What Growing Up Punk Taught Me About Being Gender Non-Conforming
As a teenager, I used to buy women’s jeans from the department store and sew the inseams. I would sew my pants as tight as possible, from the crotch down to the cuff. I would tighten the cuffs to a point where my feet could barely slip out of them.
In P.E. class, I would have to ask my friends to help me pull off my pants because they were so tight. In those days, Levi’s didn’t sell skinny jeans and nobody in my friend group was “out” as queer.
The cis girls in our friend group would sew their jeans, too. We would put patches on our them and on our jackets, too. We had cuts and dirt stains on all of our cloths. Our shirts were from thrift stores or from bands that we liked. Our hair was dyed bright colors—straightened and oddly cut.
One friend, Allie, cut my hair diagonally at the bangs. I had shaved bridges into the sides, and I was growing a rattail in the back.
In my hometown, there were goths, cholos, bros, skaters, the blacks, the tongans, preps and my friends, the punks.
For the most part, everyone minded their own business—except for the bros, who were always starting trouble with other groups. They even beat up a couple of the girls in our clique because they thought our pants were too tight.
Being punk was being an outcast, and it taught me how much society can isolate people that are different.
Our parents assumed that we were always high, though we were actually straight-edge. The police would always follow us, but we weren't troublemakers.
I was a smart kid, but the teachers never respected my ideas.
To be punk was to resist, to accept the burden of being gawked at in return for living a life of self-determination.
Someone might ask why put up with the burden, the harassment? I'd tell them, I have no interest in being part of the “normal” world or communicating with people who cannot accept my differences.
The punks accepted me for who I was, despite how I looked. The punks loved my differences.
Now, it's more than a decade later: I don’t really talk to punks anymore. I moved across the country and found different interests. I started focusing on my writing and I identify as gender non-conforming.
My struggle to understand my gender has been a long process, and it still continues. Lately, though, I've been thinking about the relationship between my teenage years as a punk and my reality as a gender non-conforming adult now.
I've come to understand that I have always been gender non-conforming. To be punk is to be gender non-conforming, to resist the cis standards of gender and beauty in favor of having agency in your life.
To be punk is to understand street harassment, job discrimination, police profiling and other costs associated with presenting yourself as outside of the gender binary.
I've often been told to think within binaries. People regularly say, "You're either male or female" and "You're either cis or trans." I don’t think its that simple.
My gender has a billion different opportunities for how it wants to present itself: I don’t think of male as the antithesis of female, a dichotomy that already erases intersex people. And I don’t think of trans as the antithesis of cis. Again, that's limiting.
I identify as gender non-conforming because I've never been privileged by white cisgender constructs. I have never seen a space for myself within the confines of cis manhood.
Maybe someday this feeling, this resentment, will change.
I don’t identify as trans (most of the time, anyway) because trans is also often thought of as part of a binary, a destination to reach. Those definitions don't relate to me: I don’t pass or identify as a woman or a man. Sometimes people try to tell me what my gender is, but it's really just their ignorance showing.
Being a gender non-conforming youth, the main thing I loved about growing up punk was that I could fail the binary and still didn't have to put up with any transmisogyny. I didn’t have to prove myself as "legitimate." I could just be.
Now, I feel so many expectations about my gender, from cis and trans people alike. Like they did when I was punk, or came out queer, I'm still told that my existence is just a phase.
And I’m finally in a place where I’m okay with that. I mean, even if my current gender presentation is just a phase, and shifts into something new, that’s exciting. That's an opportunity for me to learn more about myself.
Christopher Soto is a punk poet & prison abolitionist. To learn more, click here.
