Meditations on the Feminine

I have a fraught relationship with femininity. The last family dinner I went to, before I started training to be a priest, the men of my family sat around in a circle and quite solemnly proclaimed my career in engineering unfeminine, and listed the careers which as a woman (and a whole ass adult), I was allowed to have, in this the year of our lord not 1950.

As ridiculous as it seems, that sort of thing really colored my relationship to femininity. It did not help that I am also tall(ish), not inclined to their idea of feminine dress, and generally a poor tolerant of rules I think are ridiculous. I tend to do my own thing, both by preference and because people are not always good company.

Where I’m from, these are invitations to violence, to beat (or rape) the unnatural tendencies out of you.

Freda says I dress like a homeless man. When people dream of me and tell me about it, they see me as an alley cat or fighter. Freda is not wrong and neither are people.

I never see myself in conversations about femininity. I don’t seem to have any of the qualities people list (especially not conservative Christians), and I do not often trust people enough to let them close enough for intimacy and to be vulnerable with them.

Instead, I sit quietly, listening to their lists, looking at the glances people dart at me, and wonder if there’s any room for me whatsoever in femininity. It’s been a source of quiet despair.

Papa says it’s about time to start decoupling what I have been taught of femininity from what femininity is. I’m early in that process, but I am often reminded of something he said: the tendencies I’ve been punished for are human qualities.

Men do not own bravery. They do not own violence in the defense of home and children or self. They do not own self-sacrifice, even the quiet gesture of being the person who gets up to investigate a noise in the night. They do not own providing for one’s loved ones. They do not own standing up for the things they believe in, or being straightforward in communication, and they do not own silence.

These are human qualities. For whatever else I am, I am human.