#and the times they called maintenance about urgent problems we had (repeating weeklong black outs/mold/rapid flooding/etc)

[little-cereal-draws]

So I just finished reading a New York Times article on the division of household chores for a presentation I'm giving next week and it's actually eye opening. Despite young people's more open viewpoints on gender identity and women in the workforce, women nowadays are still doing the same percentage of domestic work as they were in the 70s; that is to say, most of it. The article references multiple studies done over the course of decades and despite slight shifts in childrearing responsibilities, things like cooking and cleaning are still widely delegated to women.

As a trans person (ftm) now living with three cis boys, this confirms everything I've been thinking for the last year. I've been doing 90% of the cleaning and maintaining of our dorm while they do... anything else. At first it was really bad; it was over a month since we moved in and everything was a mess. There were cockroaches living in the toilet (which was now brown), it looked like someone was practicing spit takes on the mirror to the point where you physically couldn't see yourself in it, and the shower walls were literally covered in brown slime. None of them even started a conversation about cleaning, much less actually did anything. So, every three weeks, I deep cleaned the whole dorm by myself. It was horrible. And they knew, they would literally step over me as I scrubbed their mess out of the floor for hours.

I implemented a chore wheel after that so they each got one chore every two weeks and I got the other seven, but they still often neglect to do them so I have to pick them up.

I have done a lot of angry thinking during the countless hours I've been scrubbing and sweeping and my thoughts kept coming back to gender. I was never forced to act excessively in line with gender roles by my parents or had a lot of chores at home, but I still felt like it was my obligation to keep things clean here. Maybe it was because the others weren't doing it, but why weren't they? Did they all feel like it wasn't their job to do? Were they all waiting for their mother (or someone akin to that) to come and clean up after them? Or maybe because I was raised in a household that was mostly women, my standards of cleanliness were higher than theirs and they were fine living like this?

I don't really have anywhere I'm going with this; I just think it's really interesting that despite more acceptance for women to deviate from the household sphere, they're still expected to do most of the cleaning. And how even though I've been presenting and living as a man for the last three years, I still accepted that traditionally female role instead of trying harder to get them to do it. Gender roles are a lot harder to escape than I thought.