and circled around back, where she found me standing firmly in our neighbor’s backyard, peeing.

Jacob! Get back here! What did I tell you?!

You didn’t say anything about peeing in our neighbor’s yard! I exclaimed, triumphant.

From this story, you should learn two things about me. One, I am the worst type of smartass, and I learned to mobilize my intelligence to get what I want from literally before I can remember. Two, shame about who I am or about my body did not come naturally to me. I had to learn to be ashamed of my body and my identity. And even when others insisted that I should be ashamed, I did my darnedest to ignore them and live a shame-free life.

In the glimmers I remember, the first few years of my childhood were lived without shame. I could freely relate to my body and, without fear of reproach, my gender.

My femininity came as naturally as my masculinity. As a child, I simply wanted it all. I was a precocious, smart, fast, energetic little fucker, and baby, I wanted all the gender I could get. In quintessential little boy style, I wanted to run around screaming in the front yard. I wanted to play in the dirt and get in mud fights. I wanted to splash in puddles and roll in the grass and be filthy and smelly. I wanted to frolic in the woods and find sticks that could serve as swords, then fight with them. I hated playing coordination-based sports because I didn’t naturally enjoy competing for things, but I adored using my body and getting it dirty. I loved playing with bugs; I thought spiders were the coolest animals. I fancied lizards and would chase blue-tailed skinks around the deck whenever I saw them, trying to catch them and take them up to my room to live with me. I also liked snakes.

But for every ounce of masculinity, of rough-and-tumble boyhood, there was an ounce of femininity. My gender was balanced tit for tat.

For every romping excursion in the woods, I equally wanted a glamorous tea party with some dolls. I loved coloring and doodling and sparkles and feathers. Arts and crafts were my favorite, and I would spend hours diligently decorating a Popsicle stick wreath or adding glitter poofs to a drawing for my mom to put on the refrigerator. I excelled at gymnastics and relished seeing how gracefully I could move my limbs. I loved to dance, to shake my body all over and feel the beat and move my hips and kick my legs and spin in circles. I loved fairies and witches and princesses and wizards alike. I wanted to wear pants and dresses, bow ties and skirts. I wanted Barbies and an Easy-Bake Oven to accompany my science kit and bug collection. And for most of my early childhood, the part that I struggle to remember, I had no shame about what I wanted.

The older I get, the crueler I feel memory has been to me. I had one period in my life where my gender did not come paired with shame and expectation, a brief window of three or four years that I can now hardly recall. I almost feel as if gender-based trauma is what activated my memory itself, because my ability to remember coincides almost perfectly with my inability to express my gender safely.

As an adult, I am attempting to revive that early part of my consciousness. I am attempting to resurrect the dead memories of this blissful period, Lazarus-like, from their crypt. I want them to have legs. I want them to walk again. I want them to dance. Some days, the good days, I feel that I am an archaeologist excavating a beautiful Pompeiian mosaic buried under volcanic ash. Other days, the hard days, I am both Eve and Adam, groping about in the wilderness, trying to get back to Eden. It will likely take the rest of my life to return to a gender that is free of shame. I will spend the rest of my life trying to resurrect who I was when I was four. But perhaps this is what we all do? Or at least, this is what we all should do.

—

The memories I have of my life pre-shame are scarce and beautiful. Back then, my two best friends were girls from my neighborhood, Katie and Paige. Katie lived in the house next door, and Paige lived up the road a bit. When I was very young, I could venture freely back and forth to Katie’s house, but if I wanted to see Paige, I had to schedule a play date and be escorted by a parent.

Katie’s and Paige’s houses were my sanctuaries. There, playing one-on-one, I could just be a girl for a while. I didn’t have to feign any masculinity that didn’t feel natural. I didn’t have to worry about my older brother’s judgment or my parents’ concern about what my femininity meant. With Paige and Katie, I could simply be. Playing dress up, playing house, playing with dolls. I didn’t have shame about my gender and, equally important, Katie and Paige didn’t, either. If anything, it made me cooler than other kids. The fact that I could gender shapeshift was sort of awesome. I had a boy’s body, sure, but I was at home being a girl, and at that age, Katie and Paige simply thought that was neat.

Katie’s house was the most special, because her mom, Mrs. Bullock, could not have been more affirming and sweet toward my childhood femininity. Their whole house was a font of feminine energy, especially compared to my own.

In my house, I was inundated with a sedate sort of masculinity that came from the rest of my family.

There was my mom, who was pretty much a tomboy growing up—a virtue that would later bring us closer together. When I began to explore my gender in my young adult life, my mom innately understood on some level, because she, too, had been gender nonconforming when she was a kid. Even as an adult, my mother only wears lipstick to church, wears light blush and mascara on a daily basis, but never eyeliner, and would choose capris over a dress any day of her life.

Some of her favorite memories of her childhood came from running around with my grandfather doing boyish things. He taught her how to drive stick shift and how to mow the lawn. They’d throw a football around in the back yard before my mom ran off to play tackle football with the neighborhood boys. He’d drive her to the Dan River Mills Chemical Manufacturing Plant, where he was the manager, and let her skateboard around the plant with no helmet on.* One weekend, my grandfather took my mom to a fire tower; they climbed it and had a picnic together at the top. My mom’s childhood was tomboy bliss until the age of twelve or thirteen, when my grandmother pulled her out of a baseball game to tell her about periods, about how she needed to stop roughhousing with the boys.

There was also my dad, who grew up in a Catholic Lebanese immigrant family of seven in Cleveland, Ohio. As a young man, he worked at the Ford factory during the summers alongside my grandfather, until he got his dual PhD in toxicology and pharmacology. This gave him a combination of nerdy masculinity (in the science-PhD way) and grumpy masculinity (in the repressed-Midwestern-Catholic way).

He, too, had a few gender nonconforming attributes, ones that I’ve only come to appreciate later in life. When I was a child, my dad was often the one who did the laundry, bathed us, made us dinner, cleaned the house, cut our nails, and did so many of the other myriad details that are usually relegated solely to mothers. My mom did those things, too, but from the outset, my parents had a very gender-equal partnership when it came to managing the household; something that shouldn’t be taken for granted in early 1990s suburban North Carolina. It was unusual enough that some of our neighbors even poked fun at my dad for doing what was understood at the time as women’s work. When they did, he’d just shrug his shoulders and keep doing what needed to be done. He didn’t relate to the work as feminine per se—they were just tasks that had to be taken care of—but he almost completely rebuffed the idea that a man shouldn’t do housework, and that put him way ahead of the pack. In the words of one of my neighbors: he didn’t give a fuck who thought it was ‘weird’!

And then there was my brother, Matt, who was three years older and a typical antiauthority guitar-playing skater type from an early age. When we played with LEGOs together, I would build castles and spaceships, and he would build spaceships and race cars. We agreed on spaceships.

This mundane, practical masculinity was reflected in every aspect of our house, from the less-than-cute interior decorating to the pragmatism of our clothing. I don’t begrudge the fact that our house wasn’t immaculately decorated or that our shirts weren’t always on trend—if anything, I think it’s awesome that my mom and dad didn’t care too much about aesthetics, especially my mom. She grew up in Virginia in a generation where women were expected (or really obligated) to beautify the home and beautify the self, and I love that she rejected that imperative and focused on other things. I’ve always admired that about her, though she’ll likely be embarrassed that I wrote about it in a book.

But the relatively quotidian furnishings and masculine energy of my house combined to make the Bullocks’ house totally enchanting. Mrs. Bullock is about as feminine as they come. She applied full makeup almost every day, had her hair done regularly, and wore dresses and heels and jewelry that my mother wouldn’t even have tried on for fun. And unlike my house, the Bullocks’ was dominated by feminine energy that poured from Katie, her older sister, Betsy, and Mrs. Bullock herself, outshining Mr. Bullock. Where our house was plain, the Bullocks’ was well decorated. Where our house was practical, theirs was tasteful. Where our house was masculine, theirs was perfectly femme.

For a feminine child like me, the Bullocks’ house was a sanctuary and a laboratory folded into one.

Mrs. Bullock was in an ideal position to encourage and comfort me. She was like a cool aunt who would let me eat all the candy I desired and then send me home without having to deal with the short-term sugar high or long-term health consequences. I could be as feminine as I wanted at her house, and she was totally fine with it because she didn’t feel the same pressure my parents felt to ensure that I was a normal boy. She affirmed my femininity in the simplest of ways: She let me do what I wanted. If I wanted to put on a tutu, I did. If I wanted to put on makeup, I did. If I wanted to decorate cookies with bright pink sprinkles, I did. If I wanted to wear her shoes, I could (as long as I didn’t try to walk up and down the stairs in them).

In many ways, Katie and Paige were the sisters I never had. If I’d had an older sister instead of an older brother, maybe I would’ve figured things out a bit earlier. I would’ve had ready access to jewelry and dolls and bright colors and someone whose hair I could braid. But I also would’ve been a demon little sibling to any older sister, because you know I would’ve stolen her stuff constantly. I would’ve been that little sibling who, when their sister got a new dress, would’ve snuck into her room, put it on, and run around the neighborhood in it before she had the chance to wear it first. I would’ve been that little sibling who stole her makeup and then claimed it just disappeared or that she’d left it at the neighbors’ house or something. It’s probably good that I didn’t have an older sister, because I would’ve been a monster. Well, more of a monster.

The freedom I got from Mrs. Bullock was a freedom my parents didn’t know how to give me. From the time I was about five, my parents began to feel real pressure to teach me the rules. They were never abusive or violent or unkind about it, but I was a smart, more-emotionally-intelligent-than-average kid, so they didn’t have to be. All it took to curtail my feminine behavior was the slightest look of disappointment when I reached for the wrong item of clothing in the dress-up bin, or the subtlest hesitancy when I asked if I could get another Barbie set for Christmas. The smallest gestures and emotions became significant currency. As soon as I was old enough to perceive gender policing, I began to abide by what it told me to do.

When I enrolled in preschool, things got worse. While my parents policed my gender gently, my peers at school were ruthless. If I insisted on coloring in a picture of a fairy or a pony, the boys and girls alike would glare. If I appeared too interested in the girls’ dress-up bin, I would be met with looks of disapprobation.

By the time I was six, Mrs. Bullock’s house went from being one of the places I could safely express my femininity to being the only place I could. But this, too, would not last.

—

When my older brother started elementary school, things changed radically for me. In elementary school, children take the task of gender policing upon themselves. In an environment of increasing independence, first and second graders use gender as a primary tool of establishing social power and position. Children who conform to masculinity or femininity, who excel at being boys or being girls, are granted social status, and those who can’t or won’t perform their gender roles correctly are immediately ostracized. Across the board, from teachers and principals to pop culture and TV shows, this behavior is not only permitted, but encouraged. Gender, matched only by ethnicity, body type, and family income, incites bullying, and becomes the primary indicator of who belongs and who is an outcast.

When my brother learned this behavior, he brought it home with him, and my life became hell. All of a sudden, boys and girls were radically different people. All of a sudden, who I was was not okay. All of a sudden, in my own home, I went from being a person to being a sissy.

Sissy was the first gender identity I ever really had. It was the first word that was ever applied to my difference. Before gay, before transgender, before genderqueer or nonbinary or gender nonconforming or GNC, sissy was the first word the world ever gave me. And it was imparted to me with such shame. A scarlet letter. My cross to bear.

The moment this label was placed on me, it burned. My brother, along with the rest of the kids in my neighborhood, my teachers, my preschool classmates, and my parents, began bullying me for my femininity. Along with other boys from the neighborhood, he reiterated over and over again that it was not okay for me to be friends with girls, that hanging out with girls made me liable to get cooties, that spending time with girls was grounds for social isolation and reproach.

My brother and his friends communicated this message in a number of ways. They would mock me for my mannerisms, for the way I spoke, for the way I held my wrists or moved my body as I walked. They would mock me for skipping or dancing or being too nice or coloring too well or sitting in the incorrect position or singing too loudly in choir. Once I’d been marked as a sissy, everything was fair game. My every behavior, every mannerism, every inclination was put under a public microscope, available to all for interrogation and inspection.

—

My mom wasn’t stupid. She could plainly see what was happening. She could see that the water around me was beginning to heat up, that it’d soon be boiling. She knew the world was becoming increasingly hostile to her effeminate, sensitive, creative son. And she, like every parent of a gender nonconforming child, faced a horrible choice: She had to choose between affirming me and keeping me safe from harm.

While this choice was made iteratively, almost daily, my strongest memory of it is from Halloween 1997, when I was six years old.

Like every Halloween, my mom took me to the ToysRUs* near our house to pick out a costume. As I stared down the wall of costumes, which was easily three times taller than me and over forty feet long, I felt a little out to sea. Spread around me were countless identities, ideas, possibilities-of-self to experiment with for one night only. I could be a princess surveying my realm, a firefighter facing down an inferno, a scientist exploring outer space, or I could be something stupid like a pumpkin or a ladybug or whatever.

I mean, no offense, but why do children go as pumpkins for Halloween? It’s such a Hufflepuff choice, not to mention a pretty arbitrary vegetable. You get one night to be as extravagant as you’d like, as daring as you want, and something compels certain children to say, "I wanna be a gourd. That’s just who I am."

It’s not that children shouldn’t dress up as vegetables. I’m a vegetarian and I love vegetables, so obviously I think that children dressed as vegetables are adorable. It’s just that I believe children should be able to dress up as vegetables any day they want to; they shouldn’t have to waste their precious, once-a-year Halloween costume on it. Parents should just be able to say, Okay, it’s Tuesday. You know what that means, Stephanie? Time to dress up like your favorite item from the produce aisle! Stephanie shouldn’t have to wait until Halloween for that. Stephanie should get to dress up like a tomato any day she damn well pleases. Anyway.

As I stood there, facing the great wall of identities offered by ToysRUs, one costume stuck out to me above all others: I wanted to be Pocahontas more than anything in the world.

Now, let me preface this story with the following: If you think that I am in any way endorsing cultural appropriation by writing this, you should just stop reading. I swear to Goddess,* if I hear about any one of you reading this passage and deciding, Okay, yeah, great, the moral of this story is that Jacob thinks it’s awesome for white people to dress up as Native Americans for Halloween, so I’m gonna go do that, I will use the power of the internet to find out where you live and throw so many eggs at your house that it becomes a giant omelet. Or if you’re vegan, I will throw so much tofu at your house that it becomes a giant tofu scramble. The point of this passage is not that white people should dress their children as Native Americans for Halloween. That’s basically the opposite of the point here.