Respect your gender

Respect your gender

These are confusing times, when a three-year old boy wants to play with dolls so his mother says he is a girl.  This is my send article on this topic.  As you will see, I have been giving it a lot of thought.  These are my conclusions.  Please feel free to dialogue, through the ‘comments’ section. 

I was a tomboy.  I played cowboys and Indians.  In winter, with the neighbor boys, I built snow forts and fought off the invaders with snowballs. 

I remember a two-foot tall doll I was given for a birthday, perhaps it was my eighth.  I did not know what to do with it.  I propped it in a corner, looked at it, wondered what to do with it.  It felt so alien.

My favorite dress was blue jeans. I never enjoyed clothes shopping, I simply had no clue.  I remember a time in high school when, with my own money earned from babysitting, I went shopping for clothes.  Of course, mother took me, and had ultimate say over what I chose.  I picked out a gabardine pleated brown skirt that pleased her, and that was too small.  I spent all my money, and I never wore it.  My shopping mind set has always been to walk into a store with a specific target, hunt it down, buy it and leave.  Wandering the mall just looking at things gives me a headache.  What’s the point

I never wanted to marry.  High school flirtations were all about seeking the love, acceptance and intimacy that was denied me in childhood.  Boys were not drawn to me.  I felt like I just didn’t give out the right vibe.  I had my flirtations and explorations, but that feeling stayed with me throughout my life.

One of those explorations resulted in a pregnancy.  There were no options, no discussions.  I knew what the right thing to do was.  And maybe now I would finally have that love and intimacy that I craved. 

I have to laugh when I think of it now.  I didn’t have the usual slut vibe.  I was a serious kid.  But I was a horny kid, once I discovered the pleasure of sex.  I guess I had the masculine sensibility of it all.  Men sew their wild oats, while a good Catholic girl is meant to be modest, chaste.  Hmm.  I had a few wild oats of my own to sew, though my virginal pregnancy and marriage postponed that.

As a mother I was a good mechanic.  There was some kind of maternal connection that was missing.  I loved my kids, but did not find motherhood satisfying.  My mind lay fallow.

I left my kids, and suffered the condemnation of abandonment for the rest of my life.  They suffered it, too.  Yet to stay with them would have been suicide.  I remember being in the car with the family.  We were ‘happy’.  Yet I wanted to push open the door and jump out at a high speed, in hopes to end my futile existence.  Now, some fifty years later, I understand.

When I began to understand reincarnation, I made sense of my maleness.  Of course.  These feelings were simply left over from a previous life.  I am a man in a woman’s body.  So be it.

I had the best of both worlds.  I was perceived as a woman. I participated in the sacred mystery of having a life grow within me, three times.  My body was fertile!  On the other hand, I did not understand how to be subjected by a male partner, nor what it would entail to make him happy. No doubt, this is why my attempts at marriage were doomed.  I have always been fearless.  If I could imagine it, I could attempt it.  I traveled freely, which was my destiny.  I have had an independent life.  Observers say I am not homely, yet I have never been a magnet for men who were seeking a partner.  My intelligence, confidence and independence were surely effective deterrents. 

I cannot imagine what I would have become if I stayed in my marriage with my children.  It is simply unimaginable.  For their sakes, I am happy that I had the opportunity to bring life into this world.  That is a humbling experience.  They can never forgive me for that.  Had I changed my gender in my youth, as people today are doing, I would have avoided causing these people this pain.  On the other hand, they would not have been born!  Which is the more noble path?

People seek happiness and fulfillment today, IMHO to an absurd degree.  Of course my life had its share of emotional pain and suffering.  But what life does not?  I took my gender ambiguity in stride.  I did not obsess over it.  What has happened in our world to shift the balance, such that people are not willing to accept this dysphoria and get on with their lives?

As a woman, I have never knew an insurmountable barrier to doing what I wanted to do, to fulfilling my destiny.  I have worked on my car, changing the oil, replacing a manifold gasket for example.  I have remodeled a house, doing carpentry, plumbing, putting up sheet rocking, painting. Perhaps the greater difficulty is with a man who feels like a woman, who wants to wear makeup and high heel shoes.  Who would rather play with dolls, who likes soft and frilly things, who isn’t interested in ‘manly’ things.  Perhaps in our culture that is more an obstacle than to such as myself.  Yet in my childhood and among my peers in adulthood I have known of husbands and fathers who preferred to cook, to sew clothing and frilly drapes, and to do other traditionally feminine things while their wives worked and had a career.  Why is that not enough any longer?

I shake my head.  Are these rhetorical questions?  My curious mind wants to know.  These things trouble me, as I see the culture, the social order crumbling around me.  The answers do not matter.  We have gone too far into devolution.  There is no remedy.  We are on a collision course, we cannot heal the planet nor our societies.  We are all doomed.  Pass the tequila.