Labeled Life - Caroline Pitone
Caroline P.
Ms. Pahomov
1/9/17
Labeled Life
While my mother was pregnant with me, she always believed that I was going to be a boy ever since she found out she was having a baby. But then I arrived, a surprise of gender for my parents, as well as a surprise of being a 22 inch long baby with a full head of hair and screeching that flowed from my mouth. At a time of my life of being a toddler, I would say I loved dolls and Barbies, and I loved dresses and pink, and things like stuffed animals and princess sets. I loved these toys so much, but I don't know if it was because they were marketed towards my assigned gender, or if I voluntarily was attracted to these plastic objects. I always will wonder if I still would have loved them if I'd been exposed to other toys instead more often.
As time went on in my life, my mother and father put me in sports like tennis, soccer, martial arts, hockey, and so on, ever since I was five years old. I adored these activities and they soon became the only thing I really loved to do. Things began to change a bit for me and my perspective upon things, as I started to closely inspect my environment and the people I would be placed around during the activities I would do. I started hanging out with boys more. I observed that all of their hair was cut short in a similar style, with slightly off voices that were completely different from mine. Their pants looked larger than what their waist could support at times, and their t-shirts would cut them into the shapes of perfect boxes. Their muscles were more defined than mine and they seemed to have different nail beds than I did. Growing up as an athlete was very life changing for me and it was something I always loved to do and looked forward to. I was always in co-ed, which means it was both boys and girls in the same sport and in the same environment. At the time, I remember usually being one of the only girls on the team. Hanging out with boys was always something in my comfort zone and it always felt more appropriate since there were never usually girls around me in a hobby that I enjoyed so much.
Everyone's sports uniforms were always the same, with the only difference of the individual number on the back of each jersey. I never saw anyone differently, as everyone wore the same thing. When it came time for dressing off the field at the age of around eight years old, I despised wearing skirts and dresses. “Why should I wear that? It isn't comfortable!”, I would exclaim on and on, while cramming in enough words in the short mornings to my parents to let me go to school in pants instead of the school uniform every little girl was getting put into. It typically consisted of navy blue dresses and a white or blue collared shirt with an added touch of just a few hair clips. This made me feel very uncomfortable with myself. “Am I just odd?”, I would think, since all of the girls around me were fine and comfortable with wearing things like hair clips and high knee socks, but for some reason my mind would go against it. I felt wrong, It was very easy to compare myself to other girls, since there were so many of them around me in the environment of school. This kind of environment was something I was not used to. I tried and tried, but it never felt correct for me to look in the mirror and see a dress, and having some sort of label pinned to me, as benign as the term “girl”, at the time.
While I played sports from a young age, I never fully self reflected on my environment and behavior until I was about 9 years old. I started to realize differences with me and the boys I surrounded myself with. I began to be judged by my team members for being the gender that I am, a female. I would be looked down upon, and even assumed to be some sort of joke for being on any sports team. This particularly happened during the time I played roller hockey for a league at a park nearby my house. Roller hockey, for some time, was my favorite sport. I played defense man for my team, and was one of the best defense man in the league. I sensed jealousy and tension between me and the team, and a slight disconnect from me and the usual groupings of boys. I noticed I was not being accepted into the team for being a girl since every other person was a boy. I figured this judgement just came because I was a female hockey player, on a mostly all boys team.
I started to feel as though something was wrong with me, and I really was different. I tried to not let it bother me because I thought it was some sort of fun joke. As I began to do some independent thinking, I realized that I was seen as different for loving sports, not liking skirts and dresses, and wanting to play with Pokemon instead of Barbies. I was not the typical girl that people like to label. I started to become very noticeable once I did something impressive in any sport. It was looked at as more of a miracle than if a boy did the same thing I did. I loved the attention I was grasping while playing these sports, but I was uncomfortable with the thought of being congratulated so highly when I know that my performance was not as amazing as people believed it was. “Is it because I am a girl?” I would always think, and I allowed this thought to float in my mind for quite some time. This subject fired up my brain power and discovered the common use of gender stereotypes and genders abilities to perform certain things. It made me believe how much of a fool I really felt like, thinking I was this amazing athlete, but only to realize it was because I was a female and I was doing things not most girls were doing at my age. When I played sports on a mostly male team, I got a lot of attention even though it wasn't always for a good reason. Being a girl and doing things girls weren't seen doing very so often made me feel small in a way the boys never experienced.I began to start to understand everything, and everything began to fall into place.
Now that I am older, I realize that gender rules are not a realistic thing unless you take into account what they are and you want to allow them to affect your life I wear what I like to wear. I do not ever think about “do I look enough like a female today?” because I have learned that the way I should present myself is the way I feel inside. Although I don’t scream and cry once I see a dress in front of me as I did when I was a child, I realize that I do not have to do anything I do not feel comfortable as a whole.
Comments (10)
Log in to post a comment.