Gender Consciousness

“…Women make gender visible, but most men do not know they are gendered beings. Courses on gender are still populated mostly by women. Most men don’t see that gender is as central to their lives as it is to women*s. The privilege of privilege is that its terms are rendered invisible. It’s a luxury not to have to think about race, class, or gender. Only those marginalized by some category understand how powerful that category is when deployed against them.”

- Michael Kimmel, "A Black Woman Took My Job”

This sounds about right. It is a luxury i do not know yet; to not notice my gender. To not be aware of it at all. some days it is the be and end all of my life. Thinking about it though, it is only because other people make me aware of mine. If I am at how mi am simply a person. When in public though, like a woman, I am conscious of how people talk to me because of what they perceive me to be. Men, on the other hand, are made less aware of their gender because they are generally received as individuals. That being said, there is also the pressure to be overtly masculine sometimes, which I have also experienced, so the point could be argued an variety of ways. The way I am concentrating on though, is the way in which i am not taken seriously in a dress, but when mistaken for a man I am suddenly listened to and respected. I also find it wonderfully uncomfortable that i can hold my boyfriends hand in public, but not my girlfriends, or the fact that sometimes I feel as though I have to be condescending about women to be seen as more masculine to butch peers, even if it is just passing around her profile pictures in the group or rolling my eyes over her actions. Then again, a lot of women say, “I hate men” as if it were a conversation starter, but that doesn’t take away the fact that I am a female chauvinistic pig. Chauvinistic feminist and other Intersex Oxymoron’s is a good description of me. I saw a poem on you tube called trans/national by a university student named Janani. There is a line in it, which I can only begin to roughly quote which states “The M in FTM must stand for misogyny” or something like that. I believe it to be all true. In order to prove myself as a man I must somehow hate the aspects of myself that are deemed feminine, when infact they should be celebrated. I blame society in itself, for not keeping sacred femme traits like childbirth and creativity and for putting down ‘masculine’ females. It is like a line I found on the internet, I think it was a website called wild gender that read, “Men are taught to apologise for their weaknesses, women for their strengths .“