Liz Rosema grew up in a nice Protestant cult and only set her face on fire that one time. She draws cartoons and sticks them on the internet here.
36 Comments
grevgrevgrev+95
I think about this a lot – I just went in for a haircut today and actually pondered how much I wanted to be misgendered with my final result. Then I said “fuck all those people” and got a buzzcut. Because fuck all those people.
gefthetalkingmongoose+33
I know it’s just a throwaway gag, but I really really enjoy the coat of arms in the title. I also enjoy the rest, but the coat of arms tho. That is all.
floridagal1+12
Thank you for sharing this!
RudyRed+27
This comic is stirring so many feelings and emotions and memories in me as a female-bodied gender-fluid masculine-leaning person. I know our experiences are not exactly the same, nor our reactions to them, but ugh yes the stares when you walk into a bathroom or locker room. Ugh.
blizzard+22
I was really hoping that people would be willing to tell their stories back to me …because I would love to hear them And of course you shouldn’t feel pressured to do that at all but if someone wants to share them I will hold your stories well.
RudyRed+31
For me, I’m usually read as female even when I’m in the butchiest butch outfits because I’m short and small-framed. I actually get a little thrill when people call me “Sir” because it’s like, YES! I’m doing it right! Of course, they usually realize their mistake as soon as I open my mouth to speak, and they get SUPER apologetic and embarrassed, and I want to explain to them that, no, they were just reading my signals correctly, but that’s not exactly the kind of conversation you have with a server at a restaurant.
I remember I attended my (cis male) partner’s brother’s birthday party earlier this year. I showed up in my dapperest, androgynous attire, all full of swagger, but as soon as I saw all the other attendees that confidence deflated because everyone was SO. HETERONORMATIVE. All the guys (all cis, natch) wore Bermuda shorts or pants with button-down or polo shirts; all the women (also all cis) wore drapey, shimmery tops with skinny jeans, high heels, long hair, and tons of makeup. I was very visually the odd one out. It didn’t help that Partner’s other partner (we’re poly) was there too, and she’s cis-femme too even though it’s in a way that’s more transgressive than the other women. So you had a bunch of happy butch/femme hetero couples… and me.
Everyone was nice – no one gave me the stink-eye – but oh my god was I uncomfortable the whole night. The worst was when I was following the women down a hallway, thinking they were going to the main arena for the show we were attending, and realizing too late that they were doing the Communal Bathroom Trip. I always find those very uncomfortable because there’s always that element of Girl Talk and Performing Femininity with it. So I put on the brakes and awkwardly sat on a bench outside while everyone else went in. I went to the bathroom later, alone.
blizzard+34
Yeah I find this causes me to have constant and strange interactions with strangers where they are like, “Oh my god I am so sorry I can’t believe..” It’s really okay. “Oh man I am just sooooo sorry. I can’t believe I did that to you yeah I mean you are clearly not a dude I don’t know what” I WANT… “sooo sorry” TO LOOK THIS WAY. “really very sorry” AND I WASN’T INSULTED BUT NOW I KINDA AM (wanst to launch into a tirade about gender and how silly it is)
anyway I had a strange experience writing this comic – I never worried about looking androgynous enough before, but then I wrote this and was like “Oh no, Oh my god. What if I’m not butch enough to write this and somebody sees a picture of me and then I’m a faker like a poser skateboarding kid from fifth grade.” So for a while I was ever so grateful every time someone called me Sir.
RudyRed+22
It’s amazing how often we can have impostor syndrome about our own minority identities!
Lady_Honoria+10
I very occasionally get misgendered – I’m a cis woman (mostly. It’s complicated. But I am for social purposes cis, and comfortable with that) and I have a feminine shape so it’s not often. But I have short hair, and resting bitchface, and although I wear dresses they are often very plain, or shirtdresses. So every so often when my torso is not visible I do get misgendered.
I don’t usually mind at all. I mean honestly I don’t care what gender that delivery man thinks I am, as long as they treat me as a human. I DO mind the horrified apologising. Especially in light of my trans friends, who get misgendered constantly and I suspect that same deliveryman would not apologise so much to them.
dakimel+20
I am so heteronormative, and when I see dapper, swaggery, androgynous people I am filled with jealousy over their fashion sense, and I look at my khaki-clad spouse and bemoan his lack of fashion sense, and I wish we had flair.
I don’t know about that crowd, but if I’d been in it, I would have been admiring you and also bemoaning the fact that I so rarely transgress. I like being feminine, but am not confident about my (lack of) fashion sense, and admire people who are confident about theirs.
(And group bathroom trips are the worst.)
sorrycassandra+11
Wow, I could have written…like, every word of this, khaki-clad spouse and all!
I would actually love to dress in a more androgynously dapper, even butch, fashion, but there are a couple things holding me back: (a) it feels a little appropriative for a ciswoman married to a dude, and (b), well, ginormous knockers. I can barely find women’s tops cut to fit me.
manulpika+17
Obviously I can’t speak for anyone else but as a semi-butch queer woman who gets called sir on a regular basis, I don’t feel like it would be appropriative. Femininity is a great look if that’s your jam but you shouldn’t be forced into a performance of it just because you don’t identify a certain way.
yda+7
Upvote for the prospect of androgynously dapper people with ginormous knockers!
Theo_Winterwood+25
I always find those very uncomfortable because there’s always that element of Girl Talk and Performing Femininity with it.
Yes. This. I sometimes try to explain that to people, how that feels like a foreign language I don’t know, and I’m not sure a lot of people get what I mean. I have friends who assume that means they’re talking about, I dunno, makeup and I don’t know about those things. But it’s not a subject matter thing; it’s more like a dialect thing that I have no tangible way to describe. (I could talk about makeup pretty easily, but I can’t Girl Talk about makeup, if that makes sense?)
But, yeah, that whole party sounds like something that I’ve kinda felt before–Feeling like somehow I accidentally got invited to a heteronormativity festival and any second they might realize that I wasn’t supposed to be there. (The best/worst was recently a couple friends had a Girls’ Night/Guys’ Night party, where the girls watched chick flicks in the basement with wine and cheese and the guys played video games upstairs with beer and chips. A different friend asked if that meant they wanted me to hang out on the stairs.)
Lady_Honoria+8
This is actually really clarifying where my own gender lines fall. I can Girl Talk – but I can’t start it. I can be the quiet friend encouraging someone to go on, but I can’t do it my own self without someone else setting the structure.
Man. I’m having a little moment of realisation, here, about how I feel a lot of guilt for being good at Passing, and how that’s privilege, etc etc, but how I also don’t feel much active ownership of that identity.
That Girl’s/Guy’s night sounds like a nightmare on a lot of levels. I’m sorry that you have to be so familiar with that alienating feeling.
CordeliaFitz+13
I used to work in a building that also housed a senior citizens center, and pretty much every time I held the door open for one of the members of the center they would say something along the lines of, “Why, thank you, young man!”
To be fair, I was a scrawny, scruffy youth who wore a lot of ill-fitting pants or shorts with polos. But I also usually wore earrings and eyeliner, which was not a thing that young men in rural Ohio were really doing very often.
It was mostly pretty easy to shrug/laugh off, but you’re right, it *grates* at you after a while.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your story in such a lovely format! I can’t wait to read the rest of your work on your site!
Lemur+17
Thank you for this! Can understand it, even though I usually hope that people see me as a man. What bothers me is the fact that the people who see me as a woman tend to assume that my more masculine dress sense/lack of make-up somehow also makes me less mature….heels and eye shadow do not automatically a more responsible woman make! Not that I have a problem with either. I’m just getting tired of people basing their personality assessments off appearance alone.
neuromanticism+19
Yes! Why is that?? No, I’m not too irresponsible to dress like a woman*, I just prefer to dress like a slightly campy man
*I totally am tho, I could NEVER be femme! ** ** not that woman and femme means the same thing
highfivesforall+20
I am always worried about this in Corporate America. I’m a cis woman, and I’m not particularly butch, but I’m not that femme either (virtually never wear makeup, wear pants and collared shirts often, though some days I’ll wear a dress and earrings), and there are basically no women role models in upper management that don’t have perfectly blown out hair, pencil skirts, heavy makeup, etc. Part of the problem here of course is that there are not very many women in upper management to begin with – but I always worry whether I’m not getting ahead because I’m not performing my gender correctly.
AnnaHowe+10
Oh God, the makeup thing. I’ve finally realised that its absence is why I am consistently read as 5-10 years younger than my age. There was a sort of horrifying post on a disability forum recently where a lot of women reported that if you wear makeup when visiting the doctor, the doctor is more likely to believe you and take you seriously. Also it helps to take along a handy male partner, and put him in a suit and tie. My partner promised, “My love for you is so great that I will even wear a tie” (he hates the things), and I have bought some light makeup. I mean, I think it’s revolting that I should have to do this, but I’m severely disabled and not getting appropriate medical care, so I’ll take anything I can get.
theinvisiblecritic+24
Thank you for making this lovely thing. The other day my hairdresser advised me to wear more makeup and jewellery because “otherwise people might think that you’re, you know…” and I wish I’d quipped something clever back.
Hadrosaur+12
Urgh, a lot of hairdressing salons are so heteronormative. I feel so uncomfortable going to get my hair cut.
Theo_Winterwood+17
I went to get my hair once and my fiancé tagged along. The woman cutting my hair asked if he was my friend and didn’t quite succeed at hiding her surprise when I said I was engaged to him.
(Then again, I also went to the restaurant he manages last week and had one of his servers ask me if I was his brother. I had very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I don’t mind being mistaken for a guy. On the other, I do slightly mind being mistaken for an immediate blood relative of my romantic partner.)
dcbrierton+11
One time my girlfriend and I were coming out of a restaurant and someone thought I was her son. She was two years older than I. We were both in our twenties. Good times!
This was a lot less surprising than it could have been; people thought I was a teenage or pre-teen boy a lot at that time of my life. But it was a lot more squicky than most of those occasions.
Theo_Winterwood+7
I hear you. On the flip side of that same coin, when I was in high school, there were a few times that people mistook my (four grades younger) middle school brother as my boyfriend. (He was incredibly tall and we look nothing alike, but still. Squicky.)
RudyRed+18
For my most recent haircut I went to a barber shop that does only masculine cuts. They were actually very chill about it when I called. They just double-checked that I wanted a masculine style (their other location does feminine styles too, so I imagine they’ve had mix-ups in the past), and went about their business. And I got a free cup of coffee!
Lady_Honoria+8
I go to a barber now, too. They do advertise that they cut women’s hair as long as they want a short, masculine-ish haircut. I do not understand the sportstalk and dude codes, but at least there i am NOT SUPPOSED TO, as opposed to every other hairdresser I’ve ever been to where it felt like an alien world and the best I could do was lie low until it was over and hope they didn’t find out.
I would rather go to the dentist that the hairdresser.
RudyRed+9
The place I went to is super fucking hipster, so instead of sportstalk we discussed Mad Max and social expectations surrounding marriage.
An_Alien+15
I love this! I’m just a very tall woman, and I dress however I want (mens pants fit me better, but i do flowers and cleavage and stuff) but i get the public bathroom double take most of the time. when im sir-ed I don’t really care, but that look from women in the bathroom when they think there’s a big man coming in really makes me feel unhappy in the body.
30Litresof+18
This is great. All these things have come to the fore for me recently because I’ve grown my hair out: for five years it was really short and then at the start of this year I decided to try it long again. It never registered with me just how much I was misgendered or otherwise misread until my hair got to a certain length and that stopped happening. For the first time in my life, I’m automatically assumed by people to be a straight woman rather than a man or a lesbian. It’s very strange because something so minor has meant that I’ve gone from being read as ‘Other’ to being read as ‘Same’. I have very mixed feelings about this.
jlo+7
If I have the energy for it and the person who has just misgendered me seems particularly awful, I find a double-barrel boob-thrust does the job pretty well. But 90% of the time it’s easier to ignore it or just be prepared to keep my ears out for either “sir” or “ma’am”. Of course there was that one time in Narita Airport where someone tripped the security alarm when I walked into the women’s bathroom.
Heathered+7
Polo shirts to look like the yacht captain you’ll never be? That speaks directly to my soul as well as my wardrobe. Love it.
UnquenchableThirst+7
Thank you for this! At my brother’s graduation, I went for a Zatanna look: suiting on top- shorts, hose, and heels below. To get to our seats we had to walk past the entire graduating class of 200 or so young humans; they stared so hard I thought I had a third eye.
Brie+1
This is such a difficult thing! Personally, I deal with a weird bit of this – mostly, when people see me from the back, they often think I’m a guy. From the front, though, I look mostly like a woman – I just have this *super round face* and I’m fat, and I have short hair. I had a hard time with deciding to cut my hair short – it does make me look more masculine, which doesn’t actually bother me, but I still (even though my hair is short) feel like only thin, non-round face people can pull off short hair like mine. I don’t get bothered as much by the gender issues – once or twice, though, I’ve been annoyed by people who are bothered by me looking more masculine (like my parents).
idrathernot+2
More butch stories plzzzz!
wondering+3
I’m short and stocky. I live in t-shirts and jeans and don’t wear makeup. Currently my hair is short. However, I don’t get taken for a man unless it is dark or I’m wearing a leather (biker-style) leather jacket and/or combat boots. I take up space. I sit like a dude (don’t feel comfortable crossing my legs), stand like a dude, and I’m loud. Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t get sir’d more often, but I guess boobs? Maybe my glasses?
Also, apparently seeing combat boots under the stall divider in the woman’s bathroom sometimes makes
I think about this a lot – I just went in for a haircut today and actually pondered how much I wanted to be misgendered with my final result. Then I said “fuck all those people” and got a buzzcut. Because fuck all those people.
I know it’s just a throwaway gag, but I really really enjoy the coat of arms in the title. I also enjoy the rest, but the coat of arms tho. That is all.
Thank you for sharing this!
This comic is stirring so many feelings and emotions and memories in me as a female-bodied gender-fluid masculine-leaning person. I know our experiences are not exactly the same, nor our reactions to them, but ugh yes the stares when you walk into a bathroom or locker room. Ugh.
I was really hoping that people would be willing to tell their stories back to me …because I would love to hear them
And of course you shouldn’t feel pressured to do that at all but if someone wants to share them I will hold your stories well.
For me, I’m usually read as female even when I’m in the butchiest butch outfits because I’m short and small-framed. I actually get a little thrill when people call me “Sir” because it’s like, YES! I’m doing it right! Of course, they usually realize their mistake as soon as I open my mouth to speak, and they get SUPER apologetic and embarrassed, and I want to explain to them that, no, they were just reading my signals correctly, but that’s not exactly the kind of conversation you have with a server at a restaurant.
I remember I attended my (cis male) partner’s brother’s birthday party earlier this year. I showed up in my dapperest, androgynous attire, all full of swagger, but as soon as I saw all the other attendees that confidence deflated because everyone was SO. HETERONORMATIVE. All the guys (all cis, natch) wore Bermuda shorts or pants with button-down or polo shirts; all the women (also all cis) wore drapey, shimmery tops with skinny jeans, high heels, long hair, and tons of makeup. I was very visually the odd one out. It didn’t help that Partner’s other partner (we’re poly) was there too, and she’s cis-femme too even though it’s in a way that’s more transgressive than the other women. So you had a bunch of happy butch/femme hetero couples… and me.
Everyone was nice – no one gave me the stink-eye – but oh my god was I uncomfortable the whole night. The worst was when I was following the women down a hallway, thinking they were going to the main arena for the show we were attending, and realizing too late that they were doing the Communal Bathroom Trip. I always find those very uncomfortable because there’s always that element of Girl Talk and Performing Femininity with it. So I put on the brakes and awkwardly sat on a bench outside while everyone else went in. I went to the bathroom later, alone.
Yeah I find this causes me to have constant and strange interactions with strangers where they are like,
“Oh my god I am so sorry I can’t believe..”
It’s really okay.
“Oh man I am just sooooo sorry. I can’t believe I did that to you yeah I mean you are clearly not a dude I don’t know what”
I WANT…
“sooo sorry”
TO LOOK THIS WAY.
“really very sorry”
AND I WASN’T INSULTED BUT NOW I KINDA AM (wanst to launch into a tirade about gender and how silly it is)
anyway
I had a strange experience writing this comic – I never worried about looking androgynous enough before, but then I wrote this and was like “Oh no, Oh my god. What if I’m not butch enough to write this and somebody sees a picture of me and then I’m a faker like a poser skateboarding kid from fifth grade.” So for a while I was ever so grateful every time someone called me Sir.
It’s amazing how often we can have impostor syndrome about our own minority identities!
I very occasionally get misgendered – I’m a cis woman (mostly. It’s complicated. But I am for social purposes cis, and comfortable with that) and I have a feminine shape so it’s not often. But I have short hair, and resting bitchface, and although I wear dresses they are often very plain, or shirtdresses. So every so often when my torso is not visible I do get misgendered.
I don’t usually mind at all. I mean honestly I don’t care what gender that delivery man thinks I am, as long as they treat me as a human. I DO mind the horrified apologising. Especially in light of my trans friends, who get misgendered constantly and I suspect that same deliveryman would not apologise so much to them.
I am so heteronormative, and when I see dapper, swaggery, androgynous people I am filled with jealousy over their fashion sense, and I look at my khaki-clad spouse and bemoan his lack of fashion sense, and I wish we had flair.
I don’t know about that crowd, but if I’d been in it, I would have been admiring you and also bemoaning the fact that I so rarely transgress. I like being feminine, but am not confident about my (lack of) fashion sense, and admire people who are confident about theirs.
(And group bathroom trips are the worst.)
Wow, I could have written…like, every word of this, khaki-clad spouse and all!
I would actually love to dress in a more androgynously dapper, even butch, fashion, but there are a couple things holding me back: (a) it feels a little appropriative for a ciswoman married to a dude, and (b), well, ginormous knockers. I can barely find women’s tops cut to fit me.
Obviously I can’t speak for anyone else but as a semi-butch queer woman who gets called sir on a regular basis, I don’t feel like it would be appropriative. Femininity is a great look if that’s your jam but you shouldn’t be forced into a performance of it just because you don’t identify a certain way.
Upvote for the prospect of androgynously dapper people with ginormous knockers!
I always find those very uncomfortable because there’s always that element of Girl Talk and Performing Femininity with it.
Yes. This. I sometimes try to explain that to people, how that feels like a foreign language I don’t know, and I’m not sure a lot of people get what I mean. I have friends who assume that means they’re talking about, I dunno, makeup and I don’t know about those things. But it’s not a subject matter thing; it’s more like a dialect thing that I have no tangible way to describe. (I could talk about makeup pretty easily, but I can’t Girl Talk about makeup, if that makes sense?)
But, yeah, that whole party sounds like something that I’ve kinda felt before–Feeling like somehow I accidentally got invited to a heteronormativity festival and any second they might realize that I wasn’t supposed to be there. (The best/worst was recently a couple friends had a Girls’ Night/Guys’ Night party, where the girls watched chick flicks in the basement with wine and cheese and the guys played video games upstairs with beer and chips. A different friend asked if that meant they wanted me to hang out on the stairs.)
This is actually really clarifying where my own gender lines fall. I can Girl Talk – but I can’t start it. I can be the quiet friend encouraging someone to go on, but I can’t do it my own self without someone else setting the structure.
Man. I’m having a little moment of realisation, here, about how I feel a lot of guilt for being good at Passing, and how that’s privilege, etc etc, but how I also don’t feel much active ownership of that identity.
That Girl’s/Guy’s night sounds like a nightmare on a lot of levels. I’m sorry that you have to be so familiar with that alienating feeling.
I used to work in a building that also housed a senior citizens center, and pretty much every time I held the door open for one of the members of the center they would say something along the lines of, “Why, thank you, young man!”
To be fair, I was a scrawny, scruffy youth who wore a lot of ill-fitting pants or shorts with polos. But I also usually wore earrings and eyeliner, which was not a thing that young men in rural Ohio were really doing very often.
It was mostly pretty easy to shrug/laugh off, but you’re right, it *grates* at you after a while.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your story in such a lovely format! I can’t wait to read the rest of your work on your site!
Thank you for this! Can understand it, even though I usually hope that people see me as a man. What bothers me is the fact that the people who see me as a woman tend to assume that my more masculine dress sense/lack of make-up somehow also makes me less mature….heels and eye shadow do not automatically a more responsible woman make! Not that I have a problem with either. I’m just getting tired of people basing their personality assessments off appearance alone.
Yes! Why is that?? No, I’m not too irresponsible to dress like a woman*, I just prefer to dress like a slightly campy man
*I totally am tho, I could NEVER be femme! **
** not that woman and femme means the same thing
I am always worried about this in Corporate America. I’m a cis woman, and I’m not particularly butch, but I’m not that femme either (virtually never wear makeup, wear pants and collared shirts often, though some days I’ll wear a dress and earrings), and there are basically no women role models in upper management that don’t have perfectly blown out hair, pencil skirts, heavy makeup, etc. Part of the problem here of course is that there are not very many women in upper management to begin with – but I always worry whether I’m not getting ahead because I’m not performing my gender correctly.
Oh God, the makeup thing. I’ve finally realised that its absence is why I am consistently read as 5-10 years younger than my age. There was a sort of horrifying post on a disability forum recently where a lot of women reported that if you wear makeup when visiting the doctor, the doctor is more likely to believe you and take you seriously. Also it helps to take along a handy male partner, and put him in a suit and tie. My partner promised, “My love for you is so great that I will even wear a tie” (he hates the things), and I have bought some light makeup. I mean, I think it’s revolting that I should have to do this, but I’m severely disabled and not getting appropriate medical care, so I’ll take anything I can get.
Thank you for making this lovely thing. The other day my hairdresser advised me to wear more makeup and jewellery because “otherwise people might think that you’re, you know…” and I wish I’d quipped something clever back.
Urgh, a lot of hairdressing salons are so heteronormative. I feel so uncomfortable going to get my hair cut.
I went to get my hair once and my fiancé tagged along. The woman cutting my hair asked if he was my friend and didn’t quite succeed at hiding her surprise when I said I was engaged to him.
(Then again, I also went to the restaurant he manages last week and had one of his servers ask me if I was his brother. I had very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, I don’t mind being mistaken for a guy. On the other, I do slightly mind being mistaken for an immediate blood relative of my romantic partner.)
One time my girlfriend and I were coming out of a restaurant and someone thought I was her son. She was two years older than I. We were both in our twenties. Good times!
This was a lot less surprising than it could have been; people thought I was a teenage or pre-teen boy a lot at that time of my life. But it was a lot more squicky than most of those occasions.
I hear you. On the flip side of that same coin, when I was in high school, there were a few times that people mistook my (four grades younger) middle school brother as my boyfriend. (He was incredibly tall and we look nothing alike, but still. Squicky.)
For my most recent haircut I went to a barber shop that does only masculine cuts. They were actually very chill about it when I called. They just double-checked that I wanted a masculine style (their other location does feminine styles too, so I imagine they’ve had mix-ups in the past), and went about their business. And I got a free cup of coffee!
I go to a barber now, too. They do advertise that they cut women’s hair as long as they want a short, masculine-ish haircut. I do not understand the sportstalk and dude codes, but at least there i am NOT SUPPOSED TO, as opposed to every other hairdresser I’ve ever been to where it felt like an alien world and the best I could do was lie low until it was over and hope they didn’t find out.
I would rather go to the dentist that the hairdresser.
The place I went to is super fucking hipster, so instead of sportstalk we discussed Mad Max and social expectations surrounding marriage.
I love this! I’m just a very tall woman, and I dress however I want (mens pants fit me better, but i do flowers and cleavage and stuff) but i get the public bathroom double take most of the time. when im sir-ed I don’t really care, but that look from women in the bathroom when they think there’s a big man coming in really makes me feel unhappy in the body.
This is great. All these things have come to the fore for me recently because I’ve grown my hair out: for five years it was really short and then at the start of this year I decided to try it long again. It never registered with me just how much I was misgendered or otherwise misread until my hair got to a certain length and that stopped happening. For the first time in my life, I’m automatically assumed by people to be a straight woman rather than a man or a lesbian. It’s very strange because something so minor has meant that I’ve gone from being read as ‘Other’ to being read as ‘Same’. I have very mixed feelings about this.
If I have the energy for it and the person who has just misgendered me seems particularly awful, I find a double-barrel boob-thrust does the job pretty well. But 90% of the time it’s easier to ignore it or just be prepared to keep my ears out for either “sir” or “ma’am”. Of course there was that one time in Narita Airport where someone tripped the security alarm when I walked into the women’s bathroom.
Polo shirts to look like the yacht captain you’ll never be? That speaks directly to my soul as well as my wardrobe. Love it.
Thank you for this! At my brother’s graduation, I went for a Zatanna look: suiting on top- shorts, hose, and heels below. To get to our seats we had to walk past the entire graduating class of 200 or so young humans; they stared so hard I thought I had a third eye.
This is such a difficult thing! Personally, I deal with a weird bit of this – mostly, when people see me from the back, they often think I’m a guy. From the front, though, I look mostly like a woman – I just have this *super round face* and I’m fat, and I have short hair. I had a hard time with deciding to cut my hair short – it does make me look more masculine, which doesn’t actually bother me, but I still (even though my hair is short) feel like only thin, non-round face people can pull off short hair like mine. I don’t get bothered as much by the gender issues – once or twice, though, I’ve been annoyed by people who are bothered by me looking more masculine (like my parents).
More butch stories plzzzz!
I’m short and stocky. I live in t-shirts and jeans and don’t wear makeup. Currently my hair is short. However, I don’t get taken for a man unless it is dark or I’m wearing a leather (biker-style) leather jacket and/or combat boots. I take up space. I sit like a dude (don’t feel comfortable crossing my legs), stand like a dude, and I’m loud. Sometimes I’m surprised I don’t get sir’d more often, but I guess boobs? Maybe my glasses?
Also, apparently seeing combat boots under the stall divider in the woman’s bathroom sometimes makes