Recently a good friend of mine, Ileana Jiminez of Feminist Teacher, wrote a blog post called Teaching Boys Feminism. This blog post appeared in a larger series on Feminism and Education held by Gender Across Boarders and Equality 101. The article got me to thinking (I realize that is grammatically incorrect.) I was reminiscing on my own beginnings with feminism as a young girl.
Now for various reasons I both loved and hated what I will call "girl feminism." When I was young the wave of Third Wave/girl of color feminist projects were just starting to get published. Being a girl of color I felt like I was one of maybe six people on the planet (or in my middle school and high school at least) who cared about feminism. I was friends with most of the others and related to a few more. I read Ophelia Speaks at least once a year. And I stubbornly insisted on reading books with female protagonist. And then my twin sister introduced me to a book called The Last Time I Wore A Dress. Now The Last Time isn't actually about a trans*kid. It's instead about how a young woman (she was like 16 when the book starts if I'm remembering correctly) gets mistaken as being a trans*kid and is institutionalized because of it.
This book was very important in shaping how I though about gender. Not because of how the main characters 'true' gender gets recognized. The main character (whose name I of course cannot remember, if it is in fact ever mentioned) has a pretty ambivalent relationship to gender anyway. Its just that the particular "psychological diagnosis" given to her is untrue. She in fact does not feel gender dysphoria, or at least does not express this explicitly (I was in high school I could have missed something.) But again not the point. The point is that the book helped me to understand the brutal nature through which institutions define and redefine sex for young people.
I was sensitive (though I would not call myself knowledgable) about non-confirming gender identity from that point forward. I was coming out to myself as bi around the same time and quite confused as to why I didn't seem to want to be the butch but felt uncomfortable playing the role of femme. (I now identify proudly as a femme but for many years I was certain that my kind of gender wasn't femme enough to be femme.) I drank up films and books about non-comforming gender kids/people (when I could find them, it is not exactly the most readily available genre.) I read fanfic and rpf and original fiction. ( I have to pause here and recommend Smitty aka Susan Smith's Of Drag Kings and The Wheel of Fate, it was the first place I heard of drag kings long before anyone ever assigned me any Halberstam. It was offered online for free when I was young--Go Xena Fandom!--but is now only available for purchase. GO BUY IT. It's not perfect, and its a definitely a romance novel, but its amazing. And complicated and I just love it.)
And yet this girl feminism that I was so invested in said nothing about this topic. Girl feminism the difference between a vulva and a vagina and that I should *love* mine. I did love mine. But I knew not everyone with a vulva loved them. And girl feminism didn't talk about that. It didn't talk about binding. If you cut off your hair and wore pants it might be because you were a tomboy or a lesbian or a bisexual. But it couldn't be because you were trans*. Being trans* was never even mentioned.
I think what projects like Ileana's of targeting multiple genders of kids to talk about feminism can do is to break that silence. That its not just about learning what kinds of masculinities or feminities that girls and boys can inhabit beyond the white-washed hetero-patriarchal ones set out by society. But that their gender is something that isn't tied to their bodies. I think more kids are exploring gender non-conformity not from a stance against conformity writ-large but specifically from gender binaries. I wounder if our youth feminism (girl or boy or whatever) is prepared to go there with them.
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