I’m a transvestite–I think. I like to wear pants. When I was in grad school I even used to wear ties. No one else did, not even the professors, let alone the male grad students. Just me. I liked them. They seemed like me. I like spare, streamlined clothing. I like utilitarian things: pants and shirts and serviceable shoes. I’m not entirely lacking style. I’ve been told, actually, that I have good taste. It’s rather masculine taste though. I don’t like ruffles, don’t like frills, don’t like high heels, don’t paint my nails. I don’t “do” my hair. I can’t be bothered. I just wash it, you know, and let it dry naturally.

My, shall we say “masculine” aesthetic is not something I’d given much thought to until the last couple of years. Several times, in my adult life, I’ve caught a glimpse of myself reflected in a store window and been shocked by the image that confronted me. Why that’s me, I’ve thought to myself, that small woman is me. This will sound strange, but I was surprised to see that I was a small woman. I realized then that I actually had some kind of mental image of myself as a medium-sized man. I’m not seriously mentally ill or anything. I know I’m a woman. I’m not shocked when I look at myself in the mirror in the morning. I do sometimes wear dresses and I always wear makeup, though not very much because, like my hair, I can’t be bothered to spend too much time on it. Still, I rise in the morning and perform the ablutions appropriate to a person of my sex. But then I forget. I get caught up in the things that must be done in the day, and in thought. I forget what I look like. It’s then, I think, that I must unconsciously slip into the masculine image that I have of myself. It fits my job, I guess. There aren’t too many women in philosophy and there are few female academics in any discipline who have what my dean once described as my “pit bull” quality.

It’s how I was brought up, I think. My father is actually a terrible sexist. The thing is, he didn’t have any sons. If he’d had even one son, he’d have raised his daughters differently. He didn’t have any sons though, so he raised us, at least to some extent, the way he’d have raised sons if he’d had them and me more even than my two sisters because I am more similar in temperament to my father than they are. Yes, I was sort of the de facto son. My husband is always remarking that I am “the man” and he is “the woman” in our relationship, not in the sense of the Nicolsons, but in the sense of character traits that are usually thought of as gender specific, things such as my not liking to ask for directions or being generally uncommunicative as opposed to his insisting on asking for directions and talking often about his feelings. He has more friends than I do too. It’s not that I don’t have friends. I’m fortunate to have many good friends. I don’t feel any compulsion to see them all the time though unlike my husband who begins to muse audibly about whether he might have offended a particular friend if a week goes by without his hearing from him or her. That’s another thing, he has more female friends, good friends, than I do. I have some of course, but according to one, not enough. “You need more women friends,” she said. I hadn’t thought about it until then, but most of my friends are actually men.

As I explained, however, I’m no Vita Sackville-West. I’ve never been sexually attracted to women. I’ve always liked men. Still, I realized recently that from the time I was very young, if I were attracted to a boy, and then later a man, I would fantasize about impressing him with how strong and tough I was. Many of my romantic fantasies involved rescue, which, I suppose, is not that unusual for a woman, except that I was always the one doing the rescuing. Yes, I was always rescuing the man I loved from some deadly peril through my extraordinary courage and cunning. I know that sounds strange, but there it is. I’ve been fortunate too, despite my bizarrely masculine character traits, to have had several deeply satisfying romantic relationship with fairly typically masculine men (in which company I would include my former-football-captain husband, despite his frequent protestations that he is “the woman” in our relationship).

I’m small and delicate looking. I’m sure it never occurred to any of the men I’ve been involved with that I had such a masculine self-conception. Though my husband thinks I frighten people whom I argue with and will issue subtle cues if he senses the dinner conversation going in the direction of a confrontation.

I’m not telling you all these things about myself out of some sort of confessional impulse. I’ve something larger in mind. Ever since I figured out why I was always so shocked to be unexpectedly confronted with the fact that I was a woman, which is to say, ever since realized that I actually had somewhere in the depths of my psyche, an image of myself as a man, I’ve been intrigued by this fact about myself. I’ve tried to figure out how it came about, whether it was nature or nurture, marveled that it clearly had no relation whatever to my sexuality. I identify with what Jung called “the animus” the masculine half of human nature that everyone has. Everyone, according to Jung, has a masculine side and a feminine side (though I doubt he would like the term “side”) that he refers to as “the animus” and “anima” respectively.

I smoked a pipe briefly in college and my male friends thought that was cool. I had a masculine nickname too. “Max,” they called me. One of my friends had decided the name “Marilyn” didn’t fit me and that I therefore needed a nickname. She hit on “Max” because my last name was “Piety” and Max Carter, the college chaplain, was the most pious man anyone knew. So there I was, a pipe-smoking girl named Max who went about in what was generally androgynous attire. And yet I was popular with the young men at my college.

I doubt very much though that a purse-carrying lipstick-wearing young man with a moniker of, say, Debbie, would have enjoyed a similar degree of popularity with the opposite sex. I suppose I’ve been aware of this sort of inequity for a long time without really having very strong feelings about it. I guess it seemed natural to me, somehow, that women were allowed a wider berth in terms of what was considered an appropriate expression of their gender than were men. It’s only recently that I have begun to feel this disparity is tragically unfair.

It started, I think, the evening I told my husband about my strange experience of being surprised when I caught an unexpected glimpse of myself in a window or a mirror and saw that I was small woman rather than a medium-sized man. “I have a friend,” he said slowly, “who is a transvestite.” This friend, he explained, did not actually go out dressed up as a woman. He just went around his apartment sometimes in women’s clothes. They’d been friends for years, my husband continued, before his friend had actually “confessed” his predilection for women’s clothes. He was ashamed of it, fearful that people would condemn him. There were only a few people who knew this fact about him, people he was very close to, people he knew well enough to feel confident they wouldn’t condemn him. I could tell my husband was sad, that he felt bad for his friend, bad that his friend was ashamed of something that was so harmless, so innocent, something that a woman, that his wife, could do with impunity was something that he lived in constant fear might be discovered.

That’s when I started to think how tragic is the disparity in the flexibility, or whatever you want to call it, of gender roles. Women can play at being men all they want, but men are made to feel ashamed if they even fantasize about playing at being women, let alone–God forbid–actually try it.

Where do our archetypes of the masculine and the feminine come from? Who dictates them? There was a time when men wore laces and velvets, gaudy jewelry and even makeup. When did that become shameful and why? I wondered briefly whether we really needed these archetypes. Couldn’t we just speak of “character traits,” I asked myself, without having to assign them a gender? Don’t the categories of “masculine” and “feminine” represent a false dichotomy? Can’t everything just be “human” I mused?

But the longer I tried to entertain such a possibility the harder it became to form any firm conception of it. Maybe we need these two most basic of archetypes. We are a classifying species, after all. Gender it seems is itself an archetype and one that I’m beginning to suspect we can’t do without. I’m okay with that, my concern is that there are many men who are perhaps not okay with it because the archetype of masculinity is so much narrower than that of femininity, so while a woman can wear pants in public, a man cannot do the same with a dress. I think that’s wrong. Not only is it horribly unfair, its destructive.

Susan Faludi explains in her book, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, that while there have been steady gains in women’s rights over the years, studies show that most Americans, men and women, still expect men to be the main bread winners. Women’s freedoms are increasing, yet men are apparently still expected by nearly everyone to exceed women’s accomplishments both personally and professionally. Faludi postulates very persuasively that this inequity is one of the main causes of continuing sexism. I mean, how fair is that? Men and women are increasingly placed in competition with one another. Men enter this competition, however, in metaphorical straightjackets and yet are still expected by nearly everyone to win and condemned as “un-masculine,” or as “failures” (which in our culture are roughly synonymous) if they don’t. The mind boggles at the amount of resentment that would naturally be created by that kind of inequity.

Maybe we need gender archetypes, but if we do, then I think we also need to allow everyone an equal degree of experimentation with them and maybe that means the archetypes themselves are due for some adjustments. Maybe its time we brought the laces and velvets back into the masculine archetype. Plato talks in book V of the Republic about how the differences between men and women are really what philosophers refer to as “accidental” rather than “essential.” Some women are more “spirited” than some men. Some men are more “appetitive” than some women. The only thing that is important according to Plato is that individuals are assigned to positions or tasks that are appropriate to their individual personalities. I like that. It seems just.