Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

  The moment this label was placed on me, it burned. My brother, along with the rest of the kids in my neighborhood, my teachers, my preschool classmates, and my parents, began bullying me for my femininity. Along with other boys from the neighborhood, he reiterated over and over again that it was not okay for me to be friends with girls, that hanging out with girls made me liable to get cooties, that spending time with girls was grounds for social isolation and reproach.

  My brother and his friends communicated this message in a number of ways. They would mock me for my mannerisms, for the way I spoke, for the way I held my wrists or moved my body as I walked. They would mock me for skipping or dancing or being too nice or coloring too well or sitting in the incorrect position or singing too loudly in choir. Once I’d been marked as a sissy, everything was fair game. My every behavior, every mannerism, every inclination was put under a public microscope, available to all for interrogation and inspection.

  * * *

  —

  My mom wasn’t stupid. She could plainly see what was happening. She could see that the water around me was beginning to heat up, that it’d soon be boiling. She knew the world was becoming increasingly hostile to her effeminate, sensitive, creative son. And she, like every parent of a gender nonconforming child, faced a horrible choice: She had to choose between affirming me and keeping me safe from harm.

  While this choice was made iteratively, almost daily, my strongest memory of it is from Halloween 1997, when I was six years old.

  Like every Halloween, my mom took me to the Toys”R”Us* near our house to pick out a costume. As I stared down the wall of costumes, which was easily three times taller than me and over forty feet long, I felt a little out to sea. Spread around me were countless identities, ideas, possibilities-of-self to experiment with for one night only. I could be a princess surveying my realm, a firefighter facing down an inferno, a scientist exploring outer space, or I could be something stupid like a pumpkin or a ladybug or whatever.

  I mean, no offense, but why do children go as pumpkins for Halloween? It’s such a Hufflepuff choice, not to mention a pretty arbitrary vegetable. You get one night to be as extravagant as you’d like, as daring as you want, and something compels certain children to say, “I wanna be a gourd. That’s just who I am.”

  It’s not that children shouldn’t dress up as vegetables. I’m a vegetarian and I love vegetables, so obviously I think that children dressed as vegetables are adorable. It’s just that I believe children should be able to dress up as vegetables any day they want to; they shouldn’t have to waste their precious, once-a-year Halloween costume on it. Parents should just be able to say, “Okay, it’s Tuesday. You know what that means, Stephanie? Time to dress up like your favorite item from the produce aisle!” Stephanie shouldn’t have to wait until Halloween for that. Stephanie should get to dress up like a tomato any day she damn well pleases. Anyway.

  As I stood there, facing the great wall of identities offered by Toys”R”Us, one costume stuck out to me above all others: I wanted to be Pocahontas more than anything in the world.

  Now, let me preface this story with the following: If you think that I am in any way endorsing cultural appropriation by writing this, you should just stop reading. I swear to Goddess,* if I hear about any one of you reading this passage and deciding, “Okay, yeah, great, the moral of this story is that Jacob thinks it’s awesome for white people to dress up as Native Americans for Halloween, so I’m gonna go do that,” I will use the power of the internet to find out where you live and throw so many eggs at your house that it becomes a giant omelet. Or if you’re vegan, I will throw so much tofu at your house that it becomes a giant tofu scramble. The point of this passage is not that white people should dress their children as Native Americans for Halloween. That’s basically the opposite of the point here. Capisce?

  All that being said, it was 1997. I was six years old and hadn’t quite developed my political consciousness about cultural appropriation or the colonization of the Americas and subsequent genocide of Native American people at the hands of white settlers yet. I also didn’t know multiplication, so I had some stuff to work on.

  What I did know was that Pocahontas was, by far, the most badass Disney princess. Keep in mind that Disney’s transgender-butch-lesbian masterpiece Mulan wasn’t released until a year later, or else I would’ve obviously gone with that (equally problematic) costume.

  The similarities between who Pocahontas was and who I saw myself as were uncanny. She wore dresses. I wanted to wear dresses. She loved running around in the woods and singing. I loved running around in the woods and singing. She talked to trees. I also talked to trees.

  So in that toy store aisle, I took a deep breath and conjured up all the courage I could muster. The inevitable question was posed by my mom: “So, who do you want to be for Halloween this year?”

  I paused, turned to her, and managed to squeak out, “Pocahontas, maybe?”

  The silence was deafening. You know when you tell someone you’re in love with them, and within two nanoseconds, before they can even utter a word, you know they don’t reciprocate? This was like that. I knew, from the moment the words left my lips, that it wasn’t going to happen.

  My mom paused and let out a deep sigh as her gears turned. How could she explain to me what I needed to know? How could she tell me what I needed to hear?

  If we’d grown up in a different world, in a more perfect universe, in an alternate, less racist, less misogynistic reality, perhaps that would’ve been the moment when she would pause, collect her thoughts, and cautiously say what needed to be said: “I know you are more feminine than the other boys. I know you love dresses and flowers and playing with your grandmother’s jewelry. And I love that about you. There is absolutely nothing wrong with who you are, and I will support you no matter what. But I also want to help you understand the world you’re growing up in. You are growing up in a world where many people—your brother, your father, your classmates, your peers, random strangers on the street, you name it—are going to be hostile toward you because of your femininity. People are going to spend most of your life making you feel less than. Knowing that, I want to help you make an informed decision. Would you rather go as a more socially acceptable costume, like a pumpkin or some equally stupid vegetable, thereby avoiding the torment of your peers? Or are you ready to put on a dress and bravely face the world? Whatever you choose, I will support you and love you and hug you when it feels like too much. Okay?”*

  But in our universe, instead of saying all that, she simply turned to me with a quiet look of concern and sheepishly asked, “What about going as a boy character from the movie?”

  If we lived in a better world, I would’ve turned to her and replied, “Really, Jane? Are you serious right now? You want me to go as John Smith, the asshole colonizer? I mean, I know the Disney version of the movie makes his ethical position sort of ‘debatable’ or whatever, but we all know that is some propaganda bullshit. Are you seriously suggesting I walk around the neighborhood dressed as a genocide-perpetrating white dude?”

  We didn’t live in that world. So, defeated, I turned to her and simply said, “Okay. But I want to go as another boy from the movie, not John Smith.”

  Looking back on that Halloween, I missed the mark. If I’d known then what I know now, the solution would’ve been obvious: I should’ve just gone as Grandmother Willow.

  She doesn’t have a gender. She’s a tree.

  * * *

  —

  Later that year, my maternal grandfather passed away from complications from a brain tumor. His death was expected, but still felt sudden for my parents when it happened. My parents decided I was too young to attend the funeral, so instead of traveling to Danville, Virginia, I went next door to stay with the Bullocks.

  When they explained to me what was happening, I was off-the-walls excited. Yes, I was sad my grandfather had p
assed away, and I was going to miss seeing him, but at that age, the idea of death didn’t feel too real yet. What did feel real was the idea of a two-day sleepover at the Bullocks’—with girls!!! In kindergarten, “no sleepovers with boys and girls” was ground zero of the gender binary. It was, far and above everything else, the most important rule. And I was breaking it!

  Though I was just going next door and the Bullocks had a key to our house, my parents insisted I pack a few basics so I wouldn’t have to run back and forth to grab things. The juxtaposition between my mother’s grief and my giddiness must’ve been striking. I did my best to rein in my giggles and jitters, but a rambunctious child can only do so much to contain their excitement.

  My parents walked me next door, rang the doorbell, and shared a somber hug with Mrs. Bullock before she took me inside.

  To this very day, it was the best staycation I’ve ever had. Though I didn’t really understand what was happening in the existential terms of our fragile human mortality, Mrs. Bullock assumed I was devastated. She did her utmost to cheer me up, which basically meant I got to queen out for two whole days. Katie and I played dress up ad nauseam, we played with Barbies for hours, and I didn’t have to look over my shoulder, anxious that my parents would walk in at any moment. We slept in the same room and got to giggle and have movie marathons and do all the fun things girls did together when they had sleepovers on TV shows. We even took a bubble bath together (with our bathing suits on, of course), and Mrs. Bullock let me paint my nails. I got to wear blue nail polish for twenty-four whole hours before Mrs. Bullock took it off to send me home. She knew my dad would be less than thrilled if I showed up back at the house like that.

  What was so radical about the sleepover was that it totally went against the grain of everything else I was learning in my life at that time. Everywhere else, the messages I was receiving were all about how girls and boys were different and couldn’t be left alone together. About how girls and boys had different “parts” and needed to be kept separate. About how boys were one thing and girls were another thing entirely. About how men and women needed to act differently because that’s what everyone said. Everything was about difference, and the more easily you could discern and perform your given role, the more praise, affirmation, and love you received from the world.

  Chief among this (mis)education was a fixation on the body. Male and female bodies were euphemized to the extent of comedy. Because the words penis and vagina were deemed too “mature,” I was instead taught to say “wee-wee” or “pee-pee,” which, when I think back on it, have low-key radical potential, because the terms were gender neutral. Boys had pee-pees, girls had pee-pees, boys went wee-wee, girls went wee-wee: It was all the same, shrouded in the language of body shame.

  In practice, however, the terms were not used radically. Instead, it was made very clear to me that girls’ pee-pees and boys’ pee-pees were very different, but that difference was never properly explained. As a kid, I wasn’t shown diagrams of a boy’s pee-pee and a girl’s pee-pee, and I was chastised for asking about it—something I did with some frequency.

  Because I was an implacably curious child, I was perplexed by the difference between girls’ pee-pees and boys’ pee-pees. At that age, I made a very natural assumption: The physical difference would explain everything. The difference in our pee-pees would explain why boys and girls had to act differently. If I could simply compare the two, I might figure out their alchemy, and all this “act like a boy” gender stuff might finally start to make sense.

  When I look back on it, I realize that the way I was taught about genitalia was akin to learning mythology. Through its magical, determinative power, my pee-pee explained everything that I had to be. The mystical, other type of pee-pee explained why I couldn’t play with Barbies or like the color pink. Genitals had the ability to tell us everything about who we were, about how we should function in the world. They determined the future.

  I hoped that, some day, I would figure out what the fuss was all about. I thought that if I could just see a girl’s pee-pee, and maybe another boy’s pee-pee, I would be able to understand everything about how gender worked.

  I got my chance to bridge this mystical divide at one of my brother’s baseball games. Baseball games were generally the worst. I hated going to them more than anything in the whole world. Playing in them was humiliating, because I was awful at baseball, but I would’ve taken that humiliation over the boredom of watching my brother’s team play any day.

  There was one baseball field that wasn’t so bad, because it had a playground nearby where the younger siblings could congregate while our older siblings smashed things with bats, caught balls, threw the bases around, scored innings, danced in the outfield, and did whatever else you were supposed to do during a game of baseball.

  One day, shortly before my seventh birthday, I ran off with two other little siblings—Maddie and Ian—to go play. After a few minutes of swinging from the monkey bars, going down the slide, and sitting atop the jungle gym, we were already bored. To pass the time, we got to talking. Out of the blue, Maddie brought it up.

  “My parents say that boys’ pee-pees are different than girls’ pee-pees,” Maddie blurted out.

  “Duh. Everyone knows that,” I responded, matter-of-factly. I didn’t like it when other kids implied that they were smarter than me.

  “Yeah, I know everyone knows that!” Maddie didn’t like it when other kids implied they were smarter than her, either.

  Ian corroborated. “Yeah, I heard that, too.”

  “Have y’all ever, I dunno, seen what the other kind of pee-pee looks like?” I inquired.

  “Yeah, I saw my dad’s once on accident when he was getting out of the shower,” Maddie bragged, cavalier. “My mom’s, too. They’re pretty different. Boys’ hang down and are funny looking, girls’ are a lot smaller and prettier.”

  “That’s interesting,” Ian commented.

  “Huh,” I added.

  There was an awkward pause after that. We stood there uncomfortably, but I think we all knew where things were heading. Maddie, who was a year older, finally had the courage to say what we were all thinking.

  “I’ll show you my pee-pee if you two show me yours.”

  “Ew, gross!” said Ian. He was trying to ruin this.

  “I don’t think it’s gross,” I said. “We could just show each other for a second. And no touching!”

  “Won’t we get in trouble?” Ian was such a wet towel.

  “Not if you don’t tell anybody, stupid!” (Maddie for the win.) “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Ian, but Jacob and I are gonna go do it.”

  Maddie and I exited the jungle gym and went over to a nearby tree. Ian squirmed for a moment, but ultimately felt too left out not to join. We circled around the tree, looking over our shoulders to make sure that no parents were walking over.

  Maddie took the reins, because Ian and I were too nervous. “On the count of three, we drop our pants for three seconds, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  This was it.

  “One.”

  I was finally going to figure out why boys and girls were so different.

  “Two.”

  This was going to explain everything.

  “Three.”

  We dropped our pants. For three brief seconds, we looked around, then pulled our pants back up.

  I could not have been more disappointed by what I saw. For all the weight adults seemed to give them, our bodies were nothing fascinating. We all just kinda had some skin and some other stuff down there. Ian and I looked more similar, I guessed, but Maddie didn’t look all that different. It was still skin and stuff. I don’t know what I’d been expecting to see, but I’d thought that looking at a girl’s pee-pee for the first time would be like Adam and Eve eating the apple. I had imagined that this whole “being a boy” thing would finally m
ake sense, that the difference between who I was and who girls were would feel somehow justified.

  Instead, I was more confused than ever. If our bodies were supposedly so different, if we were supposedly so opposite, why wasn’t it more dramatic? Why didn’t Maddie have, like, some kind of magical portal down there? Or something shiny and crazy? Or tentacles or a claw or pincers or dragon fangs or wings or something cool like that? It was just a bunch of skin!

  I felt ripped off. I realized, for the first time, that sometimes adults just make stuff up when they don’t know how to explain what’s really going on. I’d seen a girl’s pee-pee, but I was livid that it didn’t explain more. Like any good scientist, I left my successful experiment with more questions than answers. If boys and girls didn’t look all that different, then why did people seem so insistent that we act differently?

  To top it all off, our moms were yelling: Apparently, we had to go back to watching our brothers’ stupid baseball game.

  * * *

  —

  This newfound knowledge didn’t help to ease the masculine expectations placed on me. If anything, it made them feel like even more of a burden. Ignorance was bliss, and unfortunately, I was no longer ignorant.

  By the time I was in second grade, the bullying had gotten pretty bad, and the only way I made it through was by being the teacher’s pet. In elementary school, my teachers (who were all women) played a vital role in supporting and nurturing me, in recognizing my femininity—the fact that I was a gentle, sweet, creative, artistic, kind little kid, as opposed to a raging ball of aggression like most boys—and affirming it. My second-grade teacher and I were so close that she invited me to attend her wedding the year after I was in her class. I was a dream to teach because, in addition to being bright, I was desperate for my teachers’ affection and support—affection and support I couldn’t get from my peers.