Competence

Thursday's windstorm ripped some of the asphalt shingles off my roof and dismantled a long stretch of the vinyl skirting that runs around the base of the outer walls of my house.  I went out in the morning to survey the damage and found myself pursuing a truly feeble line of thought...oh, this is terrible, whatever shall I do, who is going to help me?  It took a moment of real effort to make myself remember, hey, I know how to use a hammer and a shovel, and I'm good at finding clever solutions to problems; and then I remembered I had some shingles in my shed and got the ladder and some appropriate nails and went up and patched the holes well enough to hold until I can hire someone to do it right, and then dug out the gravel along the base of the ripped-out skirting and reset the guide-tracks and reinstalled the skirting, better than it had been before. 

While I was doing these things, I felt male.

Something else to consider:  a big part of my job is training people to talk on the radio, and over the years I have observed that many more of my female trainees than male ones are intimidated by the studio technology.  Their hands flutter, they dither...I was talking about this with Deb, and she said that her father never taught her anything, as he did her brothers, about how things are made and work and can be fixed, and that in that moment those women are five years old, struggling with a lifetime of the anxiety of never having been taught such things.

Here's another angle:  romantically, sexually, I definitely begin to feel the excitement of the idea of being the passive one, the seducee...I find I desire someone else's desire for me, and that person's acting on that desire, taking the lead, pursuing me...ooh, yes...

Finally, let it be noted that in the same journal entry, fifteen months ago now, in which I wrote "I just want to be a girl," I also wrote this sentence:  "I am so sick of being strong."

To my working list of what I consider to be my positive feminine traits - that I'm empathetic, collaborative, emotional, nurturing - it seems I need to add something less positive:  an impulse to passivity, weakness, even helplessness.  The more femme I'm feeling, the more I forget that I am smart and capable and strong.  My sense of competence evaporates.

What's up with that?

Um...uh...*scratches head*...that's a toughie.  The whole history of women in the world looms in the mind...

Well, I'll tell you one thing:  I intend to become as much a woman as I can be, but I do not want to give up feeling competent to do it.  So somehow I have to figure out how to combine the softness I yearn for with the hardness I have learned and earned.  I find myself back again at a question I have pondered before, and have not yet answered to my satisfaction.  What constitutes specifically feminine strength?  How can you be strong and still womanly?  What is a strong woman?

I haven't figured that out yet.  Any thoughts?  :-)

p.s.  I got in the paper!  I'm the cover girl (in the paper version) for an article on trans identity in this week's Portland Phoenix:  click here to read.

Comments

[Robin]

Hi Dee, Here's an interesting article that pertains to this post. I hope you don't get too caught up in gender stereotypes as you proceed on your path. The women I know are competent on many levels, and don't seem to think twice about it. And their self-confidence/competence certainly is nothing that could make them feel less feminine.

http://tinyurl.com/y9ggbcs