Last week, I decided that it was time to go through the items my son left behind when he moved out of our home and changed his identity as our son. There were containers full of toys, videos and video games, all attesting to the fact that his interests were always those of a typical boy. I found thousands of Legos and K-nex pieces, dozens of Ben Ten and superhero figurines, piles of superhero DVDs, car racing video games (he took all the Mario games!), train, trucks and matchbox car collections, strategy-based board games, etc.
I texted my mom friends, “I have receipts!” while sending them photos of the items. We had a funny exchange where we found out that our kids had the exact same toys and many of the same interests when they were growing up. Several of us still have Thomas the Tank train collections, Legos and circuit boards.
I am hanging on to those toys. I can’t bear to part with them. Those are receipts that I plan to keep, just in case…
Ah yes, “receipts” that you keep just in case. Totally not a sign of obsession…
As for the “he can’t be trans because he had typical boy interests”… I’m a trans woman. So I know a bit about these things.
If you looked at the toys from my childhood, you would peg me as a typical boy. Nothing ‘girlish’ in there at all.
I grew up with two older brothers. Hence, the toys that were already there were typically the sort coded for boys.
Did anyone get me “girl toys”? Of course not. Why would they?
As a kid and teen, I played a lot of video games. Ones you’d probably mostly see as being coded male. Why? Well, that was what was available. It was what my brothers played, so naturally I played the same things, and often developed the same interests accordingly.
I’ve had an interest in female clothes for about as long as I remember. Did I wear them? Of course not. Did I express this interest to anyone at all in my life? HELL NO!
You see, there are some things that you learn well even as a young child, and learn them quickly. Particularly once you start going to elementary school. At least it was so in my time and place.
The iron law of gender norms is one of the earliest, strongest and most impactful things that a young child learns.
You would learn that boys and girls generally don’t mix. They separate into mono-gendered groups, and don’t really hang out together.
A boy that hangs out with the girls? Preposterous! You’d be an immediate target for mocking by all the boys in your class… but probably also the girls as well.
You learn from everyone around you that you’re supposed to be interested in some things, and not others. ‘Girl things’ are not meant for you. You are a boy. Be a man, damn it! Surely you’re not some… sissy?
You can’t be overly sensitive; you can’t cry. That is not for you — you are not a girl.
Unless you really are that… weak and pathetic, hmm?
Because, as any boy knows, being “like a girl” is exactly that — weak, lame, pathetic.
And even once they grow up a little and start getting interested in girls, they still never lose that idea that a boy or man must never be like a girl or a woman. Even if they don’t scorn women for it anymore, even if they respect them, they still don’t respect men who act the same way, at all.
What is okay for one ‘sex’, is completely unacceptable for the other. Then we teach the same to our kids.
As a boy, there is a certain way you’re supposed to act. To look like. To dress. To walk, to talk, to carry yourself… and if you deviate from that substantially, then god help your stupid non-conforming soul, because you WILL get eaten alive.
The thing is… none of this baggage came onto me from a single person or few. It came, to a greater or lesser extent, from EVERYONE.
Men, women, boys, girls.
Nobody terrorized me with it at home. But there were certain expectations, assumptions, a ‘logic’ you are inculcated into that isn’t even always outright stated, but rather shown through example.
And you don’t have to experience all of the things I had mentioned above, in order to be terrified to even consider being non-conforming. Nobody needs to outright call you a girl, or a sissy, or to beat you up.
It can just be things that you see happening to other people. Or derisive off-hand comments that people make about non-conformity without much thought. Or the patterns and norms that you see reproduced in society, on the TV, in the papers, at home, and literally everywhere, over and over and over again. With hardly any counter-examples.
So no, I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even hint that I may be different. And it’s not just due to direct consequences.
You see, the power of a hegemonic view is not merely in that it is enforced by aggressive thugs. True power doesn’t need to raise a fist, or apply a reactionary law.
Hegemony is truly established when opposition to, or even the simple questioning of a certain view, becomes unimaginable to pretty much everyone.
The most successful way to get conformity is if you convince everyone that it’s just the way things are. The only way they can be. That it is simply… logical.
When children are raised into a world of expectations that hardly even need to be said or spelled out loud, because they’re simply so ubiquitous and omnipresent that they basically constitute the very air we breathe.
You don’t question these expectations, because that is unimaginable.
Even if it is imaginable, why would you do such a thing? Why question the obvious, sensible way of the world? It would be ridiculous!
Even if you might want to do so anyway, why would you risk it? Why expose yourself to scorn, ridicule and isolation, perhaps even violence?
And so, you find yourself alone.
Not knowing anyone like you. Not knowing that people even have such thoughts as you do.
Not having any inkling or hope that things could ever be different.
So, you keep quiet and follow the norms, at least minimally.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a ‘true believer’. Nobody is asking for your opinion; only your respect and obedience are expected.
In a world where everyone follows the same set of rules — often without even explicitly acknowledging them, as if they are some obvious law of nature — you’ll probably just walk in the same direction where everyone else walks. It’s simple, safe and seemingly necessary for being accepted by your peers and society.
The perfect conformist is the person who has become their own policeman. The one who will put a stop to any stray thoughts or wants or urges or yearnings before they ever come out into the open, out of the bounds of their own mind.
I never told my parents so much as a whisper about any of this… until I was 33 years old. And, of course, they were completely shocked and couldn’t understand.
After all, there was no indication I might be trans… right?
There was no indication, because I made damn sure that there wouldn’t be any.
I policed myself so thoroughly that nobody would have any reason to think I was anything other than simply a man, with pretty much typical male interests.
That doesn’t mean that everything I did or was visibly interested was a lie — after all, as the years go by, you find interests within the bounds of what is allowed for your ‘kind’.
But that didn’t mean that it’s all I ever wanted. Just that I only openly expressed those interests that had fit the “acceptable boxes”.
The rest… had to remain forever silent, I thought.
Until they didn’t.