Being Female

I was watching a couple of friends of mine yesterday, aged approximately 6 and 8.  The 6 year old girl is very girly, and has been as long as I've known her (a couple of years).  When I arrived she was wearing a purple T shirt with sparkly hearts on it, and pink sandals.  She was holding a "Brat" which is a kind of teenaged version of Barbie (except for the genius marketing innovation that Brats travel in packs -- collect them all!) and our first activity was to undress and re-dress the Brat. Later she was drawing pictures of mermaids.  Lots of mermaids.  An unexpected twist was that she had developed a morbid streak since I'd seen her last, so some of the mermaids were vampire mermaids, with magic hair that could grab other mermaids, squeeze them, and empty their blood into cups.  Yikes!  Anyway, as she drew her pictures, notwithstanding the addition of the vampires, witches, and zombies, I noticed that all of the characters were female.  There were babies, and flowers, and lots of attention to the hair.  I thought, 'This little girl is preoccupied with the concept of being female.  Where does all this girliness come from?'

I am not very feminine a lot of the time.  I'm a late-blooming girl. I'm still a stranger to a lot of the parts of me that are traditionally seen as "feminine" traits (e.g. intuition, love of beauty, sensitivity, receptiveness, vanity, changeability), and when they show up I'm not always very kind or welcoming or accepting of them.  Although I'm learning to, gradually, I don't innately trust their strength.  As a result of not playing around with these parts of myself I am only now figuring out things like how to put on makeup, or how to dress myself.  Not that those external manifestations are what it means to be feminine, but I think maybe distrusting the feminine traits suppressed my curiosity about the girly accessory parts.  So yesterday watching this girl playing I guess I felt a little envious.  She's thinking about it about 25 years earlier than I started to.  I felt behind.  How am I going to figure out my femininity?  I'm too old to play with Brats. 

I know a man who became a woman.  I had lots of questions when the man I knew started down the path of becoming a woman, but the one that never crossed my mind was, "Why would a man want to be a woman?"  Today I was talking to a man who used to be a woman, and after our conversation all I could think was, "Why would a woman want to be a man?"  I can't imagine it.  Which I guess means I'm more connected to being female than I realized.  It's deep, perhaps impossible to articulate.

Comments

[bill]

Just don't offer those friends beers.

[dgm]

i was a full-on tomboy as a young girl, and as i grew older i preferred mostly the boys as friends. i remember in about 6th grade, when the girls were ramping up on their prissiness, i thought it would be great to be a boy because they got to do more things--which, in my understanding, meant that they could still get dirty and play sports and be uninhibited to laugh about things.

now, i wouldn't want to be a man but i still think of myself as a gay man trapped inside a woman's body.

as for your 6 year old friend, she may still be going through that stage when girls are really girly. my 7 y.o. went through it, despite all my efforts to keep her from pink, and she has, in the past year, now embraced the idea of being a tomboy who likes cool clothes.

and as for offering them beer, i wouldn't. if they're truly girly girls, i suggest strawberry dacquiris.

where did the idea of offering a beer to a 6 year old come from?

[Monjo]

Both genetically and physiologically there is no definition for man or woman per se.

The human brain develops independently of the body, and the external genitals can develop independent of them both. So you could have a fairly androngeous body but have a vagina and a male brain.

Christianity it was argued (Western culture) destroyed human sexuality, in a fascinating programme on British television a while back. It looked at homosexuality, bisexuality, a young American boy who wore girls clothes and played with girls toys, Indian marriages (where only the men are allowed to dance in very homoerotic fashion, indeed iirc it said most Indian boys first sexual experience is with other boys), cross-dressing, sex-change (the programme showed someone having his/her? testicles removed, again in India where there's whole communities of deballed men/women who are seen as spiritual) all the way to Thai ladyboys.

[Scheherazade]

Bill -- when I was writing the post I just *knew* some wisecracker would bring up the beers from that older post. Just didn't know who it would be....

[PG]

Do you have sisters? I think that can make for some enforced girliness.

[sidhra]

This is one I could go on about at length, and still shed little light on the subject. I don't believe a man would wish to be a woman, nor a woman wish to be a man. A person wishes to be. Simply be. Gender is beyond the culturally masculine or feminine, whether it's percieved that way or not, and thankfully it's something most folks simply don't worry about. The tricky bit comes when that gender switch is thrown in two directions in the same individual. It's not a lot of fun. That's the short of it. The long of it, well, Jennifer Boylan tells her version of the story quite well in "She's Not There". Guess I'll stop here.

[Dave]

Most researchers now agree that gender identity (as well as sexual orientation) is hard-wired before birth. There are a number of developmental theories out there, but the one I think has real promise has to do with a hormone "wash" the brain gets at about the 7th week of fetal development. It's a mix of Estrogen and Testosterone. The bulk of people seem to get a mix that's close enough to ideal to end up with a fully congruent body and brain. Others do not, resulting in everything from tomboys and sensitive men to gays, or at the extreme end of the scale, transgender people, where the body and brain are entirely incongruent.