Super Gender Roles - Who Am I? (part 4)

Like I said I was an inquisitive and imaginative little kid, but I was different. I liked superheroes. I really liked superheroes. Even before I had real friends, I played make-believe which now that I think about it is basically Live Action Role Playing, but when you’re kids it’s more socially acceptable which is something I learned on my own as I transitioned into junior high. At the time I was really into X-Men and Teen Titans, but all the girls had the super cool super powerful powers. Jean Grey and Raven have telepathy and telekinesis. Starfire can fly and shoot lasers. Shadowcat can walk through walls. Storm can control the freaking weather. Even the Invisible Woman has the best powers of the Fantastic Four. There was even an episode of X-Men Evolution that was basically an anthem of girl power and I loved it. What could the boys do? Anything the girls can do but with severe limitations in comparison. Professor X has telepathy but not telekinesis and is in wheelchair. The Thing, Beast, and Nightcrawler all hate their appearance and try to hide it. Cyclops needs his special ruby glasses to keep his powers under control.  Robin doesn’t have any powers (but I still loved him, and wanted to be him for Halloween, except we weren’t allowed to celebrate the only day it would have been socially acceptable for me to go outside in a cape and a mask). Spider-Man was my absolute favorite: smart, witty, fast, strong, thwip-thwip web shooters swing from the skyscrapers of NYC. If I had to be a superhero of my gender, I would want to be Spider-Man, but when it came to creating my own superhero, I chose all the powers that the girls had so I also adopted some of their other attributes when I imitated their powers. Like Kitty’s like total valley girl accent like totally.
And when my mom heard me talk like that, she like totally shamed me and like totally made me like stop. I was confused because I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong (and I wasn’t). So even on this subconscious level I identified with the boys because I didn’t like myself and I wished I could be more like the girls because they’re awesome and confident.

But in the (false) dichotomy of gender roles or things boys are “supposed to do” and things girls are “supposed to do,” this was basically playing house which is a girly thing. And I actually did play house with the girls at my school. I was usually the only boy and that made it more fun for all of us. I also liked to watch “girly” shows which my mom also strongly disliked. I adamantly pointed out every time there was a boy in a scene to declare that it was for boys too so I could still watch it. Especially as I got a little older, I realized I liked those kind of shows because I related more to the girls and how they crushed on the boys. The girls were cute but the boys were cuter. 

So let’s see. I didn’t like sports but I liked playing house. I didn’t like dolls but I liked action figures. I liked “girly” shows but I also liked Spider-Man. The poem I mentioned earlier really captures what I was feeling. So yeah I didn’t agree with how gender roles were “supposed” to work, not enough to comfortably identify as one or the other, but back then I didn’t know what I know now. I didn’t have the whole picture of what gender actual means. And while I do acknowledge and recognize the importance and reasons for male and female gender roles because boys will be boys and girls will be girls. And that might be true for a lot of people and probably the majority to an extent. But you can’t cut everything down the middle and boys on this side and girls on the other. There are things that boys might be more inclined to and the same said for girls, but there’s a hella big gap of an overlap and not even like a Venn diagram because there isn’t any one thing that is boys only or girls only. It’s all just preferences and that varies infinitely from person to person. It’s what makes us all so unique individuals. No one else has the exact same taste in absolutely everything. And I like how I’m seeing the world star to change, but it’s still a ways away before all parents and children will figure this out and accept it. And it is extremely complicated and can be messy, but that’s what it means to be human.