Sissy

by Jacob Tobia

  That I had to participate in this public ritual of shame was the greatest injury of all. That I had to strut onstage and mock myself, mock my own deepest desires, mock the generations of gender nonconforming people who came before me, mock the diversity of human expression, is one of the countless small tragedies I endured in my adolescence. That night, I learned a toxic lesson, one that would take years to undo: People like you are a laughingstock.

  * * *

  —

  The transition to sixth grade wasn’t just a big deal in terms of my church life. It also meant transitioning from elementary school to middle school. I went to a weird, hippie-leaning Montessori-style middle school called Exploris, attached to an eponymous global-themed museum in downtown Raleigh. There were only sixty kids in each class, so it was a small, intimate learning environment, the type of school where we didn’t have lockers because lockers promoted being “closed off.” Instead, we stored our stuff in milk crates, because they were open and communal. While we had janitorial staff, we took five minutes after lunch every day for “Blitz,” where we would crawl around on the floor and clean up bits of trash and food. Oh, and there was no cafeteria. Or gym. It was in an old church building, so in place of a bona fide auditorium, we had a big room with a little stage at the end and stained-glass windows.

  For me, it was paradise. I was an unconventional kid with too much curiosity, intellect, and sass for a standard North Carolina middle school curriculum. At Exploris, I got to write about my feelings to my teachers, who we called by their first names. My “Prime Group” teacher in sixth grade was Mary Beth. In seventh grade it was Shannon. Eighth grade was Frank. No “Mr.” and “Ms.” No hierarchy. We respected our teachers as people, and they respected us. While Exploris wasn’t without issues, it was pretty damn utopian compared to most middle schools.*

  By seventh grade, school had become kind of awesome for me, because of, ironically enough, the heterosexual awakenings of my peers.

  I owe a lot to heterosexuality, actually. Under the aegis of heterosexuality, the gender divide started to fall. Okay, maybe that’s a bit generous, but the gender divide certainly got mushier. Mushy is a gross word—like moist or squelch or gush—but it’s accurate in this case.

  The beautiful thing about girls wanting to kiss boys and boys wanting to kiss girls is that in order to accomplish such a feat, boys and girls have to actually spend time together. And more than spend time together, they have to communicate. All of a sudden, as my peers awakened to their sexual desires, as the fires in their respective loins were set ablaze, boys who hung out with girls were given incredible social standing. It took a certain grace, a certain sense of bravado, a certain je ne sais quoi, for a middle school boy to spend time one-on-one with a girl. It took class and elegance and endless amounts of cool for girls to grace you with their presence.

  Seemingly overnight, hanging out with girls one-on-one had transformed from a damnable activity that condemned me to social isolation into something that only the coolest guys could pull off, the presumption being that if you were friends with a girl, you were that much closer to giving her a big ol’ smooch. And while I wasn’t smooching anyone, boy oh boy, was I good at hanging out with girls.

  Not only that, but knowing how girls worked, knowing how to talk to them and get inside their heads, became a marketable social commodity. All the cishetero* boys I knew in middle and high school were desperate for my counsel. I always knew what to do. I always had the best advice, in part because I sort of was a girl. Being a gender-seer, one who can see beyond the two genders, the bridge builder between the “disparate” sexes, was an esteemed social position in the preteen and teenage pecking order. Who better than a budding trans weirdo like me to fill that role? I was more than qualified for the position.

  I took this inch of mushiness, this iota of flexibility in the rigid gender rules of my childhood, and spun it into a mile. I went from being the weird, nerdy sissy to being the glorified font of gender wisdom. Under the guise of wanting to have sex with girls, I was able to gain unfettered access to femininity. My straight friends wanted to get close to girls to know more about their boobs and vaginas. I wanted to get close to girls to know more about their shoe collections. I thought boobs and vaginas were awesome (I still think so), but they weren’t my primary goal.

  Nowhere was this shift more pronounced than in my relationship with my brother. We first learned to really see each other because of the girls my brother was trying to hook up with. The shift in our relationship started, predictably, at church, where my brother attended youth group with the sole purpose of flirting with his friends Karen and Tara.

  When I started youth group in sixth grade, my brother was apprehensive. Having his nerdy little brother running around after him would surely cramp his style.

  It couldn’t have been more the opposite. Having a gay, feminine little brother is like walking around with a puppy. Girls are much more likely to talk to you if they want to hang out with your cute dog. As my brother soon discovered, there was nothing better for a straight man’s romantic life than an effeminate little bro.

  I was his youth group wingman, his matchmaker. I was ChristianMingle.com, bringing Christian singles together since 2001. Not only did I help the girls he was interested in feel comfortable around him, I also made him look good. By being gentle and sweet to me, by tolerating and being kind toward my obvious, screaming homosexuality, Matt looked sensitive, kind, sophisticated, and in touch with his feminine side. This put him, automatically, about three or four years ahead of basically all the other guys.

  Through my prowess with women (again, because I was basically one of them), I earned my brother’s favor, affirmation, and kindness for the first time in a very long time. And in return, my brother got some fairly risqué sexual experiences, including, but not limited to, a girl showing him her boobs behind the multipurpose room during the annual Mardi Gras celebration.* In exchange for beads, of course.

  This gender mushiness also allowed me to again have friends who were girls. The most significant of these friendships was with my childhood best friend Paige. After being compelled to give up my friendship with Paige at the age of six, I was finally able to reconnect with her in seventh grade. Our rekindled connection was instant, affectionate, nurturing, and incredible. (She came out as queer many years later, something that I feel responsible for. You’re welcome, world. She probably tells herself the same thing about me.)

  My friendship with Paige was instrumental because she was by far the most open-minded person I knew. She thought gay and feminine guys were cool. She was obsessed with David Bowie and the entire glam rock movement. She was the first person to introduce me to Labyrinth, which by now she’s watched at least three hundred times. I’m sure she meant this as a nudge in the right direction: Look, Jacob, David Bowie is so cool and gender-fluid and incredible and sexy and you can be all those things!

  But I wasn’t immediately a fan of Bowie, at least not Bowie circa Labyrinth. For one, I was legitimately perturbed by how much you could see his dick in that movie. You know how male ballet dancers always have those sculpted, beautiful, well-padded crotches? Apparently Bowie felt that was too much effort or something, because my biggest memory of Labyrinth was simply seeing David Bowie’s flaccid, lumpy dick boppin’ around inside those tights. I even remember that they were gray tights. That’s how much the image stuck with me.

  On a more general level, I wasn’t really ready for Bowie. Sometimes, when you’re queer or trans and you’re in denial about it, when you aren’t yet ready to recognize your truth and own it in public, when you feel trapped in a culture or a home situation where you don’t think you can be open about who you are, seeing people who are liberated in their gender or sexuality can be too much to handle. It can be hard to watch. Looking at David Bowie, this gender-transgressive, suave musician oozing sex, I was simply overwhelmed.

  As a teenager, I was
hungry for queer affirmation and gender transgression in my own life. I was starving for it, but I didn’t have faith that I’d get a meal anytime soon. I didn’t have faith that I’d have space to safely express my femininity, let alone find a boy to kiss me, in the next few years. Watching Bowie gyrate, flounce, and throw glitter everywhere was the queer equivalent of watching the Food Network when you’ve forgotten to eat lunch and dinner is many, many hours away. What should be delicious, what should inspire hope, only inspires envy and insatiable, painful hunger. Sometimes, when you feel like that, it’s best not to look.

  While my newly socially permissible friendships with girls couldn’t satiate my hunger or provide a real meal, they were identitarian snacks that helped tide me over: a scoop of hummus here, a few potato chips there, an Oreo or two. At school, my closest friends were Kate and Meredith, and they couldn’t’ve been more different.

  Where Meredith was girly, Kate was androgynous. Where Meredith was preppy, Kate was edgy. Meredith put bows in her hair when she had it up in a ponytail. Kate dyed her hair blue, then bleach blond. They were a good balance for me. Meredith and I could sing cute songs on guitar and talk about Disney Channel shows, and Kate and I could talk about the anime we were watching and the comic books we were buying and the Star Wars franchise.

  Whenever I’d spend time with Kate or Meredith or Paige, my parents, especially my father, would give me an incredible amount of leeway. Before he went to bed each night, my father probably said a little prayer to Jesus that I would start dating one of them. When they came over, my dad would let us close the bedroom door, and no matter how much noise we made or how long we were silent, he wouldn’t check in. When he wanted us to come down for dinner or when Meredith’s parents came to pick her up, he would knock on the closed door, wait about five seconds (ostensibly for me to put away my dick or Meredith to roll off me or whatever he imagined was happening) and then ask, with the door still closed, “Can I come in?”

  Meredith and I always thought this was hilarious. We’d joke about how badly my dad wanted us to date. On some level, I think Meredith always understood who I was and knew implicitly why that was never going to happen.

  But while hanging out in coed groups became more normal and my friendships with girls started to feel effortless, hanging out with just the guys got worse. Despite going to a very open-minded middle school, there was only so much our teachers could do to rein in the budding masculinity. In middle school, masculinity became, for the first time, fairly violent. Being one of the “cool guys” in elementary school had only entailed playing gentle games of soccer and maybe throwing a football around every now and then, but being one of the “cool guys” in middle school entailed much, much more.

  This pressure centered on Ty, my elementary school crush. Originally, we hadn’t gone to the same middle school. He’d gone off to West Lake, the fairly normal school I was supposed to go to. Ty didn’t last long at West Lake. He was too much of a middle school bad boy, too poorly behaved. He’d gotten in so much trouble that his parents thought it best for him to transfer schools. And where should he land but in my seventh grade class at Exploris.

  In the beginning, it was awesome. The second he set foot in Exploris, Ty was by far the coolest boy in our class, and because we were already friends, that meant I got a serious boost in my social clout. In the video game of middle school, Ty’s arrival meant I got to level up. I was a different person with him around, a person with more status and power. I liked that feeling a lot.

  And he’d gotten even cuter. Unlike me, puberty had been good to him. Whereas I’d gotten lots of pimples and braces and tubby and giant, Ty had gotten taller, buffer, and more attractive than ever. His power over me was almost absolute. To stay in proximity to him, I would do anything, would try to fit in with any social norm. Which meant enduring some fairly ridiculous masculine bullshit.

  At that age, boys try to become men much too quickly. They attempt to prove their masculinity to one another in the only way they know how, in the way they’ve been taught by popular culture over and over again: through normalizing and practicing violence. In middle school, hanging out with the boys meant enduring a gambit of violence and pain, a nonconsensual, biologically predetermined Tough Mudder.

  This violence had many manifestations. All the cool guys got airsoft guns, the kind that shot plastic pellets, and then shot one another with them. All the cool guys got paintball guns and shot one another with those, too. I remember having welts on my body, bruises up and down my arms. I remember wincing at the pain, wondering why this was required to prove myself. I remember feeling ensnared. What had started as a desire to spend time with cute boys had become a trap, one in which I had to endure physical pain and humiliation in order to prove a manhood I didn’t even want.

  In my experience, the process of being masculinized, the process of becoming a man, was based on three practices: the practice of violence, the endurance of physical pain, and the violation of consent. As a preteen, you were supposed to punch each other at random. You were supposed to point your airsoft gun at someone else and ask, “Can I shoot you?”; when they said no, you were supposed to do it anyway. You were supposed to learn to never say no, and you were supposed to punish people when they did say no. You were supposed to stigmatize and victimize weakness.

  What’s most disappointing to me was that none of the adults in my life stepped in to stop any of this. In fact, they implicitly encouraged it. We were “toughening up,” “becoming men,” or “just being boys.” And this message was reinforced everywhere that I looked. On TV, in movies, in video games, men were supposed to enjoy violence. The more violence they could endure, the more violence they could do to others, the better. Is it any surprise that men are so violent in our culture, when we are raised this way?

  The pinnacle of this, in my mind, was a game called Quarters. At lunch, all the cool guys would sit around a table and put their knuckles down on the table in front of them. Someone would place a quarter on the table, and we would then take turns flicking the quarter at one another’s knuckles as hard as we could. It hurt. It hurt more than I can describe, and I’m someone who, as a consenting adult, takes it up the butt.* As the narrow edge of the quarter slammed past your skin and into your bones, it sent a sharp, stinging, relentless pain vibrating throughout your entire body. It was enough to make your eyes water. It was enough to make you bleed, and I often did.

  More than the physical pain, what stuck with me was the collective psychology of the game. No one “won” the game really, but one person always lost. The first person who said, “I can’t handle this,” or “I’m out,” or “I quit,” the first person to opt out of the pain, was the loser. It was a game of mob mentality. The moment someone demonstrated weakness, the moment that someone winced too expressively or cried out, they became the immediate target of the group. You ganged up on the weakest person because it made the game end faster. Whoever appeared closest to breaking was attacked mercilessly until they did, all in the interest of “good fun.”

  The subtext of this game disturbed me then, and it horrifies me today:

  You know how much it hurts when that quarter hits your knuckles? You know how much it hurts, even though you’re not the direct target? Well, imagine if you were the direct target. That pain would be overwhelming. If this is the pain you must endure in order to prove your manhood, if this is the pain your friends do to you when you are one of the group, imagine the pain they can inflict on you if you’re no longer a member.

  It is vile, acrid. It is a subtext that stays with us well into adulthood. It governs the military and the prison system and the economy alike. In order to maintain social standing as a “good man” or to be “man enough,” you must participate in this perpetual ritual of violence. If you show weakness, you will be attacked. If you opt out of this culture of violence, you fail.

  Though we did have legitimate moments of affection for and kindne
ss toward each other, my friendships with boys could be downright tyrannical; tempests of aggression and violence and sometimes cruelty. But I put up with it. I put up with it all. This was the price of safety, and I endured it. This was the price of hanging out with cute boys, and I endured it. But with each “boyhood game,” with each “small” act of masculine violence, I was pushed further and further away from recognizing my gender, further and further away from my gentleness and sweetness and sensitivity, further and further away from my feminine truth.

  But even I had a breaking point. One day, Ty showed me a new trick he’d learned. Apparently, if you sprayed a can of AXE body spray in front of a lighter, you could create a massive, billowing flame—a flamethrower. He showed me this trick in his bedroom.

  “That’s neat,” I commented, legitimately intrigued. I was, and am, something of a pyromaniac. “But you really shouldn’t do that inside.”

  “Really? You think that’s a bad idea?” He smirked.

  He then proceeded to chase me around his house with that makeshift flamethrower, chortling with glee as I very reasonably freaked the fuck out, visions of house fires and hospitals and skin grafts flashing in my head.

  Then, and only then, did I ever think, Is spending time with this cute boy really worth it?

  If you’re a cute boy and you’re interested in bossing me around—something that, generally, I’m into—know that that’s where I draw the line. You can get away with a lot, you can hurt me in a myriad of consensual and delicious ways, but you cannot, under any circumstances, chase me around your house with a flamethrower. I’ll use the safe word every time on that one. Mkay?