My mother made sure that each one of her children had a photo album that tracked their growth from infancy to early adolescence. This is more challenging than you might at first imagine. Not only are we talking about analogue photography and exposure, but we are talking about the context of a hell of a civil war, and like almost all Palestinian refugees in Lebanon we were always financially challenged. But she did it, she managed it. Fortunately for me, I can trace the evolution of my dressing style with ease due to this fabulous photo album. I also happen to have an unusually strong set of early childhood memories.
My first memory had to have happened prior to August 1982 because the persons in it perished in the Israeli bombing of a building in Sanayeh (a suburb in Beirut), at that time. This must mean that I was less than two years old when I registered and retained my first memory. I can also guess the timeline of other early memories due to this kind of location. I know that we left the Southern Suburbs when the Amal militias made life for Palestinians impossible during their siege and wars on the camps in the mid eighties. In the streets of Beirut, they would round up Palestinian civilians and execute them, going door to door, looking for those of us who did not live in the camps. When I revisited and relived Lebanon, twenty years later, I had the misfortune of taking a ride with a taxi driver who got a bit sweet on me. When I told him I was Palestinian he was surprisingly undeterred but went on to tell me how he was once mistaken for one, and before he knew it, lay virtually unconscious on the floor and was moments away from execution, when they decided at the last moment to check his ID card before pulling the trigger. But I digress. Let's go back to building that timeline alongside the photo album that I am not going to show you. In the mid-eighties, my family fled this context of murderous persecution and left behind yet another house, home and belongings, and we relocated out of the Southern Suburbs to the coastline, near Hamra. At the time I was between four and five years old.
The transition in my dress code takes place well before our move to Hamra, as can be evidenced in the location of the photographs. My guess is that this took place between the ages of three or four. The early photographs present me in dresses, very cute dresses mind you! And shortly thereafter, when I develop my own consciousness of what clothes allow or inhibit, you cease to be able to see me in a dress. And I can tell you how that happened. You can't climb trees or ladders or play soccer or kick bullies in a dress. At least that was my reasoning. I remember it, clearly, dresses inhibited my desire for motion, they revealed underwear all too readily and I was not amenable to such restrictions. My transition from wearing dresses to pants, in those first instances was purely on a practical rather than an aesthetic basis. There was also that added problem of the way I liked to sit. I didn't do legs together when I sit. It was just not appropriate for me to sit with my legs together. And thus began a lifelong tradition that I would attempt to undo in my early teens, in a self-conscious effort to fit into the final years of all-girls Catholic schooling in Sydney, Australia. Those last couple of years of school were so torturous, but you can't say I didn't try. But whenever I did, I felt like I was pretending to be someone else, I felt like a cross dresser. But that doesn't mean that I ever felt like a man in women's clothes, or like a woman in men's clothes. These were the value judgements imposed (and are still being imposed) on me by the gender police wherever I may be in the world.
When I was a child, I never had any confusion about being a girl, I never desired to be anything other than what I was biologically. I knew I was a girl. I loved it. Had I been born a boy I would've been like every other boy, and if I wore dresses like all the other girls (yes, there was no one else around like me growing up), then I would have been like every other girl. I liked being different. I liked who I was. I remember being in a car on the Syrian border, talking to my older sister and my mother, so this would have to have been in 1989 when I was 9 years old. I remember telling them this: "I love being a girl, and a strong girl, I don't want to be a boy." I remember them congratulating me on this and quickly moving to another conversation topic and I remember wishing that they'd spent a little bit more time discussing this with me.
Throughout my entire childhood, I have had to convince people that I am what my biological sex designates me as, despite the constructed phenomenology to the contrary. More often than not, people did not allow me to assert this individual truth. I was always told either "you are a boy" or "you want to be a boy" or "you're a tomboy." I think it is for this reason that I can really feel for transgender children. By 'transgender' here I mean an individual whose biological sex is distinct from their psychic experience of themselves. Both transgender children and I have spent our childhoods trying to get people to understand who we really are and have had the problem of being told that we are NOT what we know ourselves to be. My problem is the inverse of that of the psychically transgender child. I always felt like I had to fight for being recognized as biologically female, whereas my transgender counterpart has to fight for being psychically male or female in contradistinction from the outward manifestations of biological sex.
While Palestinians in Lebanon of the 80s suffered such horrendous persecutions on every level of society, from the purges at the hands of the Kata'eb or 7arket Amal or Israeli brutalization, to name a few, my persecutors were the gender police at the Lebanese Catholic school I attended. But despite this, I didn't just survive, I thrived. In the marketplace and on the street and whenever I came in contact with the dense mélange of West Beirut's cosmopolity, I thrived. I doubt I would have received an equally enthusiastic reception if I had been an effeminate boy. I also thrived because while the gender police were actively trying to destroy my spirit at school, the situation at home afforded me such tremendous acceptance and love. Sometimes I wonder, would I have been able to write the books I have written and speak on the topics I have broached with the courage that is required to do so, if it weren't for that early unconditional love and acceptance? I think not.
When my first sister got married, this was in 1991 and I was ten years old. I hadn't worn a dress in at least 5 years at that point. I wasn't forced to do it either. I obliged. I obliged because I was implored to do so, so that I could be in my sister's bridal party. We all wore these hyper-cliched girls' mini-wedding dresses that have frills and layers and ribbons, etc., etc. I still think I looked ridiculous in it, with my short scruffy hair, but it was a fun costume. I felt kind of like children in the US must feel when they dress up for Halloween. Between the time I walked out of our apartment building and the time I arrived at the church, I had my mini-wedding dress caught on so many edges, like car bumpers and stair rails, that in the space of a half hour, the frills were almost entirely ripped off. It wasn't something I did consciously, not at all, I just wasn't used to my clothes being so far away from my body. Once again, dresses proved to be an impractical restriction of motion in tight urban spaces and I would retire the dress until a further five years, when it would finally dawn upon me that people hate you, really hate you for who you are, and you should try to conform. I did, for a couple of years, where I would occasionally wear a dress. Eventually, however, I came to the re-realization that the problem was not me. It was them.
