It is a strange time to be a woman…or a man…or neither. In a moment when lifestyle-mogul Martha Stewart is calling herself “the original fucking tradwife,” scientists are quantifying toxic masculinity, and queer people continue to challenge and upend the binary, gender roles are both more fluid and enforced than ever. Of course, whether the labels “man” and “woman” are inherently oppressive is an age-old question, but the stakes right now feel sky-high: A growing number of states have banned gender marker changes on legal IDs. The question of whether trans and nonbinary people can have passports that reflect their gender identity has reached the Supreme Court. And the Trump administration is investigating a middle school with a coed cheerleading team. Where does this leave people who are either deeply aligned with or unsure of their identity? In Gender’s New Era, we grapple with the paradigms and explore what gender means right now.
Recently, my family came to visit me in Philadelphia. My cousin, a classic Puerto Rican papi who lives in Miami, took me out to drink near my new apartment. Over beers, I told him about a recent date I had with someone from the apps. At the end of the date, I had done something out of character and announced, “You will pay the bill.” To my surprise, it worked. They picked up the $70 tab.
I’d spent the past year going on shitty dates, politely listening to boring stories about people’s exes, and then splitting the bill. I’d wanted to be considerate, even if I wasn’t feeling the spark. Sometimes, I’d spend more time than I wanted to spend with the date, just trying to find something to like about them. Could I at least see this stranger as a friend? Could I convince myself this hadn’t been a waste of time?
It never ended well. One person told me they’d recently bought a rabbit to sacrifice in a ritual. A Reiki healer turned out to be a chain-smoker. A grad student said she fists all of her friends. It all culminated in good stories but zero sparks.
My cousin listened and then looked at me with the intensity of Morpheus in The Matrix. “Become what you fear most,” he said, and then he told me a story about trying to hook up with a woman when he was a bachelor. He said he’d put his finger in her mouth—and it had worked. “Ewwww, dude,” I replied. (My cousin had once tried to teach me how to be a “player” and I had ended up crying. I hate negging and pick-up artists.) But…maybe there was some wisdom here. When I’d told that date to pay the check, I’d been embracing a persona that scared me. And that, I think, was my cousin’s point.
All my life, I’ve been afraid to be perceived the wrong way. I would hide aspects of myself to appear more “civilized”—less poor, less Black, less Indigenous, less Latin. I was scared of being seen as stereotypically marginalized. After more than one white woman who self-identified as a life coach told me I looked like “an Incan princess,” I became so worried about being perceived as a “healer” by white people that I never wore the color purple. In my mind, if I wore purple silk, I might as well have been showing up as an Ayahuasca shaman with a talking snake.
What scared me the most was my father. I feared becoming him: someone so full of rage that he could snap into violence at a moment’s notice. So I suppressed all of my anger. I joked that I could forgive anyone for anything. I let men who were my “friends” grope me, and I looked the other way because they were drunk. I let partners yell at me and put me in danger. I vowed that no matter how provoked I became, I’d never become like my father. I told myself to let it go. I thought this was noble, but it wasn’t. It was repression and fear of expressing my own monstrous anger. I had swallowed that anger and it was eating me alive—I developed searing neck pain and a spine disease.
Still, I associated masculinity with avoidance and violence, and so I feared my own expression of it. But this year, a little boy appeared in my dreams alongside a hypersexualized woman. In my sleep, I saw them in a hammock, their skin melting together David Cronenberg–style. I saw the boy watching me from the shadows, running from would-be killers who’d shot him in the neck. The pain made the boy run faster. I could feel his strength.
This was my androgyny crying out to me. My soul screaming that I am more than my perceived biology dictates. I am androgynous, nonbinary, and I reside in the middle. I am the woman—soft, patient, and allowing. And I am the boy—injured, crying out to be seen. And I have been harmed by the way my body has been consumed and used and overlooked. I can now be angry.
Demanding that my lackluster date pay the bill wasn’t nice, but it was a small way of clawing back my power. All this self-restraint wasn’t doing me or anyone else any good. As my cousin urged, I had to become what I feared. And my dreams helped me realize my deepest fear: that if someone really saw what I came from—the abuse, the hurt, the rage—it would be too ugly. Too hard to love.
But there’s a difference between wanting to be loved and wanting to be loved as your authentic self. I want to be loved in my strangeness and my rage. As the boy and the hypersexualized woman. So I’ve begun to express my anger by being a little more honest with those around me, letting my voice get stronger, saying things like, “I don’t like that!”
It’s disturbing that showing anger or disgust makes people respect you. I hate that this is so. And I hate it more that I didn’t do it sooner.
Now, as my self-acceptance grows, I receive compliments that make my heart flutter. I’ve heard that I’m “beautiful and handsome.” When I asked an older female friend to define my vibe, she said, “You look like a girl who wants to be a boy.” My family members use my chosen name (sometimes, but it’s a start). I’ve started sitting with my legs open, something I haven't done since going to etiquette school as a child. This feels like a path toward my liberation.
I’m working to become a healthy version of what I feared the most. The boy in me is feeling safe enough to emerge. Now, he walks with me in dreams. I see his blue shadow and feel rage at his silenced voice. He helps me look at my cousin, my father, the men in my family and see the little boy in them. The beautiful little boy who screamed for help but was never safe enough to be soft. And me, who had to pretend to be submissive and is just now learning to show my strength.
