Growing up, from age five onwards, I was the quintessential \u2018girly girl\u2019. Glitter and pink abounded in my room in the shape of kid makeup sets, a Barbie study table, countless dolls and a princess dressing-up station. Much of this childhood femininity I have carried on to my adulthood. Yet, it is in strong contrast to my two-year-old self, when I was nicknamed \u2018Genghis Khan\u2019 at home, exhibiting traits of fierce masculinity, walking around with a deep frown on my face, arms swinging beside me, taking wide strides and occupying space. When and how I metamorphosed into a \u2018girly-girl\u2019 I do not know, and I often wonder if had I been encouraged to try more \u2018boy\u2019 things, I would have turned out differently, experiencing a version of the Self that was more expansive and creative than boxed in. There was no active discouragement from going towards the boys\u2019 section as far as I can recall, but what might life have looked like if I had been taken to both sections in the local department store?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Childhood is when we first begin experimenting with our sense of Self and begin understanding our desires. We are selfish, at first, incapable of looking beyond our tiny noses, but we learn how to be kind and empathetic, both to others and ourselves. In the process of growing up, gender and sexuality rules dictated by society are constantly trying to fit us into one of the slots of the binary. We are told, as children, that we are innocent and do not possess sexuality at all, rendering us figures without any complexity as queer theorists note, while simultaneously being read as cis and heterosexual boys and girls. We learn from what happens around us, how our mothers part their hair in the morning and our fathers polish their work shoes. At first, we are curious, we see a young baby and ask \u201cYe boy hai ya girl?\u201d and then we go on to regurgitate the rules set in stone \u2013 \u201cGirls\/boys aisa nahi karte\u201d(Girls\/boys don\u2019t act this way). Somewhere, we make up an idea of ourselves that isn\u2019t really ours, and play and experimentation with gender and sexuality dies a slow death. We trade immense possibilities of the self for the one that simply fits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In her essay Rote Learning<\/a><\/em>, Dr. Abeera Khan writes of her observations of her grandmother in a small north Indian city as her queer grandchild. On reflection now, she reads her grandmother\u2019s unconventional actions which deviate from standards of femininity as queer deviance rather than deliberate, feminist gender-norm defiance. This points precisely to the fragility of the rigid gender\/sexuality ecosystem we are trying to live under. We are constantly presented with exceptions to the norms, sometimes participating in breaking these unsaid rules ourselves, yet we are keen on reproducing and performing gender and sexuality in the \u2018right\u2019 way since childhood.<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time we are four or five, most of us are firmly entrenched in culture-appropriate gender roles, often damaging what academic Hannah Dyer calls the \u201cqueer contours of childhood<\/a>\u201d \u2013 the desire in us that \u201crefuses to grow up toward normative ways of being an adult\u201d and therefore also impacting the \u201cresidual adult desire to play and to be creative\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The straightening and stifling of the childhood Self is what countless of us have known, but it possible to imagine alternative possibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last year, while attending a conference in Brighton, I meet the most wonderful ball of sunshine in the form of a child who compliments both my sari and my presentation. River is there with their parent, Max Davies, who is presenting research on gender-creative parenting. Davies talks us through their approach to parenting and giving the child the freedom to experiment and discover gender and sexuality for themselves, without imposing any labels and not assigning a gender at birth. By allowing for the Self to form in an environment that encourages play and curiosity, gender and sexuality can become something that makes our sense of self even more whole and satisfactory. Later, I look up Davies online and stumble across an interview<\/a> of theirs on The Transection Podcast where they note, \u201cYou have to give children all the information. If you don’t, how can they make a conscious choice?\u201d. Davies teaches me the dual benefits of gender-creative parenting \u2013 firstly, it provides queer children with the support and love they need and deserve, and secondly, it enabled all <\/em>children to be confident in their own expressions of gender and sexuality, where the adverse effects of living in an androcentric culture on the child\u2019s development can be minimised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We are all tangled messes of contradictory things, and we deserve the opportunities to form a Self that is capable of sitting with our complexity and finding the beauty in it. I am reminded here of the animated film Inside Out 2<\/em>, where protagonist Riley\u2019s narrow, binary definitions of a sense of Self \u2013 the insistent belief that she is a \u2018good person\u2019, or \u2018not good enough\u2019 \u2013 contributes to immense anxiety for the teenager. Her panic is only resolved when her emotions come together to accept the Self as an amalgamation of beautiful contradictions \u2013 she is brave, but sometimes she is scared, she wants to fit in, but she also wants to be herself. Applying this framing of the Self that is multifaceted and expansive can let children enjoy a journey where there is no fixed destination, where gender and sexuality are neither life-defining nor life-shattering, but components that can help us navigate pleasure, understand our desires and actions better, and inspire us, both as children and adults, to move beyond strict codes of ideal Selfhood. The more we explore our curiosities and nurture them, the better we are equipped for change, adaptability and exercising our agency. By giving ourselves and the children around us the grace to explore and adopt different ways of being, we open up new possibilities of life itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cover image by Devanshi’s family member<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We trade immense possibilities of the self for the one that simply fits.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":491,"featured_media":29421,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5351,8],"tags":[5429,2824,5437,1826,1200,3726,5423,5438,3062,5436],"class_list":{"0":"post-29420","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-the-self-and-sexuality","8":"category-voices","9":"tag-childhood-and-identity","10":"tag-feminism-in-india","11":"tag-gender-creative-parenting","12":"tag-gender-expression","13":"tag-gender-norms","14":"tag-lgbtqia-2","15":"tag-queer-childhood","16":"tag-queer-theory","17":"tag-selfhood","18":"tag-sexuality-and-the-self"},"menu_order":0,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29420","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/491"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29420"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29420\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29423,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29420\/revisions\/29423"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29421"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29420"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29420"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tarshi.net\/inplainspeak\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29420"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}