I Am a Material Girl

Wrestling with the progress and regression of gender ideology

I was in first grade the first time I was cast as a boy. My school was putting on a recital and for one number, they divided us up into boys and girls, each group taking turns singing verses at the other. I can’t remember the content of the song, only that it was meant to be some kind of adorable and hilarious play on the gender wars. (This was the mid-80s.)

Trouble was, my class had more girls than boys, so some of us had to change ranks, including my friend Marissa. Our teacher, Miss Vicki, coached and coached her on how to stomp her foot, drop her voice, and look menacing. But sweet Marissa couldn’t do it. She simply couldn’t shed her essential girlness. 

I watched all this with frustration. It was so obvious what she needed to do. Finally, exasperated at this sorry situation slowing us all down, I stood up and showed her. “Marissa,” I said, “just do it like this.” I stomped my foot. I dropped my voice. I looked menacing. (This was before I learned about not giving notes to your fellow actors.) 

Miss Vicki looked at me for a long moment. And just like that, Marissa was back on Team Girl, and I’d been shuttled over to join the boys. I was furious. I didn’t want to wear a goddamn fake mustache and trousers and stomp around. I wanted to wear a beautiful dress and swish my hips! 

I cried my way through lunch, until Miss Vicki took me aside and told me she was counting on me because I was the only girl in the class talented enough to pull it off. That did the trick. (Never underestimate the power of appealing to a performer’s ego.)

I’ve been playing men ever since. Girls and women too, of course, but if there’s a production that calls for cross-gender casting, you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll be playing a fella. 

I don’t know what it is about me that lends me to playing male, as I’m doing right now (plug time!) in Emilia with Ten Thousand Things Theater. I’m gangly, thin-limbed, with B-cup boobs and an unmistakably female ass. It might be my height, or my voice (which tends toward the chesty). Or it might be something more ineffable—a proclivity for channeling androgynous and masculine energies. 

If I’m honest, some of those energies have always come more easily to me than overtly female ones. I have more memories than I can count of feeling out of place amidst rituals of girlhood—playing with hair and makeup, gossiping, doing fucking crafts. Particularly in my teens, “doing femaleness” often felt like as much of an act as playing male onstage. 

Not that I was drawn to boyhood. Sports, rough-housing, video games—yawn. Mostly, I just wanted to read. 

I’m not unique. I know this now. The teen years are one long stretch of feeling like everyone else is effortlessly inhabiting a role that feels forced and false to you. All you see from the outside is all the other girls flawlessly performing girlhood, in a way that feels unattainable. What you don’t see is the effort everyone else is putting into their own performance.

I suppose there must be some tween and teen girls who genuinely feel entirely, uncomplicatedly aligned with all the norms and expectations of femininity. But I wasn’t one of them, and neither were any of my current, adult women friends. To a one, they all report feeling uncomfortable and estranged from the trappings of femaleness at some point (or many) in their youth. To some extent, I still do, though it causes me far less distress than it did in 7th grade.

Case in point: I don’t like to be called an actress. I prefer the gender-neutral “actor,” which feels more aligned with the quirky character work I tend to do. I’m used to the occasional befuddlement when people learn my name is Mo, which I guess many still associate with the male bartender in The Simpsons. In my marriage, I do most of the driving and manage our finances. 

To me, these things are unremarkable. But according to the ascendent gender ideology, they may be signs that I don’t—or shouldn’t—actually identify as a woman at all. 

I’ve long understood and advocated for those with gender dysphoria—the acute, often lifelong sense of a profound mismatch between your gender and your physical body. But in recent years, gender ideology has expanded to include more subtle and varied notions of gender nonconformity, gender fluidity, and nonbinary identities, all of which, in my view, seem to be based on rather parochial, old-school definitions of gender. 

We seem now to be in an interesting place, where we treat social constructs (like gender stereotypes) as fixed and immutable, and material reality (like biological sex) as a flexible abstraction. 

These images are from a book published last year called Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers:

This is the clearest summation I’ve seen of this ideology. A woman is someone who feels aligned with the most stereotypical aspects of femininity as it’s traditionally understood. If that doesn’t describe you, then you’re not a woman, regardless of your biology.

This helps explain why so many young people are identifying as non-binary, genderqueer, or genderfluid, and using a combination of gendered and gender-neutral pronouns (e.g. she/they). Also called “rolling pronouns,” these signify a “fluctuating gender identity,” in which someone feels aligned with stereotypical femininity at some times, but not at others. 

I confess I’m struggling with this. Who feels aligned with a stereotype at all times? Wasn’t loosening the constraints of gender norms a key principle of feminism? Isn’t the idea of immutable gender roles philosophically anathema to gay rights? (A gay man presumably doesn’t identify with all the behaviors and roles traditionally associated with men, but I suspect many would balk at the suggestion that this means they’re not men.) Isn’t this ideology actually quite regressive in the way it returns to a pre-Free to Be You and Me conception of what men and women are capable of doing and being? It seems curious for a movement that aims to dismantle rigid gender roles to wind up essentially reinforcing them.

I’m trying to stay open-minded and curious about all this. I’m trying to understand. I’m grateful for the conversations I’ve been having about these questions with friends, family, and castmates, many of whom are nursing similar questions but worry that discussing them publicly risks accusations of transphobia or bigotry. As I’ve written about before, I think liberalism requires the open, respectful, and rigorous discussion of ideas, particularly those that increasingly carry punitive consequences for questioners and detractors. 

I also realize that history is one long story of older fuddy-duddies being dragged into social progress by younger people motivated by ideals and visions that their elders often fail to understand. At 41, I’m reluctant to embrace fuddy-duddy status, but I have to acknowledge it’s possible. So I’m trying not to get locked into defending my instinctive reactions and to earnestly look for how this movement might constitute progress.

Here’s where I am. I enjoy that these are qualities I have as a woman: A deeper voice. Assertiveness. Height, presence, intellect. Leadership ability. Savviness with numbers. A total boredom with fashion and hairdos and hopeless incapacity for baking and knitting. A high risk tolerance and preference for action over a lot of blah-blah-blah. Impatience with excessive emotionality. I can encompass all this with my femaleness. Just by living as myself, I get to participate in expanding what femaleness is. 

I chafe at the notion that because these are not “behaviors, presentations, and roles typically associated with the female sex” that I must be something other than a woman. The whole idea offends me. Womanhood is not a tiny box, full of glitter and giggles. It’s a billowing bell curve, with ever-expanding edges.

I’m concerned that more and more young people are deciding that if they fall—always or occasionally—on a tail end of the bell curve for the “behaviors, presentations, and roles typically associated with” their sex that they should define themselves as something else entirely. 

It might be more compelling if doing so delivered obvious mental health benefits. But in fact this movement often seems to encourage a sort of brittle fragility, with folks suffering severe psychological distress if the world doesn’t consistently discern and affirm their subjective identity with the correct language. 

I am trying to see how this is progress, how it’s creating more joy, flexibility, resilience, and possibility. How it’s better than Prince, David Bowie, Annie Lennox, and Ani Difranco pushing the edges of male and female further out in the public imagination than they’d been before, until those edges overlap. How it’s not shrinking those categories back down and away from each other, making them more firmly rooted in the reductive stereotypes that previous generations worked so hard to dismantle. 

To pose the question in terms of solidarity: If you have to leave womanhood in order to be free of gendered expectations, what does that mean for women? Why not stay and advocate for liberation of the whole group? Is the centuries-long fight of feminism done? Have we surrendered the whole category of womanhood to stereotypes? More emotional than logical; submissive; nurturing; self-effacing; gossipy; domestic; concerned with physical appearance. Is this it?

What would progress look like to me instead? 

First off: total freedom, respect, and civil liberties for transgender and gender dysphoric people. But/and/also, less angst and energy around the whole question of gender identity and labels in general. An acknowledgment that we’re always, all of us, channeling different combinations of energies (yin and yang, masculine and feminine, receptive and assertive, etc.) and our wellbeing depends in part on helping them flow with ease and less anxiety, judgment, and meaning-making. 

Here’s what I’d say to a young person trying to figure out who and what they are today: Express yourself boldly. Channel whatever energies serve you. And let go of the need for the world’s perceptions to always line up perfectly with your inner experience. Don’t let your peace hinge on others mirroring you back exactly how you see (or want to see) yourself. That way lies misery.

Cultivate more interest in how you see the world than in how the world sees you. Try on whatever identities you like. Maybe you do need to venture away from boyhood or girlhood to see what else becomes available to you there. Maybe you’ll stay there, or maybe you’ll return and bring what you found back to the rest of us, make it available to us too. Go on. Get yourself—and all of us—free.