You have a mixed-gender family.
I want to talk for a moment about transgender and trans-racial issues and about the fallacy being committed when someone compares drag to blackface.
First, that’s a simple physical error: we aren’t born in men’s and women’s clothing. They do often put pink or blue togs on you rather quickly, but that’s a decision someone else makes for you — when you’re completely helpless, too young to feed yourself. All gendered clothing thus begins as a symbol of control… But I digress.
The main pile of stupid in the comparison is that as you’re learning how to be a person — first three years of life — you almost certainly have both men and women in your immediate or extended family.
Exceptions may may exist — say, a single parent with only same-gender living relatives and friends, and not using day care — but that’s statistically freakish to the extreme. Most kids grow up with a mom and a dad; those who grow up with a mom and a mom, or a dad and a dad, usually have a mom’s dad or a dad’s mom to relate to, or assorted co-parenting friends from the other side of the fence who come around for barbecues.
Meaning that you hear male and female voices singing you to sleep. Male and female things become a part of you. Just as you might decide some of your family make better role models than others, you’re likely to wind up settling into one gender framework and discarding others; the dominant cultural practice, here, is to try very hard to make sure you wind up settling into the gender framework that’s superstitiously associated with your genitals.
Like all cultural practices, it’s not foolproof.
I know people who’ve grown up in multiracial families. And I know from listening to their stories that in this situation one will frequently encounter a lot of charge or crisis surrounding the issue of race framework and identity, and will need to make choices about identity. Jaed Coffin, a classmate of mine, just wrote a book about growing up both white and Thai, which is coming out in January.
The people who wind up under cultural pressure to declare a racial identity are relatively few. There’s a sort of “oh-imagine-that” in the way white people (like me) talk about it, as if having different identities in your family is strange and uncommon, and as if the conflicts that arise about it — well, oh, just get over it already. But this is one of those “Body Ritual among the Nacirema” moments; we’ve got the majority blinders on and fail to see the existence of cultural practices we think of as default.
Almost everyone has a gender identity framework chosen for them, and reinforced over time. A lot of people, by far the largest number, make the framework work for them; some are completely incompatible with it on a base level; and others simply find over time that it no longer fits, and wonder where to go now? and a reason why some white liberals don’t see this framework-nailing-to as a cultural practice is because it’s so overwhelmingly, virulently majority that it’s entirely invisible. And we are so very, very not over it. And some people are so not over it, and so unwilling to talk about cultural issues internally, that they do their group boundary policing by borrowing minority oppression.
(Which I’ve tried very hard not to do in this post, though I’m humanly fallible. I want to say here that by drawing a comparison, I’m trying to debate against a bad comparison, not trying to express that gender and race struggles are identical. They are apples and oranges: both round tree fruit, differently squishy on the inside.)