Hi my name is Ashley and today I'm going to be talking about a question that I
get pretty often. Before I really get into the question I'm gonna give some
background information. For anyone who doesn't look a little bit like me it
might be hard to understand what it feels like to be in public with this
kind of ambiguous gender presentation. When hit comes to me personally I feel
like I have relatively feminine features. I don't have the jaw,
I don't have any facial hair, I'm obviously not very muscular. But I am
really tall, and I have short hair and I tend to wear more baggy clothes, and so in
situations where someone has just met me for the first time and only has a few
seconds to take me all in - more times than not I get perceived as male. A lot of the
time it's pretty harmless, or people realize that they've made a faux pas and
they correct themselves, but there are definitely times when I elicit this kind
of reaction
uh...
I don't get it
Still you know, a little awkward, but usually pretty harmless. And then there's
this kind of reaction
Excuse me, did you know that you're in the ladies bathroom? Sir. Sir! I'm gonna
have to ask you to leave.
I've had my hair short now, and i've been wearing
baggier clothes for a while, so I personally have had a lot of time to get used to
that kind of situation. When I first cut my hair, I used to not at all be able to
deal with it. I would get angry, I would lash out at people, and I felt victimized.
Understandably, because female is an identity that I claim. Regardless of what
gender roles tell you about females, I am a female, and that's an identity that I
claim, and I feel inside like a woman, so when someone calls me "sir,"
that hurts me. But as I got more and more experience with it I realized...
it's not something I need to be angry about. Unfortunately not everyone has
encountered someone who doesn't fit gender roles very well, and when you're
meeting someone for the first time that confuses you, or breaks your idea about
something that you thought you understood, that can be hard.
So when I started to look at it from somebody else's perspective, I learned
how to kind of laugh it off. Or when I couldn't laugh it off, at least shrug it
off. Because the reality of the situation is it sucks.
I don't like being called boy. Just not my favorite thing in the world. But I
don't need to be angry or upset or disrupt somebody else's day because of
that. So to get back to the question that I said I was going to answer, that I
always get asked; How are you able to come to terms with your gender
expression and the way you feel about yourself? And more importantly, how do you
learn to handle situations where other people aren't comfortable with the way
you dress or look or act? The answer is, forget about the second one.
Unfortunately no matter how comfortable you are with yourself, you will probably
still go out in public and run into a couple of these: sir Sir can I get up I'm
Sir. Sir, can I get you to -
Uh... I'm so sorry, I meant ma'am
But at the end of the day if you can ask yourself, "am I
being true to who I am? and I happy with what I look like the way I dress how I
act? Am I being true to me?" If the answer is yes, then it is possible to still be a
happy and well-adjusted person, even in a world that doesn't always understand you.
There are plenty of things that I haven't had the privilege of
experiencing and learning about in my life, and there are things that I'm sure
I would have adverse or strange reactions to. So I afford other people that
same luxury. Not everybody's going to understand me, but I know that I'm being
me
This is just me. I don't do anything I don't want to do, I never try to act like
anyone.
I'm not and because of that, I can still be happy. Not to say that it's not going to
be awkward sometimes, it is. It's not to say that sometimes it's not gonna suck.
It's gonna suck. But if you're honest with yourself, and your true to who you are,
you're going to be okay. Thanks for watching guys. Buh-bye.
Um. Uh...
Sharon. Sharon, I don't think I get it. Sharon what's that?
What's that? A boy-girl man-woman hybrid?
I don't know, Sharon. What's that? I don't know. I don't... I don't get it.
I don't get it