While driving my company vehicle at work this week, my coworker and I stopped at a light. A person crossed the street in front of us and I joked "let's play a game- is that a man or a woman?" He looked up from his ubiquitous smart phone and immediately judged "woman". We went back and forth for a moment, concluding that it was, indeed, a female because of how she walked.
Right after this, my coworker turned to me and said "you realize people must play this same game with you, right?"
After getting over my initial offense to the statement ("I am a lady, goddammit!"), I sputtered "yeah, maybe, but only at work!"
Disclaimer- work is landscaping, always has been (since college). Landscaping involves jeans of a necessarily un-womanly cut, tshirts, boots, and depending on the season, heavy outerwear and hats.
When I was about eight years old (see photo in pilot blog post for reference here), I was mistaken for a little boy all the time. I loved this, probably because I not-so-secretly wished I was a boy- they got to wear better, cooler, more comfortable clothes, and besides, who ever heard of the Red Sox having a female center fielder? In restaurants, stores, and one particularly memorable time in McDonalds when my then-stepmother rudely corrected the cashier, I was apparently often referred to as "your son" to my parents, something that I bet bothered my mom for less than one second, but drove my stepmother absolutely wild.
After about age 14, it stopped happening. Simply put, I grew boobs. D-cups, to be specific, and I figured I appeared to be certainly, clearly, definitively a female. Regardless of my choice of clothing or hair style or profession, it's really impossible for people to miss The Female Figure, right?
Wrong. In 2013, at the age of 28, I was shoveling snow at the hospital I worked at as a groundskeeper. Big storm, big boots, warm jacket and hat. Someone called out something very pet-name-like, and I picked up my head. "Oh! I'm sorry! I thought you were Brian!" Brian was my 19 year old coworker, and the person doing the calling was his own mother.
Less than a year after this incident, I cut my hair very short (that's right, my hair wasn't even in a pixie cut when Brian's Mother mistook me for her teenage son!) and moved to Florida, or as I like to refer to it, the land of stopped time, anti-progression, and traditional-gender-ideals. No one under the age of 45 in Gainesville had a pixie cut.
The other thing about the south? Everyone is "ma'am" or "sir", so if someone is not 100% sure of your gender, they just seem to wing it and pick one. I was in Florida for six months. I can't count the times someone picked wrong. It became less of an embarrassment to me and more of an amusing game, in which I would loudly point out "oh, it's actually ma'am!" and watch the various shades of red on cashiers faces when they actually looked up and saw BOOBS situated two feet below the short hair. (Note: this was the south, though, so I am sure for all their embarrassment, they probably felt some kind of vindication in discovering that I was a short haired chick in dirty work clothes - definite lesbian, practically a man anyway.)
I am not saying that I dress like a prom queen outside of my professional life. Ok, so the uniform of jeans and tshirts pretty much carries over into my entire life. The most glorious part is simply not caring.
I cut my hair short the day I decided I "didn't care" (and then immediately pierced a second hole in my ears so I could wear dangly, girly earrings).
