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Gender and body memoirs
I’ve only seen my dad Nikki in a suit twice in my life, once at my sister’s wedding, and once myself. It’s strange to see her wearing it – my dad came out as transgender in her 60s. She usually wears pretty floral tops and slacks, always wearing a blonde wig and full-face makeup. Her fingernails are often painted pale pink and she has an enviable collection of jewelery. On Sam’s birthday a few months ago, the magician we hired asked how Nikki was associated with his family. I went out in front of her and introduced her as my “parent”. This is the best way to recognize her father while respecting her gender identity. Without hesitation, the sorcerer said, “Nice to meet you, I love you.”
It was faced and painful to see Nikki come out and enter some sort of adolescence in the 1960s. She wore a tight red PVC dress and a long platinum blonde wig. She posted a photo of herself provocatively posing in lace underwear online. Many of the transgender people who appear later in life understand that they are entering such a second adolescence in search of gender identity. I don’t resent it to anyone. See if you can express on the outside how they feel on the inside. Find your edge.
I asked Nikki when she first learned that she was transgender. “I was about eight years old and liked to wear her mother’s fur coat,” she says. She also says she reads her mother’s magazine, “full of pretty women from the 1950s.” My dad grew up in Ravensbourne in the 1950s, but is now in the lower suburbs of Ōtepoti. Her own father was a butcher and her mother was an elegant woman who dominated their family. My dad didn’t yet know what transgender was. She didn’t know how she was different.
When asked why it took so long to come out to Nikki, “The main thing in my life at the time was the pressure from my mom to do well at school. Dad, but a nice kind person. I worked hard to support us, but it wasn’t the role model my mother wanted of me. What I’m trying to say is that your identity is under other pressures. I think it’s often rare. I think that was the pattern of my life. “
During recovery I saw a Netflix special Nanette By comedian Hannah Gadsby. This is a very interesting, political and traumatic explanation of her experience of Gazby being “unusual.” As women and lesbians who live in larger bodies and have a traditional masculine appearance, people often consider her to be a “female by mistake” and she is persecuted for others. It is reported that it has been done. Gazby says she was beaten by a man for being a “female bassoon”, sexually abused as a child, and raped by two men in her twenties. And is it worse than these attacks? Shame and self-loathing she has.
Nikki and I finally discussed femininity when she proudly showed us a photo of her airbrush. We were studying for our parents at the house of Daejeon, where I grew up. I flew off for work and spent the night with my parents. She handed me a color printout of her photo, and the blonde Ingénue staring at me looked like her early twenties. She had smooth skin and strawberry lips, and her face was cheeky and attractive. At that time, I was marking the students’ creative writing tasks. Her hair was dragged into a ponytail and she wore a baggy T-shirt and track pants. “Stop buying this beauty bullshit,” I suddenly said angry. I pointed to the unmakeup look of greasy hair. “Am I not a woman?” I asked. Dad looked like he had fallen badly. “But you are always beautiful,” she said.
*
That day, in a quarrel with my father, I felt that I possessed femininity. She felt she was all wrong. However, Nikki never had the opportunity to live as a woman in her twenties. She had parties, wore short dresses, slept with strangers, and expressed her youth in other ways. She feels erotic, feminine and powerful. She did not have the opportunity to learn from other parts of herself that the desired and valuable feelings were born. Those feelings have nothing to do with our appearance, even if they say something else. At the age of 30, Dad was still looking for a local library and he was looking up who he was.
Late one night, a few weeks after surgery, I finally realized that my uterus was gone. When I realized I couldn’t go back, a big wave of panic swelled in my stomach. Where was it? Was it in some biological waste treatment unit? I imagined the uterus being scratched on the side of a plastic container in the dark.
The next day, at my request, the obstetrician and gynecologist sent me a picture of my uterus taken by the technician who performed the biopsy. When I clicked on the email attachment, the image was displayed in full screen. An organ with such a background. In the picture, my womb looks like it’s dancing. The bluish fallopian tubes are rippling from the reddish mass of the uterus. Although taken from above, the uterus appears to be standing and is balanced on a thick white plug in the cervix. I immediately loved this strange and beautiful animal. Even if it’s gone, it’s always part of the first 40 years of my feminine days, and I’m grateful that it’s been in me for some time.
That afternoon I will send an email to update my dad about my recovery. Subject: “Today we are both women without a womb.”
*
This book is a conversation with me about my own femininity. After all, I lied when I told my gynecologist that I knew what constitutes my femininity. Until I had a hysterectomy, I didn’t really think about the meaning of femininity. I couldn’t answer the question, “What is my femininity?” Without relying on cisgender biological descriptions or framing femininity against masculineness. All my answers felt like a hollow reading of what I was taught and told. I knew my woman was warm and life-giving, but I couldn’t reach out and grab it, like the sunlight cutting through a wall.
To write this book, I pulled my woman’s thread to see how it unravels. And how fast has it been? The act of seeing has shown me a stitch: the standards of beauty in Western society, the gaze of men, the fear of aging, the politics of hair, care, my grandmother, the transition of life stages, the whales and trampling of sharks. Darcy Steinke, Arock Weid Menon, Megagie Jane Club, Maggie Nelson, Reni Ed Lodge, Judith Butler, Barbara Brooks, Natalie Wynn, Ani Mikaele, Atul Gawande, etc. Gender, aging, and society in a way that all people have opened the door to the next idea. I kept walking on those doors. The result is what I call the story of the arrival of middle age. I tried to understand which part of femininity was mine, it was given to me, and of the two I wanted to keep.
The purpose of this book is to help other women think a little about their femininity, and beyond the provision of my own experience, anyone can read my bibliography if they wish. must.
This book is written to unleash my femininity, so it focuses specifically on the meaning of being middle-aged. When I was young, I was so absorbed in the ideal femininity of society that I couldn’t write this book until now. Being perfect means being safe, so I wanted to be that perfect woman. And as a traditional, attractive and educated Pakeha woman, I was often able to approach (and benefit from) her ideals. I was one of the “good” people and was praised for how devoted I was to my self-destruction. Like many women in emotionally abusive relationships, I protected and defended abusers.
Failure to meet the ideal femininity of society brought me here. Since I was in my 40s, I’ve grown thicker, wrinkled, and wrinkled. I have white hair and thick arms. My face is relaxed. Time shaped my character. I can’t reproduce anymore because I don’t have a uterus. Also, I want to think that I am good at it. This natural and normal process of aging has made me more and more invisible and socially irrelevant. I hope it will continue. However, in middle age, I became able to understand gender norms more clearly. It showed me how much of my self-esteem and identity was associated with being her hungry and quiet young woman. Failure was my salvation. Because it worked me to see how my femininity works. Look, you can now choose.
This book is also a work of a particular zeitgeist, the work of the first decades of the 21st century, and the #MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQIA + rights, and earthquakes that require crossing transinclusive feminism. .. I’m not an expert on any of these topics-I’m just someone trying to understand what it’s like to live well in these places. But there is no shortage of specialists. I hope this book respects their voice. I hope that women’s conversations will begin in a friendly room and with each other.
Quoted from the memoir released today, Notes on femininity Available at Sarah Jane Burnett (University of Otago Publishing, $ 30), bookstores nationwide.