On Questioning

I am questioning of my sexuality and gender identity.

What the heck does it mean for someone to be “questioning”?  If someone is questioning, do you consider them fully out of the closet as a gay, lesbian, queer or bisexual?  Are they just not sure what they want?  Or is it a way to claim their self as someone who is “neither/nor”?

Gender and sexual identity can be very tough and stressful to grapple with.  Since high school, I’ve attempted to place myself on some kind of spectrum, something I’d like to call- “degrees of queerness”.  Am I butch, a lesbian, gender queer, gay or bisexual?  But I kept changing my position on this spectrum, as frequently as my monthly menstruation cycle.  For so long, I’ve felt like a question mark, that I’ve finally decided to BE the question mark.

But, in saying this, I want to dispel a notion that some people have about those who are questioning, that this is only a ‘phase’ and they’re just ‘confused.’  To say that, you are negating the experiences of thousands of people around the world as they attempt to negotiate identity and seek a place within/outside society and social roles and expectations. It’s not the people who are confused, but it’s the polarized system of sex and gender (male and female) that is confusing.

When I was six years old, I remember I wanted to change my name.  It sounded weak, dull, and very feminine.  Jenna.  I asked my mom if I could change my name. 

“Well,” she began, “what would you want to change it to?”
*pause*
“I want to be named ‘John’.”
She looked up at me like I was joking.  “No,” she replied.

I didn’t understand why.  To me, it made perfect sense why I would want to change my name.  I believed that if I could rename myself, I could change the way people saw me, and the way they treated me.  I was the quiet, shy, small Asian kid in school who was picked last at every basketball or dodge-ball game.  I was too fragile to play basketball, especially in those dresses and Mary Jane’s my mom made me wear.  Boys would tease me, saying that I would kick or shoot hoops like a girl.  I secretly dreamed to win the respect and admiration of the boys in the playground.  I wanted them to treat me the same way they treated the tom-boys who were good at sports.  I wanted to be the trouble maker, the epitome of boyness- like Bart Simpson, riding my skateboard and holding slingshots to the likes of teachers and principals.

I believe we learn the hierarchy of gender difference at an early age.  For me, this was determined through interactions on the playground. And from there, name-callings such as “sissy”, “weak”, and “girl”, lead me to believe that women are powerless and to be feminine is wrong, to be masculine is right.  I, like most people, wanted to be considered “right.”

Since, then, I learned to rethink notions of gender and womanhood.  It wasn’t as bad as I once thought.  But I wanted to command the respect of men around me.  So I became “girly”. 

High school was probably around the time when I started to question again.  Not gender, but sexuality.  This was before “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” or “Tatu” came out… when representations of gays in society were limited to Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres.  What they did was important, but at the time, I didn’t aspire to be like them.

To very close friends of mine, I admitted at first, how I could see myself as a “liking women” maybe not now, but in the future.  One of them said, “no way, I can’t.  I know I really like guys.”  I hastily said, “Yeah I do too, but that was just a thought.”  I felt at the time, that it wasn’t fair that it is totally acceptable for someone to be ‘out in the open’- because then everyone had to accept you, no matter what, but if you were ‘questioning’ there was more effort to push you back in the closet, because you weren’t fully out.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a very scary notion.  For one thing, I went to school in a liberal area, a suburb just south of San Francisco.  The city was predominantly Catholic, but liberal, nevertheless.  With all of my high school girl-friends I would talk about sexuality with, they would respond that they personally liked boys instead of girls, instead of asking me why it was that I felt or thought the way that I did. 

I never fully reconciled my differences with sexuality and gender until I came to Bates.  I met people who have been ‘out of the closet’ since they were in middle school, or who had come out their freshman year.  When I would question my sexuality to them, they asked me supportive questions and encouraged me to pursue the path I wished.  I stopped feeling like a question mark and began to ‘come out’ as the question mark.

~ Student ‘06

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