Gene Monteith McKechnie

GENE MONTEITH MCKECHNIE

Gender is, at its core, an impression, a feeling. It’s an arbitrary collection of traits and associations that influence how you move through society, a collection that has strayed so far from being based on physiology that it no longer has anything to do with one’s body. Owning your gender is a response to a culture that seeks to place restrictions on you based on your body. I don’t think I’m entirely a ‘boy’, per se. I’m non-binary but in a boy-way. I’m boy flavoured. I’m a boy-scented, gender-free candle for £1.29 at Wilko’s. But that’s not what this is about. This is about how I didn’t think I was allowed to be a gluten-free boy by-product in the first place.

Danielle Goodland

Being a girl never felt quite right, though it’s hard to put into words why. I think a lot of it was growing up seeing everybody around me adhere, more and more strictly, to these invisible rules about what you could be and how you could act if you were a boy or a girl. It was realising I wasn’t a part of those rules, that I didn’t want to be a part of them and didn’t know how I’d even started being a part of them in the first place. I grew up wanting to distance myself from the feminine as much as possible. Since I didn’t realise not being a girl was an option, I did everything I could to be a girl poorly. This, as it turned out, sucked. It was an angry, frustrated way of expressing myself. I was telling the world who I was by the negative space I didn’t occupy. Defining yourself by what you aren’t is never productive.

Danielle Goodland

This rejection of the norm proved to be an obstacle growing up. It didn’t help that I was also growing up as an Asian in rural France. Everyone around me disliked the fact that I existed and, as somebody naturally loud and opinionated, I had a hard time making myself as demure and invisible as everybody expected an Asian girl to be. In retrospect, I’m glad that being silenced was another thing I was bad at. When I realised I was trans, I thought I had it figured out. I thought that trying to get people to read me as male was the ultimate, immutable end goal. And it did work, on occasion! Cashiers would see the tight navy dress shirt and call me sir, and those moments would be rewarding. But between the binding and the flat muted clothing and the ineffective voice exercises, trying to pass as male did nothing but make me miserable.

Danielle Goodland

I don’t think it was an epiphany all at once, it took me years to get to where I am now. At some point, though, I got sick of baggy jeans and damaged ribs and repression. I figured out that, now that I knew what I was, the reason I was so bad at being a girl was because I was never one in the first place. I could do whatever I wanted. Whether or not I was a boy (or a part-boy, part-transformer, an employee of boy enterprises, or a boy-milk latte) didn’t depend on whether other people saw me as one, and it still doesn’t.

Danielle Goodland

I know who I am. I don’t have to bar myself from practices considered feminine, because I have no reason to distance myself from those now. I dress in bright, goofy clothes, no matter which part of the store they come from. Security in my gender identity gives me the freedom to ignore all the obsolete social conventions I used to worry so much about. I paint my face with makeup every day, and the makeup spells out ‘boy makeup’, because I am a boy, and I’m wearing it.