ladies

gender is weird to me. i like a lot of the things associated with being a girl, but i don't really have any thoughts on what it's like to be female. i know that isn't usual because when transgendered people talk about their gender identity they often say things like, "i've always felt like a woman,", or "i feel uncomfortable when people call me 'she' or 'her'." i can't understand that feeling at all. i can understand that it's unpleasant and sometimes traumatic when people insist you are something that you know yourself not to be, but the feeling of identifying with a gender at all is foreign to me.

since i spend lots of time thinking about gender and reading about gender and talking to other people who think and read about gender, i know a lot of words that people use to talk about gender. some people call themselves men or women, and some people call themselves genderqueer, and some people call themselves agender, and i guess there are as many words for gender as there are people. but the only word that feels right to me is femme, which isn't even a word for gender identity. that word is about how i look and dress, not about how i feel.

i don't worry about this stuff that much because it doesn't cause me any distress. it doesn't bother me if people call me a woman (though i prefer lady), and i don't think it'd bother me if they called me a man (gentleman?) once i got used to it. in fact, on the internet, i used to be mistaken for a boy a lot. it doesn't happen anymore because i don't post in places where people don't know me, but i didn't really care when it did.

i think the way people treat me because of being a lady and the way i think about myself are mostly the same. for example, people expect women to have an interest in babies and children, because they are supposed to be maternal. this works out well for me because i really do like babies and children, so i'm happy when people let me talk to their kids. but men also interrupt women often because they've been told over and over that what women have to say is less important than what men have to say. i think what i have to say is less important than what anyone else has to say, so i don't object much to this either.
my best friend, on the other hand, is a white man, and when he talks people generally listen and take what he says seriously. he likes children too, but unless he's with me, he doesn't interact with children he doesn't know in public, because he knows many people feel uncomfortable when a single man approaches a child.

i don't like talking about this with people because they generally don't understand. sometimes they even say hurtful things, like that i can't possibly be a feminist if i don't believe in gender, which is stupid and not even what i said. and the whole thing feels like intellectual masturbation anyway since there's nothing that needs, i don't know, doing. what i mean is that, for example, i know a person who is transgendered, and when he decided to present as male, he had to talk to people about his gender a lot to explain that he wanted to be addressed by a different name from now on. i guess there's no need for me to do anything, or ask anyone else to change anything about how they treat me. but i think it's interesting to wonder about anyway.