Remembering 2002: A Very Peter Gabriel Teenhood

Did you hear? Peter Gabriel is touring North America to mark the 25^th anniversary of his great album So. Naturally I am stoked to see my favorite singer in concert for a fourth time, because I am hip and trendy and down with the kids; but I am double-stoked because 2012 is actually a personal anniversary in my relationship with So.

People who had the misfortune to know me when I was in my teens could tell you that my defining characteristic as an adolescent was my deep, borderline-obsessive love for Peter Gabriel. (Like I said: hip, trendy, etc.) The wall above my bed was completely obscured by posters, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles relating to PG, as I abbreviated him; I faithfully wore my PG T-shirt and baseball cap every weekend; I traded bootlegs online (yes, children, once upon a time we used to trade bootlegs, via snail mail); I was consistently in the top five posters on a certain PG fan forum.

At its best, being a teenager is very dull – a stretch of life you just have to wait out so you can get to the good parts. You have to latch onto something to get you through it: casual sex, illegal drugs, chess club. I was really, really into Peter Gabriel.

One of the reasons is simple timing. After a decade of soundtrack albums and thumb-twiddling, PG dropped Up, his first proper record since 1992's Us, on September 24, 2002 – which happened to be about six weeks after my family relocated from Kenya to Scotland.

I had, of course, known that summer 2002 would be our last summer in Kenya. I was careful to commit it to memory: all the safaris, bumping along dusty roads on the roof-rack of the car, dutifully penciling down every critter we saw; blissed-out days spent reading voraciously beside the pool of a coastal villa; swearing eternal loyalty to the friends I still wasn't really used to having. Plus, Peter Gabriel. That school year I had been very into the Who, Pink Floyd, Rush, and Gong, so maybe it was toward the summer that PG fever struck me. I can remember sitting in my parents' car, listening to “Big Time” on headphones, and thinking: I am IN LOVE with this album.

Acclimatizing to life in the UK from Kenya is really, really hard, even if you're not 13. Peter Gabriel's music helped me get through a rotten time in my life. My prog-rock childhood had convinced me that good music was over; but the release of a new record from my favorite musician was like a little island of sanity in the midst of that chaotic combination of culture shock and adolescence. So was something from Kenya. Up was something from Britain. Peter Gabriel offered a way of exploring new territory while still being in touch with my past.

I love So. I've listened to it probably eighty billion gazillion times in the past decade, but to my ears it still hums with the echoes of a very different part of my life – a part that ended ten years ago. It feels very weird to be ten years out of Kenya, and weirder still to be ten years removed from the profoundly, awesomely ignorant little oddball I was when I was 13. Here are five things I wish I could go back in time and tell my 13-year-old self, to ease those troublesome years of high school:

1. Read this. Try not to be a douche about your shiny megatons of privilege.

2. Gender theory, sex-pos feminism, and QUILTBAG awareness. UK sex ed in the early-to-mid-2000s is entirely contraception-centric, with the admirable goal of reducing unwanted teen pregnancy, but you will not get any of the sex and gender education you so desperately need. You'll be much happier once you deconstruct the dominant cultural framing of all sexual activity as teleological toward PIV. Learn not to worry whether you're “normal” re: gender identity or sexuality.

3. It's okay to feel things and want things. You don't have to empty it all into your fiction, and you don't have to let other people dictate who you can be. Life will never be easy, but I promise you it will one day be a million times more interesting than it is right now.

4. Mother is right more often than you think, and she is wrong more often than you think. If that sounds contradictory, welcome to having a Jewish mother. You'll never get used to it.

5. Most of all: EVERYONE IS FAKING IT. ALL THE TIME.

A Short List Of Things That Do And Don't Matter In The Ongoing Quest For Authentic Discernment Of My Gender Identity

Things that don't matter

My parents' opinion

Wider society's opinion

Anybody at all's opinion but mine

My mother's desire for a daughter

“Why” I feel the way I do

What, precisely, I “really” am (trans, genderqueer, just confused...)

How long it's taken me to admit any of this to myself

Things that do matter

My pain and dysphoria at being gendered female

My delight at being gendered neutral or masculine

"Non-Belonging Is My Very Substance"

"I feel that I exist only outside of any belonging. That non-belonging is my very substance."

--Edmond Jabès, From the Desert to the Book

I was born in Scotland, I went to high school there, and my parents still live there. In the US, I tell people I'm Scottish – it's just easier. However, it's not strictly accurate. Both my parents are English, so I lack the Braveheart ancestry (which is what most people in the US mean when they say “Scottish”); I spent my childhood continent-hopping, so I lack the emotional ties, personal history, and identifiable accent of one specific place (which is how a lot of people seem to relate to a place they call “home”); and, to be perfectly honest, if my parents moved away tomorrow I doubt I'd ever go back to Scotland.

I'm not really Scottish.

At first, I tried telling people I was “British” or “from the UK,” to which if not my accent then at least my passport can attest, but nobody who's really British ever says that. People claim England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales: the place they identify as being from. The UK is a political fiction – not that any nation-state isn't; but the UK seems to be a particularly unconvincing one, at least as far as hearts and minds are concerned. I certainly don't “feel” British. I have no heart-and-mind national allegiance.

I'm not really anything.

These days, I try not to be a douche about this. It is both easy and insufferable to bang on about being “a citizen of the world, you guys” when you possess both the geopolitical privilege of a UK passport and the socioeconomic privilege to take advantage of the myriad doors that passport opens. I also try not to fall into a self-pity-party about my sense of alienation. My errant childhood may have robbed me of any place to call “home,” but it also gifted me broad horizons and an unslakable wanderlust – a tradeoff I'd not reverse for anything.

Sometimes, though, I do feel a secret wish to able to participate in outpourings of jingoistic fervor.

I've been witnessing such an outpouring from certain of my Facebook friends over queen whatsit and her diamond thingamajig. I am, as that last sentence might have tipped you off, firmly in the small-r-republican camp when it comes to the whole monarchy malarkey. Even if I somehow felt myself to be authentically British, my deep cynicism regarding autocratic headship, even of the mostly-symbolic variety, wouldn't permit me to do anything other than sneer at the whole business.

But, gosh, it looks like such fun.

I feel the same sense of alienation and frustration at international sporting events. Look at all these people, who are capable of (a) claiming a national identity without feeling like an impostor and (b) giving a rat's rear-end about the event in question! They all seem to be having SUCH FUN. I wish I could have fun.

Alas, I am a fun-killing overthinker with no ability to switch off my cynicism and no sense of belonging anywhere. But, on the upside, Salman Rushdie says I am a special snowflake.

You Self-Identify Wrong

A friend recently sent me this talk by Daniel Dennett, “How To Tell You're An Atheist.” Dennett is, I think it's fair to say, the least obnoxious of your Four Horsemen of New Atheism, and the talk is pretty interesting, especially at the bookends: the phenomenon of closet-atheist clergy is enormously fascinating, as is the observation that religious creeds must tend to impenetrability if they're to survive.

However, the talk's very title telegraphs something that thoroughly infuriates me about New Atheism, and that is its evangelical fervor. I realize I run the risk of making a false equivalency here, so let me state forthrightly that I absolutely do not think that New Atheists and the Christian right are like totally the same and both sides are as bad as each other and the truth lies in the fuzzy-wuzzy middle. The fact that the United States (where much of this discourse is taking place) is a Christian supremacist society means that the dynamics at play when an atheist speaks are very different than when a Christian speaks, even if they're saying the same thing. They're coming from different places, they got there in different ways, they have diametrically opposed agendas; but the fundagelical and the atheist telling me I'm not really a Christian are both very wrong.

The intense hostility of much of US culture toward atheists is pretty mystifying for us godless-commie-Europeans, but it certainly exists, and it completely explains the forcefulness of some American atheists. When you're a marginalized group trying to assert yourself to a dominant culture that would prefer to pretend you don't exist, you have to be loud and proud, and if you bruise the delicate fee-fees of your oppressors, well, cry me a frickin' river. I get that. But the marginalization of non-believers in the US really isn't exactly the same as other axes of marginalization and oppression, because belief (or lack thereof) is, as Dennett points out in that speech, entirely internal. His suggestion that Christians who help the poor are closet atheists is breathtakingly cynical (and that's coming from a thoroughgoing cynic), but his point stands: no matter what someone says and does, we can't know what they truly do or don't believe. Dennett's theory is that, for an awful lot of people, their behavior and their beliefs do not align. Christianity, on his reading, is teeming with closet atheists for whom the social consequences of admitting their lack of faith are just too high.

Now, I sympathize with the goal of making it socially acceptable to be openly atheist. Frankly, I find it nonsensical that it's not acceptable here. But I have a lot less sympathy for the accusation of widespread bad faith or false consciousness – for the practice of telling self-identified Christians that, if they're thinking people or not fully orthodox or lefties, they're probably not really Christians.

Since Dennett himself uses the analogy of gayness (which is totally not in any way a cheap shot or a false equivalency), let's roll with that. I am a queer person, and if I'm perfectly honest straightness baffles me. On a gut level it weirds me out and repels me, and, though I'm surrounded by self-identified straight people, I just don't get why anyone would be straight.

I could make the argument that they shouldn't be. I could say that, once upon a time, I thought I must be straight too, before I knew it was possible to be anything else; that I understand the fear of social consequences that keeps people closeted; that probably there are tons of straight-identified people who are really secret queers, but they're too uninformed or afraid to admit that they're anything other than straight.

To some extent, I think this is true (though the numbers are probably fewer than I'd like them to be), just as it's true of closet-atheist Christians. But that doesn't mean I think it's right to second-guess all straight people, to tell them their identity as a straight person is a lie (at best to everyone around them, at worst to themselves as well), to redefine the parameters of straightness so as to exclude a lot of straight-identified people (because I understand straightness better than they do? because I know them better than they know themselves? because I've put a lot of thought into this whole issue, and the fact that they still call themselves straight proves that they haven't?). My goal might be the noble one of encouraging self-actualization and greater self-understanding, but this tactic sucks. It's aggressive, it's arrogant, it's domineering, and it's hierarchical.

Saying “if you call yourself straight, but you've ever thought about kissing someone of the same gender as you, then you're actually a big flaming 'mo” isn't helpful. For straight people who are not ready to think deeply about sexuality, that statement sounds like a threat. For straight people who have thought deeply about sexuality, it's insulting and delegitimizes their process. Either way, it's accusing straight people of a false consciousness and co-opting their identity.

Of course, if your ultimate concern is swelling the ranks of people you can call queer, then I suppose this is the optimal tactic. But if your ultimate concern is giving people the tools for greater self-awareness, better critical thinking, and a richer engagement with the world and people around them, then you're better off sticking to education. Despite his title and some of his more condescending moments, Dennett does recognize this in that speech, and that is why I have more respect for him than for Dawkins et al.

By all means, be as loud and proud an atheist as you want. God (or whoever) knows the world needs more thinking people who will stand up boldly for what they (don't) believe in. People need to encounter others who think and live differently than they do. It's the only way to learn and grow as a person.

Tell me how you self-identify, what you think and believe, and why; I need to hear it. Just don't fucking tell me what I am.

So It Begins

So, I finally bought a binder.

I've been wanting one for so long, but I was too afraid to actually get it. Oh, they're too expensive. Oh, figuring out the sizing is too confusing. Oh, making one is beyond me because I have no arts-and-crafts skills. (Am I still allowed to be part of the queer and/or blogging communities if I admit that I have no arts-and-crafts skills?)

A week ago, the excuses ran out. I just couldn't stand it any longer. I ordered one online, and yesterday it finally arrived.

I'd been really on edge waiting for it. I knew it was ridiculous, but I just felt like putting it on for the first time would be this ~magical moment of truth~, an epiphany where everything fell into place and I would be able to stand up straight and tall and say LOOK AT ME, WORLD, THIS IS WHAT I AM.

Of course, this is not exactly what happened. It's a nice thing to have; I like what it does to my body shape a lot; but it doesn't make me completely flat, and it certainly doesn't solve all my issues in one swoop. But I did think that my first day wearing it out would be a day without (or, okay, with less) dysphoria.

It started out grand enough. I went into the city with a group of friends. It was a beautiful day, and I was wearing my new binder under one of my favorite T-shirts. I felt okay about myself, or at least as close to okay as I ever get.

Then we went to a bowling alley, and I nipped to the bathroom. There were non-gendered bathrooms, which was nice. I adjusted my binder and made sure I looked okay, and then went to join my friends in the bowling alley. They'd already paid for two lanes and entered everyone's names. They'd split up the group into “men” and “women”, and included me among the latter.

Do you want to know what the dysphoria felt like? I will tell you. It felt not unlike a panic attack: waves of nausea would crash over me, so intense I could barely stand upright, and then recede just enough to make me think I could cope before hitting me again in full force.

I am not very good at confronting issues head-on, and anyway I didn't want to ruin anyone else's fun, so I did not say anything. And it's not that I expect my friends to read my mind or anything – I haven't spoken about it openly with many of them and I don't expect them all to be totally sensitive about it – but they see the gender-neutral pronoun buttons I wear; they know gender is kind of a difficult subject for me; they know I prefer gender-neutral language wherever possible.

They should've fucking known this would upset me.

Like, I don't know, maybe gender dysphoria is trivial or a joke to them; but it's really, really painful for me. Every time someone uses female pronouns for me, it stings a little; every time someone calls attention to my assumed femaleness in a major way, it's like a punch in the gut. It really does feel like a physical injury.

The other day one of my friends referred to me as a “girl”. I didn't say anything, but afterward I cried about it in the shower.

All my life, I've been suppressing this. At a very, very early age I intuited the need to suppress it. I assumed every girl wanted to be a boy, but nobody talked about it because (a) it would upset their mother and (b) there was nothing you could do about it anyway. I channeled all of these feelings into fiction: I desperately sought out novels written by female authors from the perspective of a male character as legitimation that it was okay to do this, and I wrote all my own stories from the perspective of boys or gender-non-conforming girls. I guess the gender policing I encountered as a very small child made it clear to me that “not being a girl” would have to sit alongside “walking with dinosaurs” and “solving mysteries” as belonging to the realm of pure imagination.

Well, guess what? I give up. I give up trying to be who everyone wants me to be. I don't have a clue who I am, but I know who I'm not. The bowling incident has made that crystal clear: if I were a woman, it would not have upset me so much to be called one.

I packed up my not-girl-ness in a box marked PURE FANTASY at a very early age. Inside the box, it festered and grew; now it's a big ugly mess that has burst free of the childhood fetters, and what it will look like once I've given it two decades' worth of care and attention is anybody's guess.

Coming Out To Myself

Some people face a lot of hostility when they come out. They lose friends. Their parents disown them. They get beaten or killed.

I am not one of those people. All of my friends were super-cool; my parents were a bit weird at first (well, they still are sometimes), but they mostly got over it; I've been threatened, but never subject to physical violence. I've had the tremendous good fortune to live in queer-friendly communities.

I am very, very lucky. The biggest obstacle in my coming-out process was myself.

The hard part of coming out to myself was not actually figuring out my attractions. It was entirely clear to me quite early on that I did not want to have sex with boys and that I did want to have sex with girls. That, to be honest, was never in doubt.

That's why one older queer person's advice to me when I admitted my confusion about my sexuality – “Have sex with a guy and have sex with a girl, and see which one you like more” – was so profoundly unhelpful. Which one I would like more was definitely not the issue.

What was the issue – what I mean when I refer to “coming out to myself” – was deconstructing my internalized heterosexism.

By “internalized heterosexism,” I mean the deeply ingrained idea that straight is default and gay is Other. This idea pervades our culture like air, and is similarly taken for granted. I feel like a lot of straight people don't ever think about it.

Take my parents. They're good upstanding bleeding-heart liberals; they'd be horrified if anyone had ever suggested that they were homophobic. “We have gay friends!” they would say. “We'd never dream of saying there was anything wrong with being gay.” And of course they wouldn't; but they brought me and my brothers up with the assumption that we would be straight – that we would be like them. When we were small, they would talk about “one day when you get married,” “one day when you have kids.” My mother would give me unsolicited advice about dating men, which I would remember and be grateful for “one day.” And, sure, as we got older we were periodically told, “If any of you are gay that is totally okay,” but there was an almost dismissively hypothetically tone to it. If you were gay, we would be totally fine with that. But you're not, because being gay is something that happens to other people.

I honestly believed that. When I was a teenager, I would write shit in my diary like, “I'm not gay – I'm just homosexual,” because I couldn't be gay. Gay was Other; straight was default; to myself I am the ultimately default, and therefore I cannot be gay. The fact that I fit all the apparent criteria for being gay – 1. be gay; 2. oh wait that's it – was not sufficient for me to overcome the internalized heterosexism that told me I couldn't be gay. There must be some additional criterion, some test you had to take, some qualification you had to earn, some card you had to have… something that granted you gayness the way a power ring makes you a Green Lantern.

It took me a few years, but eventually I realized that there is no external criterion of gayness. There's no gay Guardians of the Universe, bestowing the quality of being gay on those who have proved themselves worthy. I had been unnecessarily problematizing my gayness by positing a false consciousness whereby the Otherness of “gay” required external validation before I could self-identify as such; but there is no difference between “I think I'm gay” and “I'm gay.” The only thing telling me there was a difference was my internalized heterosexism: the mechanism whereby gay was Other, and therefore Not Me. When I finally let myself participate in gayness – visiting websites for gay people, watching TV shows with gay characters, simply writing down “I am a lesbian” – I was able to dissolve that mechanism. Goodbye, internalized heterosexism. Hello, self-actualization.

It was tremendously freeing, letting all that deeply ingrained ugliness go like so much dust in the wind. Now I just have to figure out how to do the same thing with my internalized cissexism.

Genderqueer, Or Internalized Misogyny?

[ETA: It's been brought to my attention that this post is founded on certain cissexist assumptions. It's true that I haven't engaged with my ingrained cissexism as much as I should, and I hope to work on that. Apologies for fucking up.]

The other night I dreamed I was at a church that had three bathrooms marked Men, Women, and Genderqueer. Entering the last, I found a glorious wonderland that was everything I could possibly want from a bathroom: talking Japanese supertoilet, hot tub, surround-sound entertainment system, etc.

It wouldn't be quite accurate to say that I trust my dreams. Dreams are your brain sorting through its junk drawer: most of it is pure junk, and occasionally something important turns up. I trust my reactions to my dreams. I've had sexual dreams about male friends which didn't disturb me at all, because I instinctively classified them as junk (hell, if everyone keeps calling him your boyfriend, your subconscious is eventually going to try it on for size, even if the notion is quite revolting). And it was a thoroughly PG-13 teenage dream about a female friend which unleashed the initial torrent of panicked self-reflection that is the first tender step on toward the closet door.

I wish I had access to the diary entry of the time so you could see it in its full, verbatim hilarity. “I'm not gay,” I wrote desperately (or something to that effect), “though it would make sense of a lot of things I like (hot girl-on-girl makeouts on Sugar Rush; scantily clad women in horror movies)...”

(I know! Bless, right?)

It took me a couple more years of self-torture – writing things like, “I'm not gay. I'm just homosexual”, which presumably made sense to me at the time – before I gave up trying to resist The Gay. (“Suck it, haters,” I at last wrote triumphantly: “I am a lesbian.”) My reluctance to accept The Genderqueer reminds me a lot of my reluctance to accept The Gay. I'm probably scrabbling for any available reason to deny something I pretty much know is true.

And yet, and yet...

I can't stop obsessively second-guessing myself. Just as I used to fear that my homosexuality was nothing more than intense fear and disgust at the penis, I now worry that my inclination toward genderfuckery is nothing more than internalized misogyny.

Like, when I reject the societal performance of femininity (shaving, makeup, skirts, long hair), is it because I consider the feminine-coded to be lesser?

If I accept the proposition that no true generalization can be made about women without resorting to tautology – if I accept that you don't have to be, have, or do anything to “qualify” as a woman, apart from identifying as a woman – why then am I not comfortably identifying as a woman?

When I'm enraged by someone in a store calling me “Missy” (THIS LITERALLY HAPPENED LAST WEEK, IN BERKELEY, IN 2012), am I enraged because it's fucking patronizing as shit, or because it genders me as female?

Does my general feeling that being gendered female is wrong mean that it's wrong for me, or that deep down I buy into the patriarchal equation female = wrong?

I feel increasingly disconnected from the pronoun she/her. When somebody refers to me as she/her, it feels as though they're talking about someone else. I like it when I get read as male or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. I would love to ask people to use ey/em, but they probably wouldn't: even in out oh-so-progressive, wonderfully accepting and queer-friendly community, most people are terrible at respecting the pronouns of our openly genderqueer friends. And even if I could convince my friends to make the switch, how can I stop strangers from gendering me female?

We're so indoctrinated to categorize everyone into this M/F binary that people immersed in a supposedly queer-embracing environment won't even refer to someone as “they” after being explicitly asked to. And yet I pull on one thread and the whole gender thing comes apart in my hands. The existence of trans men and women is proof that it's possible to scrutinize and deconstruct your gender identity and reach a conclusion other than “Gender is bullshit”; but more and more that seems like the inevitable endpoint of my own inquiry.

Who Is A Woman?

In which I explore some long-stewing thoughts on my gender identity in relation to a question feminism hasn't been asking for about thirty years.

Who is a woman?

I have never in my life felt identified with some grand worldwide sisterhood or vague abstract conception of womanhood (my mother says the only time she has was when giving birth).

Who is a woman?

In her book Bossypants, Tina Fey describes a group of women being asked “When did you first know you were a woman?” and nearly all of them responding with an incident of harassment from men. I realized... I don't have an answer for that question. I've never felt particularly like a woman. Recently I found a diary from when I was 10 or 11; the bulk of it is spent complaining about how I just don't understand girls. Not much changed in my teens.

Who is a woman?

In our culture, male is still coded as default (witness the recent study about gender coding in children's books). Maybe my identification as “female” is merely an identification as “other”.

Who is a woman?

When I was 16, I rocked this androgynous look that got me asked a number of times “are you a boy or a girl?”. I feigned outrage when bragging to my friends about these incidents, but secretly I was delighted. Lately I've been feeling an urge to recapture that ambiguity. I'm deconstructing my every pose, accessory, and article of clothing for its cultural coding as M or F. The other day, a security guard called me “sir” and I was chuffed to bits.

Who is a woman?

The more I think about it, the more important it seems to deconstruct the gender binary, quit defining “male” and “female” as discrete categories, and consistently take account of trans*, intersex, and genderqueer people. Paul wrote, “there is no male and female...in Christ Jesus”, and I think, with a prescience far beyond his own understanding, he's referring to a time when we no longer find it necessary to identify each other as such.

Who is a woman?

As a child, I often used to long to be a boy. Although I had long hair and was quite femmey (largely at my parents' behest), in the stories of my imagination I was often a boy. I can remember the thrill of stuffing all my hair up inside a baseball cap and pretending I was a boy. I can remember checking the authorship of all first-person novels I read to see if it was okay for a female writer to “pretend to be a boy” (Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing assured me it was). And I can remember feeling ashamed of this desire to experiment with my gender identity, feeling that I couldn't ask my parents for boy clothes and boy haircuts because those thing were For Boys and I was A Girl. (More on parental and societal gender policing in a few Fictioneerings' time.)

Who is a woman?

The other day I decided to fuck around with my gender presentation. I bound my breasts, wore a men's shirt and suspenders (that's braces for all of y'all Olde English linguistic imperialists), and drew on a 'stache. It made me feel empowered and sexy, with the thrill of transgression and queering. Am I maybe not a cis woman? Am I perhaps genderfluid, a little genderqueer?

Who is a woman?

I've always wondered how it is that trans* women know they're women. Of course I know they do know, but personally the only reason I know I'm a woman is because, when I was a child, I was told I was a girl (unlike my brothers, who were boys), and I got bigger. It doesn't seem like a very good reason.

Geek Identity

“What are you doing this weekend?” my coworker asked, as she wiped down the bar.

“My Dungeons & Dragons group is meeting for the first time in ages,” I replied – whereupon she collapsed into a fit of laughter that lasted for about five solid minutes. Each time the giggles seemed likely to dry up, she would take another glance at me, patiently waiting for her to finish, and a fresh wave of uncontrollable mirth would strike. Eventually, staggering upright, wiping away the tears, she hiccuped out,

“I suppose – you still have – a few more years...”

Most of the people I regularly spend time with, online or in real life, are, like me, nerds. The ones who aren't tolerate my nerdiness, to the point that they don't tend to laugh uncontrollably at me (to my face, anyway). I had forgotten that the world is full of people who react to forthright declarations of geekery the way my coworker did.

If geek culture – as signified by markers like Dungeons & Dragons, devotion to cult TV series, paperback doorstoppers with dragons on the covers – is an adolescent pursuit we should all outgrow by our mid-twenties, what does that say about those of us who are lifelong geeks?

You're never supposed to admit this, but I haven't always been devoted to Firefly and Mystery Science Theater 3000 and China Miéville. These things are merely the current trappings of geekdom. Being a geek is a lot like being gay: anybody can latch onto the external behaviors and signifiers of the subculture, but externals do not a geek make. Geek is something you always have been and always will be, whether you like Star Trek or not.

Geekdom is the eight-year-old who sneaks away from the birthday party to spend the afternoon hiding in a closet with a book. It's the kid who works so hard in school that even the teachers write “Swotticus mingicus” on her report card (that's neo-British-East-African for “Dorkus malorkus”). It's the teenager who enjoys exams and spends her free time writing a novel.

Geeks are, I think, almost all introverts. It's not that we're friendless social misfits, though many of us have been at some point in our lives, but we thrive on our own company. The defining characteristic of geekdom is a love of minutiae and depth – the enjoyment of overthinking for its own sake – and that necessarily entails time spent alone with one's interests.

That's why we're all internet-diagnosed aspies (I score 34 on the AQ Test, yo), and that's why we all love Dr. Sheldon Cooper. The Big Bang Theory is probably the most popular mainstream representation of geek culture, and Sheldon is its best character by a parsec *audience laughs because I geekified a common idiom*. The other characters engage in the recognized cultural currency of geekdom – they read comic books, play videogames, watch sci-fi shows – but none of them displays that single-mindedness that is the hallmark of being a geek.

I realize that watching people be introverted would make for terrible TV, but there's no indication that Leonard or Howard or Raj gives to anything the time and attention that Sheldon gives to his work and his fandoms. Of course, in his single-minded devotion to his own interests, Sheldon frequently misses social cues and acts like an ass to people, but we like him because we wish we could do that too.

The Big Bang Theory, for all its claims to be representative of geeks and geek culture, buys into the idea that geekery is adolescent. Although lately it's improved its portrayal of women, adding several strong (and geeky!) female characters to the regular cast, the show is still beholden to its initial premise of laughing at the geeks' failures to interact with the pretty normie girl. Just last week, Priya (the other pretty normie girl) spoke disparagingly of her brother's nerdy hobby from when he was little, “but not as little as you'd want him to be.”

This coding of geek activities as immature plays directly into the heteronormative patriarchy. Yeah, I just wrote that sentence, and I believe it. Because “you'll outgrow geek culture” sounds to me a lot like “you'll get broody before you're thirty”. It's a way of delegitimating non-mainstream identities and assuming every life has to follow the traditionalist model of “growing up” – leaving behind all your interests and ambitions in order to have a spouse and children and a house in the suburbs and Tupperware parties and a mortgage. Which is fine if you want it, but not everyone does.

People tell me that one day I'll want to “settle down” and bear children; people tell me I'll “outgrow” my geeky interests. I say: God, I hope not.