Toxic Masculinity and Non-Binary Identity
By Marina Martinez-Bateman
Trigger Warning: violence and sexual abuse.
Little girls are made of sugar and spice and letting mom’s friend put his hands in your sundress at the breakfast table and not threatening to kill him if he touches you again. You can't tell him you'll cut off his dirty fingers with the kitchen knives. You can’t threaten him or yell at him or tell your mom to make him stop. That's called being uptight, and your mom will laugh and tell you not to be such a buzzkill.
That guy didn’t touch me again. I was getting my ass kicked so regularly at that point in time, that any pedophile who failed to start his attempt at grooming with deadly force got dispatched pretty quick. But my mom’s disapproval sticks with me. I was expected to be pliant in the hands of my abusers, to be a good girl and a quiet girl. I was to let the men in my life have unfettered access to my body in whatever violent, sexual, or criminal ways they wanted while adult women coached me on how to “deal” with men. Their lessons focused on how to manipulate male egos and male rages to carve out a little bit of peace under those thumbs and other appendages they loved to crush us with.
A man is a dangerous animal, and I wanted more than anything to be something other than his prey.
All my friends were boys until 2nd grade when the girls got cooties and my last best friend pushed me out of a tree because he didn't want to catch them. I remember when I hit the ground, my breath left my body and I thought, “This is what happens.” This is what happens when your love for a boy propels you into a tree, and you don’t have strength of will to push him out of it first.
Toxic masculinity is the self-destructive commitment to an archaic caricature of men and male-ness. It’s predicated on the glorification of violence, a lack of introspection, and the cruel rejection of anything womanly, even and especially in one’s self. It associates femininity with weakness, and it is a particularly virulent form of internalized misogyny that kills people.
And I loved it.
My whole life, I have been filled to the point of overflowing with shame at my inability to control what happened to me as a child. I remember the night, after a particularly brutal incident when I decided that no matter what I had to do to make it happen, I would never feel this small or this weak ever again.
I was tired of being vulnerable. It was better to cut out my own heart than experience that kind of pain. Not the pain of being attacked, but the deeper, more desperate pain of being a child and needing love and care and not getting it. The pain of being hurt and alone with no comfort to speak of except for a list of things I did or didn’t do to deserve it this time.
There's this line in a Sandra Cisneros story, “I am the one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate.” I remember reading that in 7th grade and knowing that's what I needed. To leave the table like a man. To be cold enough to leave, instead of begging to be welcomed and being chased away instead. To stop trying to be a good enough girl when that clearly wasn’t possible for me. To kill these feelings of longing and love that caused me no end of pain, to live from a place of immovable disregard.
When my parents used my impending womanhood as an excuse for how I got treated, it missed a mark I didn’t have. Maybe some girls grow up to be women, but I leave the table like a man. Maybe some girls are made to be crushed forever by male violence, but I am growing into a hard thing that can’t be hurt. A dense, sharp thing that pushes you before you can push it. But hard things are too frequently brittle, too cold and still and dead inside to properly anticipate any way but force.
So I shaved my head, and I got into fights, and I snarled at little old ladies who shot me nasty looks in grocery stores. I thought, “If I hide this pain, and if I never show fear then maybe, just maybe, no one will test the theory of my toughness. Maybe, just maybe, this jelly soft, shamefully girly weak thing inside me will finally go away forever.”
That was the bargain I struck with the universe: Rip my heart out, God, and I'll never try to find it if I can just avoid the feeling of being human and being me. Two identities that I cannot survive.
My life was a one-room building with no running water and no door. I’d rather die than get broken open by the emotional revelation that there is more than this. I'd rather die than ask someone to care for me, as I am, ever again. Because it’s the one thing I ever needed and one thing of many I never got.
Toxic masculinity is the perfect container for a person so broken that you can't figure out how to hold yourself together in any other way.
I remember wanting so badly to be close to people and wanting so badly to be real with people and not being able to. Not being able to come out of my own cage to facilitate that closeness. Not knowing what my feelings were, nor how I would articulate them if I did. It was easy to pass off my complete and utter lack of emotional intelligence as aloof butchy charm, but internally, I felt alone.
I was filled with rage. I refused to acknowledge my grief or my massive trauma, and no matter what I told myself about how tough I was, all I ever wanted was love and family. Two things I could never truly have without acknowledging my humanity or coming to terms with my identity.
Not my non-binary identity. We live in a sexist world that is more than happy to validate the feelings of a misogynist queer. I’m talking about my identity as a human with my own human connection to the sacred feminine. The vast, unknowable creative mother spirit I alternately desired and rejected every day. Content to starve to death in my one-room life because I could not see through to a reality where I was safe enough to have feelings again.
When I finally started to try and break away from this toxic pattern, my first real emotions were indistinguishable from stomach upset. For months, and even years into my recovery, I could not tell the difference between certain emotions and nausea. So much so that there were some feelings I only expressed by vomiting. My mind-body connection was unstable for a long time.
Ironically enough, the very thing I was avoiding in order to not feel weak, was the thing that gave me my strength back: confronting my trauma. As long as I spent my days as the confines of the armor I’d built around the wounded child I’d been, I had no resilience, and no ability to deal with adversity. But as soon as I started to address the terror I felt at the prospect of my own vulnerability, I found I was strong enough to look at myself, to know myself, and eventually to love myself.
I went so long believing that feelings were for girls, and girls are weak. But girls should have every right to grow up into whole people, whether they’re really girls or not. Girls can be strong, and girls can handle their shit, and being non-binary doesn’t require me to reject my femininity. In fact, the one has nothing to do with the other. The whole spectrum of femininity, masculinity, and everything outside and in between is available to me, in spite of what my parents said, or what my culture tried to reinforce.
I do still shave my head (mostly), and I will fight for what I believe in, but that tends to look very different these days. I’ve found that when you smile real wide and send cute little waves at angry old ladies in grocery stores, they either like it a lot or they get comically mad.
Today, I am tough in a way I didn’t think was possible when I decided all those years ago, that I would never be hurt again. My strength is a living thing that comes from inside of me and makes room for my grief. It accepts that having a life means getting hurt, but it also means getting back up and learning new skills. Not with hatred, but with patience, compassion, and love.
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