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trashweavings · 6 years

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July 29th, 1996, 7:24 AM, a baby was born to two poor, Vietnamese immigrants in Fountain Valley, California’s Regional Hospital. The baby was promptly declared a girl, and that may have been the worst thing that could have happened to that baby. Because from the moment the hospital said, “it’s a girl” that baby became a “she” that she would never be able to live up to, and within our patriarchal society, being unable to live up to your gender is one of the worst things you can do.

Her parents chose to give her the name Natalie Ngoc Duong. Ngoc, the middle name given to her and her two older brother meant jade. The middle name was chosen in hopes to give the child a chance of wealth that her parents didn’t have.

Duong, the last name, was taken from her father to indicate that she belongs to the father and will continue his lineage.

Natalie was chosen because her father admired the actress Natalie Wood. He wanted his daughter to not be trapped by her Vietnamese status and able to assimilate better into the white culture he admired in America. He wanted his daughter to have the grace and beauty and femininity of an old Hollywood actress.

See, when a parent names their child, they’re putting their hopes of what that child will be into those words. Those words aren’t just what that child makes those words to be, but also, they shape the child. Many people may think, “a name is a name. It doesn’t make a difference. It’s just a word,” but when they say that, they fail to understand the fundamental power that language has. That girl was me. Or maybe that girl “is” me. I’ve felt the weight of what my parents wanted from me before I could even explain what it meant to feel pressure.

Kleinman touches on this in her text “Why Sexist Language Matters.” In that text, she talks about the pervasiveness of male-coded language, and why it is problematic. Saying the words “you guys” , “freshman” , “chairman” , etc. as the default is dangerous because despite people saying it is innocuous, in reality, they are saying that the default in our society is man. Using “you guys” to refer to a full of group of women isn’t an innocent act, it inadvertently reduces women into nothingness. They can’t even be acknowledged if they are the only in the room. Language is how we describe and experience the world around us. People say they’re just words, but where do the words come from other than our human selves and the way we treat and view others around us.

So, the name “Natalie” was never right for me. Maybe I could still be the me that I am now with that name, but when I changed my name to Ryn, it was like all the weight of my parents’ gendered expectations on me were lifted off of me. It was like all the times that people looked at me in confusion when a queer body introduced themselves at Natalie was erased from my history, and I was rewriting my narrative.

I think it disappointed my family when I changed my name. My parents wanted so badly for me to fit the mold of a girl. For a while I really wanted to be that too. Not just for more parents, but because I didn’t know I had any other options. From the moment I was born, from the moment a human is born, the world imposes endless amounts of expectations and standards on that person. Gender is taught and enforced onto a person often even before they were born.

I figured out I wasn’t good at being a girl when I was 5 years old. I liked to play with Barbie dolls growing up, even when I was allowed to play with my brother’s Legos and transformers, I always chose Barbie dolls. In my Kindergarten class, a boy made fun of me for playing with my Barbie dolls because they were girly and weak, so I pushed him over and he started crying. I got sent to time out for making him cry, but I was so mad. Boys got to push each other all the time. Why couldn’t I?

Because girls don’t get to be boys. Girls have to be sweet. They have to be soft. They have to be gentle. They have to be all the things I couldn’t make myself be no matter how hard I tried. 5 years old was the first time that I realized, I was never going to live up to the name my parents gave me, and I felt endless guilt for it.

The reason doing gender wrong is one of the worst things you can do is because of the patriarchy. Our society centers around the power dynamic between men and women. Our social practices, our economy, our media, everything can relate back to patriarchy. In a patriarchy, everything is structured around the power dynamics between white, cisgender, heterosexual men over everyone else. As Allan Johnson describes in his text, our patriarchy is a capitalist, white supremacist system that is “male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered.” Meaning everything in our society is structured out of a power differential between men and everyone else. Our gender binary is so problematic not because gender is problematic, but because it is a binary structured to empower men. Our gender binary enforces this by teaching boys how to be more powerful than girls, by teaching girls how to subdue themselves and make themselves smaller because that’s what they are supposed to be.

Not only does a patriarchy have this expectations for everybody, it also creates real world consequences for people who do gender wrong. This can be seen in the grooming practices women subject themselves to despite how troublesome and harmful the practices are can be. Sheila Jeffrey’s describes in “Making Up is Hard to Do” how women who don’t wear makeup look less “healthy,” “heterosexual” or “credible.” This means, women who don’t subject themselves to this one aspect of gendered expectation they literally have less access to intimacy and wealth. Intimacy because if a woman is heterosexual and does not mark herself as so, she could pass up the chance for a potential partner, which as a human, can be really painful. Furthermore, in our capitalistic society, it is so difficult as a woman to sustain oneself without a partner who also works. Especially if a woman wants to have a family. There’s even less access to wealth because a woman is viewed as less credible without makeup on. This affects their ability to get hired, and their perceived job performance.

Girls learn from a young age that grooming oneself, beautifying one self, is not optional. This is one of the many ways we learn gender growing up, but here’s the thing. Girls learn about makeup in an unsuspecting way. So many women who do makeup now talk about how their first experience with makeup was sneaking into their mom’s or grandmother’s makeup and putting it on in secret. They talk about a woman figure in their life teaching their how to do makeup. They talk about it with nostalgia, and as if makeup is this beautiful way of bonding with other women that is really empowering. I’ve almost never heard about girls learning about makeup in a way that felt forceful, yet these same women will talk about how they need to put makeup on to go out in public, about how they look like a potato without it.

This demonstrates how gender can be learned in such inconspicuous, innocent way, yet it’s never just gender. People don’t think about how problematic the way we are socialized in terms of gender is because if you look at it individually and closely, gender doesn’t seem problematic. Marilyn Frye describes this perfectly when she describes oppression as a birdcage. The way a girl becomes interested in makeup is a wire, and it seems like not a big deal. Maybe makeup can make a girl feel less adequate in her appearance, but she can simply get around that wire by using it as play and using it to bond with maybe her mom or aunt or whoever. Zoom out and look at the wires surrounding it you see that makeup is one of the many grooming practices that relates to the oppression of women as a whole. Makeup is wholly white supremacist. Many trends are about white washing and getting a face to conform to European beauty standards. It promotes thin culture where it’s about making your face look slenderer and cheekbones pop out more. It’s classist because women with more money have access to more makeup and higher quality products that allow them to look more “beautiful.” When one simply participates in makeup, they are trapping themselves in this birdcage that relates to all the aspects of the patriarchy.

Gender feels like a choice, and it is in a way. Obviously, I chose to identify as non-binary. I chose my gender. The problem is, there has been a real pushback and consequence to my “choice.” I have been told by society that I have made the wrong choice. That I am behaving incorrectly for a “Natalie” in our society. I have had to reckon with the fact that I don’t have the same access to love as other people. That people don’t know how to view me as attractive because they only know the heterosexual script for attraction and I don’t fit that script. I’ve had to accept the fact that I will never have the same bond with my brothers ever again because they view my gender as a “mental illness.” I have to accept that everyday is a fight for me.

I am trapped in a birdcage. I am resisting it, but I will always be bound by this birdcage. I have lost in society’s eye by being trans. The thing is, for someone who is not a heterosexual, cisgender, financially-privileged, white man, there is not winning for me. This inability to win no matter what shows you the truth, gender is not truly a choice. It is compulsory.

The fact that gender is inescapable makes the concept of dismantling the patriarchy feel hopeless, but Allan Johnson gives space for hope in “Unravelling the Gender Knot.” He describes all the expectations and things that encompass gender as a knot, and that there are things we can do to unravel this not. One that resonates with me was to “openly choose and model alternative paths.”

I mean, at the age of 6, I made the conscious decision to never wear dresses in public unless I was being forced. Not because I didn’t like them. I love them. As a 6-year-old, they were just another fun clothing item to me. Even at 6, I recognized that people treated me differently when I was in a dress. They told me not to run around, not to rough house. I was supposed to behave even more when I was in a dress. I saw adults coo at me and coddle me as if I was smaller and weaker in a dress, and I hated that. The last thing I wanted was to be treated like I was less capable than the other children around me just because I was wearing a dress.

Dresses restricted me, but they taught me that I could take control over more body, over my gender expression, and people would treat me different. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing then, but I knew it made a difference when I chose not to wear dresses. The thing is, I still loved dresses, and I would wear them in my room by myself all the time. I let myself feel powerful in a clothing item I wasn’t supposed to feel powerful in at 6. When I wore dresses in secret, I did the things my mom told me I wasn’t supposed to do when wearing a dress. I would run around, jump around, sprawl out spreading my legs with no regard to how I was exposing my body because as a kid in private, I didn’t have to worry about being inappropriate. I could just have fun. At 6 years old, I was going down an alternative path and queering dresses. As Johnson said, “modeling new paths creates tension in a system, which moves towards resolution.”

I don’t think dresses will stop being associated with girlhood and pushed onto girls in my lifetime, but I know that my choice to not wear dresses at 6 was my part in tugging at that one part of the gender knot.

I continue to model alternative paths now. The thing is modeling alternative paths relates to another way that Johnson says that we can unravel this knot. I “choose to make people uncomfortable, starting with myself.” When a queer human wears a dress, and refuses to behave in a soft or small manner, they make people uncomfortable because what they are doing is technically wrong. So, in my life now, I choose to wear dresses. I choose to wear skirts. I choose to wear clothes that are associated with femininity, but I also choose to not allow them to dictate my behavior and posturing within them.

My shaved head was also a conscious decision to not only take control over my body but to also queer the sight of people around me and make them uncomfortable. I am undeniably queer, clockable from a mile away, and I am forcing people around me to see that there are queer ways of gender expression, and the more we queer the world around us, the more strides we are making to resist the patriarchy. People cannot erase queer people if we “shove” it into their faces. If me shaving my head is to queer my body and deny the expectation of my feminine-coded body to have long hair, then me wearing dresses is reject and resist the idea that my androgyny is defined by claiming masculine traits. When I step out of the house knowing that I chose each item on my body out of an enjoyment for those items and as a way to express the infinity of my gender, I can describe the feeling as nothing less than gender euphoria.

Along with my gender shifting how I related to myself and my choices, my gender has shifted the way I relate to people too. I mean, people really don’t understand how gender affects everything in our lives. I think people think gender just affects the few things they really noticed as gendered like clothing and colors, but that’s not true. We’ve gendered nearly everything in our society in a way, especially human behavior and traits. Which means, the gender assigned to us at birth teaches us to behave and interact with other people in different ways.

When I rejected girlhood, and came out as non-binary, I realized, I had to analyze so many things I did and figure out, do I behave this way because I want to, or because that’s the way I was told I had to be. Even if something is the way I want to be, does it still reinforce and perpetuate the patriarchy? All these things have shifted because of my gender.

When I talk to other people, it has shifted because of my awareness of gender. I am brash, I am loud, I am unapologetic. I don’t let my voice be covered up by men or cisgender people, and I refuse to ever let that happen. Despite that, I am kind, and I am sensitive. I don’t let my voice be covered up by men and cisgender people, but I don’t speak up over people with aggression and deny them a voice. I want to be considerate and caring, but I refuse to let gender and society dictate I can’t be all those things and powerful and assertive too.

The fact of the matter though is despite these being the ways I resist the patriarchy, I often ask myself, why don’t more people do this? Why don’t more people imbue acts of resistance in their everyday actions and choices when this is what it takes to deconstruct the patriarchy? Going back to Patriarchy by Allan Johnson, Johnson describes this as following “path of least resistance.” People don’t go against the rigid structure of gender because it’s easier not to. It’s normal not to resist. People who resist and do gender wrong, there’s not many people who look like them, they feel isolated, different. That’s just a social consequence though. Beyond that it can be harder to be hired or your job performance is placed into question when you look or act different. That’s a powerful punishment in this capitalistic world. Despite this though, people are resisting now, and people who look like me, who look queer, they are only growing in number. My best friend, Julie, who has always subscribed to heteronormative gender expectations has recently chosen to cut all her hair of. This is something she’s always wanted to do but felt like she couldn’t because of fear of judgement. She has expanded her idea of gender and liberated her choices in clothing and behavior and appearance despite still identifying as a cisgender woman. She is learning from me, how to model alternative paths in her life. She is unraveling gender within in her own life. At the end of the day, of each day, that is what we can do and will do to empower ourselves in this gender mess around us. We can choose for ourselves to make our lives harder and resist gender, and in turn that serves as an example to others as to how to liberate themselves.

Dismantling oppressive systems is not an overnight feat. It is not a feat I can envision happening, but that does not stop me from taking each small act I can in my life to resist. That does not stop me from helping my other friends feel empowered to resist. I may still be oppressed, but like I said in my midterm “oppression and privilege does not mean suffering or not suffering.” I am finding ways to alleviate my suffering in this world despite still being oppressed, and beyond that the alleviation of my suffering (which often time is related to the parts of my identity that signify my oppression) are part of endless small acts that everyone must take to alleviate oppression. I am certainly happy and not suffering currently because I am choosing to live my truth as a gender non-conforming persons, and that’s pretty awesome to be able to do in this patriarchy.

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