Can’t Let Go Of That Feeling or About Socialization Stuff

Reading! Reading! Reading! I agree at some point with the written. Gender is oppression. Sex is oppression. “Biological reality” is oppression. And I still can’t let go of that feeling of wrongness.

“I was socialized as a girl. It’s so oppressive for me. I didn’t choose it. I can’t change it. I try to change myself. I try to be non-binary. Now I hate gender and everything that is cited as “male” and “man”, no matter the fact that it might not be “masculine” and “man” at all.”

And I thought I was miserable.

One of my favorite authors/philosophers Rachel Anne Williams wrote in her amazing book “Transgressive” about male privileges. She said that not every male experience is the same and here I can totally agree, with the first-handed experience.

I hated being socialized as a boy. I hated the boys’ games, way of communication, and bodies. My best friend from kindergarten was a girl, with a mental issue. We were besties without poking at each other's genitals and gender. I felt a kind of relief being in her company and we were friends until second grade. We were playing non-gendered games, like our own TV shows, playing in the sand. I didn’t like the boys' life and I didn’t like them. I hated being in their team when the teachers separate us into “boys” and “girls” groups.

I played with cars and I played with dolls. Years later I played with plastic guns, just because several female FBI agents on TV like Dana Scully and Sam from “Profiler” (I wished to look like Ally Walker, back then, I even imitated her) used guns. I loved strong female characters but I had a soft spot for “pinky and shine” feminine characters, as well.

I remember that the first thought when I watched a film or a TV series was: “Where is the girl? If they don’t have a girl on their team, they are not worth my attention!”.

I was a loner. Maybe that prevented me to absorb the male culture and socialization. Actually, I don’t like it. At all. Believe me, Bulgarians had a really cruel toxic masculinity culture and my father was a confirming one, but he wasn’t intelligent and somehow he performed in front of others. My mother was strong and intelligent, but she never was an example for a woman to me. She wastes her potential and over the years when I grew up I saw that. I got mad at her. She performed niceness and kindness as well. The only thing that she could show that could be an example for me was strength and how she fought men — physically, and defeated them, before letting one of them rape her (not my father, of course) at school.

My examples have always been women. Strong women, beautiful but active women, and sometimes just pretty women. But mostly strong and smart women. Independent. I didn’t have one single female hero and I still didn’t have one female example in my life — I followed and respect many women and take their characteristics collectively, to fuel the femininity in me. To cover my female identity core with solid layers of women’s strength and power.

My whole socialization as a boy at first wasn’t a lie. I used every opportunity to escape from my role as the “secret girl” and to be ME, Michelle, at every opportunity. I showed my femininity in a specific manner, so people often asked what I am, mistook the pronounces, etc. And deep inside, behind the pretending I was happy when I heard “Is this a boy or a girl?”(a question that annoyed me as well, because it’s none of your business, duh).

I started to have boys as friends around 5th grade. Until then I was so involved with the girls, without knowing what transgender is and without sharing how much I know that my body and role are wrong and I belong to the girlhood with all of my heart and soul. I started to have boys as friends just to confirm and as a facade. But our games were sexually tense with one of my boyfriends at the time. Somehow, unconsciously, he loved to treat me like a girl. We didn’t have sex, you perverts. But we had very sensual wrestling games. I even kissed him on the cheek one day. Aside from that, we were doing things that boys and girls could do like playing some video games, some of them played piano, we read books a lot, and listening to music, nothing too gendered. And I was always into women as role models. Look Mae from Yu-Gi-Oh, she’s amazing. Look Jasmine from Connan The Barbarian- The Animated Series — she’s so pretty and tough. From Badass to Nice, Heroic women -admiration and respect. That’s where my heart lay. That was what I know I wanted to be.

My socialization was a blur of a boy’s socialization. A myth. I knew what I am inside. I was jealous of girls' bodies and beauties and life because most of the girls around me have a happy life, even when they were forced to learn to housekeep stuff — “Hey, I wish I could do that as well! I want to be a housewife!”. There was oppression, I can’t deny it, but for me as long as we were together with me, “the secret girl” and my “real girls” friends it doesn’t matter — all of them were strong and smart, skilled in different ways, and unique. Boys suck! Even when we started to look more romantically at the masculine part of society, they still were sucking bastards, who use you or you use them.

All these years when I hear or see a woman struggling or bending backward in the face of men’s oppressive games I walked to her and told her “You are not weak! Don’t listen to these shites! You are powerful! A woman can beat a man! So don’t give up!”…

And today my real “natal”, “cis”, “biological” or just “a woman” female friends are still around, the best and more confident ones. I also know that many of these women who accepted me, do it not just because they are confident in their own sex and gender, but because they can see further and deeper in me and see that my whole identity, not some “gender zone” is not a fluke.

I can’t let go of that feeling of wrongness, when someone says how oppressed she is from her female socialization, just because of the oppression. Well, I also know what is it to fight constantly against the wrong socialization, in a private, “partizan” wars, with little victories and losses. I know what it is to be humiliated by dumb boys and miserable girls-conformists. My own socialization was a fluke. I hate boyhood, I hated boys’ ways. It was like an allergy to the whole manhood. I bent the masculinity through the prism of femininity, knowing deep inside, secretly, that this is who I am — a (trans) girl, beyond ‘feelings’, far away from ‘delusional self-conviction’, more than ‘wanting and dreaming’, beyond the ‘biological-limitations(not ‘reality’)’ and all old-school transphobic lies. It was kind of surreal, at the same time so real, so natural and I use that knowledge to hack the boyhood and the manhood.

I can’t let go of that feeling of wrongness about how we can’t escape our socialization. I think that all of us who were oppressed by it found our ways to transgress that human-made prison. Maybe we are not supposed to defeat it but we can change it from the inside with our own experience and knowledge.