I was 12 years old when I first experienced aversion to my family’s concept of gender. It was fall 2019, and I was staying with family in New York City for a weekend. I have a clear memory of being in the shower when my older cousin walked into the bathroom to get something. I don’t remember what I said to her, but I must’ve expressed the extreme discomfort I felt at the time, because I remember her responding with something like “we have all the same parts. Why does it matter?” I just wanted to have some privacy during the 10 or so minutes I was in the bathroom, but apparently it was okay for my cousin to come because we were both girls, because “we have the same parts”. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the start of my years-long critique of my family’s version of womanhood.

Reading Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like A Girl” caused me to reflect a lot on my ever-changing perception of gender, particularly the contrast between how I perceived it in my childhood and during my teenage years (I’m writing this two months before my twentieth birthday, which is weird for me to think about). It has me pondering on the influence of the idea of gender pushed upon me by my family as I grew up. My maternal grandparents had ten kids, and each of those kids had two to five kids of their own. I have roughly three dozen first cousins on my mother’s side, plus a handful of second cousins from the first cousins old enough to raise kids. Most of us were assigned female at birth.

My family holds an implicit yet persistent dichotomy about its women and girls. We must submit to those above us, because submission is the most acceptable version of respect. We must stand our ground and assert dominance against those who oppose us. We must only have opinions that match those of our parents. We must be loud and proud about our identities in public spaces (the acceptable versions of them, anyway). We must cross our legs at all times lest a grown man take interest in a child’s vagina on the subway, or at a family gathering. We must have kids and be the primary caregiver for them, our partners, and our households, not as a sign of weakness, but as a sign of strength and resilience. We must bend and mold ourselves to the expectations forced on us by the men we start relationships with, only to become too scared to leave when we should. Even though I’m nonbinary, I say “we” because my family either doesn’t know about my gender identity or doesn’t care, nor do I want to know what would happen if they acknowledged it.

Despite my family’s standards for the way girls and women should behave, there are a few more tangible attributes many of us have that aren’t seen as feminine in most contexts. Oftentimes, our implicit hierarchy of respect drives our actions more and trumps typical gender norms. Even though the women in my family can be more comfortable taking up space compared to other women, I think the idea of experiencing things as either a subject or an object is something almost all of us (and maybe most of the boys and men as well) move through life with. We’re used to experiencing things as they happen to us instead of being in charge of what happens. Honestly, I think that has less to do with gender norms and more to do with the implicit hierarchy of respect that I don’t know how to explain to someone who isn’t part of it. At the surface level, respect is exclusive to autonomy and control and the amount one has increases as they age.

My family’s gender norms are heavily enforced. They’re a set of expectations we all know we’re supposed to meet, and they’re such a constant that we don’t even stop and think about why the expectations exist in the first place. I have no idea where they came from. I don’t know when they first started to diverge from societal gender norms. I just know I’m supposed to conform to them.