Gender expectations for afabs in high school are unhinged. A “friend” once made me feel bad because I carried fat in my breasts, just because she was insecure about having smaller breasts than I did. I didn’t even want them at all, but somehow I got shamed for them not being good enough.
The most baffling part is that I didn’t get my period until 17, so at no point during high school did I even have a bust for her to get jealous about, I was just a little chubby.
I was also regularly called a man for not plucking my pretty tame eyebrows and getting fake tans. I’d say that they might have been picking up on my egg status, but I’m pretty certain that’s not the case. Man, I hated high school.
(Sorry for the stilted terminology- I don’t feel comfortable using any word to describe 17 year olds’ chests, it turns out.)
Don’t worry, perfectly reasonable thing to be uncomfortable with imo.
It’s “funny” that very thought about gender expectations is what made my own gender crisis in high school so difficult to navigate. I was only aware of the full Binary transition options and so being amab I thought the only way to be “not boy” was to “be girl” instead, I didn’t know nonbinary was even a thing someone could be until my now wife heard my story over a decade later and introduced me to it.
So being the imaginative little doofus I am, I set about imagining my life from that perspective. Trying to see if I’d be happier as a girl. But what I kept coming back to was that as much as being a boy felt wrong, as much as I hated the gender expectations put on me for being born in that box, and as much as I wished that I had been born different because of things like being bullied for showing emotion or being seen as a predator for wanting to work with children deep down, all I’d be doing is trading one set of expectations I hated for a different set of expectations I hated in different ways.
I didn’t learn until much later that a lot of that had to do with subconsciously being very uncomfortable as an asexual person with the amount of overt sexualization women face. Which makes a ton of sense because one of the big “male” expectations I hated was being constantly made to feel like I was broken because I wasn’t looking to sleep with anything vaguely female shaped with a pulse.
Or feral, tbh.
Gender expectations for afabs in high school are unhinged. A “friend” once made me feel bad because I carried fat in my breasts, just because she was insecure about having smaller breasts than I did. I didn’t even want them at all, but somehow I got shamed for them not being good enough.
The most baffling part is that I didn’t get my period until 17, so at no point during high school did I even have a bust for her to get jealous about, I was just a little chubby.
I was also regularly called a man for not plucking my pretty tame eyebrows and getting fake tans. I’d say that they might have been picking up on my egg status, but I’m pretty certain that’s not the case. Man, I hated high school.
(Sorry for the stilted terminology- I don’t feel comfortable using any word to describe 17 year olds’ chests, it turns out.)
Don’t worry, perfectly reasonable thing to be uncomfortable with imo.
It’s “funny” that very thought about gender expectations is what made my own gender crisis in high school so difficult to navigate. I was only aware of the full Binary transition options and so being amab I thought the only way to be “not boy” was to “be girl” instead, I didn’t know nonbinary was even a thing someone could be until my now wife heard my story over a decade later and introduced me to it.
So being the imaginative little doofus I am, I set about imagining my life from that perspective. Trying to see if I’d be happier as a girl. But what I kept coming back to was that as much as being a boy felt wrong, as much as I hated the gender expectations put on me for being born in that box, and as much as I wished that I had been born different because of things like being bullied for showing emotion or being seen as a predator for wanting to work with children deep down, all I’d be doing is trading one set of expectations I hated for a different set of expectations I hated in different ways.
I didn’t learn until much later that a lot of that had to do with subconsciously being very uncomfortable as an asexual person with the amount of overt sexualization women face. Which makes a ton of sense because one of the big “male” expectations I hated was being constantly made to feel like I was broken because I wasn’t looking to sleep with anything vaguely female shaped with a pulse.
Sorry, I’m rambling… uh… gender expectations are bullshit? Yeah… yeah that.