I’m not straight. And my gender identity is complicated. I never really had a coming-out—in part because I never thought I had the right, and in part, as difficult as it is to admit, because I’m still terrified to say some things aloud. But it’s also because I so often feel like I don’t have the words. There are words I use sometimes: words like bisexual, which attempts to define who I am attracted to and who I seek intimacy from; words like genderqueer or simply queer, which attempts to define the ways my body doesn’t conform to traditional notions of gender. I use these words because they’re the best words I have. But sometimes they make me uneasy. And sometimes I feel like I’m still seeking the words that fit, that feel more right, that might help me feel like I belong.
My body is androgynous, both masculine and feminine. My gender expression fluctuates, depending on the day—what I’m wearing, what my hair is doing—but I typically look more traditionally masculine than feminine. The word presentation is sometimes used in this context, but I find the word problematic. It isn’t just the choices I make about my appearance that make me androgynous but the body I was born with, the DNA that built me. Equal parts farm-family Midwesterner and swarthy Mediterranean, my body is a stovepipe, long and lean without much curve. My hips are narrow, my back and shoulders broad. My biceps are big and my breasts are small, my cheekbones sharp and my nose large. My body hair is dark and thick; it grows black and wild on my arms and legs, and with obnoxious consistency between my eyebrows and above my upper lip. My voice is deeper than that of many men I know.
I keep my hair short. In the summer, I cut it with clippers on the sides and a sharp edge at the neck; in the winter, I let it grow a little, and it curls around my ears in a style that’s been called “the Tegan and Sara,” after the beloved Canadian lesbian-twin pop duo. My uniform is a T-shirt and jeans, unisex button-downs and utility boots. I keep my breasts tamped down with a sports bra or with something the fashion industry insists on calling a bralette. I haven’t worn a dress in years and got rid of every skirt gathering dust in my wardrobe. At weddings and work events, I wear a suit. I don’t wear makeup or jewelry, and I keep my fingernails short and unpainted. I rarely shave my legs and never my armpits. At this point in history, none of these things should sound radical. But you’d be surprised how they’re still received in the world.
On average, I get misgendered at least twice a week. I get called sir far more often than ma’am or miss, a fact that makes itself most apparent in restaurants, where servers still insist on addressing their guests in these binary terms.
“For you, sir?” he will say, for the misgendering server is almost always a man. He might realize his mistake or second-guess his assumption. He’ll stumble, flustered, stammer a bit.
“Oh,” he might say. “Sorry.”
“It’s OK!” I’ll say, my voice bright and cheery and pitched up a notch, an attempt to sound more like a woman. “No worries! Happens all the time!”
I hate myself when I do this. I feel complicit in the system that shames me, complicit in preserving my own shame. But I keep this collection of words and tones in my linguistic toolbox anyway, for just such an occasion, and use them to reassure the perpetrator that I’m not angry, that I’m friendly and unthreatening, that I won’t punish him with a bad tip or a scene. That I will be the one to accommodate him. Sometimes, my dining companions remain oblivious to the small drama unfolding in front of them. But sometimes they notice, and this is even worse.
“What the hell?” they’ll loud-whisper when he scurries away.
“Don’t worry about it,” I’ll say, trying to change the subject.
“But seriously,” they’ll insist. “It’s not like”—pause—“it’s hard to tell.”
In the silence that follows, my dining companions—be they friends or family or colleagues or strangers—will look down at their plates, their embarrassment palpable. I’ll sip my drink or stuff calamari into my mouth and know that what lives in that silence, at least for a moment or two, are thoughts about my body. Sometimes, at least, I get a free dessert out of it.
Sometimes, I call myself a woman. But sometimes I avoid the word. At various points in my life I’ve wondered what exactly it means, and how I fit—or don’t—into the shape of it. By default, I’ve always checked the “Female” box on applications and medical forms. But my body has never been a simple answer to any question. I don’t look like a woman, and I don’t always feel like one. Uncertainty is hardly unique among those of us born into female bodies, but as my own body moves through the world, it is marked by one common question: What are you? And the honest answer is—I don’t really know.
Whenever I’m misgendered, I’m never sure how I feel. Sometimes I’m angry; sometimes I’m not. Sometimes it’s shocking; sometimes it’s not. Sometimes a ma’am or miss makes me flinch just as much as sir. (More than anything, I hate being called a lady; it makes me physically uncomfortable at best and like I want to punch things at worst. Other words used to address women—girl, gal, etc.—also make me twitchy, but slightly less gendered terms of endearment—hon, babe, sweetie, darlin’—I find far less offensive.) But what I always feel is embarrassment. It’s a bodily feeling, a quick buzz in the back of my scalp, my guts lurching into my throat. When I walk into a women’s bathroom and the person standing at the sink visibly starts at my presence, a flash of fear in her eyes, and whenever a man calls me sir, I feel like I’m standing naked in front of that bathroom mirror or bare-assed at that restaurant table while a stranger inspects my body. While they cock their heads and question, calculate, perform feats of mental gymnastics required to consider the categories, then place my body into one of them. While they figure out whether I might be some kind of threat. Sometimes I make a joke of it, because at this point in my life, and not least because of where I come from—where we’re taught to avoid conflict, to keep the peace, to deflect attention by way of self-deprecation—a joke seems the only way out.
The truth, of course, is it’s usually not funny. Sometimes it’s frightening. In the past six months, I’ve been called sir, mister, buddy, bro, fella, and man. While buying shoelaces in a cobbler’s shop, I got called sir three times by the same guy in a two-minute transaction, which I’m pretty sure was a record. On all but one of these occasions, it seemed like a genuine mistake. That one occasion, though, was different. It happened at night, at the bodega on my block in Brooklyn. As I was leaving, a man leaned against the ice cream cooler by the door, scratching a lottery ticket with a dime.
“Have a good night,” I called out to the owner as I pulled open the door. The man with the lottery ticket stopped scratching.
“Good night—mister,” he said, spitting out the word, the hiss of it hanging in the dusty air between us. I glanced over my shoulder at him as I left and watched his lips curl into a sneer. At first I thought I’d misheard him. Of all the things I’ve been called in my life, mister seemed like the furthest from a threat.
But everything I needed to know lived in that man’s face. As I stepped out into the night, the streetlight on my block out as usual, I walked fast, not looking back, ready to run.