Read on Twitter
I've been thinking about the gender binary and gender roles from my cis woman & lesbian stand point and how I personally feel about them. This is going to be a bit of messy, think it and say it kinda short thread.
I can't honestly say that I'm totally comfortable with them. I mean as a lesbian, one who's not too femme or too butch, never really have been too much one way or the other, I guess you'd say I'm somewhere in the middle presentation wise. When I was younger, I didn't really date
butch women. I was one of those lesbians who used to say stupid shit like "I date women who look like women". Pretty fucking shallow and judgy looking back on it. It wasn't until I met my ex (of 8 years) that that changed. She came along and rather than fall for the outside, I
took the time to get to know her properly & we eventually ended up living together & having a kid together. She was and still is a pretty awesome woman. This was also when I started to take stock of my ideas on gender roles. It's kinda hard to keep the preconceived notions of...
gender roles in the "correct" (as is cisheteronormative) order, so to speak, when u're in a same gender relationship and kids are involved. I didn't think too hard on it then but I think that was definitely the starting point of me questioning "what the hell is a *normal* gender
role anyway?" I mean who says what's normal? Normal for me has been a lifetime of not being a cis-het who settles down, marries a guy and cooks him his dinner every day etc... I've always balked at the idea that a woman MUST be this way or that way to be a *proper woman*. A lot
of that is definitely informed by the fact that I'm a lesbian, obviously. Then there's the feminist in me who, even before I started reading feminist theory, had this innate sense of "fuck this sexist bullshit". I think all women kinda feel that on some level, maybe some men too.
This is super simplified of course. I guess what I'm trying to say, without having to lay out all the feminist arguments against gender roles and the gender binary is that I'm realising it's OK to NOT be OK with either of those things. Rather than trying to justify them, I'm...
learning to sit with discomfort that those things have pretty much always made me feel and reason them through instead of shutting it down. I'm also pretty sure that my trans friends have a lot to do with why I'm actually OK with figuring out why these things have always kinda...
niggled at me. Why should I just be this way or that way, the ways society has imposed on me, when I can just learn to be me without putting limitations on myself? Stuffing yourself in a box really limits your ability to be who u truly are & I'm realising that boxes fucking suck.
I'm happy being a woman who kinda bucks the system a bit. I also wish there wasn't so much focus on what a woman is or isn't, what a woman should or shouldn't be. I just want to be me, without having to constantly tick off a fucking check list. If that makes sense?
I also wonder if the reason cis people are transphobic is partly because we've all felt this & many of us who do, haven't actually tried to process these thoughts & feelings because they can be kinda scary to face, as things that take u out of your comfort zone often are? Maybe.
