Redefining Realness Read Online Free PDF Page A

open, rolling my eyes at Cori while she continued cackling from the kitchen table.
    “No roll your eyes at me for I pop dem out of your head!” Cori said, standing up from her chair.
    “Enough already,” Grandma chimed in from the sink. “Just be happy Papa never catch him.”
    The women in our family used Papa as a looming threat. I don’t remember him reprimanding any of us. Grandma was the one to be feared. Papa was the giver of money. He smelled of Drakkar Noir and watched Westerners from his La-Z-Boy and gave me a dollar every time he came home smelling of beer from the bar, his go-to spot after driving the street sweeper. I usually spent it at the Manapua Truck, Hawaii’s version of an ice cream truck, named after local pork buns, where a man in a van sells greasy noodles, crunchy wontons, and a variety of candy and chips.
    Cori walked out the front door, probably to go hang with her boyfriend, the Filipino Cheraine and Rene said she was skipping school to fool around with. At the time, I remember Cori and Cheraine being much older than they really were because they were so independent; their lives barely intersected with Mom’s. I didn’t question why theywere not with us on the weekends in Pearl City as I sat next to Mom in the living room on a wicker love seat with floral seat covers.
    I often felt dirty when Mom came to Grandma’s straight from work, all perfumed and hair-sprayed. Her hair was long, dark, and straight, like vintage Cher, whom she resembled, especially in her teen years, with big brown eyes, olive skin, high cheekbones, and thin lips she painted pink. Her growing belly was out of place with her long, lean frame.
    “Want to tell me what happened?” Mom said, wiping my eye with her saliva-moistened index finger. Her breath never smelled good as it dried on my face, but I felt cared for when she did that.
    “I pulled a dress off the clothesline,” I whispered, afraid Grandma would hear me from the kitchen and rebut my testimony. “But I put it right back.”
    Pushing my short curls from my forehead, Mom smiled. “I don’t think Grandma scolded you for taking the dress, even though you shouldn’t touch stuff that’s not yours. You’re not supposed to wear dresses.”
    She wasn’t reprimanding me. She was just telling me the way things were, the way she’d learned the world. In her learning, what I did by openly expressing femininity as her son was wrong and, in effect, from Cori’s cackle to Grandma’s smack, taught me that my girlhood desires were inappropriate. Resisting and hiding my femininity would keep me from being laughed at by my sister, being hit by my grandmother, and being lectured at by my mother.
    These women believed they were raising a boy child, and boys do not wear dresses, according to the rules of Western culture’s gender binary system, which is rigidly fixed between two poles (boy and girl; male and female; man and woman; masculine and feminine) for all people depending on assigned sex (based on the appearance of one’s genitals at birth). This system proclaims that sex is determinedat birth; gender is based on your sex assigned at birth; no variation exists in sex or gender; you should not change your sex or gender; and you should act according to your assigned sex and its correlating gender-appropriate behaviors.
    My family subscribed to this rigid belief system. They were unaware of the reality that gender, like sexuality, exists on a spectrum. By punishing me, they were performing the socially sanctioned practice of hammering the girl out of me, replacing her with tenets of gender-appropriate behavior. Though I would grow up to fit neatly into the binary, I believe in self-determination, autonomy, in people having the freedom to proclaim who they are and define gender for themselves. Our genders are as unique as we are. No one’s definition is the same, and compartmentalizing a person as either a boy or a girl based entirely on the appearance of