Closeted with Something to Lose

Hey folks, I read a thing on the internet and it made me have feelings.  I know the author's experiences aren't about my feelings, that I should listen/signal boost more and talk less, but I'm not sure how it does people any good to have me shut up all the time.  Is there some kind of magic ratio?  Someone who knows how this is done please clue me in? I Google stuff, but there's no comprehensive guide about how to not be a jerk. I still haven't worked out what "check your privilege" means in practice, even if I have (finally) worked out that I have a lot of it.  So go read that other piece, at least.

When I was in high school, I had very little fear.  I wore boy's jeans, fitted tops from ThinkGeek, pink fuzzy slippers, duct-taped my mouth for Day of Silence, and flirted with everyone. I'd been out since basically middle school when I'd had the least-closeted relationship possible, and my mother had told me that I could date as many girls as I liked as long as I quit lying that hickeys I came home with were mosquito bites*.  When ScanTron forms asked me for my gender, I marked "Male" half the time because "Female" wasn't right either, and when they left a blank when asking for my "sex" I wrote "YES PLEASE".  What was the worst that could happen? If people didn't like me, then I didn't like them, my grades always reflected my ADHD (the full range from F to A), and I didn't have a job to lose.

Eventually, I grew out of my adolescent belligerence, but that didn't stop me from being open about any of it, if anyone cared to ask or look up my Facebook profile.  I stayed less-belligerent-still-open as I went to two colleges, trying to figure out how to make a living in the world, working at a preschool and at a minimum-wage retail job to pay for books because my family had generously contributed most of my tuition.  What did I have to fear?

Then I got accepted at Clarkson University with a merit scholarship that covered most of what my parents couldn't, and I found out some of what I have to fear. I had signed up for on-campus housing because I didn't have the contacts or time to look for off-campus housing, and I was placed with three blonde girls, two of whom were in the Army ROTC program.

I don't know if it was because of my Facebook profile or if it was just because I wasn't their friend whose spot I'd been placed in, but they treated me like I had walked into their house with a dripping suitcase full of virulent pond scum rather than a couple sets of cheap plastic drawers for my clothes and an extra-long twin bedding set. In a thousand tiny ways, they made it clear that I wasn't welcome-- not to exist there, not even to study late in the library and come home at two in the morning to sleep before I left for a nine o'clock class.  I raised my concerns with the housing department and the RA staff, but everyone refused to help me.  "Compromise more," the people who might have helped told me.  I didn't know where else I could compromise and still maintain the GPA I needed for my scholarship.

It was three against one, and it wasn't worth taking a stand.  They drove me out of what was supposed to be my home.  I moved off-campus the next semester, living with three guys who were more than happy that I was picking up the rent their friend wasn't paying, but I remembered that when three people decided I wasn't worth respect, nothing in the world could make them treat me like a human. I had found my fear.

I felt it every time I tried to go to a hockey game and the Pep Band yelled homophobic slurs, every time I saw a women-in-engineering quote defaced in the hallway. I met people richer and more conservative than I'd ever met before, my-vacation-home-has-more-bedrooms-than-your-actual-home rich and all-poor-people-are-lazy conservative. I found out that the real reason Clarkson gets people jobs after graduating relates to its historically-wealthy alumni network, and I learned whose favor I'd need to curry if I wanted to find similar success and pay off my loans.

I have one of those alumni-network jobs now, so I spend effort to look like an ambitious, straight, white, cis, married woman.  Nothing to see here, employer, just another hard worker doing her job and trying to prove she wants a career (not just a job for maternity benefits). It's not even so far from the truth: plenty of people are happy to argue with me about whether I'm gay enough or far enough outside the gender binary to count as anything but.

I hear the comments the higher-ups in my company make, about women and about people of color and about anything that's outside of their upper-middle-class aesthetic, and mostly I put my head down. When I feel brave, I suggest we go out for Thai instead of steak and quietly explain that I was personally kind of uncomfortable when my boss's boss made that comment about how my co-worker should take her sweater off. I'm scared I'll risk my job, my paycheck, my home, the food on my table, if I say more.

I know I've sold out, but I don't know what else I could do that would be any better.  The world taught me that it expects me to behave in a certain way, present myself in a certain way, and that there will be consequences if I don't.

I behave.

_________
*Actually, I think she wanted me to stop coming home with hickeys, period. I love you, Mom.

These Shoes Won't Last Forever

"I wear a size 11 women's shoe and a size 9 men's," I told a friend today.

"Do women normally know their size in men's shoes?" he asked.

"I don't think so," I said. "I know because it used to be really hard to find sneakers that I liked and that fit."

I wasn't telling the whole truth there.  I wore jeans from the men's section, too, and it's not because they really fit better on my hipsy, curvy build, no matter how much I protested that they did at the time.

Maybe I was using a different definition of the word "fit".

It made me wonder why I don't buy a pair of men's dress shoes.  I don't wear heels, except under duress, because I don't like the way they feel, I don't care about the way they look, and I don't want to have to learn how to walk in them in order to fit someone else's idea of gender conformity.  Flats don't go with every outfit, and I'm not sure I'll be able to find another pair of shoes like my now-bedraggled chunky black dress shoe.  Maybe I could find something work-appropriate in the men's section, if I looked there.

I love seeing women and people of many genders* dress in masculine ways.  It's one part attraction, one part admiration, and maybe one part jealousy, because I've never quite been able to pull the look off and generally plump for buying clothes that are "right for my body type".  Maybe, if I tried harder and looked up some how-to guides on the internet, I could dress that way too in spite of my hips and my breasts.

But no one at my place of employment goes anywhere near the lines of blurring gender roles.  There's even a dress code neatly spelled out in two columns: women may wear this, men may wear that. Plus, I enjoy my work. I like the paycheck, the house and the bills and the food it pays for.  Having money and being employed beats the hell out of the other option.  Maybe this makes me a coward, that I'm too scared to lose career opportunities to even look for men's shoes that might make me feel great (and that might not. Who knows?).  I know that it makes me lucky, because I'm wondering what shoes I can wear to keep a job, instead of (for example) whether I can buy new shoes at all.

I guess I have a decision to make: would I rather spend hours shopping, looking for shoes I like that toe the dress code line but don't make me want to throw them through a window after wearing them for two hours? should I just suck it up and cope with heels for the sake of the paycheck? am I brave enough to alter my wardrobe and make it more masculine?

Clock's ticking. These shoes won't last forever.

_________
*Not all genders in this particular case. Talking here about the range of genders that starts with some acknowledgement of having ladybits, or having once had them, and adds a layer or few of what's traditionally considered "masculine".  I know I don't have all the very best words to describe it, and I'm trying to be as inclusive as possible while still successfully communicating about a particular set of gender expressions that make sense to me.  Please feel free to add any language suggestions in the comments.

My Breasts: Offending Everyone Since 1999

One of the regulars at Zumba pulled me aside yesterday.

"What's your name?" she asked, which was friendly, so I told her.

"You seem nice," she said.  "So don't take this the wrong way."

It never goes well when someone says this.

"I've heard other people talking about you," she continued.  "About your breasts."

Why yes, my breasts are nice.  I like them quite a lot, actually.

"They move a lot," she said.  "And I understand because I have large breasts too."

Oh my goodness.  It is like I exercise at exercise class, and my breasts obey the laws of fluid dynamics!

"So you need to wear two bras," she finished blithely.  "Not just one.  You're really all over the place."

She stopped then, waiting for a response.

"Understood," I said curtly, because I did understand.  I understood that I was not conforming, that I was being judged for having the wrong body. I understood that the "other people" believed that their right to not be confronted with my breasts, clad in only a single sports bra and a tank top, superseded my right to exercise in only one bra and a tank top.

I don't buy it.  My breasts are part of my body, and I am not ashamed of them.  They move when I exercise because I exercise for me, not for society's approval.  I'm sorry that they're offended, and I'm sorry that they can't see that mine is another body that is a good body to have.

It's not the first time someone has complained about my breasts.  Perhaps I should buy or make a witty t-shirt about it, as it appears that I am doomed to offend people with my unacceptable breasts.


And I don't even have a child to breastfeed.

Other People On The Internet Are Smart

I have found some posts around the internet related to the things I am trying to do. I could try to summarize and give my own take on each of these, but instead, I will round up some links.

I am not the only one trying to balance a fiancé and a job hunt. Fortunately, if it doesn't work out in either the short or long terms, I don't have to feel crushed because I'm not "successful" (thought I am terrified of being unable to contribute to the household. I always dreamed I would have a nice permanent partner interested in doing the bulk of the home stuff, and while K is game for that, he may be more employable than I am, at least over the short term, and we will have to make it work however we can).

How to build a starter wardrobe for $150. Or: it's OK that everything I own comes from the Target clearance rack (except for my bras) while I'm establishing myself professionally. I can replace things later, once I actually have money. Apparently, jackets are magical things, which is brilliant because I love the concept of easy layering.

Apparently following a Tumblr that admonishes me to make my bed every morning causes me actually make my bed every morning. I've set alarms to get myself to do things, but apparently if an actual person does the telling, it motivates me, even if the person is a random stranger from the internet. Now, I have extra magical space. Brilliant.

This is seriously creepy. I can't even fathom what the school that wants to "[reserve] the right to require any female student to take a pregnancy test to confirm whether or not the suspected student is in fact pregnant" thinks it can accomplish through this pointless invasion of privacy, and I'm pretty sure I don't want to know, either. Yuck.

EDIT TO ADD:  And this, which helps me articulate that, even though I have various behaviors that our culture has assigned a gender to, I still don't like assigning a gender to myself.

Can I Dress For the Job I Want?

Some links I've found while trying to figure out if my appearance is preventing me from getting a job.


This post suggests setting aside at least $1000 to build a professional wardrobe from scratch. I'm grateful that there are posts out there that give fashion-clueless folks like me hints about how to go about presenting a professional appearance.


Meanwhile, this post neatly sums up a large part of my frustration when it says, "Women routinely have to spend more money, and more time, to make ourselves visually presentable and fit society’s basic expectations of grooming… and that’s more true the higher up you get in status and income." 


I want to play by the rules, but I haven't yet worked out how I can feasibly do so. Sometimes, it seems like the prerequisite to getting a job that pays money is to already have money.

Health, Identity, and Adulthood

I find myself posting recipes for stuff I've cooked. I also post regularly about my thoughts on sleep, as I'm trying out biphasic sleep.  I do this in part because I hope it's interesting or helpful, but under that, I do these things because I'm trying to exert control over my own life.

See, I can't force employers to post job openings, interview me, or give me a job. I can't lower the cost of living so that I can support a family on less money. I can't buy much of anything, as I'm hoarding the money I have so that I can afford to move to the location of job.

However, I can still try to create value. I can cook, I can craft, I can clean, and I can write*. I can work to improve myself by exercising and eating better.  I can hack my sleep schedule so that I have time to do all of these things and still work on applying for jobs.

Perhaps it's all a carefully-constructed method of distracting myself from feeling worthless because no one has found me worth paying (yet).**  If so, it's a relatively productive one. I have plenty of unhealthy coping mechanisms for this, so encouraging the healthy ones definitely appeals to me.

I think it's also part of my attempt to build an adult identity for myself, though. Now that I have more opportunity to make my own decisions about how I will live my life as an adult, I want to put some conscious thought into what I want to do with my life, in terms of both my career and personal life.

Over the past few weeks, I've been asking myself questions like these:

• Am I willing to reduce my consumption of certain foods and increase my activity level to lose weight?
  (yes, but I'm not giving up cheese or dessert entirely, no matter what the literature says about dairy and sugar. I'd rather exercise more than feel hungry, but staying sedentary is not an option: I want children, and I need to be fit before I can have them.)
• Am I willing to relocate to get a job? How far?
  (yes, but I want to be able to get home for Christmas, and it needs to be close enough to civilization so that K can find a job, too)
• What do I like to do in my spare time?
  (it took me a while to remember that, hey, I actually really do still like crafting! because I had no free time during college: I wanted to learn as much as I could because I'd already paid outrageous sums. It feels really good to create things again.)

So, even if some of the things I do and write about don't relate to becoming an adult on the surface, I'm still in the process of building my identity, and the new activities are part of the new identity.

I'm sure it will all change again soon enough.

_______

*An aside: it's a little bit irritating how this list contains skills that can be considered "women's work" (except, possibly, for the writing). When I was young, no one taught me how to fix cars or program computers or build things with power tools. Instead, my parents shipped me off to innumerable summer camps where I did lots of crafts, most usually in a class full of girls. I had fun, but did not learn much in the way of marketable skills.

**To me, this seems like a fair metric. When something is valuable, you pay for it in one way or another. No one seems to want to pay me enough money for me to survive (yet), so I am not (yet) worth much to anyone other than my parents.

Emotional Sleeping vs. Emotional Eating

I have a couple of unhealthy coping mechanisms. For example, I'm prone to emotional eating (along with a lot of people).  Similarly, when I feel upset and don't have a lot to do, I sleep for hours.  I don't know how common this is: people don't talk about their sleep patterns the same way they talk about their diets.

According to the CDC, adults need seven to nine hours of sleep. It goes on to provide troubleshooting for falling asleep, but never challenges the assumption that the sleep should happen in a single block at night. (Woe to the poor souls doing third-shift work, apparently.) There's no discussion of what sleep patterns work better, just adherence to "normal" sleep and advice for insomnia.

Perhaps this stems from a lack of knowledge about sleep. We know that light, stimulants, and physical exertion can play roles, but the roles these things play vary wildly from person to person. There are no sleep hygiene plans, no discussion about what sleep components best support healthy sleep, and no discussions about what sleep styles work for us. We don't even really know why we sleep-- we just know that it's miserable to go without it.

We know lots of things about the inputs to the nutrition process: macronutrients, fiber, vitamins and minerals, level of processing, and so forth. We know that a weight loss program should involve burning more calories than consumed and, similarly, that a weight gain program involves consuming more calories than burned.  We know that some foods feel more "filling" than others.

Everyone has an opinion to share about food. For example, my brother will talk for hours about the benefits of his diet, and I tease him mercilessly about how various foods I find particularly delicious will, in his words, "kill him".*  In another case, my mother got into a heated argument with a woman at a church dinner about the merits of vegan diets and the acceptability of honey.  Still, with religion, sex, and politics off the table and so much social activity centered around mealtimes, food commonly enters discussions.

I've worked in two predominately-female workplaces, a preschool for developmentally-challenged three- and four-year-olds and a customer service department in a large company.  In these settings, food played an even larger role in discussion. We traded recipes and diet tips regularly. In some ways, I find it irksome that I regularly trade the conversations I'd like to have about rapid prototyping  and identity security for bland ones about buffalo chicken wing dip and pepper plants, but mostly, I like talking about food.  It provides a platform of commonality: I, too, cook and care about nutrition. Plus, as the experts can't agree on a set of recommendations, there's room for endless discussion: if at a loss for conversation, I can almost always safely discuss nutrition.

Maybe this leads us, as a society, to have a healthy dialogue about food. Whether or not we actually follow any healthy eating guidelines at all, we have a good idea of what constitutes health foods, and we usually respect other people's food choices.

Meanwhile, we don't have a very good dialogue about sleep. Even when sleeping monophasically, friends and family would interrupt my sleep rhythm-- "it's past my bedtime" rarely excuses me from a social obligation. Work and sleep schedules don't take sleep schedules into account: if you have to wake up early to get to a meeting or work late to finish a project, no one cares that it may cause sleep deprivation. It's often acceptable to bring a small snack, but it's almost never acceptable to bring a pillow and grab a quick nap.

Perhaps this further impedes discussion of how to handle emotional sleeping: sleeping that's unhealthy. If we can't discuss healthy sleep, how can we distinguish it from unhealthy sleep? In particular, if we consider sleep some sort of optional extra that only the lazy indulge in, how can we keep ourselves healthy and productive?
______
*I consider poking fun at my younger sibling my sworn duty as an older sibling.

Proof of Partner: Entering Adulthood Next to the Right Person

K and I woke up Saturday morning at 7:30, took down and packed up our tent, and were on the road by 8:00.  Nearly four hours later, we arrived at my parents' house with the goal of making ourselves presentable before we went to our friends' wedding.  We had a plan: we would spend the next two to three hours struggling into our unfamiliar formal clothes, drive the last hour, check into our hotel, and have time to take our nap early before six, when we would arrive at the wedding.

We took turns in the shower, and then we diverged. He trimmed his beard while I shaved my legs. I put on a bathrobe and glopped color onto my nails; K pulled out his netbook and his tie and spent forty-five minutes failing to tie a Windsor knot.  After waiting for what I hoped was a suitable interval, I tried to towel-dry my hair, and the towel scored deep grooves into my attempt at nail polish.  I took it off, finished drying my hair, and tried again.

From the bed, K looked up from his tie.  "Do you even like putting on nail polish?" he asked me.

"Not really," I said. "But I'm supposed to be a girl, and girls are supposed to be able to take care of their hands and do their own hair nicely and so on."

"I don't care if you can't do your nails or hair," he told me, watching the frustration bloom on my face. "I still love you."

I paused with the brush in mid-air. "I know," I told him.  "I still feel like I should be able to do these things."

I try to cultivate these skills: the ones that don't come naturally to me, but the ones that may allow me to fit in a little bit better.  Theoretically, employers evaluate your merit based solely on your work performance; in practice, I feel like I miss some interpersonal-interaction targets because I'm too different.  I use different words, think about different things, participate in different leisure time activities*.  When I'm at work, I prefer to focus on work, but the package of professionalism includes appearance and the ability to find enough non-work-related common ground with the people around you to build relationships and trust. It means cooing over baby pictures, carefully remaining neutral when the people around you discuss television shows you wouldn't watch even if you had cable, and participating in office celebrations-- all while attempting to demonstrate your value and your focus on the work at hand. I can do it, but it takes effort.

Struggling with my hair and my nails in preparation for a wedding seems like practice for a career in which I'll have to do things with my hair and my nails on a regular basis, so I didn't give up. Eventually, I managed to stuff myself into a thrifted dress and a pair of heels I can't walk in.  We cut our nap to twenty minutes and got to the wedding ten minutes before the ceremony began.

Foreground: my foot (without the heels). Background: my dress.

It's the second wedding we've attended as a couple (out of only three I've attended as an adult.. The experience still feels new and a little bit weird: at the wedding, people treat us as a unit. The invitation arrived in a single envelope with two names, and the place card at the table shared the names, too. As neither of us plan to change names when we get married, we will see our names almost exactly as we saw them this weekend for the rest of our lives (barring disaster).


Perhaps attending weddings as an adult signals impending adulthood across other areas of my life.  The feeling resembles the one I had the first time I signed a brand new rental agreement-- K and I had elected to room together as a matter of convenience, and reading through the paperwork, placing a security deposit, and signing every page of a twenty-page document seemed like an adventure. (The semester I rented space with a couple of guys, filling the vacated room of a guy who had taken off to parts unknown on a journey of self-discovery, does not count.) It feels good, like I'm stepping into something approaching a permanent place in society (carving out bits to improve the fit whenever I feel I can get away with it).

In that case, the wedding contained another signal. I love to dance. I took dance classes every year except one from the age of five until I graduated from high school. When there's socially-sanctioned dancing, I dance.** The last time K and I went to a wedding, he amiably held my bag and watched me dance with a group of friends.

This time, he beat me onto the dance floor.  Apparently, he secretly spent some quality alone time with the Kinect and our copy of Dance Central and developed some dance moves. (He convinced me to leave it with him while I interned in Florida, claiming he couldn't resist the challenge of a new video game.) Now, it appears that he took time to learn how to do something that I love to do so he could do it with me, sore leg muscles and all. He may not be a polished professional, but he's mine, and I couldn't have picked a better partner.
__________________
*I love following baseball with K in part because it lets me have acceptably neutral conversations with people.  Apparently, it's OK to publicly disagree with Yankees fans, but publicly disagreeing with people who oppose marriage equality isn't-- even though both groups of people are clearly wrong.
** I also dance in situations when it's not socially sanctioned, such as in supermarket aisles, when I think no one's watching.

There's a Reason We Don't Give People Numbers: Part 2

Note: this was inspired by a friend's post on names. This is part of a two-part series about how I struggle with gender and my own name.  The first part is here.

Names are important. They can indicate our kinship ties and pieces of our identity. They can change how people perceive us, sometimes even before they meet us. In turn, as we wear our names, people color the meaning of the syllables that make up our name with the things they know about us. So, what do you do when the name people expect you to take isn't yours?

Historically, in many cultures, marriages took place to establish paternity, which was useful (a) to avoid incestuous procreation and genetic abnormalities and (b) to establish who financially took care of whom and to whom property would pass after a death and so on.  Often, this came with a side order of restricted rights for a woman as she passed from her father's care to her husband's care.  This doesn't thrill me: I don't believe that I require a husband (or a father) to provide for me.

The social expectation that a woman changes her last name when she marries a man seems annoys me.  Not only does it assume a heterosexual marriage, it seems (to me) to symbolize this sort of less-than-modern passing-the-woman nonsense, as she trades her father's surname for her new husband's.

This doesn't work for me.  I won't turn into a whole new person when I marry K.  I've had my name my whole life, and I have made it my name.  Certainly, it's a name that I share with my family: this doesn't bother me, as the family who bears the same name as I do has supported me throughout my life.  So, why should I abandon my name-- the name of my family-- because I'm starting a new family with K?  Our children will have his last name, and I believe that that will adequately signal my kinship ties to anyone who needs to know.  I don't need to give up my last name to commit to him.


Also, I love my last name.  When I went from my given name to "JP", I began writing my last name -- just my last name-- on all those things you're supposed to label with your name in case they get lost or stolen: textbooks, graphing calculators, notebooks, and so on.  I have a professional identity that I'm just starting to build using my last name, too. It's on four diplomas: one each from high school and community college and two from my university. It headlines my resume. 

I love my last name, and I don't want to change it.

I know that people will probably end up calling me Mrs. Hislastname.  That doesn't bother me-- after all, it will be kind of true.  K and I are getting married. People address letters to Mr. and Mrs. Hisfirstname Hislastname, after all,* and people do not expect me to change my first name.


I don't really mind what other people call me, as long as it indicates they respect me.**  We use people's names to identify each other, and what other people call me in the context of our relationship should simply select which of a number of respected people the speaker wishes to address.  In terms of my identity, the names that matter most are the ones I call myself.


____________
*I could go on about how this is annoyingly gendered, too, but the people who do this are either (1) people who love you enough to send you mail or (2) working for a company sending junk mail.  The former already love you, and also yay mail, so I'm not inclined to fuss, and the latter everyone ignores anyway.  Etiquette guides are beginning to establish guidelines for addressing formal letters and invitations to non-traditional families, but this is a process, and since there is good-natured effort going on here, I'm not going to quibble.

**If I introduce myself as "Firstname Mylastname" to someone who persists in calling me "Mrs. Hislastname", though, that's disrespectful, and not the kind of mistake that's OK because you're trying but met him first and just didn't know better.  Of course, your best choice is to ask me what I'd like to be called, but I understand it's a lot of work to ask everyone that when so many people still follow the convention.

There's a Reason We Don't Give People Numbers: Part 1

Note: this was inspired by a friend's post on names. This is part of a two-part series about how I struggle with gender and my own name.  The second part will be posted tomorrow. I hope.

Names are important. They can indicate our kinship ties and pieces of our identity. They can change how people perceive us, sometimes even before they meet us. In turn, as we wear our names, people color the meaning of the syllables that make up our name with the things they know about us. So, what do you do when your name doesn't quite fit?

My first name has never thrilled me.  (Sorry, Mom.)  It's a good name, a solid name, a name I could put on business cards.  However, it's also gendered, which makes me uncomfortable.  People can look at my name and say, "Oh, it's [Firstname]! She's a girl" and make decisions about how they're going to interact with me from that.

A couple things happened while I was in middle school:

• A teacher pulled me aside and explained to me that wearing a bra* was not optional.
• I began noticing that girls had Different Social Rules, like "you should shave your legs or people will make fun of you".**  These rules did not apply to boys, which didn't seem fair.
• We started our foreign-language instruction, and I had to pick a name.

I was taking French, and the sheet they passed out had two sides: one labeled "Girl's Names" and one labeled "Boy's Names".  I skimmed the side with the "Girl's Names".  Jacqueline? I thought to myself. Blech. Way too girly. So, I turned the paper over.

A spark of rebellion ignited.  Our French teacher had instructed us to pick a name from the paper. She hadn't specified which side I had to use.  I didn't have to pick a girl's name, so I picked a boy's name.  I couldn't decide between "Jacques" and "Pierre" when she called on me to ask for my choice, so I simply concatenated them.

"Je m'appelle Jacques-Pierre," I told her.  She gave me a look.  I can't remember if she suggested I call myself a French version of my own name or not.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Oui," I said.  "Je m'appelle Jacques-Pierre."

To prove it, I began calling myself Jacques-Pierre in all my classes.  I wrote it on top of my papers.  I asked the rest of my teachers to call me Jacques-Pierre in class. I corrected my poor French teacher every time she called on me using a French version of my given name.

At some point during all this, I began thinking of myself as "JP".  The next summer, I made the switch and began introducing myself as "JP".  Friends would eventually ask where it came from-- my initials don't contain either "J" or "P", and I got sick of explaining telling the story of the French class, so I started telling them it stood for "Just Perfect".  This had the side benefit of making the name gender-neutral instead of a boys' name.

As I began participating in online communities, I chose yet another name because "JP" was too short for a log-in ID.  Eventually, I concatenated them: I am now jpnadia online. So, I had three names: one for on-line, one for my friends, and one for my professional identity.

In real life, I got tired of endless explanations of why I wanted to be called JP instead of my given name.  (Also, lecture halls got bigger, and professors stopped asking for nicknames and started calling on me by my roster name, so people would learn my given name and then there would be an Argument when I asked them to call me JP.) I gave up, and most people call me my given name now.  Still, I love it that people I met when I introduced myself as "JP" still call me "JP".  It's more comfortable, for me, to have a gender-neutral name.

Secretly, I still call myself "JP" in my head most of the time.
________
*In sharp contrast to the characters in Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, who wanted very much to wear bras, I found them and continue to find them uncomfortable.

**In elementary school, people made fun of me for reading too much.  I didn't care: I chose to read a lot, and I could tell myself that they were making fun of me because I was smarter than them. Being teased about having hairy legs while female, however, baffled me.

Why I Won't Shave My Hands

A while back, a friend-of-a-friend posted the following on Facebook:

"Whenever I wear a dress or wear my hair down when it's long, everybody always gives me all these compliments. But as a sociologist, it's hard to not see "You look pretty" as "Good job at the gender conformity!" "

Apparently, the comment percolated in my head: I had a nasty dream about a week ago.  In it, I was in some kind of job counseling meeting with a woman as she took notes on a partially-obscured computer screen.  I didn't think too much of it until I glanced over and noticed she was using a special program to document my appearance.  She was busy adding thick, black hairs to the back of a cartoon hand.  There was dirt under the nails, and the nails themselves had green, moldy splotches.

Like this.

"What are you doing?" I asked her.

"Documenting your appearance," she said.  "The hair on the back of your hands is really unprofessional for a woman. You need to shave them."

"What?" I said, flabbergasted. I frantically texted one of my female cousins to ask if this "shave your hands" deal was really a thing. The reply came back almost instantly. Yes, of course.  You don't shave yours?


I got a little bit upset.  Surely, I reasoned in my dream, my applications were not being turned down for such a small thing as the hair on the back of my hands.  "Could I please have a copy of that image?" I asked, hoping to learn what other rules of appearance I had unknowingly broken.

"No," said the woman.  She didn't bother to offer an apology.  "Until you shave your hands, I don't want to work with you."

The dream went on: I escalated the issue, and the woman's manager, who reminded me of Dolores Umbridge, also refused to give me the information until I suggested I could go to Twitter with my problem.  I woke up, half-wanting to go back to sleep so I could find out what exactly the dream woman thought was wrong with my dream self's appearance.


Some dreams are just dreams.  This one, however, highlights some things that I've had hovering around the back of my mind recently.

1. The interview process seems really opaque and arbitrary.
2. Appropriate work attire is gendered.  So is appropriate interview attire. I've read in a couple of places that, for interviews, women should have manicured nails.  (Men just need to trim theirs neatly.)

I really like my hands. They have long, thin fingers, and I keep my nails short. I wear an engagement ring.  I like to think my hands say something about who I am: practical, willing to work, committed, and honest.  They're useful hands.


I've gotten them manicured exactly once, for prom when I was sixteen.  I have no particular wish to change that: it costs money, and I don't have a lot of that particular commodity just at the moment. As far as I can tell, it's not relevant to my ability to do my job, so it's not something I'm going to make a habit, either.


I feel pretty much the same way about makeup and heels-- I don't do it often. So I'll wear neat hair, nice (practical) shoes, minimal makeup that I could grudgingly put on every day if I needed to.  Half of the interviews I've had have been over the 'phone; most of the rest have involved a hefty drive with nowhere to change or touch up the minor details.  


I own a pair of conservative closed-toed black shoes with a one-and-a-half inch heel.  Since they're what I can afford as a college student, they're hideously uncomfortable.  I hate them only slightly less than I love my hands.  Still, I'm willing to wear them if I need to do so to get a job.


There are a lot of masks I'm willing to slip on to please an employer.  They're not lies, just a bit of differentiation between the "me" that (for example) wakes up grouchy and the "me" that behaves pleasantly and professionally at all times. Everyone has a professional identity, and I firmly believe that an employer has no business dictating what one does in one's personal life (if it does not reduce one's ability to perform professionally). Some of the masks, however, seem to tend toward the expensive, and I still don't have that first real job yet.  Worse, I'm never sure I've understood all the rules-- how can I tailor a professional mask to suit an employer if I'm never sure what I must do to please them?

Food, Health, Weight, and the Freedom to Make Your Own Choices

I went shopping the other day, and it felt like freedom.  It is really, really nice to have the food I like to eat available in the house.

And this is what freedom looks like.

"I found a neat recipe on Pinterest," I told my mom last night.  "But it takes a whole cup of sugar."  

"That is a lot of sugar," said my dad.  "You should use high fructose corn syrup instead."

My mother and I both want to lose weight.  I want to lose weight because I want to feel better, have more energy, and I know it will get harder when I get older.  I gained thirty pounds over the school from stress, eating too much, and not having the time to cook right or exercise.  They say it's important to be a healthy weight before you get pregnant, too, and I want that in my future. I think my mom wants to be healthier too.  We don't talk much about it.


"We should join Weight Watchers together!" says my mom regularly.  She is trying to be supportive.  It feels, sometimes, like she wants to let me know that my weight isn't healthy.  I already know my weight isn't healthy*.  I maintain that university is not a healthy environment: you don't have time to cook healthy food (or exercise), and you don't have money to buy healthy food (or, worse, you're locked into a meal plan.).  It's full of stress, and you don't have financial resources to offset the stress, because you've already paid the university all your financial resources (and then some).


My weight bothers me in part because worrying about weight is such a gendered phenomenon.  You don't hear vitriol spewed toward men with beer bellies, but if a woman is overweight, everyone seems to feel entitled to comment. I don't want people to comment: it isn't my job to look pretty for them, and it isn't their job to care about my appearance or my health**.

I hear it around the holidays, too, from other parts of my family.  "Oh, you look so good-- did you lose weight?" (Sometimes I get this even if I have gained weight.)  Or: "You know, you gained some weight-- that isn't very healthy."  I know when I gain weight, thank you very much, you didn't need to point it out.

And so I do not want to join Weight Watchers. I don't want to hold myself up to an outside standard, even a kindly one.  I know it works for a lot of people, but I have a nifty app on my phone that tracks my calories and my current weight, and that works for me***.  If you want to bond with me on a weight-loss quest, we can exercise together or trade recipes.

I want to feel good, and I don't want to worry about people commenting on how I look.  I want my clothes to fit, and I want to be able to shop for clothes that are not labeled as "plus" sizes.  (I'm medium-tall and I have hips-- anything smaller than a ten is never going to happen for me.)  I want to be healthy, and I want "healthy" to happen on my own terms.


______
*My parents are both physical therapists, so they care a lot about being healthy.
**Unless you are my physician.  Then, you may comment on my weight if you would like.
***I know it works for me, because I was able to lose significant chunks of weight when I was away from school on internships.  They key element to the weight loss, in my opinion, was having the time and money to establish a routine.

Why "Reluctantly Female"?

When I was seventeen or so, I had a minor epiphany.  "It's okay for guys to like pink," I had told someone.  A few days later, it hit me.  I had never liked the color pink: I had always considered it "too girly".  I had avoided this color for as long as I could remember, not because I didn't like it (I like pink as much as any single color), but because, subconsciously, I thought it wasn't okay for guys to like pink.  Except, of course, it is okay for guys to like pink.  This produced a contradiction, and I realized that I, too, could like to color pink without being a girl.

The problem* with this logic is that, biologically, I am a girl. I have all the female bits, and I'm generally happy with them, so why do female gender expressions make me so uneasy?

I hate filling out forms. There's always the space that asks for your "sex" (or worse, your "gender").  It's better now-- most of the forms I fill out have a "prefer not to answer" option, which I take whenever it's available.  When I was thirteen, I would always the blank with "YES" because I was oh-so-mature, but really, it's still the answer.  You want to know about my sex?  I like it, when it's consensual, and not otherwise. That's not what you meant? Is it really your business what bits I have under my swimsuit?

I'd never really thought of myself as a potential wife or mother.  Oh, I thought about getting married (and being a "spouse" or a "partner"), and I thought about having children (and being a "parent"), but I always thought about it in terms of a personal, concrete events (making and eating dinner together with my family, negotiating holiday family-sharing, teaching a child how to garden, etc).

A couple of things have come up recently that change that.

• I'm planning a wedding.  This makes me, to nearly everyone, a "bride", which is a hugely gendered role.  (Especially since I'm marrying a man.)
• I'm thinking practically about having a child, especially in terms of the impact to my career. Biologically, being pregnant and giving birth are exclusively female activities.
• There's been a lot of public controversy about reproductive health care recently, and reproductive health care tends to be a woman's responsibility**. The tone of the discourse (that birth control should be a special exception to federal healthcare mandates because of "religious freedom" and that an unborn fetus should have rights greater than or equal to the rights of its mother) is scary, no matter what I think about abortion and the individual mandate.

My reaction to all this has been, approximately, "Oh, I guess I am a girl after all! How do I go about being a girl, again? And can I be a girl without, you know, actually being a girl?"

The answer? I don't know.  I don't know what any of it means.

I hope to find out.
__________
*Problem for me, not necessarily a problem for anyone else.
**I don't want to diminish men's reproductive health or the role of a second parent in reproductive health care, because having a child is usually an important personal decision for two adults, but it is a biological female who bears the bulk of the risk and responsibility for a pregnancy and, by extension, birth control.