Gender Expression

The first memory that I have of “being a girl”, was through my father; not something that I had done personally. With all of my siblings, I was the only girl; so, I was given different expectations. The main moments I followed through with the way my parents wanted me to be a girl was when they would dress me in pink and/or frilly dresses. I did this part of being a girl right until my parents weren’t around. Then I would wear clothes that I felt comfortable in (t-shirt and jeans). I was lucky to have the parents that I did, though, because once I got to a certain age, they let me be and dress myself; and I enjoyed way less dresses and the color pink and stuck to more of darker of colored clothes.

To an extent they had to let me be what I was going to anyways because I started playing softball from a young age and we played positions and in-game in a rotation so that everybody had a chance to play. When it wasn’t my turn to be in the game, I would sit down, play with the boys and play in the mud and sand that was next to the field. Mostly because of being at the field, nobody really took it further than “kids being kids”. When I would go home though it was a different story. We had a creek near our house that myself and the neighborhood kids would sneak away to play in, and when I would come up (dirty, muddy, soaked from the water) I would get a small lecture from my dad that girls didn’t do that kind of thing.



There was never a moment, other than early on and the clothes I would wear, that there was a discussion about the way that I was or the way that I presented my body. Nobody has talk to me about my body, positively or negatively, because I went from 13 years of softball to an injury that required surgery, and a lot of people have been understanding about what stress and not being able to do the same activities will do to anybody’s body. The one thing that I did struggle with as a body image type was through softball was my body type (Schultz et al, 2019), but in the way that I wanted muscles like the other girls had because it seemed that those girls that I was playing against had more muscle and they had a tendency to hit the ball harder and farther and  struggled to gain muscle. There was motivation for my body image through the dissatisfaction. (Schultz et al, 2019). 

“Body Image.” Women and Sports in the United States: a Documentary Reader, by Jaime Schultz et al., Dartmouth College Press, 2019, pp. 78–79.