But what explains the fuzzy socks?

[gryphonsegg]

Today I watched Thundercats at a friend's house. She says the fact that I watched it when I was a small child explains some things about me. XD Then we started talking about TV shows we watched as kids, how we may have unconsciously imprinted on certain things in them, and how badly some of them hold up to adult viewing.

One of the things that I'd forgotten about was how many of the shows I watched were boy-oriented. Yeah, I watched My Little Pony and Rainbow Bright, but either I didn't watch them as regularly or they didn't leave as big an impression on me as Transformers, GI Joe, Ghost Busters, He-Man, and the androgynous monarch of my childhood television experience, Thundercats. The only primarily girl-marketed show I have much recollection of is She-Ra, which may count as a special case because it was created specifically as a girl-positive counterpart to He-Man. I had some rather intense gender-related turmoil as kid, but I hadn't thought much about how my taste in cartoons figured into that.

Maybe my hatred of being female (and my denial about it for the couple of years before puberty hit me like a truck) was influenced by the shortage of female characters in the kinds of storylines I found interesting and exciting. Yeah, I had some RL people telling me to my face that being in a female body meant I was inferior. But would I have been more resistant to believing them if I hadn't already had a notion that even on other planets, it's mostly boys who get to do the cool stuff?

What's equally or more striking, though, is how much the stuff that I consider interesting and exciting has stayed the same. I always liked aliens from other planets, robots, magic, fantastic creatures, animal people, unicorns, lasers, alien or future technology, psychic characters, dinosaurs, dragons, and fighting the forces of capital-E Evil. I really have been a nerd as far back as I can remember.

Comments

[lady_ganesh]

I don't know. I watched a lot of the same shows, but there were some 'girlier' things I watched, too, and then there was the more gender-neutral stuff like Shirt Tales. I remember wanting to be Zorro and wanting to stay a girl at the same time.

[gryphonsegg]

One thing I should probably mention in this context is that, after reading about other people's gender identity issues, I've come to realize that lots of people have a sort of instinctive/intuitive/internal sense of gender, and I, for whatever reason, never had that.

[lady_ganesh]

I almost wonder if there's a spectrum of, IDK, gender sense, because there are a lot of people who claim they don't really mind if they were mistaken for boys when they were kids, and man, that pissed me off every time. And people just don't really think about that, because we don't talk about gender much at all, and...well. I don't know, anyway.

[gryphonsegg]

I think there is a spectrum like that, or maybe it's two axes rather than a single spectrum. I don't post about this as much as I think about it, since I'm always afraid of getting something wrong, but there seem to be some people who feel really strongly attached to the sex-and-gender they were assigned at birth, some people who feel really strongly attached to the other and have a deep and misery-generating sense of wrongness about being misgendered and having anatomy that is believed not to match what they feel inside, some people who . . . don't. I can imagine it as either a single axis (male-identified too female-identified, with some of us floating around the middle) or a pair of intersecting axes (more to less female-identified vs. more to less male-identified, with some having a strong affinity for both classes of gender markers and others have little or no affinity for being gendered).

I know that when I talked about my writing with a feminist counselor who has done a lot of work with LGBT people as well as cisgender-identifying women, and I described certain original characters as having been degendered, she responded that the word "degendered" sounded like something horrible and violent had been done to them. What I actually meant was that their circumstances had freed them from the typical gendered strictures of their society. I perceived it as a neutral-to-positive word, and my main association with it was freedom to be openly who one really is, but she thought even the word sounded violent.

[lady_ganesh]

Yeah, that makes sense.

I confess, 'degendered' sounds pretty unpleasant to me too! Gender-free, maybe? Though maybe that sounds too much like things like childfree. It's amazing how emotionally powerful this stuff is to us.

[gryphonsegg]

Yeah, my inclination ever since I was old enough to understand such things has been to think of sex as a medical condition of the body and gender as something that is forced on a person from the outside by other people and their expectations. I hated being female not because I perceived any positive good in being male but because it was clear to me that most people around me believed that being female was synonymous with being inferior. It took me years and years to realize that many people perceive sex identification and gender as inherent qualities of a personality.