Pretty Woman

At least once a month, someone mistakes me for a woman.

I used to be a bitch about it. I especially turned into a were-bitch (think Selene from the Underworld Movies meets Noxzema Jackson from To Wong Foo) when I was an adolescent. Those were my Old Testament days, when I was already struggling with the idea that I liked guys and that this—guys liking guys—was that homosex’al thing the people at church kept going on about (and not in a good way). I was swift and terse with correcting people who mislabeled my gender. But it seemed that the more I corrected people, the more often it happened.

So, I decided to handle it with a nice, healthy dose of Fuck That. I had more important things to get my panties in a twist about, and that I say things like “my panties”—let alone that I have my own personal version of the Vagina Monologues—was not exactly helping my case. I stopped correcting people, told myself I didn’t care about it. And, eventually that became the truth: I stopped caring about it. What was the big deal anyway? Was I going to stop being effeminate? No. Was I going to give up my panties at confession? No. Was the person mislabeling my gender trying to fuck me? Sometimes. Was I trying to fuck them. Hell no. So fuck that.

By the time I was thirty-five or so, I had begun to just laugh it off and embrace it as a sign that I am absurdly pretty—too pretty, apparently—to be male.

A few weeks ago, a child asked me whether I was a boy or a girl, and I noticed something had changed in the way I felt about it. I didn’t laugh. But I didn’t feel bad about it. In fact, it felt good. “Well, I’m a man,” I explained.

His mother, who was so embarrassed I heard her heart stop, apologized profusely.

“It’s all right,” I explained. I asked the boy why he had asked.

His answer was not what I had expected: “Because you’re pretty.”

(Well, I’m pretty sure there is more to it than that, but he was a child, and even most adults in the Midwest have limited vocabularies on such matters. Plus, truth is truth, no?)

I thanked him for the compliment and, for the benefit of his mother, explained my feelings on the matter—which, to be honest, I was still—well—feeling my way through. That it felt pleasant caught me off-guard, you see. After I had resigned to stop being frustrated or offended about it in my twenties and to start deflecting it with a sense of humor, I hadn’t really allowed myself to process what my actual feelings about it. I had just told myself I felt nothing at all. And, over time, I thought that had become true. That I felt good about this meant such was not the case.

That must have meant the boy’s question was a good thing.

Yes, it is.

We should live in a world where gender, race and the other aspects of our identities that make us unique and beautiful can be discussed and explored free of shame. The fact of whether a person identifies as a gender other than what might be apparent or that we can identify as all genders or none at all ought to be as innocuous as the color of one’s eyes. We should be able to freely explain our identities and cultures to one another, to shed light on who we are so that it doesn’t become a secret. Secrets breed shame. And it is in this explaining—this telling of our own stories—that we inform others of how to treat us so that they do not just assume. It helps us to be understood. By allowing others to ask questions about who and what we are free of scorn or shame, we free ourselves of scorn and shame. The root of all understanding is curiosity. It allows others to understand us.

And who wouldn’t want that?

What’s more, it’s offensive to be mistaken for a woman only if one equates being feminine to somehow being evil, weak, or otherwise flawed. Or if one believes that women are inferior and that to be a woman is demeaning or degrading.

And I do not. Some of the strongest and bravest souls I have met have happened to inhabit the bodies of females (or any other non-male gender). Most of my flesh-and-blood role models are female. Every boss at every employer I have had in my lifetime has been a lady boss. And I am a better man for it.

Part of me has always enjoyed being seen as androgynous. (Although, I’ve never been fond of the term androgynous. It implies an absence of gender—I view gender kind of like a dial: One way turns up masculine, one way turns up feminine; and if you turn the thing full-circle from masculine to feminine, you end up right back at masculine again.) The things that people see in me that cause them to mislabel my gender—beauty, femininity, sensitivity—aren’t an absence of anything. They’re gifts that I nurture, flowers I keep in my garden for the world to see. I received them for that purpose, after all: Everything given to us is meant for us to give back, reflections of the Universe refracted through us to be reflected them back. And how I feel now when someone mistakes me for female (or any of the thirty-two  and then some flavors of gender humans can be) is, well, flattered.

And if you’re still one of those guys who gets twisted over being mistaken for a gal, man up, please: It’s an insult only if you’re one of those poor unfortunate souls who still buys into the myth that this is a man’s world.

Bitch, please.