gym class

I had a memory today that I would like to talk about. And I would also like to talk about how awful it is the way that children are dissuaded from breaking gender stereotypes and even sometimes punished if they do.

BUT I’M GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF.

Let’s get in the ‘ole time machine and head back about six years to my freshman year of high school. Yes, this is the scariest ride in the park so if you have a weak constitution I would advise you to sit this one out.

So let’s think for a minute about high school. It’s a pretty terrible and awkward time. We’re in the throws of puberty, hormones rush too quickly for some of us and not fast enough for others, hearts are broken and then healed the next day, everyone is too distracted by their social status/sexual frustration/unrequited love/magic cards to learn a damn thing, and crowds gather in an instant to watch those two girls from earth science tear each other’s hair out by the fistful. (Not to joke about girl fights, some of them got pretty serious, like when that one girl with the ring cut that other’s girl’s face open and broke her jaw or something and she had to go to the hospital) #classy #goskippers #weareNK

Sorry everyone, I’m getting nostalgic.

Anyway, everyone is mostly just trying really hard to fit in. And a huge part of fitting in, was squeezing into the neat oppressive little boxes marked male, and female. I remember the first day of freshman English class. We were filtered in from three different middle schools and so we didn’t all know each other. Our teacher instructed us to stand up, walk around the room, and introduce ourselves to three people we had never met. After about ten minutes we all sat back down, and she remarked that she was happily surprised to see that we had mingled so well, and that usually when she does this the boys introduce themselves to other boys, and the girls to other girls.

you come here often?

It was funny how even the most seemingly gender-neutral things suddenly seemed so divided. When we got our uniforms for band class (yeah yeah laugh it up…) Everyone received a (used) white concert shirt (talk about sweat stains), and a clip on bow tie, but the girls got cummerbunds, and the boys got suspenders. And I wanted suspenders dammit! Although I do remember being pretty happy about getting to wear a collared shirt and bow tie to every concert. But still, I was the only girl drummer in high school and a lot of people thought that was a REALLY BIG DEAL. I remember the first time I met the high school band director, before I even started high school and she was helping with rehearsals for the Rhode Island All-State Jazz Band (yeah, I know it’s the smallest state). She gave me a lecture about how girls hardly ever get this spot and how there aren’t many girl drummers and how music is a mostly male-dominated scene and how I should be very proud and how I have to make all my fellow females proud and play confidently to show everyone that girls can play the drums too.

Geez.

No pressure.

How about being proud of all the hard work and practicing I did to get to that point? How about people judging my drumming by how well I played and not my gender?

Then there was jazz band. The senior jazz band got to rent special concert clothes. The boys were all fitted for tuxes and the girls were asked what size (hideous) concert dress they needed. I remember being very upset when I saw the senior jazz band play for the first time. One of the only times when I felt really comfortable and good about myself was playing the drums, and I was NOT about to let that be ruined by having to wear a stupid dress (which was more like a glittery black toga than a formal dress JUST SAYIN’).

Luckily I was clever, and so I told the band director that I wouldn’t be able to wear a dress to play the drums since you have to sit with your legs apart (left foot on the high-hat pedal, right foot on the bass drum pedal). So I dodged that bullet and got away with wearing black pants and a black dress shirt. BUT STILL, what if I had played something else? I would have been very upset. And what about all those other boys and girls who would prefer to wear a dress or a tux or pants or a skirt or any of it? What would they have done? What do they DO? School was just a very oppressive institution when it came to following gender roles, and I don’t think the teachers even realize what they’re doing or how much harm a simple rule can impose on a questioning or queer or confused teenager.

Then of course there was drama club. I loved drama club; that was another place where I was really comfortable and just happy overall. I loved acting, and although it might sound sad, I liked pretending to be someone else sometimes. Not in a really desperate needing-to-escape kind of way, but it was a kind of release of tension and a loosening of the standards which I felt I had to comply to every day kind of way. It’s funny, because the majority of the roles I played required me to be much more feminine than I was in real life, but since I was pretending to be someone else anyway it didn’t bother me as much. Also, gender roles were bent and broken more in the drama club than anywhere else in school. 

gender norms? what are those?

Everyone had to wear makeup onstage (“hey dude can you pass me the MANscara?), everyone flirted with each other like crazy, and the only gay kids I knew in high school were in the drama club. I remember asking my director once, “when will I get to play a part that is more like me?” And she said, “when we can find a character like that.” What I was REALLY asking DEEP DOWN in my SUBCOUCIOUS was “How come I can’t play a male part?” But I never worked up the courage to ask out loud.

I remember once she cast me as Macbeth’s father’s ghost in a comedy that included a short spoof of Macbeth, and I was so happy. It was such a small insignificant part but it was awesome. I used the big deep gruff voice and yelled a little and that was it.

Wonderful.

OK now that we’ve taken a little detour down memory lane and you’ve heard all about my extra-curricular activities, I’m going to attempt to guide us back towards on-topic lane and get back to the original memory that I set out to write about when I started writing this post.

Gym class.

the key to dodgeball is body glitter and a fierce attitude 

We all remember gym class. Forced exercise. Hours of embarrassment for the un-fit, and a time to show-off for the athletically inclined. What I hated worst about gym class was how damn gendered it was. In my freshman year gym class was one of my best and oldest friends. The problem was, he was a boy and I was a girl so every time the class got split by gender I had to endure it without him. And we got split up quite a bit. There was the fitness test, where all the girls would run as many laps as they could in one gym while the boys would do push ups, sit ups, and leg stretches in the other, and then vice versa. I remember there was a “standard of fitness” that we were all supposed to meet, except that it was different for the guys, they were supposed to be able to do more push ups and sit ups and run more laps, and I remember always peeking to the boys side of the fitness rubric whenever I checked my scores.

Then of course there was health class. I remember on particular day of health class where we got split up; we were supposedly learning about dating and relationships and we were supposed to get into groups of three of four and were instructed to talk about what we didn’t like about guys on dates. First of all, I had never been on a date. Second of all, what kind of stupid-ass-stereotype-encouraging-gender-role assignment was this?? What exactly was the point of this assignment other than to drive high-school boys and girls further apart? I mean, I’m being completely serious here, each group got a piece of giant paper and a couple markers and we were supposed to write down basically what ticked us off about guys when they tried to woo girls. I just sat there, but I remember the other girls in my group saying how stupid it was when guys talked about how big their penises (peni?) were in order to try and impress girls. Just then my gym teacher walked up; Oh good, I thought, they’ll be embarrassed when she hears them and she’ll surely put a stop to this madness.

FALSE.

She just CHIMED RIGHT IN. “Yeah, that’s so annoying” said my GYM TEACHER WHO WAS AN ADULT AND SUPPOSED TO BE TEACHING US TO RESPECT EACH OTHER “they’re all just six inches anyway.”

…

REALLY MRS GYM TEACHER??

I mean, c’mon, right?

But the worst part of being split up from my friend, was that he wasn’t there to defend me when I got teased. Almost every day of freshman gym class, I got made fun of by this girl who thought she was from the ghetto (let’s call her Tiffany) and her two lackeys. By the way, my school was comprised of 98.5% white kids, from middle to upper class families, and I can assure you that she was not from the ghetto. Now, luckily I have a conscience or else I could have really done some serious damage, she was extremely overweight, barely passing remedial classes, and obviously came from a troubled home. She was always starting fights with people for no reason; one of her favorite lines was “My daddy’s blacker than the ace of spades! He’s from PORTUGAL!” She said that to me several times but I never knew why. I did a pretty good job ignoring her until she started to call me out specifically.

She made fun of my gym shorts, every day. I wore long cargo shorts and a t-shirt to gym class, and a few days into the semester she asked me why my shorts were so long. “Because I like them like this,” was my honest reply. She thought there was something wrong with this, and she and her friends started to call me “Mail-Man,” “Because you look like the guy who delivers my mail.”

Now, this was all very stupid and at first it didn’t bother me that much, and when she noticed that I wasn’t getting upset over her name-calling she decided to amp it up. Tiffany and her friends started to tease me in the locker room, telling me I should be in the boys’ room. She would yell when I came in so everyone could hear; “there’s a BOY in the girls’ room! Somebody get the teacher!! Oh wait, it’s just MAIL MAN.” She would tell me to get out of the wrong room and say that I was perverted for sneaking in. I changed quickly in a stall before and after class and tried to ignore her. Then she and her friends started picking on other aspects of my gender-non-conforming appearance, asking me why I didn’t wear makeup or shave my legs, and said that I must WANT to be a boy because of the way I dressed and acted. After while I started to hear

“Male-Man” instead of

“Mail-Man.”

Getting teased sucks no matter who you are, but it invokes a different kind of fear and dread when you’re struggling with your own identity, constantly wondering what’s the matter with me already, and in fear that someone will be able to read my thoughts and prove that I’m insane.

Soon Tiffany started to find me outside of gym. I’ll never forget one day in the cafeteria when one of my other best friends swooped in to rescue me. I was saving her seat at the table when Tiffany walked up.

“Hey Mail-Man. When are you gonna get rid of those ugly-ass shorts?”

My face burned red but I ignored her. I hadn’t noticed that my friend had walked up behind me until I heard her voice,

“What’s wrong with her shorts??”

“They too long. They for boys obviously.”

“Well your sweat pants are even longer than her shorts, so they must OBVOUSLY be for boys too.”

Tiffany literally couldn’t think of anything else to say. She just scoffed and walked away.

I was beaming. One of the best feelings in the world is when a friend has your back, followed closely by making a bully feel like an idiot.

good friends know how to provide support

The teasing slowed down a bit for a few days but then she picked right back up and was even worse than before.

What’s funny is that the day I finally snapped, she wasn’t even making fun of me. Instead, she had targeted my friend. He had accidentally knocked some kid over during a game of basketball, and Tiffany had taken great offense to this and began to berate him loudly from the bleachers (she never participated in any of the exercise).

Now, let me just say, that my friend was, and still is, one of the nicest people on the face of the earth. He doesn’t go around fighting with people, he’s never mean to anyone, he never bullied or attacked anyone, and plus he just didn’t care enough about gym class to purposely knock someone down over a stupid game. So when Tiffany and her lackeys started yelling at him from the sidelines;

“oh yes you DID knock him down on purpose! I SAW YOU DID IT,”

he didn’t really know what to say. I just couldn’t take it anymore, I had had WAY MORE THAN ENOUGH of her, so I stopped playing, ran over to the bleachers and yelled with a voice that I did not recognize as my own, by rather seemed to materialize in my throat like the sword of Griffindor in the Sorting Hat, right when I needed it most;

“SHUT UP YOU STUPID JACKASS.”

A few kids stopped and stared. The gym teacher looked slightly startled but did not make any attempt to stop me. It wasn’t a sophisticated manipulation of the English language by any means, but for a fourteen-year-old it wasn’t half bad. She shut up for the rest of the day.

So the moral of the story is, high school sucks. Especially when you don’t want to conform to gender norms, but the thing is, I don’t think the teachers and administrators even are aware that they are helping perpetuate these stereotypes. There must be something we as a society can do about this. Kids spend so much of their time not only in school but also in extra-curricular activities run by the school after classes end for the day. What I’m saying, is that anyone in charge of educating and influencing young adults for six plus hours a day needs to be aware of the strain that pressure to conform to gender stereotypes puts on kids, whether the kids themselves realize it or not. I wrote about being picked on in gym class in a reflective essay for my sophomore English class and I remember getting the graded paper back and reading one of the comments my English teacher had written near the end of the essay; “where were your gym teachers for all of this?”

Well English teacher, I still don’t know where they were, but I sure would like to be a part of making sure that kids aren’t subjected to this type of bullying in school anymore.