I find the idea of this column pretty daunting. I mean, how could I possibly write articles that are going to capture the experience of being a woman? There isn’t a single experience that every woman will have, and the more that womanhood interacts with different identities, the more the experience deviates from what’s “normal.” Of course, I know that all the experiences of women are normal no matter how many identities they have. Still, it’s difficult not to feel like an imposter when speaking for women. I feel like I haven’t gone through enough of the same things that a woman should have. I wonder if other women with different identities also feel like this sometimes like there’s an elephant in the room alongside their womanhood.
For me, my elephant is being queer. While it might not be immediately clear how my sexuality can connect to my gender, the more I think back, the more I see how interwoven the two are. Like, would you believe that I’ve never been hit on by a guy? I spent most of college barely looking like a girl, so I’ve been pretty successful at avoiding any unwanted interactions with men. I didn’t get catcalled until I was 19 (and even then, it only happened once), I’ve never been followed online by sugar daddies, and I’ve never had to be worried about reproductive rights. Of course, some of these experiences are inherently tied to sexuality, but when you don’t date men, there’s less pressure to be feminine and appeal to the male gaze. Actually, there’s pressure in the other direction to be masculine, to dress and act in ways that will signal to other people what your dating preferences are, so people already know on a subconscious or conscious level that you’re different in some way.
There are downsides to acting masculine as a girl, but I feel like, in some ways, I’ve traded the disadvantages of being a girl for the disadvantages of being queer. There are some things that I can’t avoid, but I think that on a subconscious level, people view queer women as more similar to a man than a woman. I think that we deal less with the stereotypes of being overly emotional, irrational, or weak. We tend to avoid romantic male attention, which (I think) has a whole host of benefits. At least in my experience, straight men are more comfortable interacting with me than a straight girl because I “don’t really count,” I’m just “one of the boys,” and I don’t take offense to this. They’re right — in many of the ways that matter to society, I’m a man. In the same way that gay and queer men, who tend to present more feminine, are negatively affected by sexism, I’m sheltered by my sexuality from some of the stereotypes that straight women are subject to. Anyway, there’s not really a point to this article, I just wanted to talk about something that bothers me every time I write one of these. I wonder if every woman feels that they have an elephant in the room with their identity, that their struggles being female are overshadowed by certain experiences or conditions, or if other queer women agree that we have sexism on easy mode compared to straight or more feminine women.
