Growing Pains

Another beautiful, brisk autumn day in Portland. I really am so lucky to call such a beautiful place home.

This is something I’ve been wanting to write about and share for a long time, but was never sure of the best way to do it, how much to share, or whether it was the right time. After working on this off and on for the better part of two years, I’ve decided to share most of it here on the blog today. I want to thank my friends and colleagues from over the years who gave their input in helping me articulate and process these feelings, and hope our collective efforts can be of use to others.

Today’s post is about my gender, gender expression, and sexuality. Not wanting to lead anyone astray, I would like to articulate here at the start that I am going to be talking about my gradual, rather messy acceptance of my gender (she/her), asserting publicly for the first time how I view my sexuality (demisexual), and sharing my experiences in order to encourage others who are questioning things to do some exploring of their own.

CW: sexism, misogyny, body-shaming, anxiety, mentions of sexual violence and attempted suicide (terms referenced, no descriptions), and gender dysphoria.

Some context

Before middle school, I never thought much about being a girl. For me, clothes were utilitarian. My backyard was largely woods, and – a lot of the time – my friends and family lived either in or near a farm, a park, or the woods. While I was still expected to dress up for church, I often wore jeans and a shirt otherwise. By the end all of us were wearing dirt anyway. I played with make-up sometimes, but only when it was for a play or for playing pretend with my sister; to me, it was used to become someone else. Most of the make-up we had smelled weird and got glitter everywhere, so it always seemed more trouble than it was worth. Whenever I did dress up, it was always for something like church or a recital. I was in Catholic school for a year, and if you had a skirt on you couldn’t go on the monkey bars, sit cross-legged on the ground, or use the swings; when I wore a dress to my grandma’s church, I couldn’t go into the woods behind the church with my friends who were boys because it would mess up my clothes. Dressing up was for standing or sitting around.

In fifth grade, they separated the boys and the girls to talk about puberty. I was furious that girls had to deal with periods, pregnancy, menopause, growing breasts, shaving their legs and armpits, and having genitals you could only see properly with a mirror; boys had things out in the open and didn’t have to deal with any of that. It seemed completely unfair. Why couldn’t it be like with clothes? Why couldn’t I be a girl on Sundays and a boy the other days? It was my body, so how come I couldn’t choose what it looked like and what changes it had? Why did my body have to grow anything at all? I told my friends I hoped I got my period late in life and menopause early—but I got my first period later that school year, and it felt like the universe was out to get me.

Fighting in the dark

By the time I was in middle school, I had a lot of anger and resentment regarding my body. I cut my hair short and wouldn’t wear dresses and skirts anymore. Skirts and dresses had rules—they restricted what you were allowed to do. I never wanted a penis, but I hated my growing breasts. I screamed at my mom when she told me I had to start wearing a bra. I was also fatter than a lot of my classmates, and thought the baggy clothes could help hide what I considered to be my gross, ugly body; I stopped looking at myself in the mirror. I avoided anything I thought was “girly,” tried to be “not like the other girls,” and stopped playing with my PollyPockets, Barbies, and horse toys. I didn’t want to accept what was happening to my body. Looking back now, it is so obvious I was terrified; scared that I couldn’t control what was happening to my body—but also angry that the body I was growing might make people treat me differently.

Like for most people in middle school, the other kids didn’t help with my existing insecurities. Being a “tomboy” without being good at sports ensured the way I dressed didn’t make me ‘one of the guys,’ it just made me a weirdo. Girls on my basketball and swim teams told me more people would like me if I would “just dress and act more like a girl.” I told them I wanted people to like me even if I didn’t look that way; I kept dressing in baggy shirts, cutting my hair, and rejecting all things ‘girly’ – a dumb test to see who was really my friend. The boys would ask me if I was drinking sperm to become more like a guy, referring to me as “Ozman,” “Kimothy,” or simply “sperm-drinker.” One group of boys even threw fireworks and sticks as I rode past on my bike, yelling about what a freak I was. On the rare occasion I did end up having to put on a dress, I hated the attention it got; girls would run up and say “you look like a girl today! You should dress like that every day now.” Adults would nod approvingly and tell me “There, don’t you feel prettier now? Don’t you feel better dressing like a real girl?” Boys would just tell me I looked like a boy in a dress.

My small reprieves were band classes, swim team, and plays. In band we all had to wear black pants and our band shirts. On swim team, I still had to deal with looking bigger and frumpier than the other girls on the team, but in the water I was just another blue streak sending splashes of bubbles behind me. In theatre we were all pretending to be someone else, so it didn’t matter if I had to wear a dress or a wig or makeup. I started doing stage crew with our local theatre, and we had to wear black pants and a black shirt and be invisible; when I helped build sets, it was like being a kid again—everyone covered in paint, sawdust, and sweat instead of dirt. No one talked to me about my appearance in these spaces. I felt relief in the uniformity, the perceived equality.

I was also developing what I would later identify to be anxiety; when I was alone, I would spend a lot of time organizing and re-organizing the books in my room, or re-writing notes from class in a neater hand. I panicked if I got a bad grade, thinking if I couldn’t be attractive or athletic I had to at least be smart. I held hypothetical conversations with my teachers or classmates aloud, pouring over the different ways they might react to things I would say; my dreams were almost always conversations I planned to have the next day, and sometimes I couldn’t remember if the mean things I heard people say were memories or dreams. I started insulting myself before other’s got the chance, developing a brand of self-deprecating humor that is still with me today. I spent a lot of time drawing maps, faces, swords, trees, shapes, and eyes, and almost daily journaled in the form of melodramatic poems that rhymed “life” with “knife” too many times.

The relief of apathy

By the time I reached high school, I was exhausted thinking about girl things vs. boy things; I was tired of being angry and resentful all the time. I let my hair grow out and settled into wearing jeans with shirts—now mixing in tighter-fitting shirts and various necklaces. Some people still made comments when I wore a dress to prom or put make-up on, but they made me feel numb instead of panicked. While I had stopped being actively angry about being a girl, I still spent a lot of time trying my best not to think about it at all. I didn’t want to be a girl or a boy, I just wanted to be “Kim.”

I started doing a lot of music and theatre stuff and got really into my studies. Half of our percussion section were girls, and there were plenty of girls doing music at the summer music camps I went to—so I never felt like I was being treated differently in those spaces; my band teacher even encouraged my composing, performing, and conducting, so I never felt like I was being overlooked in favor of a male student. Our school and local theatre programs had a good mix of different people, so I didn’t feel treated differently in those spaces either. I still wouldn’t have described high school as a “happy” time (I had a lot of other things I was dealing with), but I did finally feel like I could focus on things other than my gender for a while. While I was in this phase of “genderapathy,” I had a few brief-but-disappointing romances; none of them were bad guys, but I just found dating boring and uncomfortable. I still didn’t like being reminded I was girl and avoided any significant physical relationships throughout high school.

Stoking old fires

By the time I got to college, I really felt like I had a chance at a fresh start. I let myself cry and be vulnerable with other people. I got to meet other girls who grew up in different towns from me, some who struggled with the same questions about their bodies that I did, who got to be girly and still do everything they wanted. My composition seminar was only 10 people, but nearly half of us were women. I had meaningful friendships with other women I genuinely trusted and who never made mean comments about my appearance. I even went to a therapist for a while (though I was sent there by a doctor after finding out I had given myself an ulcer from stress), and found a safe space to process and let go some of my anger. I really started to feel I could be a girl and not be treated differently than anyone else—for a while.

During my undergrad, I ran into my first real, visceral, nasty encounters with overt sexism. There was a faculty member who demeaned and singled-out women in his classes. I really thought the issue was with something I was doing personally and took on every criticism at face value; I really started to hate myself again and wondered what I was doing wrong. It took a long time to finally piece together that this was happening to other women; a few of us complained, but it went nowhere. But I still thought it was an isolated incident; I didn’t yet realize that this happens to other women all the time everywhere. Living in a small town and going to college in an even smaller town, I use to walk around at night a lot alone. I liked that it was quieter, more mysterious. I liked that I could exhaust myself and destress before going to sleep. But stories of girls getting attacked on their way home from the bars, or walking around campus, or even in their own dorm rooms made those walks scarier. I still went out, but now I always took someone with me.

In my relationships, I was made to feel like I was doing something wrong when I hung out with other boys alone; now it was weird to go to dinner and a movie with my male best friend from back home if I was dating someone else. If I watched a movie with a boy in my room, now it meant I wanted to kiss them. I didn’t drink in undergrad, but saw how a drunk guy could blame his bad behavior on getting drunk, but a drunk girl was blamed for her bad behavior because she was drunk. If a guy dated a lot of girls, he was popular; if a girl dated a lot of guys, she was seen as a slut.

I started attending bigger summer music festivals, and met people who were openly trans for the first time. Everything they said made sense to me, and I couldn’t figure out why other people thought it was weird to want a different body than the one they were born into. In listening to their experiences, I was able to sort out my own feelings after the fact—that I related to those feelings, but still wanted to be a girl. I was slowly starting to realize something I wouldn’t fully accept until later on in life: I didn’t actually hate being a girl—I just hated the way people treated them.

Pulling back the curtain

The double-standards and sexist comments I began to encounter in my undergrad got worse in my masters. Suddenly I was in a school the size of my hometown, and a music department the size of the entirety of my last school. A friend of mine had helped me professionalize my wardrobe over the summer (jeans, but now with boots, a dress shirt, and a blazer), and I started receiving unwanted attention from some of my male colleagues. In a department of 50 students, only 7 of us were women. I started hearing more horror stories from my female colleagues of sexist behavior, assaults, abuse, and harassment—and more insights into the different ways they manipulated their own behavior to try and get different results.

I saw how women who refused to diminish their femininity in professional spaces were often treated with derision, dismissal, condescension, and sometimes even outright hostility. I met more people of color, whose experiences were complicated further by different levels of simultaneously being objectified, being seen as inferior, being tokenized, and being seen as a threatening presence—how they have to think about dressing in a way that’s perceived as nonthreatening, researching what cars are less likely to get pulled over, and how to wear their hair for auditions and interviews in white-dominated spaces. I learned about honor killings, genital mutilations, revenge porn/deepfakes, and femicide. I had resented being a woman, but had no idea these resentments and attitudes were the steppingstones to larger-scale violence and oppression against women—that my personal feelings about myself could be so dangerous and destructive to others. That I was actually letting myself be part of the oppression I suffered from and resented.

I had gone so long being relatively isolated from all of this, that suddenly being bombarded with these realities was traumatizing. Why did women have to worry about these things? Why are there still rules for us that men don’t have to follow? How could things be so different for women? How could the men I’m friends with and who care about me be contributing to this awful behavior I’m seeing and experiencing? Double-standards, harassment, and sexist comments were everywhere. I started to look back on my time in high school, realizing I was so intent on not thinking about gender during those years, I had likely just dismissed sexist behavior as being something else—and I was still catching myself in old habits of resentment, anger, and fear towards my gender.

Attempting to compromise

Clothes seemed like the only way to even marginally control how I was being treated. I wore professional attire to lessons and recitals where faculty were present. I dressed in jerseys or t-shirts if I was hanging out with male peers so I was less likely to be given unwanted attention. I had to walk 30 minutes home most days—sometimes late at night—so when I didn’t have a lesson I wore sweatpants and baggy shirts and hoodies to school so I was less likely to be bothered on the way home. If I had to walk home, I held my keys between my fingers. If someone started following me, I’d start talking loudly on my phone or singing. I didn’t drink alcohol, making myself available to drive people home after parties or if it was raining; I never trusted anyone enough to take care of me if I got drunk, so I never did.

Romantic relationships were still tough; I hadn’t had any physical experiences by that time, and started to wonder if I was asexual. I never thought about it, never wanted it, and never felt like doing anything for myself either. I still never looked at myself in the mirror unclothed. I didn’t know that this was considered unusual until I started dating, and the men I went out with expected me to already be experienced and willing. I was never assaulted or raped, but I was frequently pressured to do more or was pushed past where I was comfortable. When I set boundaries or asked to stop, I was told I probably needed intimacy counseling, or that I was making them feel unwanted, or that I should know these things by now, or that I must have repressed being raped because no one would act like that otherwise. One guy even touted my sexual inadequacies by name to friends in a bar after we broke up. Friends told me I might just be a lesbian, but I never wanted these things with women either. I didn’t know if the problem were the guys or with me, but I was done dating. It was too painful for everyone involved, and I was tired of letting people down.

It may seem strange to say, but in many ways, by the time I reached my masters degree it was the most comfortable and most feminine I had been in my life—but I still felt out of place. I wasn’t masculine enough to be one “one of the boys,” yet I still struggled to fit into female-dominant spaces comfortably as well. Sometimes I still got comments that I “dressed and acted like a man.” Someone in my family said I would do well in the field because I “talked like a man.” In one of my lessons, a teacher even told me that it was good no one could tell I was a woman from my music(??), while another told me it was good that I didn’t “write like a man(???).” But even as I was being told how “male” I appeared or acted, I was still dealing with a lot of the same issues other women deal with in a professional space—still condescended to, hit on, tokenized, and dismissed. I oscillated wildly back and forth on whether to let interviewers ask me about “being a woman in composition.” Sometimes I really wanted to talk about it; other times I just couldn’t bear the thought of it, or thought I was the last person they should be asking—having spent so long trying to have nothing ever be “because of” or “in spite of” my gender.

Compounding these issues also was my anxiety; I skipped meals, pulled all-nighters (sometimes 2 in a row), compulsively cleaned or organized, couldn’t sleep, and struggled to trust compliments or positive attention. I wasn’t able to cry for the longest periods of time even when I wanted to, and then it would all come out at once in explosive, 2-3 hour bursts where I couldn’t calm down. I went through extreme lows and periods of near-mania. I didn’t know whether my body issues and gender-resentments came from anxiety, or if it was the other way around, or if they were two separate issues. I wondered if I could really be a “good feminist” in the future if I had spent so long being afraid and resentful of my gender—if it was too late, and I had already messed up too bad and hurt too many people. After school I lost two of my closest friends over differences I still don’t fully understand, and contemplated suicide on multiple occasions; I ended up in the ER again for stress-related illness. I was lucky to have the friends and family I did, the understanding boss and commissioners that I did, the attentive medical staff I did, the loving partner I did; it took all of them to pull me out of the lows I got into both during and after my masters. Some people are not so lucky.

Sorting it out for real

Looking over my compositions, I can now see how I’ve slowly allowed myself to be more vulnerable and introspective. Before my masters, I never wrote anything that had to do with me personally; I wrote about birds, mountains, colors—but never myself. During my masters, I started slowly sharing bits of myself. A piece about doubt. A piece about the anxieties when posting to social media. A piece about a breakup. Another piece about a breakup. A piece about a memory I shared with someone I was still in love with. A piece about anxiety. A 20-minute piece about anxiety, depression, and PTSD. A piece about my body insecurities. A piece where I finally call myself a woman in the text.

To a large degree, I still struggle with some of these insecurities and questions—but now I find I’m doing so from a place of self-love and genuine respect rather than fear, internalized misogyny, and resentment. I still have to remind myself sometimes that I don’t hate being a woman walking alone at night—I hate how people treat women walking alone at night—but now I always catch myself in these misogynistic resentments. I don’t like being catcalled, but I no longer recoil when a friend or family member tells me I look pretty. I still have body-image issues, but now I look at myself in the mirror with respect and take care of body. I still only wear make-up occasionally and dress largely in jeans (or, in pandemic life, work-out pants), but I genuinely enjoy wearing dresses and jewelry. I am still learning more about my trans and non-binary friends’ experiences—especially those who come from other marginalized communities—and working to be a better ally. I found friends, resources, and the vernacular to help me sort through some of my questions, and can now understand that—at least for now—I am cisgender, but demisexual. I met my partner after my masters, who has been genuinely patient, caring, understanding, and open—who makes me feel like a whole, complex person and not a symbol or social construct; who respects the boundaries I put in place, and accepts me. I now understand that the “rules” or “restrictions” I felt were never the fault of the clothes I wore or the gender I am, but the result of patriarchy and misogyny.

Why I’m sharing this

It took a lot for me to get here, and I was not the only person who suffered for it. It is difficult to admit that I was so wrongheaded about these things for so long, but I am sharing these details about myself because I hope it helps someone else who is struggling with these things to find answers faster, to hurt less people, to love themselves more, or even just to feel less alone. The reality is that gender really isn’t so cut and dry as we’re often led to believe, and there are so many factors that play into how we are perceived—a lot of which is beyond our immediate, individual control. However, learning to embrace who we really are, what we really want, what really scares us, and sharing that in safe or public spaces as appropriate seems like a good first step. If you have yet to find your community, I hope you find each other soon. If you are questioning, I hope you can do so from a place of curiosity and self-love. Most of all, wherever you are with all of this, I hope you can keep learning about yourself in a space that is loving, patient, safe, and kind—and that you are all of these things to yourself, first and foremost.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I really appreciate the time you’ve given today.