What does “feminine” mean, anyway?

 

“I’m going to start cutting now.” The hairstylist seemed to be asking for confirmation.

I cheerfully replied, “Yes, of course.”

 

More than thirty centimeters of hair were sheared off. I felt refreshed. How had I been carrying all that that weight around? The hair lay in heaps on the floor. When I had told the hairstylist to cut it not just short but really short, they had asked, “Will you be okay with that?”  Why wouldn’t I be? When I answered that I would, they said, “It’s a pity, though.” I think it’s a pity too—that for years I had been spending at least thirty minutes a day on my hair, buying expensive shampoos, and doing hair washing labor that was nearly as difficult as hand-washing laundry.  

 

Just seven years ago, I had clung to a short hairstyle that barely covered my ears. I was always being mistaken for a man because of it. Once, when I went to a public bath, a woman screamed when she saw me in the women’s section. I found I had been given men’s clothing at the reception desk. (To make the incident even more symbolic, women’s clothes were pink and men’s were blue.) This kind of thing happened all the time, whether I was going into a bathroom or trying to buy clothes.

 

 It put me in a bad mood each time. I had been told since I was little that I was a “tough girl” and “like a boy”, but it was never a compliment. A few relatively nice people said it teasingly, while most had criticism and scorn behind their words. Each time, I would think, ‘This would all end if I would just ‘act like a girl’ by growing out my hair and wearing a skirt.’ But doing that seemed like it would be acknowledging the criticism as valid, and I hated that idea.

 

After graduating from high school, people started treating me as less of an adult because I wasn’t feminine. The compliment(?) “baby-faced” seemed to contain some vague nuance of ‘you’re not feminine, so you’re immature’. Who makes the standards for the appropriate face for a certain age? I felt uncomfortable being told I was baby-faced. It seemed to me to convey that there is a standard for a “normal” appearance for my age, and that I wasn’t meeting it.

 

A friend once told me, “You too will have to start wearing make-up when you have a career,” because “wearing make-up is good manners”. I had been working at a nonprofit organization for more than eight years at that point. Clearly, she didn’t see me as a person with a career, as a full adult.

 

Why can’t I have whatever hairstyle I want?

 

The highlight of these numerous episodes happened with a guy I dated in my early twenties. He pestered me endlessly about growing out my hair “like a woman” and tried to get me to let him buy feminine clothing for me. I fought against this idea again and again by telling him that I would break up with him if he pulled something like that, but he did end up dragging me to an underwear store one day. He told me to be brave and start the change with my underwear, which people wouldn’t see. I boiled with anger. He sincerely complimented (appeased) me by saying that I was just a little rough around the edges, that I was a diamond that would shine if only her beauty were polished. At that, I finally exploded, shouting, “Then why the hell are you dating me?” and storming out.

 

I didn’t become feminine like he hoped, but my self-esteem plummeted. I felt sure that men who saw me were whispering to each other that I was a “strange one who goes around looking like a guy”. When I was sexually molested, I didn’t say anything afterwards, because I was afraid that people would say, “But you’re not even pretty! You must have misunderstood what happened.” I devoted myself to finding a style that was neither masculine nor very feminine. I wanted the right level, the one at which I wouldn’t get daily comments on my appearance. In other words, I wanted to become ordinary.

 

▲ Did my sex chromosomes decide my hair and clothing style for me? ©pixabay

When I grew out my hair, I stopped getting mistaken for a man. I was also free from “suspicion” of being a lesbian. I found out how much people judge others just by their appearance. In exchange for enjoying the label of “a normal person”, I had to do the daily labor of washing my hair, which felt little different from doing laundry by hand. My hair is very thick, so if I don’t wash it carefully, it quickly gets full of dandruff. Thirty minutes of washing at the basin, every day. That’s 15 hours a month and 180 hours a year. Over the past seven years, I’ve spent roughly two months with my head in the bathroom sink.

 

It was worst in the summer. Every August, I would decide to cut the long hair that was making me sweat, but I couldn’t get up the courage to go through with it. These days, since I’m dating my girlfriend, I worried cutting my hair would automatically out me. It was not uncommon for my mom to ask why I would cut my hair short like a middle-aged woman right when I was the most pretty, and even threaten to kill herself if I cut my hair.  When my friend said, “You know that the shorter your hair is, the worse it is when you wear a crappy T-shirt, right?” I found myself nodding in agreement without thinking. To become “feminine”, do I need to make more effort than just buying clothes in the women’s corner of the shop? Ah, did my sex chromosomes decide my hair and clothing style, and I just wasn’t aware of it?

 

Hiding love by lying to myself and others

 

There’s another thing that my sex chromosomes have apparently determined for me: who I can date. When I was in middle school, a female classmate asked, “Why do you stare at me during class?” I equivocated. “When have I done that?” At our all-girls school, homosexuality secretly existed, but if it became publicly known, the girls involved became outcasts. Friends would occasionally confess feelings for me, but I would get scared and say, “That’s something boys and girls say to each other.” Of course, I couldn’t even dream of confessing my feelings for other girls. I became an expert in the field of unrequited love, and learned to hide love by acting like it wasn’t true, like I was unaware of it, like I was uninterested.

 

The long hair that I started growing in my mid-twenties was a kind of disguise. I wanted to look normal, if possible. If I thought, for even a second, that someone was looking at me like, ‘Look at this woman,’ I would be upset for days. I’ve been with my girlfriend for five years now, and if we’re out in the street and my girlfriend says, “Honey, look at that,” the first thing I do is look around to see if anyone’s staring at us. “No one’s paying any attention to us,” my girlfriend says. She calls me “Meerkat”, because of how I’m always twisting my head this way and that to look around.

 

At some point, she started calling me “honey”. I asked, “How about we just use each other’s names?” I gave the grandiose reason that I preferred using our individual names over the homogenizing “honey”, but there was something else I wanted—for people on the street to mistake us for just close friends.

 

“I’m in the neighborhood. Can I stop by?” When I would get a message like this from her when I was with my friends, I felt panicked. Her sudden appearance would mean my automatic coming out. I was always wearing a mask of dishonesty. I would snipe at her for arriving earlier or later than we had planned to meet. But really, I was getting angry to hide the fact that I wanted to keep her hidden.

 

In contrast, she was unhesitant. She said she had come out to her mother by saying, “I’m dating Muldal” at the dinner table. Unable to imagine that scene, I asked her, “Your mom really accepted it?” “Of course. She even bought snacks for us to each together,” she said nonchalantly. I wanted to ask her why, then, her mother had called her recently and angrily asked her if she had gone to the pride parade. But I decided not to cause trouble.

 

“Is that person a girl or a boy?”

 

An FTM (female-to-male) transgender friend said he’s used to these kinds of whispers. Some people will even make a bet about whether he is male or female and then come up and ask him to settle it. Most stare intently at his chest to figure it out for themselves.

 

The issue of being able to “pass” (to hide your biological identity and be accepted as a member of the opposite gender; the word was first used to describe biracial children of black and white parents living as white people) is a matter of life and death. This is because not passing makes it hard to get a job. My friend also says, “What will I do if I get in a traffic accident, and in the emergency room, they say, ‘There’s nothing down below, but nothing up top either!’?” (He’s only had breast removal surgery.) This is one of his jokes; I sympathize fiercely with it. 

 

I’m scared enough of being robbed, raped, or murdered in my home, but I’m even more scared of my private life being exposed. Even with my life in danger, I worry about getting found out. You may wonder what could be so bad about my sexual orientation being revealed. First, just the thought of my mom’s reaction makes my vision swim. She would definitely freak out, saying that she had raised me wrong and she wouldn’t be able to hold her head up anymore. And what if she decides to set her mind to “turning me back to normal”?

 

I’ve realized that my identity will prevent me from ever becoming a politician (though I don’t want to). I’m afraid that if I’m publicly out, people will snicker, “How do they have sex?” behind my back. And won’t I face disadvantages in the workplace? It only takes one second for me to think of these and countless other worries. Whatever the reality would be, I shrink in anticipation of it. So when my girlfriend says, “No one’s paying any attention to us,” I say, “It bothers me, though.”

 

How hard it is to keep secret a secret love

 

In my twenties, when I first realized that I liked men as well, I expressed my affection like a dam bursting. I was ecstatic just at the fact that I could walk around with him with my head held high. Things that had seemed impossible actually happened. That I proudly held hands with my partner and kissed him! And in front of people!

 

I enjoyed the privileges of heterosexuality. I was even proud of going to a motel with my boyfriend, something that other people find embarrassing. I was like, “Look, everybody! We love each other like this! And there’s no problem with it!” I didn’t need to lie or speak vaguely. Until four years ago, that is. That’s when I met her—the woman who unlocked my heart.

 

I was 29 when I met her (my current girlfriend) and started the kind of homosexual love that I’d only seen in movies. I had thought that it wasn’t possible, but I soon found myself talking with her on the phone all night and exchanging text messages with her all day. I tried to coax and soothe myself: ‘Won’t it be all right if she and I are the only ones who know about it? Won’t we be able to continue this sweet happiness then?’ I also had cowardly thoughts like, ‘Couldn’t we just basically be dating each other but never make it official?’ But I’m a responsible person by nature, so I couldn’t abide that. We started dating, and our secret love story began.

 

But it wasn’t long before my secret was half-revealed. I was annoyed to hear, “You’re not dating anyone?” from my friends when I was dating someone, so I told them that I was. I tried to answer their follow-up questions truthfully, telling them her real job and where she really lives. I just left out her gender. Since then, when my friends have asked me, “How’s your boyfriend doing?”, my conscience prickles, but I say, “Fine.” Because it’s true that my partner is fine. When they teasingly compliment me about dating a “younger man”, I just laugh along with them.

 

I have discovered that, setting aside the question of whether it’s right or wrong, lying is very hard! First of all, you need an outstanding memory. When my friends first asked how old my partner was, I became flustered and said, “The same age as me.” I was afraid their interest would be piqued d if I told them the truth—that she’s younger—and they assumed I was dating a younger man. But then the next time I saw those friends, I mentioned that the person I’m dating is three years younger than me. I didn’t even realize my mistake until a friend with a good memory said, “You said you were the same age.” Since then, I’m always panicked when I talk about my girlfriend. What if I say something contradictory again? I’m also careful not to let anything slip about her height or weight, which would give away her gender. I started to feel that lying was too hard for me.

 

And then came the really hard part. All my careful efforts collapsed at a single utterance from one of them: “Show us a picture of him!” I tried to tell them that “he” was ugly and that I didn’t have a photo, but it just made them suspicious. Even I think it was a lame excuse. These days, who doesn’t have a picture of the person they’re dating? When a friend finally said, “Are you maybe dating a woman?”, I’m sure my expression gave me away. At that point, I wondered what I was trying to protect by hiding her. Is our being in love really worse than lying?

 

I found out why love shouldn’t be hidden

 

When I told my girlfriend that I wanted to cut my hair not just short but very short, she unexpectedly pushed back. “Won’t it seem suspicious if we both have short hair?” she worried. I stared at her, blinking in surprise. Wasn’t she the one always comforting me, telling me no one was paying attention to us, when I panicked about showing even a little bit of physical affection on the street? I finally said, “So you have those kinds of worries, too,” and then suddenly, felt that the whole issue wasn’t as important as I’d made it out to be. Go ahead and be suspicious, people on the street. Who cares? Your suspicions are right, anyway.  

 

What made me finally decide to cut my hair was something an FTM transgender friend said: “People are surprised when I walk into the women’s bathroom, of course. I’m sorry about that, but it also makes me happy inside. It means they see me as a man.” I felt like I had been conked in the head. I had thought anyone would be upset by that experience. But I had been wrong. So why I was I upset by it? Because I’m a woman? No, because I didn’t like being seen as a strange being whose gender was unclear. Every time people in the bathroom were surprised by my presence, I worried that the people close to me also actually saw me the same way. So, I hadn’t been interested in what I actually wanted.

 

It was after talking with him that I cut my hair short for the first time in seven years. I wanted to stop being a passive person who couldn’t choose her own haircut because she was so worried about how she appeared to others. What does it matter how others see me?

 

While I was at it, I met up with my friends and finally, after 30 years on this planet, came out. When one asked, “How’s your boyfriend?” I said, “She’s a woman.” They understood me right away. But I felt weird when, after my explanation, my friend confirmed, “So you’re saying you could also date men, right?” That is what I had wanted to emphasize when I was coming out. I am a pansexual who can also date men—in other words, I am also a heterosexual/normal person. I felt like my wish to somehow hang on to the edge of normalcy, to live with my toes right on the last line, had been found out. Ah! How nice it would be to be able to get rid of this desire as easily as I had cut my hair.

 

Coming out was more boring than I’d expected. One friend upset herself worrying for me, another thanked me for telling her. None of our relationships changed. I just suddenly felt like I could breathe.

 

When we first started dating, I had feared that my life would be destroyed because of my girlfriend. The morning after telling my friends, I felt so different that I almost wondered who I was.  I felt that something hiding inside me for 30 years had been awoken. But that new feeling was kind of scary. I wanted to go to a bamboo forest and yell, “I hug and kiss a woman!” Though I was scared and felt strange, I was happy. I realized why people don’t usually hide love: there is no reason to. Our love doesn’t harm anyone. [Translated by Marilyn Hook]

 

Published May 20, 2018 *Original article: http://ildaro.com/8206

 

◆ To see more English-language articles from Ilda, visit our English blog(https://ildaro.blogspot.com).

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