So my anxiety kicked up a bit tonight in regards to gender presentation/some related things, and I just felt like saying this:

Even though it’s been more than 20 years since I was a GNC kid (and at that time, more GNC internally than externally), I’m pretty sure the biggest problem GNC kids face today is still people pressuring them to conform to the gender “norms” and roles society has assigned to their assigned gender and punishing them if they don’t, not that people are pressuring them to transition from their assigned gendered to a different gender.

Advertising, especially for kids and teens, is still pretty normatively gendered, even if some progress is being made.

I mean, the message I got from advertisements as a kid was that girls like me didn’t exist; the message I saw was that girls liked–exclusively–Barbie, pastels, pink, flowers, cosmetics, etc., and that boys–exclusively–liked cars, action figures, bold colors, weapons, etc. Guess which ones of those things I like and which ones I didn’t. It was a very confusing message to get, and even though my parents were good about letting me play with whatever I want to, there was only so much they could do to combat that message, because as a kid, I didn’t know how to talk about how it made me feel.

So I ended up with a really complicated and also really negative view towards girls who did tend to meet the Expected Criteria for Girls for a long time (a long time in this case being elementary school through eigth grade and a little beyond). Both because they fit into that mold (for whatever reason) and because I couldn’t.

And I still feel weird about my relationship to my gender now, as a 30 year old. Largely because society is still fucked up when it comes to the myriad of ways people can express their genders. But I generally still think of myself as a woman out of a desire to make up for the years I hated and feared “other girls” and as a way of saying, “Girls like me exist! Even if you want us to ‘act like girls,’ we’re already girls.”