#5: Gendering actions sucks.
TL:DR: Gendered actions make life harder to live sometimes.
So today started rough when I went to get into my car and found that it didn’t start. Now, I’m not a car person, but luckily I have a car with some fancy computer shit in it, so my dad was able to tell me what was wrong from all the back where he lives. It turned out that the battery was fucked and needed replaced. This sucks since batteries aren’t cheap, but overall, not too bad. I’m handy enough to do it. So I got the help of a friend (Thanks again if you see this!), bought a new battery, and we got it all taken care of.
However, it did kinda hurt to do it.
And it reminded me of another incident I had earlier this week.
At work, someone came in and asked me, as the person sitting at the front desk, to find someone not scared of spiders to kill a spider for them. Well, I’m not scared of spiders, so I got up and did it myself. But afterwards I felt terrible. Not just because I probably should have captured and released the spider (which I totally should have) but rather because, growing up, I was expected to take care of things like spiders and wasps for my mom and sister because I was one of the “big strong men” of the house and they were afraid of them. And so, in doing the same thing now, I had unfortunately taken on a masculine role and was feeling dysphoric due to it. And the fact that this is a thing is kinda stupid: actions don’t really belong to gender identities. However, from years in an upbringing with decently enforced gender roles, it is still a thing that wears on me to this day.
And my experience today with the battery was the same thing. Growing up, neither my sister nor my mom were expected to know how to fix things or do mechanic work. So doing something like handling a battery replacement isn’t a thing that that they would ever be doing. And here I was. Doing it. Doing the thing that I was told I would need to be able to do as a man.
So uh, lesson for y’all: be careful with gendering acts. It might just make it harder for someone else to get done whatever responsibilities they may have in day-to-day life.
Then again, I love how some acts I like to do are female gendered because gender euphoria, so...
Your mileage may vary?
- Vrell, Depressed Trans Girl
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