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I& #39;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& #39;t honestly say that I& #39;m totally comfortable with them. I mean as a lesbian, one who& #39;s not too femme or too butch, never really have been too much one way or the other, I guess you& #39;d say I& #39;m somewhere in the middle presentation wise. When I was younger, I didn& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s kinda hard to keep the preconceived notions of...
gender roles in the "correct" (as is cisheteronormative) order, so to speak, when u& #39;re in a same gender relationship and kids are involved. I didn& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;m a lesbian, obviously. Then there& #39;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& #39;m trying to say, without having to lay out all the feminist arguments against gender roles and the gender binary is that I& #39;m realising it& #39;s OK to NOT be OK with either of those things. Rather than trying to justify them, I& #39;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& #39;m also pretty sure that my trans friends have a lot to do with why I& #39;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& #39;m realising that boxes fucking suck.
