Recently I did a talk that one of my queer femme friends attended, and at some point during the talk I mentioned what a hard time I had with Betty’s femininity because it brought up my own issues with my own “failed” femininity. Afterwards, she asked, “Well don’t I drive you nuts, then?” or something like that.
& The funny thing is: no, she doesn’t. Aside from her being a nice person who takes people as they come (moreso even than most other open-minded folks I know), she’s a queer femme. & The girls who were the bane of my existence – and the women who still are – were almost always straight femmes. Because queer femmes are somehow different than their straight sisters. For starters, they flirt with me, & I can flirt with them, & even though everyone knows nothing is happening, there’s a script of sorts that jives with everyone involved. Queer femmes have met other women with my gender before, & a lot of the time, they’ve dated them too. Our genders are mutually complimentary, you might say. Butches seem occasonally puzzled by me, or they seem to understand me, or they accept me as some kind of liminal butch, but they certainly aren’t threatened. Gay men – femme and masculine – seem to get that I’m not a jerk. (Or, as a gay friend said when he met me, “Oh, so you’re hip?” – after which we didn’t really need to discuss anything about my gender or SO beyond that.)
But it’s straight feminine women I can’t seem to have an un-awkward conversation with; often I feel like they’re worried I’m going to hit on them, and/or that their boyfriend is going to like me better than them (because of that “one of the guys” thing). Sometimes I swear they’re worried about both simultaneously. Straight feminine women seem to have way more invested in a kind of combative, competitive relationship between women – you know, who is the prettiest, the most feminine, the most fashion sense, or who gets the most attention from boys. Mostly I feel like I’m being asked to a duel but I haven’t got a pistol & I don’t the rules and I don’t know who I challenged and certainly didn’t mean to. It’s really like being in a culture that I don’t know & I’m not familiar with, the way that sometimes, as a white person, another white person will say something racist to you as if assuming you agree, or as a straight person, having another straight person make a homophobic joke assuming you’ll think it’s funny, too. Straight women like to complain about “what a guy” their man is, & how they don’t understand them at all, especially how they don’t hear anything when they’re playing a computer game or the like. And when I’ve said something along the lines of, “yeah, well I tend to tune out when I’m playing The Sims,” I get stares all around as if they’ve discovered a traitor in their midst.
And I am, I guess, a gender traitor. I don’t have much in common with the people who are assumedly “my tribe” – other heterosexual women. I don’t know how to talk to them. I don’t know how to make them feel better about themselves, or reassure them that I really dress the way I do on purpose. But it hadn’t occurred to me that it wasn’t all feminine women I felt that way about until my friend asked me that question. Looking back, it’s often been queer femmes who have helped me think about femininity in ways that didn’t just piss me off.
[...] 6th, 2007 · No Comments I read the following from Helen Boyd this evening: From http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/?p=1646 . . .And I am, I guess, a gender traitor. I don’t have much in common with the people who are [...]
Straight femmes say they feel threatened by the casual way I relate to their ‘guys’ since we share the same interests. Like an inside joke that only we get leaving them to feel left out. And when one of their guys calls me or asks me to join them at an event the claws are out and I don’t have a single clue how to unruffle the fur. They may see me as a gender traitor but I feel more like a gender outsider.
Wow… you know I always thought that it was just me, that I was the only one that “the girls” never quite liked. I usually hang out with the guys drinking and talking while the girls all do the book club /gossip thing. Glad to know I am not alone! It’s kinda awkward being in the middle.
BTW, been reading for long time and never commented before. I always look forward to reading it. Thanks!
I have an equally hard time with both heterosexual men and heterosexual women, for very similar reasons. It makes things very uncomfortable sometimes (which is one of the reasons why I was nodding and muttering “uh huh, yes” pretty much continually through my reading of She’s Not the Man I Married.
Have you ever seen the 1987 Debra Winger/Theresa Russell movie Black Widow? I think you would appreciate it. When I watched it last summer I said that it
“really about is women’s roles in society. Alex [Debra Winger] is a professional woman in a line of work that’s still clearly a boys club, trying to operate on the same terms as her colleagues and monumentally frustrated by their reluctance to take her seriously. Winger plays Alex as something of a dork, but, crucially, she’s no more of a dork than any of her male coworkers, it’s just that she’s being judged according to different standards. She becomes fascinated and obsessed with “Catharine” [Theresa Russell] because she’s alarmed at the way she’s gotten away with murder largely through the same condescension Alex experiences: no one is willing to believe a woman would be that calculating and methodical. Alex’s feelings towards Catharine, and subsequent relationship with her, are a complicated mixture of outrage, contempt, and envy. On one hand she’s annoyed at the way Catharine uses her sexuality in this (literally) predatory way, but she’s also reluctantly jealous that it works so well, and she wants to understand why Catharine would choose such a strategy. A conversation between them in the latter part of the second act, where Catharine tells her (quite sincerely) that she’s always seen marrying for money as her job, is quite revealing.”
Helen,
I think this is such a fascinating truth for a lot of women and
can be tied back to many different interactions of ‘social codes’.
What I found very frustrating and difficult when I first strated
to transition was, I went from being the biggest of queenie fags,
to the oddly femme (looking/acting) slightly ‘butch’ in the sense
that, 1. I’m a super fracking geek! 2. I tend to get along better
and feel more closely knit with boys, and 3. I seriously never got
the ‘girl’ thing in the social sense of ‘the world of women’ (god!
I’m seriously having a gender crisis right this moment!).
What is so bizzare is that, when I was a young ‘boi’ I hung out
with 90% girls, whom I seemed to most closely relate to, but
as I got older (teens and 20′s) I started to feel similarly ‘traitorous’
in that, I get guys a heck of a lot better than I get women!
So. To the male onlooker I’m this ‘high femme’ woman, but
to women I tend to get this “Wow! Weirdo!” vibe that, somehow
I’m a bit off. Call it my ‘boi geek’ heritage but mercy!
Also: I wonder if part of what you are describing comes from an
inability to act helpless, stupid, clueless, incapable, and naive.
If we know the same femme (perhaps not, perhaps so) I suspect
that this person is highly capable, very strong, very intelligent,
engaged etc… and both honestly and sadly, those are not qualities
that ‘most women’ (a generalization), tend to codify as ‘uniquely
female’.
I would submit that:
Perhaps you are just a strong ass-kicking, pro-feminist at heart,
uuber capable, totally NOT debilitated by your gender brilliant
person!!!!
I’ve really struggled to figure out what ‘gendered aspects’ I choose
to embody (as my original therapist once said “Not if you are a woman,
but HOW you are a woman is the question.”)… I just attribute some
of my ‘boyish’ or (covers mouth) ‘butch’ qualities to my feminist
core to be a woman who kicks ass and takes names!
I say! Rock the Socks H*!
You ain’t missing much by playing dumb and debilitating yourself
from impacting your life! *ha that sounds SO mean!* But you
get what I mean.
-Your biggest Fan in Seattle
~Danielle