Attention Seeking

I have been told that people like me, who present gender in atypical ways, are attention whores. "You can just be whoever you are. No one's questioning that", they say, (contradicting my experience, because some people definitely question that). "But by dressing the way you are, you're drawing attention to yourself, so as far as I'm concerned, you brought it on yourself".

This was in response to me telling about when I was physically assaulted a month ago on 14th street while wearing an orange skirt.

The person went on to say "I don't mean they've got any right to attack you. I'm just saying you did things that we could all sort of predict might lead to that kind of thing happening".

I'll take "Victim Blaming 101" for $500, Alex.

Look, here's the deal. People started drawing attention to me being a femme (sissy, whatever) when I was quite young. How I sat. The clothes I wore and how I wore them. The idea was that they get to draw attention to my difference, and I was expected to try to ameliorate the situation, to make more of an effort to fit in and hide the ways in which I wasn't like other male kids in the school.

My fourth grade teacher never had much patience for "Well, he started it", but, well, I can't help that: They started it. They get to draw attention to my difference but if I do anything that highlights it, I'm an attention seeker?

It reminds me of a conversation in grad school about women's footwear. Someone pointed out that a lot of the shoes designed for women are noisy; they make clack, clack sounds when you walk in them. "So when you wear those, you're broadcasting 'Hey everybody, I'm female' wherever you go. So isn't that luring in the attention you complain about, the unwanted public harassment you get?"

One of the women students replied that she'd originally gone everywhere simply as a person but people kept drawing her attention to the fact that she was a girl. As if perhaps she'd never noticed or something. And she began to assert that she was indeed a girl, especially when she went places that girls didn't generally go, because if she never did and they always did, it ended up feeling like something she was ashamed of, and she wasn't.

That's how I feel about being a gender invert, a sissy femme male. I've spent a lifetime encountering the assumption that I was ashamed of it, that I would prefer that nobody notice, that I agreed that it was inferior to how the other males were.

But I like who I am and I'm entitled to indicate that I'm proud and happy about it.


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