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Right, Like a Man
On the power of gender in an author’s name
I prefer the way I write when, while writing, I imagine being read as a man.
There’s an immediate freedom to not be apologetic. To do as we were taught in high school English and eliminate the self-conscious “I think…” from the writing.
I’m not sure when it happened, the shift into having to pretend.
My father, a single parent, never gave my sister or me the impression that being female was considered a weakness or would limit us in any way.
Now and then we’d have to fetch him things, and we were tasked with decorating and undecorating the Christmas tree, but that was because we were his kids. It had nothing to do with being girls. That I was a “girl” was so separate from my identity that I would sometimes be confused about why I didn’t feel more like one. Females my dad’s age who had soft, styled hair and wore perfume and nail polish were curiosities. I wanted to ask them questions about womanhood. I wanted them to somehow infuse me with the kind of femininity I saw blooming in the girls my age who wore clanking bracelets and pink lipstick.
That absence of innate femininity combined with being raised by a man contributed…
