Personal Narrative: Does Boys Do This?

At times life can seem so random, it’s scary. Everyone has a place on this little Earth we share. First and foremost, we are all children born from a mother but for many people, that’s where our similarities end. As a little girl or boy there is a big wide worlds of innocence and possibilities. Your born gender already influences you, depending on where you live, how many siblings you have. Maybe you lived close to the city and loved

Growing up, I lived the life of grass stained knees and an almost perpetually sweaty face. I will never be ashamed of the fact that I have been and always will be a tomboy through and through. If I wasn’t getting dirty at my local baseball field being that my Father was the president of the Pony League then I was finding trouble at the football fields of my local Pop Warner, because as you may have guessed my Father was the president of that too. As you can see my family had their hands full and I can’t help it if boys and sports raised me. Being that boys constantly surrounded me, I saw first hand the struggle of the emotional divide between yearning for both connection and independence. Boys want affection and understanding but at the same time are afraid of the stigma they may receive from both their peers and even their mentors.

I knew I wasn't a boy by the time I was five. Soon after, you knew too—though, this is something I wouldn't realize until some time later. It really wasn't so bad at first. It felt almost like a game; some secret that only I was privy to. Sure, everyone thought I was a boy now, but in the end I'd grow up to be like all the

In a place called Earth, there are many types of genders. As we hear the word “gender”, males and females are typically the words that pop up in our head. With that being said, there are social norms of how males and females should be raised in a specific way. The males are raised to be aggressive and physically fit. While females are passive and submissive. As the stereotypes of gender continues to grow, it slowly damages the people that do not fit in society's point of view. With that discouragement constantly following us everywhere, many of us find ways to fit in society’s expectations. In this case, being born as a male and not fitting or reinforcing in the stereotype has changed me dramatically. The pressure of not fitting in or reinforcing made me change my physical look, dressing semi-formal, challenging the stereotype of how males should be aggressive and challenging the stereotype of having emotions.

When I was in the kindergarten, my parents were busy with work and they seldom policed my gender. Peer and friends play a more influential role in the field. There was a time when my sister painted her nails, she also painted my nails, too. When I went to the kindergarten, other children were unwilling to play with me. The teacher also told me to wash away the nail polish. I came to understand that boys cannot paint nails because it weakens men’s masculinity. When we moved to a new apartment, my parent painted the wall in my room blue and the curtain was grey. When I was in primary school, I was weak and some bad boys often bullied me. When I was bullied, I cried and reported my sadness to my father. However, my father said boys should not cry but

As I grew up I started to notice I wasn't like other girls in my grade. I wasn't having crushes on boys and I didn't understand why I had feelings for girls. It was terrifying being different. It was at a age when the goal was to look exactly like a carbon copy of other kids, being different was not something anyone embraced it was something that was frowned at. I pretended to look at the boys that were supposedly cute and I fawned over Zac Efron and Daniel Radcliffe; I acted as any straight teenager would. When I went home however I would sit in my room on the floor in tears crying because I was so upset that I couldn't be myself. If you were look at my search history at the time you would have seen pages of hundreds of LGTBQ+ activists come up

Freshman year of college was great. I made a lot of friends and had so many opportunities to learn about different people, where they came from, and who they were. I am from a very small town. To give you a little insight into how small it is, I will let you know that I graduated with 17 other individuals. So coming to college really broadened my horizons. I will never forget one day when I was running the track at the Wellness Center. I went to the locker room, got my workout attire on, and headed up the stairs to hit up the running track. As I came to the second level, I saw this male with sunken in cheeks and thighs about the size of my forearm.

Starting at a very young age, I’ve been labeled by society. When I was born, no one focused on the idea of what I would turn out to be. Instead, they focused on putting me in fluffy, pink outfits and imprinting me with femininity. They focused on showing me Disney movies with female leads that depended on men to save them and whisk them away to a life of luxury. There was a strong

I remember being in Pre-K, when they gave us our first handbook and one of the first things we learned in class was to identify ourselves as boys or girls. How could we do so? There were two drawings on the book; one of a naked boy with a blue background that explained boys have a penis and another of a girl with a pink background that explained girls have a vagina. Besides that, my parents were always very strict about how ladies behave, how they dress, and how they not play rough with boys. In middle school, I went to a Christian school were they constantly told me the differences between a male and female and clarify all the time that I was a female, just in case I forgot.

A theory that can be applied to the film is the Social Learning Theory. The social learning theory states that individuals learn to be masculine and feminine by imitating others and getting responses from others to their behavior (42) and that parents and other reward girls for feminine behaviors and discourage that attitudes that perceive male. In this film, social learning theory was shown when they present the statement that men are not able to express themselves at an early age because it is not manly enough to express feelings, and they learn that through parents, grandparents, or anyone who discourages males to show expression. That is why there was a statistic that showed that there are 1 in 18 boys are in some way of jail due to their

This topic of gender is quite intriguing. Through my experience in life, I’ve encountered many situations, that has led me to believe that our gender is influenced by both our biology and nurture. I recall once upon a time; when I was in the third grade my neighbor would always want to play with me and brother either that would be the new Spiderman game on the PlayStation or a simple game of hide-and-seek. And throughout our childhood time, I notice his mother pushing him to hang out with me and my younger brother. At the time I thought nothing of it. I was happy that he came to our house and play with us. However, the boy did exemplify some behaviors to me, I thought he was a touchy kid but fun to be around with. Furthermore, two years ago

I grew as a kid who didn’t understand how to express myself with words. I was the child of a single mother who raised me gender neutrally so I was never told I couldn’t do anything I wanted to do.

I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan and have lived there ever since. On the day that I was born, I was given the ascribed status of the eldest child and sister. From the moment that my parents discovered that my sex was female, they used my gender to make decisions about how I was going to be raised, how I should be dressed, and what would be expected of me, or my gender role. This means that my parents automatically dressed me in pink and purple, bought me dollhouses and kitchen sets, and taught me how to cook and sew. They taught me values, ideas, manners, general beliefs and norms based on society’s standards. One of the experiences that I remember from my childhood came from a family reunion that we had when I was three years old. My male cousins who were around my age had brought some toys with them to play with. Intrigued by their

From birth to the first day in school, children seem to be concerned with food, love, and rest. From first grade and on, however, I for one, found myself trying to define who I am. What started as sharing food in first grade in order to make friend turned into caring about the way I dressed in middle school. I was careful to follow society’s standards of what a “boy” should be like. This included walking a certain way, being rude to the teacher, using crude language, pushing and shoving in lunch lines, and picking on girls. Most of the time I didn’t want to do those things, but it made me feel masculine when I did them. Through repetition, I found myself identifying with those habits.

As years went by, as I began to enter puberty, I started to take more interest in boys. While in the locker room during physical education, I detected that I was sexually attracted to boys. Although, I did date a few girls here in there it was nothing serious (specially because we did not even kiss.) During my period of adolescence, I never thought about what I was. All the things that took place in the emotional and sexual real were, admittedly, real and concrete to me. I experienced real feelings for other boys, such as love and sexual attraction. At the same time, I never really confronted my feelings, so I continued to have them without having to worry about them. They just were, and that was fine with me. While some people claimed that my sexuality was “unnatural” (a claim which did not affect me in any shape or form), for me, my homosexuality was very natural indeed.