"Pink v. Blue: Gender Equality in a Hyperbolic Existence" by Avery Hart

The air was dry, the heat still blistering despite summer having just ended, and yet my excitement could not be contained. My mother, little sister, and I had just finished the twenty-minute walk from our house over to Union Elementary School where I would soon be starting kindergarten. Being only a year and a half my junior, my sister would be in the preschool classroom just down the hall from me. We arrived thirty minutes before the Orientation, so we sat along the bleachers at the humble baseball field at the corner of the school. “Don’t sit like that when you’re in school, it isn’t ladylike,” my mother said to me, and that was my earliest memory of giving the idea of gender any consideration at all.

Until I was about five years old, my parents—mainly my mother—picked out all my clothes for me. On most days, I would run around the house in brightly colored Bobby Jack tees, each one depicting a different design of the over-enthusiastic primate engaging in various activities, from skipping rope to scarfing copious amounts of candies. When my sister and I would play in the red-mulch-covered backyard, we would wear gingham sundresses—sometimes popsicle-stained blue—that our mother had handsewn for us.

It wasn’t until being around my kindergarten peers that I started to give what I wore any thought beyond “No, I don’t want to wear the Christmas dress again this year! It’s too itchy!” Being perceived as a girl by other kids my age came as a total shock to me and bothered me in a way, I couldn’t explain at the mere age of five. My parents had always referred to me as their oldest daughter or would simply refer to my sister and me as “the girls.” I was so used to hearing these terms at home but could never identify myself with them. Even my birthname, though I answered it, gave me a strange, lingering feeling that I can only explain as what I imagine a ghost must feel to watch their loved ones pass them by without a glance.

While the girls my age would practice cartwheels in the hopes of someday becoming cheerleaders, I spent my time at recess with the boys finding grubs in the mulch or—when the teachers weren’t looking--seeing who was brave enough to jump off the top rung of the steel-framed firetruck. “You’re a tough girl!” is something I heard from the boys often, and girl echoed endlessly through my mind. Girl was unnecessary. To me, it was a backhanded compliment, but I struggled to articulate why.

One morning before school, I eagerly packed my SpongeBob SquarePants backpack with two handfuls of my favorite, bobble-headed Littlest Pet Shop toys: a tortoise, a grey cat with white paws, an orange tabby kitten, a banana-wielding monkey, variously colored hamsters, etc. The second I walked into the classroom I ran over to my best friend, Spero, whose cubby was adjacent to mine. “I want you to have one!” I said, handing him the tortoise. He took it in his olive-skinned hands, turned it over, and rejected it with disgust. “Um, those are for girls.”

In the first grade, my parents decided to homeschool my sister and me due to a bomb threat at the high school nearby. I no longer dealt with my peers constantly reminding me of my gender, but it became inescapable at home. Christmas at my aunt’s house became more of a nightmare than something to look forward to, and the infamous red dress started to itch my soul. I apprehensively unwrapped the last gift from my Aunt Linda to me, pulling aside the sparkly white tissue paper, to reveal my first makeup kit. The case was the loudest hot pink I had ever seen like it was screaming the commercial idea of girlhood directly into my brain.

At twelve, having gone through the hell that is female puberty two years prior, I had a better grasp on who I was and wanted people to see me as. I denounced this “girlhood” that was given to me against my will. Within the sanctuary of my mind, I knew I was becoming a teenage boy; throughout my entire childhood, I was a boy carrying the weight of societal expectations on young girls.

Though I never truly believed in the notion that “pink is for girls” or “blue is for boys,” I gave any clothing item with a shred of pink in it to my kid sister, Audra. Whether I believed that pink was for girls or not, my family would see me wearing it as a declaration of my femininity. In “There is No Unmarked Woman,” Deborah Tannen describes, “Each of the women at the conference had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup and accessories, and each decision carried meaning. Every style available to us was marked” (2).  At that age, I knew I was a boy, but my family still saw me as a girl—everything I wore was a “mark” against my character.

When I was fourteen, I cut off all my hair with a sharp kitchen knife and safety scissors in both retaliation and self-expression. If I were like any other boy, I could have simply asked to go to the barber, but that would have been like begging for a miracle. My light brown hair, once silky-smooth, and long enough to touch my middle back, became a short mess, sticking up in all directions, resembling that of a Barbie who was played with too rough. “What are you, a lesbian now?” my father asked, his fists trembling with anger. “There is no woman's hair style that can be called standard, that says nothing about her. The range of women's hair styles is staggering, but a woman whose hair has no particular style is perceived as not caring about how she looks, which can disqualify her for many positions, and will subtly diminish her as a person in the eyes of some” (Tannen, 2).

Eventually, the time came to go out into the world, away from home post-graduation. I moved away from Pennsylvania to Florida in 2019 to live with my boyfriend, Michael and got a job at Starbucks just across from the beach in Ormond. While I was working there, I started hormone replacement therapy—taking testosterone injections intramuscularly once a week.

After merely a month of this painful, weekly ritual, my voice began to drop. Another month more, and I had a full mustache. One of the first changes I noticed in the workspace was how my co-workers and customers began to interact with me. Pre-testosterone, there were a couple of male customers seemingly flirting with me; one older man with the thickest English accent would compliment me on my hair or even go so far as to ask me out to the bar, usually saying, “You’re old enough to drink where I’m from!”

When I started to display male characteristics, the other men started calling me “buddy” or “boss” instead of “young lady.” The Englishman then avoided me, nearly running out of the café to sit in his blue Audi, questioning his sexuality.

Two years into being on testosterone, anyone who didn’t know of my past saw me like they would any other man walking down the street. In the workplace, when I spoke, my words seemed to carry more weight than they would have if I were a girl. My formerly girlish voice was always met with eyes of objectification or eyes of dismissal. Once my voice dropped, these eyes now looked at me with approval and understanding. My aspirations to become a filmmaker were brushed off like some whimsical fantasy when I was seen as a girl, but as a man, I was met with nods of respect and words of encouragement.

I gradually became part of some sort of universal fraternity that I didn’t intentionally nor expect to join. One afternoon, while walking to the convenience store, a man passing by me gave me a subtle downturned nod, a gesture formerly unknown to me. Once this happened several more times, all by other men, it caught on that that this was a normal form of social acknowledgment among men. Men went from catcalling me to showing me a sign of respect. I was no longer afraid to go out alone at night but remember it like it was yesterday how terrified I used to be.  

Women are a constant spectacle, whether it be online or in the real world. Everything a woman says or does is intensely scrutinized. As a man, one can wear the same shirt he wore yesterday, pants that don’t match, and go to the store without anyone batting an eye. If a woman does the same thing—God forbid she forgets to put on makeup—she is seen as lazy, or uncaring. As Tannen writes, “Although no man wore makeup, you couldn't say the men didn't wear makeup in the sense that you could say a woman didn't wear makeup. For men, no makeup is unmarked. I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men's. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman” (2).

Seeing the requirements of what it means to be accepted by both genders has allowed me to provide a point of view that not many people close to me may be able to sympathize with, nor understand. However, having to forcibly walk in the shoes of one gender, and then make a conscious choice to walk in my own, has allowed me to be able to not only empathize with others but provide a viewpoint that helps others begin to grasp the straws of understanding. Changes are necessary in all corners of the world, yet the building block of meaningful change is empathy that people slowly learn from seeing the struggles of others. Everyone, regardless of gender or the clothes they wear, strives to live the average existence that is often shown to be the norm, hoping that others will allow them the same privilege to live a simple life of those that they coexist with, and forget just for a moment that they are different from the majority. There should be no “pink versus blue,” no girl or boy reprimanded for finding interest in things deemed only for the opposite gender, no little girl’s voice left unheard because she doesn’t carry the same authority as a boy, or no woman forever “marked” by society for what she decides or doesn’t decide to wear.

Work Cited

Tannen, Deborah. There is No Unmarked Woman: ENC 1101 Readings and Handouts

       Publisher: DSC Press

       Year of Publication: 2020

      Editor: Frank Gunshanan