GNDR 1100-003

March 16, 2014

Gender Journey Paper

My name is Amanda Lau, and I am a 20-year-old, cisgender, Chinese American female.

This story traces my gender development from its oblivious beginnings to present day thoughts.
My gender journey begins before I was even born. Chinese culture favors firstborns to be male,
and prefers sons over daughters; in fact, my uncle (who had six daughters but no sons) adopted
my dad for this very reason. Thus, I immediately failed expectations at a very young age. Two
individuals hoped I would come out female, so thankfully I did not disappoint my mother or my
aunt. Either way, my parents could not really do much to change their luck anyway since the
chances of me being born a boy or girl were 50/50 because there are only two genders, right?
Or so I thought. Well, I can see now why being involuntarily sorted through a dichotomous
gender binary sieve in our society would make it difficult to think otherwise.
As an infant, my sex at birth was female, my given American/Chinese names were both
feminine, and my parents openly addressed me as their daughter, but if one were to flip through
our old family albums without that context, my assigned gender was relatively ambiguous. Some
days I was dressed in all pastel pink as expected of little girls, but other days, I could just as
easily pass for a little boy clad in all pastel blue. My short, choppy hair did little to make my
assigned gender look any more obvious. Even I would have to second-guess whether or not I was
looking at a picture of my younger brother or myself. My parents dressed me this way primarily
because we were not financially well off and often times I had to wear my cousins hand-medowns, but sometimes I wonder if part of them just secretly wanted to have another son and so
they played pretend every now and then. Through the words of Judith Lorber in her 1991 article
on The Social Construction of Gender, she wrote, once a child's gender is evident, others treat

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those in one gender differently from those in the other, and the children respond to the different
treatment by feeling different and behaving differently (Lorber, p. 65).
My gender became much more apparent when I entered grade school. My hair grew out
and I wore pigtails every day along with my female school uniform. The toys I had were usually
stuffed animals and Barbie dolls, and I could not help but notice the glaring contrast between my
toys and my brothers Hot Wheels and action figures. Despite these differences, my brother and I
often shared toys, and I can still hear the echo of my parents scolding me for making him behave
more effeminately. As an innocent child, I was saddened to feel like I had done a bad thing when
I purely just wanted to have fun. It was then that the idea of boys have to be boys and girls have
to be girls ingrained itself into my mind as the natural (and only) way of things. I saw this idea
come into practice when I encountered separate restrooms for boys and girls for the first time.
Interestingly enough, I realize now that whenever I was defiant as a kid in performing my
correct gender, the people who would reprimand me tended to be female. One of many
examples happened in preschool when this girl named Jackie would constantly bully me and
knock over my Lego creations to make way for little brother to play with them. I reminisce the
days when my grandmother would relentlessly nag me to wash my face, brush my hair, sit
upright with my legs crossed, clean the house, etc. because girls must always be orderly. When I
was still hungry at the end of dinner and there was only one piece of food left on the table, she
would give it to my younger brother because he was the growing boy. My mom yelled at me for
cutting my own hair once with craft scissors, lecturing me that girls should keep their hair long.
My hair has been long ever since. Sometimes she would bitterly question me, asking if I was a
girl, if she even had a daughter. She subjected me to either become a doctor or marry a rich,
Asian husband. I do not intend to pose my grandmother or mother as being cruel, as I have come

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to understand that everything they did was out of their best intentions, but at the same time the
checklist of things I was supposed to do and be became tiresome. From these incidents, I found
myself drawing closer to my dad (I was a daddys girl) and my little brother.
Around kindergarten was when I reached the age where I was able to make the distinction
between who was male and who was female. To some extent, I could differentiate male and
female treatment by comparing parental treatment of my brother vs me. In the 1st grade, my first
best friend was this girl named Jasmine and we did nearly everything together, playing house,
coloring, arts & crafts, doing each others hair, etc. (i.e. typically girly activities). Suddenly,
she abandoned our friendship for one with a different girl named Elaineto this day I still dont
know why she did thisand from then on we stopped talking entirely. This painful event scarred
me for many years when it came to trusting and engaging in female friendships. I believe it
played a significant role in my gender journey because it marked the turning point for me to
partake heavily in male friendships and adopting masculine behaviors. This is not to say that I
was actively seeking male friends as a seven year old, but on a less conscious level, I [learned]
how to read peoples gender by learning which traits culturally [signified] each gender and by
learning rules that [enabled me] to classify individuals with a wide range of gender presentations
into two and only two gender categories (Lucal, p. 73).
Negative connotations on gender stemmed from dark childhood memories triggered me
to shy away from intermingling with my female classmates throughout my adolescence; as a
direct result, I detached myself from the typically girly activities that I used to do with
Jasmine. As a pre-teen, I grew self-aware that I was becoming one of the boys (and would say
this proudly) when I started to associate with a close-knit group of male friends. Gender was
becoming more than just what I looked like and what I did, but also how I responded to lifes

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events and who I was connecting with. Lifes situations pushed me in a direction that craved a
sense of belonging, and after years of being a loner post-Jasmine, I found my social niche
connecting with this small group of guys who I now refer to as my closest childhood friends. I
relate these thoughts to West and Zimmermans 2014 article on Doing Gender, which reads,
Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emergent feature of social
situations: both as an outcome of and a rationale for various social arrangements and as a means
of legitimating one of the most fundamental divisions of society (West, Zimmerman, p. 121).
My thought process started to change dramatically when I entered my high school years.
Growing up I learned to realize that there is more to this world than heads or tails; my perception
of society shifted from a simple, two-sided coin flip to a complicated, multi-faceted dice roll. I
took notice of classmates taunted for being homosexual, who self-identified as queer or bi, who
belonged to other genders, and it was foreign to me because all I ever knew in the past was two
genders and heterosexuality. I found myself gravitating towards individuals who shared familiar
feelings of isolation. My high school social circle was a diverse mix of ethnic minorities, gays,
lesbians, the disabled, the social outcasts, the suicidal, and the depressed. Before, my friendships
were male oriented, but now I found myself branching out into something uniquely
nonconformist. It was an interesting time when I overlooked gender in my friendships.
High school was also the time when my dad confessed to a three-year long secret affair
with another woman. He admitted to feelings of spite against my mother for having an abortion
without his permission. Simultaneously, my family fell to bankruptcy due to my dads company
going under. Both events deeply wounded my family; it hurt us as a whole when we almost lost
our house, it hurt my mother who was betrayed by the man she loved, it hurt my younger brother
who lost trust in a male role model, and of course it hurt me, daddys little girl who I respected

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dearly. From his actions, my views on gender roles changed exceedingly. When it comes to
bodily autonomy, I am prochoice due to my moms situation. My faith in my future romantic
relationships crumbled with insecurity, but also made me to vow to stay committed in them as
well. I see now that male dominance and female submissiveness was apparent in my household,
but I hope in my future home that the only power struggle would be if the electricity went out.
Instead of lecturing me to find a rich man, my mother now tells me to find a nice man. I no
longer agree with the standards that women should be dependent (especially financially) on men.
When I was filling out my FAFSA, I found out my mom actually made more money than my
dad; and so I learned that the father figure was not always the breadwinner. I recognized that
society treats men with more respect, despite violent statistics, such as higher rates of criminal
activity and the emergence of rape culture. The unfairness visible in sports, the work place, the
classroom, etc. against women disturbed me. To see the world through patriarchal eyes is to
believe that women and men are profoundly different in their basic natures, that hierarchy is the
only alternative to chaos, and that men were made in the image of a masculine God with whom
they enjoy a special relationship (Johnson, p. 29-30), but I was starting to see the world
differently.
I feel that gender journeys are reflective of one looking through a microscope; the whole
time looking at the same specimen (society) but through different lenses and magnifications,
some showing me the bigger picture while others the finer details. Ironically, looking through my
lens the lines dividing male vs female blurred with clarity. College life has fated me taking two
gender studies courses, learning about feminist theories, and participating in a club called the
Asian American Student Association, I have more confidence in myself as an active scholar,
thinker, budding social justice advocate, and feminist in progress equipped with a critical lens.

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Works Cited

Johnson, A.G. (2009). Patriarchy, the System: An It, Not a He, A Them, or an Us. In G. Kirk &
M. Okazawa-Rey (Eds.) Womens Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (p. 25-32). NY:
McGraw Hill.
Lorber, J. (1991). Social construction of gender. In G. Kirk & M. Okazawa-Rey (Eds.) Womens
Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (p. 64-68. NY: McGraw Hill
Lorde, Audre. (1984). Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. In Sister
Outsiders: Essays and Speeches (p. 114-123). Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press
Lucal, B. (2011). What It Means to be Gendered Me: Life on the Boundaries of a Dichotomous
Gender System.
West, C &. Zimmerman, D.H. (2014). Doing Gender. (P. 121-133).