boyhood

05.03.2023

Song: Visions of Gideon – Sufjan Stevens

Growing up, dad always made sure I was raised to be a ‘real’ man. I’ve seen that exact face of his after hundreds of swimming lessons, outside my school’s gates, in our garden whilst he was trying to get me to play football instead of playing with my sister’s barbie dolls. It was a face that said, “Toughen up, stop whining, and be a man.”

“Stop crying; a real boy doesn’t cry, wipe those tears away before somebody sees you, stand tall, don’t keep your head down, you’re supposed to look after your big sister and your mom.”

One of the first memories I had was me in front of the mirror in my parent’s bedroom, trying on my sister’s skirt and putting her pantyhose on my head and dancing while my mom was laughing and calling my sister to bring the old film camera to take a picture. Somewhere around the age of fourteen, I was digging through my parents’ photo albums, looking for baby pictures, when I came upon that picture and showed it to mom and dad. That time around, mom wasn’t laughing anymore; she looked embarrassed and told me to put the picture away; dad didn’t even want to see it. I haven’t seen that picture since.

I had this inner search for my own masculinity and manhood for as long as I can remember. What was I doing wrong? What made me so different from my classmates when I was in middle school? The thing was that I didn’t even notice I was doing things differently to a certain point. But till that said point, I was constantly reminded that I was not whatever a real man was supposed to be. It was my middle school math teacher, giving my mom a concerned look as she was mentioning that I was spending too much time hanging out with girls; it was our principal telling me that it’s not very manly to have my hair braided by the girls in my class and I should get a haircut or I would be suspended; it was this well-known therapist in Istanbul my dad took me to who advised him to spend more time with me or the consequences could be irreversible.

I think I was around five or six when I picked up on the fact that I had a ‘gender’. We had separate bathrooms in first grade. I was told to play with the boys during P.E. What I did differently than the boys in my classroom, subconsciously, was that I didn’t hold tight to that newly acquired gender of mine; I didn’t perform it. I wasn’t worried that making a mistake would strip me of who I was at my essence. I played house with girls for as long as I can remember and told our P.E. teacher to put me with girls so that I could hang out with my close friends. I genuinely wish I could tell you that I stayed that way. I didn’t; I wasn’t allowed to. I lost that innocence of not performing my gender around the time I started getting asked whether I was gay or not. I didn’t know what that really meant. As every 10-year-old would do, I asked my mom. Before explaining what the word meant, she asked me if somebody had called me gay. I nodded my head. She told me it was not normal and that I should report it to my teacher the next time I was called that word, which ended up being the next day and the day after. Little did we know I would be called ‘that word’ constantly throughout my entire primary and secondary school.

By the time I had come to terms with my sexuality, I also developed this strange notion that I had lost my masculinity and was no longer worthy of the title “man”. I felt weird around boys, I didn’t feel welcome. I had this sneaky suspicion that I wasn’t feeling like a real boy because I wasn’t seen as one. Kids can be cruel, but teenagers are worse, and when they noticed that I wasn’t like them at all, they had every intention to bully me for it. With my parents being the way they were and most of my peers acting the way they did; I had the hardest time finding answers to my questions about boyhood. It almost felt like a game I was losing, yet I kept playing and playing; it got a bit tedious, but I didn’t have a choice.

I recall having a meltdown at an H&M store when I was 15 because my mother insisted that I try on a coat she wanted to buy me. Trying on clothing always made me feel like a walking billboard of my body, an appendage I had no wish to be reminded of. However, I am unsure of the extent to which this is a result of a focus on masculinity rather than issues with body image. To this day, I have no idea how many pairs of coats or shoes I wore as a teenage boy, but I could sketch you a semi-accurate depiction of every piece of “girl’s clothing” I have ever worn.

When I was packing to leave Turkey, mom put so many clothes of my dad in my luggage, which I despised her for back then. I thought I was ready to renounce my maleness and adopt femininity fully. I had no idea that such opposing traits coexisted in me the way they do now. When I boarded the plane, I was both nervous about becoming even ‘less of a man’ and eager to get started on my quest for femininity. And yet, over the course of the last three years, I’ve come to realise that the way I dress, carry, and express myself have nothing to do with the gender I was taught to identify with and everything to do with the person I am now. I still pair my leather pants with my dad’s oversized sweaters and my baby tees with his loose jeans. There’s always an essence of who I am in what I wear. I don’t feel like I need to perform femininity or masculinity.

Because of my astonishing ability to realise such things, I now see that these two things contrast but coexist as well, because imagine if you had to be one thing all the time. And I know all parts of me will be slightly different tomorrow. There is a reason a journal has entries, a book has chapters, a person has different sides and our lives have different phases. Imagine a world where faced with the infinite, we find ways to manage one day at a time, one step at a time on the way to something greater. My journey with boyhood never stops just like every other journey of mine.

All the demons used to come around to remind me to act a certain way, and I’m just grateful now that they’ve left.

-M