The threads of gender

When I was little, my mother would threaten me with dishonour whenever I misbehaved.

“I’m going to call all your friends and tell them how terrible you are,” she would say. “I’m going to come to school and scream at you in front of everyone.”

 “Fine then!” I would yell back, “Do it! I dare you.”

 She never did.

This tactic had always worked so well on my brother; I think she was honestly quite baffled as to why she couldn’t control me with the threat of societal expectations like she could everyone else.

When I told my mother I was going to shave off my already short bob, she started to cry. I was perplexed. Was she really crying over a few strands of hair? What possible reason could she have to be so upset over protein filaments?

“Aku takut kamu dipanggil LGBT.” I’m scared you’ll be called LGBT.

“Good,” I replied, “There’s nothing wrong with being LGBT.”

So I shaved my head. I did it myself, with clippers that I bought from Kmart. I sheared off each lock and revelled at the new feel of my scalp. It excited me. It made me feel powerful and liberated, like I was weaving a story of gender and sexuality and beauty that was just for me.

The first thing my mother did when she saw it was ask if I was going to get a “sex change”. It was a harsh come down. Shaving my head was in such violation of her gender expectations that according to her, I may as well “get a penis”.

The more I learn about gender and all of the ways in which it arbitrarily denigrates, categorises, policies and expresses itself, the more I realise that there has been nothing particularly useful about gender in my life.

Gender has warped my relationship with my body, from my size to my body hair to my eyelid folds. It has normalised abusive behaviour, and coerced my psyche into accepting that behaviour, when I never thought I would put myself down like that. It has created unachievable expectations, limited my choices. Everything about being raised a girl and seen as a woman has been oppressive to me. And this categorisation is so utterly arbitrary. Why do we do it? I have no use for the word woman except to describe the material conditions of my oppression and even then it feels like I’m clinging to something I want no part in.

Slowly but surely, I have pulled at the threads of gender woven into my life. I began to question why someone’s gender or their body should impact whether I am attracted to them, and I hated that being straight was presented as the only option for my life. It’s not. I have worked to unravel how gender has dictated my life, my sexuality, my body, and my choices, in ways that I never consented to.

Yet even as I do, I am confronted over and over by the reaches of gender conformity. How declarative it is. What it seems to say about my family’s appearance in the community, their moral standing, their honour.

Not only is my mother obsessed with my gender performance, but she is also consumed with the idea that freeing myself from one gender necessitates identification with its ‘opposite’, and that somehow genitalia have something to do with it. It is an outrageous, transphobic mess and it really hurts.

Gender is a construct created by a society. It is flexible, it changes over time and between cultures, and it is something each person finds for themselves. You can be agender, or pangender, or genderqueer, on a spectrum between a few genders. It is not a matter of ‘opposites’; it is not a binary.

Yet every single time I visit my mother, it starts.

“Did you shave it again?”
“Don’t you want to grow it out just a little? So it has some style?”
“When are you going to grow your hair normal?”

I am constantly being berated for something that should be my choice but is inexplicably tied to familial duty: am I a good daughter? Have I worked hard enough to respect the sacrifices my parents have made for me? Do I make them proud? Even shallower, do I make them look good? Do I increase their standing in front of others? Do I play into the toxic respectability politics of the family? Apparently not, since my shorn head reflects so poorly on my mother that she cannot stand to let people from her community see me in public without ‘explaining’.

I think my mother is so concerned with our honour when it comes to my gender performativity and sexuality that in front of her peers she desperately attempts to ‘save face’. She has a litany of justifications and excuses to whip out when anyone she knows encounters my new hairstyle.

“Dia ada dandruff gawat.” She has terrible dandruff.

“Kepalanya ada alergi, makanya mesti dipotong.” She had an allergic reaction on her scalp, that’s why she had to cut it.

Considering how greatly this Confucian value of ‘saving face’ has impacted Chinese culture, it makes sense that she would interact this way with her family and friends. As she explained to me, she knows people probably say hurtful things about me (and my sexuality and gender). She doesn’t want people to look down on us, so she pre-empts their comments with excuses to protect me.

My haircut seems to be at odds with the very fabric of society as she knows it, and as a politically conscious young person it often feels like there’s an impossible chasm between my perception of life and hers.

My gender and sexuality are becoming more fluid and less confined by normative socialisation, and that is a strain on my relationship with my mother, even without me explicitly coming out. I have never been controlled by honour or ‘saving face’ and I’m only getting further and further away from her notion of gender. In her eyes, it’s probably better she says the derogatory comments she expects from her peers, instead of me having to deal with it from strangers.

It’s a complex task to try and resolve such opposing world views in a family context and despite the transphobic and homophobic comments, I do think that my mother is trying to protect me. Ultimately, she doesn’t want anyone in her largely Christian, Chinese and Indonesian circles to judge me or discriminate against me, and I know she would defend me in a heartbeat. From the times she’s transformed into a keyboard warrior to defend me online, to the very rare brag about my social justice activism (Oh your son’s a doctor? Well my daughter cares about human rights). They’re all signs that even though I embarrass her and her friends always send her news videos of my civil disobedience, she is always going to be there for me.

For now, I can bank on an ongoing negotiation and education process with my mother, because even though it feels like the whole world is judging us, our love for each other is stronger than the gender ties that bind us.

About the author

Bridget Harilaou

Bridget Harilaou is a mixed-race Asian-Australian with a single-minded passion for intersectional social justice and trouble-making (aka activism). She writes extensively about politics and race, and has been published in Junkee, HuffPost Blog and Honi Soit. As a radical anarcho-feminist things can get heavy; Bridget likes to unwind by enjoying the finer things in life, like spicy ethnic food and male tears.