The Night I Became a "Man"

            “Are you ready?” Andrew asked, foundation sponge poised between his long fingers, his long blonde hair tied back, ready to work.

            I took one more glance at the photos on my laptop; an array of dark and brooding men with perfect jawlines. My reflection watched me in the mirror beside the laptop; big-eyed, fine-boned, and altogether unmasculine.

            “Make me a man, Frankenfurter.”

            One night in June of 2016, I sat in my apartment for two hours while an incredibly talented makeup artist contoured my face into masculinity.

Gender is a subject that has fascinated me even before I understood it as a concept. In childhood, I exhibited many masculine traits; excessive aggression, a love for catching frogs and salamanders, and a habit of scraping my knees and coming home from my adventures covered in dirt. I rejected the colour pink and shunned extremely feminine clothing, not because I hated them, but because I had picked up on the subtle cues that feminine things were considered shallow and silly and were not taken seriously. As I grew a little older, I rebelled; not against my parents or teachers, but against the idea that girls—especially feminine girls—were weak, passive, frivolous creatures. I dressed how I wanted to and behaved how I wanted and didn’t give a damn whether people thought I was being too girly or too “unladylike.” That adolescent rebellion grew and continues to this day. Though I am a cisgender woman and I often present in a very “femme” way, I consider myself a blend of traditionally gendered traits. I am comfortable in my feminine body and wield female power. However, I’ve always hated harsh lines and being told to behave a certain way.

It was Shakespeare that really made me want to experiment with actually “presenting” as a man. Tybalt has, inexplicably, always been one of my favourite characters; a paragon of toxic masculinity that we wish were a parody but feels all too genuine. In 2011, I landed the role of Laertes in Hamlet, and I was overjoyed. I had played male Shakespearian roles before, like Antonio in The Tempest, but the roles were always changed to keep me female—Antonio became Antonia, seducing Sebastian and tempting him into evil deeds, an Elizabethan femme fatale. But in this production, Laertes was to remain a man. We bound my chest with an ace bandage, tied my hair back, and penciled in a respectable goatee.

Guys.

It was so much fun.

Laertes was brash, confident, impulsive, and responded to fear and sorrow with pure aggression. He was the perfect male skin to slip into. I strutted around the stage as Laertes, I swung swords and threatened people with daggers, I yelled until I lost my voice (every single night.) I had a fucking blast playing the overcompensating male I’d seen a thousand men play as they pick fights in bars. To this day, Laertes remains one of my favourite roles ever played. Hell, I even got my dramatic death scene. For an actor, that’s the dream!

A few years passed, and I was dying to play around with being a man again. I didn’t want to simply disguise myself and walk around, no. I wanted a performance of some sort. I wanted everyone to be in on the joke. I wanted friends to dance with me and take silly photos. Most of all, I wanted to be safe. There was only one place to go. In my glamorous little Neverland, the iNation, gender is always played with; in subtle ways like men wearing eyeliner, and in bigger and more bombastic ways as well. Which is where my darling Andrew comes in.

<3 My darling Andrew! <3

Ms. Pixi Stix, courtesy of
https://www.facebook.com/BlueEmberPhotography/

Andrew, or Pixi Stix in the above photos, is a drag queen, an absolutely phenomenal makeup artist, and one of my dearest friends and surrogate brothers. He generously offered his services when I expressed an interest in going to the iNation in drag for a night. Not two weeks later, there we were, in my apartment, gluing hair trimmings to my face.

Before Andrew and I carried out our master plan, I had an idea of the sort of man I wanted to be, in terms of a drag king-style persona. Male Dee was an overly-romantic Italian playboy; a hyper-sexualized flirt who made women believe they were the most interesting thing in the world, at least for a night. He dressed sharply and was always meticulously groomed, a real wine-and-roses type of guy. For some reason, I had not considered facial hair in this image.

“Look, honey,” said Andrew when I mentioned this. “Your lips are huge. Your chin is tiny and your bone structure is feminine. We hide all of that with facial hair. We distract.”

 I wanted to pout (with my huge lips) but he was right, so I shut up and let the master work. It took two hours for Andrew to apply 1.3 shitsquillion tons of makeup, glue on facial hair, and, through some nefarious drag queen blood magic, twist my very long and unmanageable hair into a perfect pompadour. Only then was I permitted to look in the mirror.

How do you describe the feeling of not recognizing your own reflection? “Surreal” is too soft a word.

The face staring back at me was some distant relative. He—certainly a he, at least at first glance—was darker than me. Much darker. His eyes were heavier-lidded and set further apart than mine, cloaked by thicker eyebrows. His face was wider, his nose longer. He didn’t look like my father, my brother, or any of my cousins. He was an oddly familiar stranger.

“Andrew,” I said, my reflection’s paler mouth moving along with mine. “You’re a genius.”

   Awkward tonal shift #1!

Okay, I had the face and hair of a man, and it was creepy and surreal and strange. Now I needed the body.

I had watched a few thousand YouTube tutorials on how drag kings tape their breasts back toward their armpits in order to create the illusion of a masculine torso well enough to walk around in an open shirt. My breasts would not cooperate with this. I squished and taped and squished some more, but they remained stubbornly in place. When I played Laertes, our costume designer had simply wrapped my chest in an ace bandage. For some reason, that had been absolute agony. My breasts and ribs ached with every sudden move I made onstage. I often gave up and unbound them for the final scene, when I was wearing enough fencing gear to conceal them well enough. An ace bandage was not in the cards for my night at the iNation, so I compromised. I left my breasts taped and put on a sports bra and one of my husband’s (then-fiancé’s) undershirts to flatten me out. After a little bounce and jiggle testing, I was satisfied.

I looked at myself in the mirror again. I had imagined Male Dee to be a romantic who dressed sharply, almost formally, in tailored suits. But the face that looked back at me wasn’t that of a “tailored suit” kind of guy. No, this sleepy-eyed dude was way more casual than that. I slipped into one of my fiancé’s cockiest shirts. It fit surprisingly well. I dug out a pair of his tightest pants and found them just a bit loose on me, but wearable. However, the fit felt…off. They sat in a spot just before my hips curved out, making the waist gap, but the butt fitted. The crotch was lower than I was used to. I took a few steps. The pants twisted uncomfortably in front. No, this wouldn’t do. I had to dance in these. Why are men’s pants cut so differently in fro—

            Oh. Right.

            To the sock pile!

            I spent longer than you’d think finding the perfect-sized sock for the task. Ankle sock? Too small. Tube sock? I’m 5’3, what do I want, a third leg? Finally, after much rolling and tugging (ha!) I was able to get a sock into the right shape at a realistic, but totally respectable, size. Male Dee looked like a boxer kind of guy, but boxers are for men whose appendages are actually attached. I settled for a tight, “sexy” pair of men’s underwear. Fun fact: “Sexy” men’s underwear is designed with a little dick pocket. I don’t know why. But it also works for socks!

            With my new appendage, the pants fit much more comfortably. I also noticed that my stance changed, as did the way I walked. There was something on my body now, something that sticks out which, paired with the absence of my breasts, shifted my center of gravity. I breathed from a lower place in my chest, closer to the “belly breath” I would often practice in yoga, and I felt more comfortable with my hips set forward ever-so-slightly, instead of flush with my tummy. I also found myself tucking my pelvis a bit so my ass didn’t stick out so much. None of these actions were terribly conscious, which made them all the more fascinating.

            As I looked in the mirror one last time, I realized something. As I mentioned with my height, I am not a large creature. 5’3 and typically fluctuate between 115-120 pounds. And though most of my friends can—and do—lift me up and swing me around like a doll, I’ve never really felt like a small person. But staring at the man in the mirror…that man looked tiny. Like, “I think you’re great, but I kind of like…bigger guys” tiny. Like, “well, I’ll bet you have a great sense of humour, though” tiny. I wasn’t even around people yet and I felt the shift. Female Dee is allowed to be 5’3, 115 lbs. Male Dee was viciously bullied as a kid and gets his head patted when women wear heels around him.

            With a new face and new clothes, I was ready to unveil Male Dee. I threw on a pair of my husband’s shoes (slightly too large) and began the trek to the iNation. I lived only a block or so away from the bar at the time. That block proved to be a strange start to a strange night.

            By late June, most young students have returned to their ancestral homes for summer break, but the bars and the bars were booming with upperclassmen and locals. As I did my best man-walk down the sidewalk, I felt a little anxious. This was all fun for me, but it is a tragic reality that cross-dressing in this country is risky. I didn’t really expect to run into anyone who would respond to me with violence in the surprisingly LGBTQ+-friendly rural college town of BG, but who knew? Maybe one of the dudebros who loved to spew black smoke from their beater pickups would pull over and hassle me instead of just honking at me like they did when I dressed normally. I scanned the faces of passersby for reactions as I walked past. That’s when I noticed something: No one wanted to make eye contact with me. Not in an “oh god, don’t get caught staring at the freak” way. They just…didn’t meet my gaze. No one was looking at me. It was like I was completely invisible.

I walked up to the bar feeling like a ghost. I don’t remember anyone I know being in front that night, but the door girl had a good laugh when she realized who I was. I stepped into the bar that was usually my world; my community, my beloved darkling throng. On a normal Wednesday night, I’m stopped at least three times before I make it to the bar for greetings and hugs. It usually takes me 20 minutes to get to the dance floor. Today, I walked past everyone. Everyone. Friends sitting in the booths, standing at the bar, gave me a glance with no recognition and went back to their conversations or their phone screens. My baby bats, my brothers, my closest confidants—nobody recognized me right away. I was surprised by how put-off I was by that feeling. I had expected not being recognized by friends to be hilarious, but it was…uncomfortable. And that’s where the night took its odd turn.

Awkward tonal shift #2!

This is where the admittedly clunky chronological story structure has to end, because most of the rest of the night was a series of bizarre observations and insight I did not expect. So here are some of the things I experienced, in no particular order, when I was a strange man at the iNation.

I have to stress the surrealism of not being recognized by people who have spent countless nights on the dance floor with me, people who have crashed on my couch or cried in my arms. It’s like…an inversion of interacting with a family member suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s. The casual intimacy that had been built with someone over years was just…gone, back to square 1 of being a stranger with people you don’t even remember having once been a stranger to. For some friends, the spell broke when I gave them a long stare and they were forced to give me more than a cursory glance. For others, I had to pop out my hip, wave, or make an expression in some sort of “Dee” way—poses and body language that neither of us consciously recognized as specifically “Dee” until it had broken the stranger spell. Before this night, I didn’t realize just how much information we absorb through body language. I mean, everyone “knows” we do this. We all know when someone is upset, angry, overjoyed, without them having to verbalize it. But I didn’t understand just how much of our recognition of others is based on body language, rather than just physical appearance.

Ladies and gentlemen, the aesthetic paragraph break.

And yes, I can hear my actor friends laughing at me right now, like, “Oh, silly Dee, why do you think we take all of these movement classes and assign certain gestures to characters we play?” Yeah, okay, I know that, too. But it’s one thing to “know” something on an intellectual level, and quite another to truly experience it in action in such a strange way. None of my gestures or stances are particularly unique. They don’t stand out on a conscious level. I don’t have a Dr. Cox hands-behind-my-head-wide-leg-stance, for instance, or a Marilyn Monroe hair-toss; nothing instantly, consciously recognizable. If I asked a non-acting friend how I stand or walk, I guarantee you they would tell me that I don’t really have a signature walk or stance. Yet they didn’t know who I was until I shifted my weight slightly or pursed my lips.

Another thing, something a little more predictable, was that physical contact with my male friends decreased. Noticeably. To be clear, I’m talking about when they knew who I was, not when they thought I was a stranger. I received no hugs from my male friends. Hands that usually rested casually at my hip shifted to brief pats at my shoulder. Selfies were taken without draping an arm around me.

To better understand the contrast, I have to emphasize how physically comfortable the iNation crowd is with me, and how touch-focused I am as a person in general. I greet everyone with a hug (though I ask new people what they’re comfortable with,) I put my arm around waists, I pet hair and rest my head on shoulders and stroke arms. As a result, my friends, regardless of gender, tend to be very comfortable touching me. We’re an affectionate crowd. But that night, I learned that while it was okay for me to be so physical as a woman, being flat-chested and boyishly contoured changed everything. The most fascinating part of this was that none of it was conscious—except for my fiancé refusing to kiss me with my faux facial hair. My male friends were responding to my appearance without thought, and our culture’s discomfort with male-to-male affection showed itself even in this most ridiculous of situations. It didn’t matter that they knew who I was. I looked like a man, so they didn’t touch me the way they usually did.

It wasn’t just men who responded to my look. My female friends exhibited interesting behaviours as well. I fully expected them to touch me and fake-grope me and flirt with me because my crowd is pretty open about their attraction, and I have found that women are often attracted to gender bending. Hell, my crush on Ruby Rose proves the hell out of that. But even straight women seem to have a little more flexibility with their attractions, and they are often drawn to men exhibiting traditionally female traits (see “metrosexual,” men wearing eyeliner, etc, I can write a blog on this alone.)

What I didn’t expect was for them to fear me.

It started out small. Early in the night, a lone female friend glanced at me and looked back down at her phone. When she realized I hadn’t moved or stopped looking at her, she looked back up, just like my male friends did when I did the same to them. But unlike my male friends, there was an expression on her face, a tension in her body, somewhere between irritation and fear. Her eyes widened when she realized I was still staring at her and narrowed instantly. She drew her elbows in closer to her torso. It was so, so subtle, but it was there. And I realized in the milliseconds before she recognized me and the spell broke that right now, I was nothing but a strange man openly staring at a woman, and that woman was alone. With a single long glance, I was a threat. I was potentially dangerous. And my friend was unconsciously gearing up to defend herself.

Again, I cannot express how unconscious this was for my friend. It took this experience to realize that I do the same thing, that all women do this. If a woman I don’t recognize is staring at me, I don’t often feel that sense of danger. I assume she might recognize me from somewhere and is trying to figure out who I am. I’m more inclined to give her a longer glance just in case I might have missed recognizing her. But if I’m out in a bar, alone, with only my phone for company, even in a place I feel comfortable…if I look up and a man is staring at me, I’m uncomfortable. I’m nervous. I don’t know what’s about to happen. Is he about to approach me and engage me in uncomfortable “conversation” to lead into asking me to dance? I can handle that. But is he about to approach me and say something lewd? Grab at me? Become hostile if I reject him? Every single one of these scenarios has played out in my life, and I’m infuriated to say that I’m far, far from alone in this.

It was strange and frightening to be on the other end of that unconscious behaviour I didn’t even realize every woman exhibits. It felt so alien to be a threat, even for a split-second.

It happened on a larger scale later. It was long after the crowd knew that Dee was in drag tonight. I had taken pictures, pulled some pranks, joked around. My male friends still weren’t too big on touching me, as I mentioned, but I was myself again. As odd fortune would have it, a friend of mine from another realm of my existence had decided to make tonight her first visit to the iNation. I love it when my normies do this. I usually run right up to them with a hug and welcome them to my world. In my excitement, I completely forgot how I was dressed. I saw my friend at the bar and I stared at her with a raised eyebrow, waiting for her to see me and come say hi.

She looked up, met my eyes, and looked back down. Still feeling my gaze, she looked up again, her eyes wider than before. At that moment, I remembered that I was disguised. There was no way she could hear me over the din, so I headed in her direction. My poor friend saw this and threw frantic glances around her, looking for her boyfriend. She turned away from the bar and nearly began speed-walking away before I caught up to her and shouted “IT’S DEE! I’M IN DRAG!”

At this point, I was feeling a little rattled. I was surrounded by friends, and we were all enjoying my getup. My other female friends who had joined me in drag seemed to be enjoying themselves as well. But I just felt strange. I had expected a lot of fun with this disguise, but I was observing things I hadn’t expected. I didn’t feel like dancing, either—mostly due to my chest being squished. I felt like I needed some air.

Earlier in the night, a friend and I realized that Male Dee really resembled him. We somehow didn’t take a photo together, but I’ll put up a side-by-side:

My buddy, courtesy of
https://www.facebook.com/BlueEmberPhotography/

Le me.

To us, we looked related, so he convinced me to pull a prank on the three owners of the bar, whom we knew closely. I walked outside with him to the neighboring bar where the three men were hanging out, and once again, I felt strange. I hinted at this while describing my first trek down the sidewalk, but as a man, I noticed that I wasn’t looked at very much. Even casual glances were rare. In our culture, I know that women are objectified. Our oiled-up and scantily clad bodies are used in advertising for literally anything (oh, hey, Carl’s Jr.) I am stared at while sitting in the library, walking down the street, eating in a café, it doesn’t matter if I’m wearing body paint or baggy sweats. Not everyone is leered at, but all women, all women, are watched. And until this experience, I honestly didn’t know that it was different for men.

Ladies and gentlemen, another aesthetic paragraph break.

My five minutes on the sidewalks that night made me realize two things: One, that women are always looked at. By men, by other women, by children, it doesn’t matter. We are trained to look at women. I’m not saying we leer at them, harass them, judge them, or even realize we’re doing it: We just look at them. But the same is not true for men. Men walk down the street with barely a passing glance. As I walked down the street with my male face, I felt like I belonged there. It’s different than simply living in a familiar place as a woman. I wasn’t on display, therefore, I felt some sense of…possession of the street, some sense of ownership. Why would anyone stare at me? It would be like someone staring at me while I sat in my living room. It’s my living room. Man, I am grasping at straws here trying to describe this feeling. This…ugh. Thoughts. This made me realize that because of the way we are conditioned to look at women, to objectify them rather than automatically see their personhood, men are made to feel that the world is theirs, and that women are guests there.

I am going on and on about this, so yet another aesthetic paragraph break.

I felt this similarly when I started to explore gender in photography. My photos of women were met with comments like, “Absolutely gorgeous work!” “I love this!” “So pretty!” My photos of men, however? “That guy seems interesting.” “Who is he?”

When we see a photograph of a woman, we admire it. When we see a photograph of a man, we wonder who he is. We see women as aesthetic. We give personhood to men. These ideas are echoed in countless areas of our culture, where men are seen as the ‘default’ and a woman’s presence demands explanation. See any “Why do we have to have a female Transformer anyway?” “forced diversity”-type argument.

All of this was running through my head when my friend and I made it to the bar to pull a prank on the owners. Up to this point, I had only experienced reactions from people around my age, early 30s at the maximum. The bar owners were three middle-aged men, all of whom I had known for a while. Hell, I worked for them for over a year. I was certain they would recognize me. We weren’t in a dark and flashy nightclub anymore, after all. We were in a well-lit, low-key sports bar. But when my friend introduced me to them as his “cousin,” they didn’t recognize me at all. I was a stranger to them. And holy hell, did they treat me differently. First off, all three of them barely looked at me. This was when I was standing in front of them, the focus of attention, because I was meeting them. They each said, “Hey, man.” with the barest of glances, and they shook my hand. Hard. Holy shit. We all know that men sometimes turn handshakes into dick-waving contests, but they each damn near crushed my hand. They didn’t do it on purpose—I’m sure they were expecting a firm handshake from a man, and I failed to adjust from my normal, “female” handshake, which is apparently far more delicate. The handshakes were brief and their hands retreated very quickly, as if they just realized I had a cold. My friend and I sat there for a full ten minutes, and not a single one of them looked at me for more than a split-second again. They were perfectly polite. They conversed with me. But the moment our eyes met, theirs would wander to their beer or their more familiar companions or the TV screens. My friend had to repeat himself when he revealed who I was. Only then did they give me a good hard look. Their revelation was hilarious, and they gave me more eye contact for the rest of the time we were there.

Sadly, I didn’t last much longer after that point in the night. My downfall was, surprise, my chest. As the night went on, I became shorter and shorter of breath, and my aching breasts became more difficult to ignore. At the unprecedented early hour of 1am, I called it a night.

I know how clunky this post is. I’ve tried to refine it here and there, and I’ve thought about rewriting it entirely, but to tell you the truth, revisiting this night was a strange and exhausting experience in and of itself. That night, I had expected to have a lot of fun. I expected to deliberately make my more macho male friends uncomfortable by grabbing their asses or cuddling up to them like I usually do—but with facial hair! I expected to dance with my female friends and have a lot of laughs at the expense of our culture’s silly gender lines. And I did have fun like that here and there. But mostly, my night felt like a strange out-of-body experience. I learned a lot I hadn’t expected to, and it has given me a better perspective on sexism in general, and man’s blindness to it. “Men are the default” is a phrase tossed around while criticizing our media, and I knew that to be true, but this experience made me understand it on a much deeper level.

Thank the gods I finally wrote this freaking post and I can move on. I’m sorry this is so poorly written, dear invisible readers. Perhaps I can refine it sometime, make it Opinion Piece material, but I doubt it. It took me a year and a half to organize my thoughts well enough for this word salad.

If you’ve had any strange experiences involving gender norms, I’d love to hear them.

‘Til next time (week? Time. I’m never on schedule,) my loves.