Profile: Jessie Gilliam
Jessie Gilliam is a 26-year-old “gender queer” who works as an advocate for GLBT youth in Washington, D.C.
Understanding my gender is an ongoing process. Looking back on childhood, I can pull out things that are indicative of my current gender expression. I very distinctly remember going into my mother’s room and saying, “I don’t want to grow breasts.” I used to play king of the hill with the boys in my neighborhood and they never had an issue with me. I think they saw me as just a “different” kind of boy.
I was always very ambiguous in my gender presentation and that led to a lot of teasing in junior high school. The sketch comedy TV show “Saturday Night Live” had a recurring character named Pat and the joke revolved around Pat’s androgyny and how no one could figure out what gender Pat was. So to my classmates, I became Pat and could expect to be called that any time I walked down the hall, or at lunch in the cafeteria, or pretty much any time I was in public.
High school was another step in my gender travels, though in a way it might have been a detour. I came out as a lesbian and tried hard to distance myself from androgyny. I wore dresses and skirts, grew my hair long and asked to be called Jessica. I’m not exactly sure that deep down it was what I wanted to do, but it seemed like what I should do and also how I could avoid being teased.
Coming out as a lesbian was one of the easiest things to do. I was out to friends and had not gotten negative reactions. There wasn’t a gay-straight alliance yet at my school, but fortunately one of the teachers was gay, although not openly. And while it wasn’t the official GLBT club, she did advise an after-school group that became an informal version of a GSA. Those meetings were so important in allowing us to be our true selves with each other, even though I understand now that it wasn’t necessarily the true self I would later become.
Going to college brought yet another shift as it became less important to deflect others’ taunts and more important to be me. I became more comfortable about myself and shifted into a more androgynous style — loose-fitting clothes, sandals, short hair — that I maintained through college. I became very active in women’s issues, majoring in women’s studies and throwing myself into all causes related to women’s and queer issues — sort of a “big dyke on campus.” I was personally challenged by the idea that there could be more than just male and female because everything in my life focused on the female. I did understand that there were many different ways to be female but oftentimes that personal belief conflicted with my political beliefs.
After college I moved to D.C. and began to work in the GLBT community. Once I gained some distance from the woman-centeredness of college I was able to acknowledge that the way I felt most comfortable was actually boy-identified. When I discovered the trans community, it really had an impact on me. I was able to interact with other “gender queer” folk and learned that I really identified with how they saw the world. It had always felt like I had to try hard to be a lesbian. But being gender queer wasn’t work — it was natural. For once, I didn’t have to think about my identity, I could just be.
Of course, interacting with others has become a new challenge. Some people who had known “Jessica, the big dyke on campus” have had to adjust to my current gender presentation, but most have accepted me — including my first girlfriend who is transitioning and is now my first boyfriend! I know that I challenge people’s beliefs about gender but I take that as my own challenge to help them understand that there are different ways to be male and female. And being transgender means different things to different people. At this point, I have not planned any medical changes, but have recently taken the step of asking those close to me to begin using masculine pronouns.
Trans people are all on their own journeys and it is important for gender queer people to have the freedom to just be themselves. It’s crucial that you let yourself be who you are — try to think less about how others see you and instead concentrate on how you see yourself. It’s not easy to do in a society where so many people have rigid concepts of gender and how it should be expressed. Yet that’s why it is so important to educate others by simply being our true selves, wherever that is on the gender spectrum.