Finding – and sticking with – one’s identity can be a lifelong struggle. From a very young age, people have expectations of you. Parents and guardians have very strong expectations of what you should like, like hobbies, clothes, food and friendship. When you hit your teens, and you become more aware of the individuality of your feelings, these expected ideas might stop fitting you. You want to decide on your own clothing, you develop tastes in food that you had never eaten before, and you might make friends in unexpected places.
When you struggle with your gender expression – commonly from gender dysphoria – the feeling of failing expectations is compounded even more. Now, you’re ‘not who they thought you were’. If you’re born a little baby boy, then there are people who expect you, entirely without reason, to grow up to love cars, bacon and sports. These hobbies, clothes and foods that we all love to hate are tied to a very specific expectation of you. And when the root cause of that story – because it is only a story that parents tell themselves – falls away, parents don’t always know what to think.
Would that it were only the parents. We carry these expectations forth into the world, and turn a wicked amount into prejudice. We internalise our prejudices, and we become the person our opinions shape us to be. Even if those opinions are disguised self-hatred.
We internalise expectations so that we eventually trip ourselves up.
Anohni and internalisation
All of this is a roundabout way of talking about how deaf you can become to even the most obvious of things. When I first listened to I Am a Bird Now, it was love at first sight. I devoured the album, but I never read anything significant into the lyrics. I think I was avoiding them. From For Today I Am a Boy:
One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful woman.
One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful girl.
I know, right? How fucking thick am I? I know now that the album was for Anohni herself. That it isn’t a selfless record for some ‘other’. It was always the story, the voice and the pain of Anohni that we were allowed to listen to.
But now I can’t hear it without hearing my own struggle. When I first heard that song a decade ago, did I hear it then? Why did I not get it? Had I internalised transphobia ’til my eyes clouded over?
My dad has always been the musical one. He played me my first classics, showed me concerts on tape, and took me to shows and festivals. He’s the literal kind – he loves lyrics that describe something beautiful and emotional and deep, even if it’s a bit on the nose.
From him, I got my love for Queen. I watched the Freddie Mercury tribute concert so many times that I’m sure the tape is now a tattered rag of magnetic plastic. It’s a tribute concert to a bisexual, queer man who died of AIDS, and it has one of my earliest memory imprints in the form of David Bowie and Annie Lennox performing Under Pressure. Pretty queer stuff.
Despite all this, I don’t think he’s ever really heard the messages of love and support, and of insecurity and self-doubt. Maybe he can’t hear what Anohni says, either, in the same way that I couldn’t.
The fact that questioning your gender is an inherently insecure thing doesn’t help with impostor syndrome. It certainly doesn’t help in conversations with people who dismiss insecurity as de facto being wrong. Self-doubt is a multi-layered feeling for me: I feel it when I look in the mirror, I feel it when I introduce myself to strangers, and I feel it when I think about my parents. What they ‘own’ of me is what they are used to. Their expectations of me are, for them, law. Born a son. Always a son. Whatever I do that differs from their expectation is a breach of contract, and a breach of trust.
If they see me simply as their child, then what does that stand for? Do I stand for these ideas of masculinity? Because I have never stood for those, and they know that. Do I stand for their expectations of the typical boy? Because those too never really lasted. I am the same as ever. What are they unwilling to see?