Gender is an unwanted constriction, a tight, spotless, mass-produced, white shirt that makes it hard to breathe, and the type that you have to slowly peel off by bending your arm backwards at the uncomfortable angle where your shoulder pinches, to expose the infinitely speckled, varied, and irregular skin below. If the shirt is removable at all. 

Clothes have always felt like an enemy to me.

 

They’re picked out for us before we even come into this world- determined the minute the ultrasound revels our biological reproductive organs to our hopeful parents. That tiny out-of-focus white splotch on a sonogram, or lack of one, instantly launches visions, hopes and expectations for our personhood- fantasies of playing catch with good old dad or shopping with mommy dearest- taking us from the land of infinite possibilities and fantasies that occur when our parents first find out that they’re pregnant and pushing us into fenced-in fields of pink or blue painted walls, ballet recitals or football practices, and names like Brittany or Brett. 

I remember the clothes my mother picked out for me, the ones that tried to determine my identity before I had even considered it myself. They were laughably girly- the big poofy sleeves, the little pink bows, the sparkly sequined skirts. The clothes were an exercise of my mother’s uninhibited imagination, as if I was a real-life doll to dress up and sit pretty. The powdered stockings and shiny black flats made it hard to run after my brothers when playing games. As I ran the flats would fly off and the stockings would run. The clothes would be ruined by my own motion, my actions despite them. 

So, I started to steal my brother’s clothes.

 

It started off innocently, with me agreeing to take the T-shirts that he had outgrown, until I had a drawer stuffed full of loose fitting yellow iguana shirts and Jurassic Park tees that plastered roaring T-rexes over my chest. The unravelling of my gender happened slowly and then all at once. Suddenly I was actively going into his room, sneaking around to steal brown cargo shorts that he hadn’t worn in a while, or tan rope belts and baseball hats. 
 

Then there was the spring cleaning of my fourth grade year. Every year we’d get rid of the clothes that didn’t fit or that we didn’t want any more in order to make way for new clothes.

 

I sat in my room and really thought about whether I wanted to wear the purple striped turtle-necked sweater my mother had given me for Christmas the year before. I decided I didn’t. I decided I didn’t want any of it. None of it fit me, not truly.
 

I remember my mother’s tone when she saw the box of clothes I had tossed out into the hallway: bitter, confused, and dismissive. “But you love purple!” her rebuttal came swift, “and it’s a waste of perfectly good clothes!” My mother knew something was breaking; this wasn’t how she had behaved with her mother.

 Following that year, I traded shaking pom-poms and cheering at the top of my lungs for beating my sneakers against the track to try and beat the boys. My body was strong.

 

I loved beating the boys, I loved the surprise on their faces when I flew past them and reached the finish line first. I loved putting the cocky ones in their place when they thought they could throw snowballs at my friends then get away. I caught up to them and wrestled them on the ground, getting covered in mud and feeling bruises swell with pride.
 

Then my body betrayed me. Through my biological sex, my body screamed out a gender to the world when it refused to grow past five feet five inches and insisted on giving me breasts that I kept trying to hide with baggier and baggier t-shirts until the hems flirted towards my knees. The day I got my period, I cried at the embarrassment of being a woman. There was no going back, my sex forced me into a gendered existence, one in which I could no longer hide my physical differences from interested eyes. The boys got bigger, inherited more space and they beat me. There was no longer anyone to keep them in check.  
  

There was no one to keep him in check when he assaulted me. Not even myself. 
    

After that I hated my body. My body wasn’t able to protect me, it only limited me, and subjected me to stares, catcalls or assaults.
 

My gender constricts how much space I take up on the subway, as I sit with my thighs pressed together between two men whose legs are a foot apart. Gender causes me to slouch and become smaller, as small as I can. I’ve always gotten the sense that women are supposed to be as small as possible, as constricted as possible. Some force themselves to be smaller, eating nothing but a bagel all day and curling up on the couch from the pain of shrinking away, the danger of evaporating from existence. Our gendered clothes constrict our bodies to take up as little space as possible: corsets pressing our ribs together, shirts compressing our chest and arms, our skinny jeans leaving angry red marks running up our legs as if to say, “how dare you try and take up any more space!” The scarlet streaks punish our flesh for pressing outwards against the denim fabric, imprinting us with a reminder to be skinny, be small, and stay powerless.

 

Gender presses my hands at my sides, crosses my legs and keeps my chest concaved. It’s the only space the world, my society, and its norms, want to give me.
 

Gender constricts my words. “Act like a lady,” chided my uncle when I was growing up. I spoke too much and I never outgrew it, long past when I was supposed to.

 

There’s a nagging mantra in my head, inherited from those around me: keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet. At work, I disagree with my male colleagues, keep quiet keep quiet keep quiet. At parties, I want to crack a joke, keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet.  Even about my sexual assault, keep quiet, keep quiet, keep quiet. My words take up too much space.
 

Gender constricts my possibilities. If I had been born a boy, my parents would have placed me in hockey just like my brothers, and I would have learned how to stop on skates. Instead I was placed in ballet, then tap, then jazz, where I didn’t learn a damn thing that I still remember. If I had been born a boy, I would have opened up gifts of Legos, chemistry kits, and Harry Potter books. Instead I opened stiff fine china unicorn figurines, American Girl dolls, and delicate glass carousels that I accidentally broke the next day.

 

My toys were designed to keep me still, to teach me to sit, silently. I watched while my brothers built cars out of interlocking red bricks, dug up dinosaur bones on fake archaeological explorations, and shot off rocket ships in the backyard that left a trail of baking soda and vinegar, foaming with possibility. When they were done and tired of their toys, I came in to explore. My possibilities were limited by what my brothers gave to me, what men allowed me. 
 

Even now, entering journalism, society tries to tell me what it is possible for me to do in my profession. I get into the news van and I’m told, “bundle up buttercup,” by the van driver. When I tell the crew my dreams of being a foreign correspondent, they laugh. The producer in the back says I won’t last in that environment. I’m told I’m too delicate. What they’re really faulting me for is for being feminine, being woman.
 

In short, gender constricts my freedom. My own father tries to talk me out of foreign correspondence. He doesn’t want me living abroad alone. Six months before I studied abroad in the Czech Republic, my brother went backpacking solo through Europe, no questions asked. As I packed my bags to leave on my own globe-trotting adventure, my parents came into my room to talk to me. They forbade me to travel solo. They told me to always have a friend with me when travelling. They said they were concerned about my safety. Though I tried to protest, they remained firm: it wasn’t safe to allow me the same freedoms as my brothers. Purely because I was woman, I am feminine, I am thought to be unsafe in my own world. The world has no safe space for my kind. The smaller I become, the less noticeable, the safer I’m told I am. 
 

I went travelling alone anyways. I went to Belgium, stayed with a stranger man and drank cheap boxed white wine with him. He hit on me in his kitchen, yet I emerged unscathed.

 

I learned how to play sports anyways. I begged my father to take me outside, then borrowed hand-me-down baseball mitts and caught baseballs until my palm throbbed red underneath the worn-down leather.

 

I stretched and bumbled around anyways. I spoke anyways, and loudly. 
 

I identify as female because of my experiences throughout life, yet my gender is a constant opportunity for defiance, to expose the cracks below the presumed monotone that is “female.” I push back against, sneak around, and break my gender constrictions. No one perfectly fits into the t-shirt picked out for them, and some even take it off.

 

I am masculine, I am feminine, but above all, I am rebellion.