When I first knew...

Aunt B over at Tiny Cat Pants had a post the other day about the moment she first knew she was a feminist.

I have such a story, though I would argue that I didn't know anything about "feminism" at the time. But this was a moment when I first knew that something was "up" in the world that I didn't understand or like.

This is a story that I sometimes tell (with a little variation) to my freshman as a moment in my life that I can chart as a "life changing event."

Okay. Here it is:

I was around 7 (give or take a year) when I was sent home from school for having head lice (this is the part I usually skip). It was horribly embarrassing because they call you out in front of the entire class, call your parent, and send you home. Mom was mad because she had to come get me, and she was not happy about the lice. So we went to the drug store, stocked up on the appropriate medicines and combs, and went home to treat my problem.

So, I was scrubbed and combed, rinsed and repeated more times that my scalp wants to remember. It was a painful process. In the end, it was decided that my hair had to be cut off. I don't remember caring too much about the hair, to be honest; I just didn't want to have lice anymore. The hair went.

Soon after, I was in K-mart watching another kid play a hand-held electronic football game. I stood behind him and yearned to play, but I was too timid to ask for a turn. I don't know how I was dressed, but I imagine I had on jeans and a t-shirt. I was not thinking about anything but the lights and beeps of that little football game when a woman approached us from behind and said to (what I think must have been ) her son, "Let the little boy play too."

I looked around me. No one else was there. There were three of us: the mother, the boy playing the game, and me. I was the boy she referred to. Me? a boy?

After the confusion, I understood that my haircut, the simple length of my hair, must have made her mistake me for a boy. This had never happened to me before even though I always wore masculine clothes and no jewlrey, because (I reasoned) I had had long hair for as long as I could remember. I realized that the way I look (my hair, my clothes, the toys I am interested in, the shape of my body) signifies my gender, not my biological sex. I also realized that I was attached to the label of "girl" and that I did not want to be a boy, even if I didn't mind looking like one, acting like one, or having the benefits that come from being one (remind me later to tell you about motorcycles).

The root of my "gender chip" (see previous comments on this post) seems to reach to this moment. There may have been other moments, but this is the one I remember.

Me: wanting to play football, unwilling to assert myself, and shocked by the news that I seem (to others) to be something I am not.