My Gender Masquerade: Mette/Eddie

This is what I looked like in 4th grade. My mother cut my hair and she tended to keep cutting and cutting until it got straight, but I think that I liked it really short. I remember when people used to ask me if I was identical twins with my brother. I liked being taken for a boy. I'm not sure that "tom-boy" is the right phrase to describe me or not. I didn't hear that often as a kid. I wasn't an athletic type. I did climb trees, but wasn't into sports. I also hated wearing dresses, which in those days girls had to do every day at school.

I remember that my fourth grade year, I finally had a male teacher. I hadn't had any male teachers until that point. And I was determined that I was going to show this teacher what I could do, so I whipped through the regular mathbook in just a few weeks, and then proceeded to go through all of his supplementary math material. He told me once that no one else had gotten as far as I had, and that was what I wanted, for him to see me as really smart. My big rival that year was a girl named Toni who also turned out to be my best friend later.

The interesting thing about this teacher was that he didn't realize that I was a girl. My name is so unusual that people have no idea how to pronounce it or even if it is male or female. And at some point, someone typed it wrong and I started to be known as "Ette" instead of "Mette," which was fine with me. I have sometimes wondered if he would have treated me differently subtly or less subtly if he had realized I was a girl.

I knew he thought I was a boy because he once gestured at me as he was making a point about proper pronouns. "He," he said, and pointed to me. I liked that a lot. I liked being "he." I liked having a secret. I liked that the person I was at home wasn't the person I was in Mr. Condie's class. There was a certain freedom that I felt as "Ette" rather than "Mette" that I enjoyed. Maybe it was partly because I didn't have to choose whether I was going to be male or female or maybe it was because I felt that boys have more freedom than girls. I don't really know.

This is the year that I was at the skating rink and told to get off the ice since it was "all girl's" skate. I was annoyed at being told that, but there was something powerful about knowing something that these people didn't know about myself, and being able to put on a different personality. I played with names later in my life. In 7th grade, I decided to go by "Marie" instead of "Mette" because I didn't like having to explain about my name to every person that I met. Then I switched back to "Mette" when I was in 9th grade because I rather liked the uniqueness. But the gender confusion from this one year in elementary school is something I have thought about a lot in later years.

In 5th grade, there was no more mistaking me for a boy. I went through puberty painfully quickly. I have the stretch marks to prove it. I went from a flat chest to a size B cup in a couple of months and my mother, who had 10 other children to look after, didn't move fast enough to get me wearing a bra, so I got a lot of comments at school from boys in particular who had decided this was a way to make themselves feel powerful. We'd call it sexual harassment now, and I went through it for years, having my bra straps yanked on, being told what boys thought of my size, and on and on. I ignored it completely, not deeming it worthy of even comment. But there was no going back to pretending to be a boy at that point. I was not only a girl, but by sixth grade, was frequently mistaken for a high school junior or senior.

What I refused to do was to become "that" kind of girl. I didn't wear makeup. I didn't curl my hair except for occasions when my mother insisted. When I went to church, which was the one occasion when I was forced to wear a dress, I wore the same jeans skirt with a plain top and sneakers on my feet. This was also in part a rebellion against the other girls at church who seemed to be having a contest to prove whose father was the wealthiest. My parents had bought a house in a nice neighborhood without knowing much about the area when we moved in, and one of the names for it was "Snob Hill." We also happened to live across the street from the Osmonds. Yes, those Osmonds. Girls wore Prom dresses to church that cost hundreds of dollars and had their hair and nails done at pricey salons. This seemed ridiculous to me on multiple levels, and it certainly didn't make me interested in choosing to "amsquerade" as feminine. I wasn't trying to masquerade as "masculine" anymore, either, I just was refusing to choose either one or the other.

Here are the traits that I see traditionally accepted these days as . . .

Masculine:
aggressive
smart
outspoken, outgoing
strong
fast
crude
rule-breaker
plain-spoken
competitive
driven
ambitious

Feminine:
quiet
small
demure
beautiful
social
clean
neat
obedient
manipulative
musical
emotional
"spiritual"
kind
nurturing

How I would describe myself both then and now:
quiet
introverted
smart
strong
competitive
rule-breaker
efficient
driven
ambitious
creative
artistic
nurturing
OCD
thoughtful
dreamer
interesting
sympathetic
questioning

There are plenty of these descriptive words that apply to me that people often think of as "masculine," fewer as "feminine." I once told my kids that I'm 70% boy and 30% girl, but really, that doesn't make any sense to me at all. I just happen to have 70% of the character traits that are associated with boys and fewer that are associated with girls, and then a bunch of other traits that don't necessarily seem to be associated with either one, like artistic and dreamy and thoughtful and OCD.

There's an article here about how creative people are often androgynous, but when I read it, I just thought how odd it was to even think in that kind of a binary. It's not that creative people are deliberately choosing to be both masculine and feminine. It's that they simply refuse to reject certain characteristics because they happen to be labeled that way. I'm not going to stop being competitive at triathlon because someone decides that it's not "feminine." I'm not going to change my style of parenting because I think it isn't strong enough. I am who I am and I may change, but it won't be because of some artificial binary structure that society decides is useful for controlling people.

I am biologically a woman. I have chosen to take the role of mother with my children, and have chosen largely to stay home with them. My husband is largely the financial force in our house. But saying I'm a "stay at home mom" doesn't bother me. I don't need the approval of other people in my choices. I do what works for me. My kids know I'm an ardent feminist. My oldest daughter (and my other girls) and great at math and science. My son's first love in life is cooking. So what? To me that doesn't mean I'm trying to get them to break barriers. I'm just allowing them to choose what they want regardless of their biological gender. I sometimes put on makeup and wear heels if I am putting on the role of "author Mette Ivie Harrison." It doesn't bother me. I am simply doing what is expected of me so that I get the social respect I want.

I won't wear nylons, however. I do have certain boundaries that cannot be crossed. I wear tights in the winter because they are comfortable and warm. I don't paint my fingernails or perm my hair, but I have in the past. I wear men's watches, because I like them bigger, and I also follow Stacy and Clinton's advice to women to wear a jacket. There is nothing inherently good or bad about choosing certain male or female characteristics that feel more authentic to me at the time. I'm not going to set rules for that for myself and I try to allow others the same freedom.