Edition 40 | 2021
Gender Rolls Words Victoria Knight
Illustrations Nikki Sztolc
My feminine reinvention didn’t come in high school and, spoiler alert, it’s never come. While it could just be that I am, independently of my body size, gender nonconforming, there has been no moment of gender questioning in my life that has been devoid of some relation to my being fat. To hark back to high school once more, I remember I used to wear a t-shirt under my school polo, and I used to tell myself it was just to smooth out my stomach. But the shirt also minimised the size of my chest and blurred the shift from my waist to my hips. It stopped me being so conscious of my body. My fat, feminine body. I remember wearing that shirt in any weather, because the stifling discomfort was not worse than the discomfort of there only being one layer of fabric between my body and the world. A world that was cruel about my size; about my gender; about me.
I read this tweet after quite a while of thinking about my gender. I had known I was queer for a long time by this point. But, beneath my identity as a bisexual cis woman, there was this underlying feeling of…
Fast forward a few years and I hit university. I have grown my hair out again, but it’s less about a conscious pivot towards femininity and more that I have not had time to get to JustCuts. But when I do get there, I want it to be short. Cropped, pixie, short back and sides. Just something short. In early undergrad, fuelled with all the drive of a young queer who has just discovered cultural studies, I cut my hair off. And in doing it, I also cut off all of the reasons why I shouldn’t have short hair; for over the years, I had heard a lot of them.
Well, that was just it. I couldn’t tell you what it was. I had never felt fully disconnected from my gender. I have only ever made one conscious push towards femininity in my life, and it came when high school beckoned. I remember feeling pressure to reinvent myself. Long hair, skirts, and using my full first name is where I would start. The name thing lasted for less than half of Orientation Day. My teacher announced me by my full first name, Victoria – a name which I have no objections to having (it’s on this article, after all) but one which feels too long, too elaborate and too formal to be spoken. After a handful of times being referred to as such, I asked my teacher quietly if she could call me Tori. I still prefer Tori.
The haircut made me start thinking about how I had been held back from doing what I wanted with my own body for so long. That underlying feeling I had been thinking about regarding gender started to bubble again. I started thinking about how I felt in relation to womanhood, femininity and identity, and everything was touched by opinions about my fat body.
The skirt experiment was similarly short. After a few hours, the lack of stretch in the polyester became too much around my squishy stomach and burgeoning hips. I unclasped the skirt and let out a visceral sigh of relief on the stairs, but felt the sting of the lines embedded into my flesh and the itchy-hot chafing of my thighs long after.
These opinions were not always negative (though anti-fat bias and negativity did feature heavily), but compliments about my body often resided in hyper-femininity; I was thick, curvy, busty. I was sick of the laziness of being complimented only for hyper-gendered aspects of my life I could not control, but equally feeling de-gendered stirred up uncomfortable memories. For a while, I experimented with using both “she/her” and “they/ them” pronouns in an online context. Supportive friends immediately varied my pronoun usage, and I realised just as immediately that “they/them” pronouns were not
The hair lasted the longest, perhaps only because of its novelty and its relative lack of interference in my day… but even that didn’t last. I can’t remember the exact points at which I cut my hair, but my Year 12 photo features a haircut not dissimilar to the pageboy cut young Tori donned from the ages of around four to eleven.
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