By Stephanie Fairyington, CNN
I was 10 years old the first time I was basically told I was ugly.
After a swim in my family’s pool, I was racing up and down the street with the neighborhood kids in the cul-de-sac where I grew up when a woman bunched up her nose and lobbed a barbed question: “Who’s that?” she asked a fellow mom, the one all the kids loved. “Oh, that’s Chrysi’s daughter.” (Not my mom’s real name.) The woman replied incredulously, “That’s Chrysi’s daughter?”
I didn’t hear the response. I only remember retreating from the scene of pool-drenched kids shrieking this way and that on Cord Avenue in Downey, California. I pretended I needed to use the bathroom and went home.
I had already understood that the aesthetic chasm between my mother’s traditional good looks and my own was wide. But I’d never heard, until that moment, anyone outwardly express what I inwardly felt. My mom, perhaps sensing the silent critiques, always tried hard to convince me that I was “beautiful,” but it was difficult to believe when the culture was telling me otherwise.
It wasn’t until I came out in my late teens that I found my community — and felt attractive for the first time in my life.
Tomboy daughter of the popular girl
At 10, I’d already gone through puberty. I had a full face of acne, alarming buckteeth and an ample bust. My tomboy getups — a mix of ratty T-shirts, surfer shorts, scuffed-up Chuck Taylor low-tops, and knees covered in scabs and bruises from failed skateboard tricks, began to attract curious once-overs.
My mom — blue-eyed, blond-haired, full-lipped and high cheekboned — looked like she belonged in a 1980s ad for a chic label: big feathered do, semi-maximal makeup and bright, fitted clothes for the golf course.
When she was a teenager, her peers anointed her best figure, biggest flirt, best sense of humor, and runner-up for prom queen in high school. Her life then was parties, cigarettes, beer and make-out sessions with her schools’ most desirable boys. Mine was lunch in the library, social obscurity, bulky clothes that desexualized me and total inhibition.
In fact, I’ve long attributed our highly divergent experiences in the world to her genetic luck and success — and my failure — at “performing” pretty.
Whenever people learned I was her daughter, their faces would recoil like they had just smelled something unpleasant. The fact that she was my mother was unbelievable — and seemed to inspire contempt. That animosity, I believe on reflection, had something to do with my patent inability to fulfill my duty to cultural imperatives around femininity, beauty and male desire.
My subpar looks, however, weren’t the only thing that made me a curiosity to onlookers. Tomboy clothes and ways are cute on prepubescent girls, but underneath my boyish outfits, I looked like a grown woman, a gender outlaw, a freak.
My friend’s parents weren’t the only ones who saw something peculiar — queer — about me. My schoolmates saw something crooked about me, too. As much as I tried to hide any signs of my queerness with my teased-up bangs fixed in hairspray and fake interest in boys, something about me didn’t land “right.”
Walking behind a friend in fifth grade, I overheard her tell a mutual pal she thought I was a lesbian. How did she zero in on that in elementary school? Was it the goofy way I behaved around girls to make them laugh? Was it the way my gender didn’t quite align with femininity? Was it something about the way I moved?
To call someone a lesbian back then was to call them ugly. In some ways, it still is. Historian Lillian Faderman has documented a long history that shows the ways society sought to thwart the goals of feminism by lesbianizing women who rallied for their rights. “Lesbian” was shorthand for “masculine” or “abnormal woman” and thus ugly.
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