At IKEA today, I had a “misgendering” experience in which a sales person indirectly referred to me as a “lady.” (She was directing a few other customers to some merchandise and used the phrase “by that lady over there.”) This hasn’t happened to me in years, and I suspect her snap gender attribution was based on my hair and skinny pants, having only seen me from behind — she corrected herself immediately as she walked past and saw my face.
Being read as a girl — and it happened constantly — used to bother me tremendously when I was a child, but I no longer get particularly upset when it happens. For a while now I’ve found it simply amusing, and if it occurred with any frequency I likely wouldn’t correct folks on it.
Anyway, I mentioned this on Twitter and received a few sympathetic replies. Part of one person’s remarks were that I don’t look like much of a girl, so they couldn’t imagine how this could have happened. The odd thing is, this clearly well-intentioned comment made me feel much worse than the original incident itself. Going to go ahead and add that to the pile of data about myself I’ve been considering lately.
Emphasis mine.
I’ve had many interactions like this over the years, and they can be so complicated and tricky to navigate. Reading the bolded part made me feel like that thing was actually happening to me again — well-meaning person hurries to reassure me that I’m obviously my assigned gender and don’t come across like I’m the other gender at all — and I still don’t really know how to explain how it makes me feel.
If anything, I guess figuring out that I’m more “neither” than “in between” makes this kind of thing a bit easier; instead of feeling like I’m being put at the wrong point on a line (and/or “doing it wrong” compared to what I’m supposed to be like), I just see it as people thinking I’m on that line somewhere when I’m not. The difference feels significant.
