Yuan Changying 1st Prize Winner’s Observations – ‘I am from…’

This blog series showcases the student winners of the Yuan Changying Prize, sponsored by GENDER.ED and SPS’s Gender Politics Research Group. The prize recognises outstanding ‘gender observations’ written by students (and nominated by tutors) in the pre-Honours course Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World, convened by Prof. Meryl Kenny and Dr. Hemangini Gupta. Gender observations require students to link material from the course to their own day-to-day experiences and observations of ‘doing gender’. The prize is named after Yuan Changying in consultation with students, in recognition of the first female Chinese graduate in the University of Edinburgh’s history. 

By Rob Robinson

I am from a place of great privilege. I am white; I speak English; I am male; I don’t have any disabilities; I am in my thirties; I am a parent. My parents have a happy marriage. They were working class, but have moved upwards in social standing. They are moderately wealthy; enough that I never had to worry about the cost of anything growing up. Not the very top of the heap, but close enough to it. And it stays that way, as long as people never find out about the rest of me. I am intersexed; I am a transman; I am queer. The interaction of these identities with the position of privilege I can occupy has resulted in instances of conflict and has also allowed me to experience shifts between identities. Because of the nature of the instances of conflict, I’m also going to discuss subjects regarding physical and sexual violence, which might be difficult to read. 

As Judith Butler (2011) notes, gender is performative rather than being an objective fact, resulting in negative consequences for individuals who disrupt the expected norms.  West and Zimmerman (1987, pp. 125) also state their experiences of students becoming confused after having it explained to them that sex was immutable biology, only to be confronted with examples of ambiguity. I know what that feels like. When I was a teenager, having been told all my life that I was a girl, who would grow up to be a woman, my voice began to break and I grew a beard, at the same time as I began to develop breasts. Prior to puberty, any  non-feminine behaviours were framed by adults as something I would grow out of. My biological reality shocked people. I was told my voice cracking was an affectation, and my facial hair was caused by ‘attempting to shave like a boy’, as though it was something I was doing on purpose. I did shave my facial hair –  because I couldn’t bear being taunted about being a ‘circus freak’. Adults in my life were unwilling to admit that it had been present before this. It was easier to believe that I was purposely rebelling somehow than it was to accept ambiguity in my biology. The latter might lead to questions about their assumptions that sex was not a moral certainty, which could easily be deduced by looking at certain physical signifiers (ibid, pp. 132). Very little thought was given, at any point, to how or why this might be happening to me; there was an overwhelming desire to pretend it wasn’t happening. I was told I was a girl and, somehow, experiencing this rebellion in my biology was something I must have agency over.   

If physical ambiguity wasn’t acceptable, it’s not surprising that behavioural ambiguity was worse. Although Connell (2020 pp. 8) notes that gender ambiguity can arouse fascination and desire as well as disgust, this comment was made predominantly in terms of feminine men and transwomen. In my experience, masculine women and transmen don’t engender the same kind of sexualisation, except in terms of threat. Prior to my coming out as a transman, I was often told that I was ‘ugly’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘sullen’, because I didn’t smile on demand for men. Once I hit puberty, I was, like many non-conforming people, threatened with corrective rape. In one particular instance, I was playing football, as the goalkeeper. I saved a shot from a boy and he crashed into me, falling to the floor. I threw the ball away. He jumped to his feet and encroached into my personal space, balling his fists and telling me that I shouldn’t be playing with boys and that he was going to rape me to ‘make me act like a proper girl’. I remember thinking that I wasn’t going to let him treat me like a woman and physically attacked him, beating him into submission. We were both eleven years old. In this altercation, both of us demonstrated a disturbing understanding of what gender was. We both associated girls with sexual objectification and passivity. He expressed anger that I didn’t behave in line with our mutual understanding of what a girl was. I rejected the idea of being ‘treated’ like a woman entirely and expressed that by resorting to the most unfeminine thing possible – physical violence. This understanding is not surprising; Connell (2020, pp. 14) notes that in ethnographic research of schools, dominant expressions of masculinity in boys often involves the assumption of physical prowess, sexual dominance and predation, with girls expected to accept harassment and make themselves sexually available, including to actions that constitute sexual assault.  

In this act of violence, I demonstrated a capacity to adopt hegemonic masculinity to protect myself. In this, my relative privilege become evident. I could do this because I was capable of adopting and fitting into the norms that, were I not a transman, I would have been born into. As Connell (1995, pp. 77) describes, hegemonic masculinity is the accepted gender behaviours that legitimise the dominance of men and the subjugation of women. In choosing violence, I reproduced that hierarchy; a woman may be expected to be a victim, but I was not a woman, so as a man, I resisted; men should be active and ready to move to violence, so I was and did. However, I was only capable of doing this at all because I happened to fit what hegemonic masculinity defined as acceptable. My personality naturally fit into that role and I was able to conform to it. Had I been black, my experience would likely have been very different; it is likely that I would have been characterised as unstable or out of control, following the dominant schema for black masculinity (Curry, 2018, pp. 6). Ironically, I, far more than a young black man, am actually capable of adopting these norms. As a white transman, I experienced this in the way language changed in reference to me. When I transitioned, the same people who once called me ‘ugly’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘sullen’ started calling me ‘handsome’, ‘assertive’ and ‘stoic’. My behaviours didn’t change, just the context of the body presenting those behaviours. I experienced instead a total re-writing of my history. It was as if the period where I had been socialised and thought of as female never existed. I was typically masculine, so the past could not have happened. Family spoke of me being a happy boy who knew what he wanted in life. Thus, masculinity was historically ascribed to me, as people around me re-did the initial gendering process. As West and Zimmerman (1987, pp. 136) discuss, gender is both something we do and something done to us. I simply had the unusual experience of witnessing it being done again. 

Having transitioned, I was able to blend in. The price of this was never being permitted to deviate from the expected norms. I had to be a heterosexual, monogamous man who would marry a woman and have children. As Garwood (2016) discusses, this was even expected in legislation, as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 both enabled me to have a son with my female partner and encoded that I should be exactly like a cisgender man in my approach to fatherhood. As long as I was able to do that, to pretend that I had never been anything other than the very masculine presentation that I favoured, there would not be any problems. I very quickly found a problem – although happy and content in my relationship with my partner, I found myself becoming intensely attracted to my male best friend. Worse, he became intensely attracted to me. This same-sex attraction was terrifying to experience for both of us, although I particularly experienced a perpetual fear that I was not ‘really’ as masculine as I internally felt, that these desires would invalidate me as a man. As Gwenffrewi (2022, pp. 82) notes, transwomen historically felt they had to present as hyperfeminine. I felt I had to be hypermasculine, and part of that was rejecting the sexual attention of other man. Romantic attention was worse, given romance is often stereotyped as feminine. In accepting it, it felt as though I would have to shatter my identity and risk exposure as counterfeit, that to acknowledge my queerness would be to reject my maleness. My best friend admitted that he experienced similar issues, despite being cisgender – he was able to acknowledge that he might have been attracted to feminine men, but the idea of being attracted to a masculine one was shocking to him. Arguably, we both feared deviations from the ideal that hegemonic masculinity presented to us. As Connell (1995, pp. 78) notes, homosexual attraction is often merged with femininity and thus becomes a subordinate masculinity, expelled from the mainstream.  

Ultimately, I rejected the idea that I had to reject maleness to be attracted to another man. I also rejected the idea that monogamy and the traditional family unit made sense – it didn’t, for me, or for my partners, and we now raise our son together. I also rejected and became horrified by my original conformity with hegemony, even as I uncomfortably recognise that it protected me in many ways. I am from a very visible and very different family now, and have to deal with the loss of that protection. Of course, Connell (1995, pp. 70) notes that hegemonic masculinity is often correlated with bravery and resilience – so in the end, I am ‘masculine’ enough to say that I am from a queer,  non-traditional family unit, and from myself.  

References 

Butler, J. (2011) Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender | Big Think

Connell, R. (2020) Gender: In World Perspective, 4th Edition. Oxford: Polity Press 

Connell, R (1995) Masculinities. Oxford: Polity Press 

Curry, T. (2018) ‘Killing Boogeymen: Phallicism and the Misandric Mischaracterizations of Black Males in Theory’ Res Philosophica, 95(2), pp. 235–272 

Garwood, E. (2016) ‘Reproducing the homonormative family: neoliberalism, queer theory and same-sex reproductive law’ Journal of International Women’s Studies, 17(2), pp. 5–17  

Gwenffrewi, G. (2022) ‘Punk Mood, Junk Food: Portrayals of Transgender Apocalypse’ in Gavin, H. (eds) Women and the Abuse of Power, Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Bingley: Emerald Publishing, pp. 79–97 

West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987) ‘Doing Gender.’ Gender and Society, 1(2), pp. 125–151 

Author Bio

When he wrote this essay, Rob was a 2nd Year BSc Social Work Student. He believes passionately in social justice and is fascinated by the ambiguity of gender and sexuality in everyday life. When not breaking hegemonies, he enjoys RPGs, building and painting small plastic models and grappling with his energetic toddler.