Magnify

After eight years of dating women (and two trans men), I’ve started going out again with what queer women like myself refer to as “bio boys”—people who are biologically born with male bodies they enjoy having. These people are known in the rest of the world by the common term “men.”

Things were relatively uneventful with my Chinese American bio boy, Steven, until we started having communication conflicts a few months into our relationship. Each conversation had me asking, “How do you feel about that?” and “What do you think about what I just said?” Naturally, I turned to my women friends for support. I expected we would do what we had done before, when I was dating women and trans men: drink smoothies and debate my lover’s motives, analyzing childhood-inspired neuroses and making plans of what I would do to make the relationship work.

Instead I was faced with a slew of female opinions—from lesbians, straight and bi women— which reduced the communication conflicts to this: “He’s a guy—they don’t talk” and “You can’t expect him to be emotional—he’s a guy.” And finally, my favorite: “It’s not like it is with girls.”

If I didn’t believe my women friends, I had magazines citing theories of evolution to explain the communication styles of men and women. My favorite, paraphrased from O magazine: Men don’t talk to create intimacy; they do activities together like back in the day when they sat in the quiet watching for a passing buffalo.

Wait, wasn’t feminism supposed to set us free from this kind of thinking about men?

If women of all sexual orientations are so certain about who men really are, how free are men to be themselves? To what degree are we complicit in teaching men that they are their biology? And the following question I can only ask of myself: What makes me so uncomfortable with silences in my relationship? My writing inclinations aside, what makes me want to fill up every moment with chatter?

Feminists first grabbed my attention in college precisely because they asked me to question the most private parts of my life: Was I wearing lipstick because I wanted to or because that’s what a good Cuban-Colombian girl is supposed to do? Feminists encouraged me to examine the ways that everything from my ethnic and racial identity to my experience of class and xenophobia shaped how I saw my female body, my heart and my community. Now, almost 15 years later, it is feminism that tells me to get honest with myself—muy honest.

And so I have to admit that a part of me likes the explanations from my friends and women’s magazines. There’s a peculiar appeal to telling myself, “Men are a different species.” It lets me and my boyfriend off the hook. No need to sit down and talk about why he thought I said one thing when I know, absolutely know, I said something else. No need for me to wonder whether I am trying to control what he does and the direction our relationship takes. No need for me to reflect on my first relationship with a man—my father—and the ways our communications were truncated by how the world silenced him as a Latino immigrant.

In my moments of grace, I put away any notion that my boyfriend’s biology is the reason he’s gone quiet over dinner. I recognize that I interpret silence as anger and rejection, but it’s not what is happening here. I acknowledge that I have no first-hand experience with the way his sense of being a man in a relationship is shaped by being Asian American. I am also learning that when it’s the right time for him, he does share how he feels, even if it is in short sentences.

Daisy Hernández is the editor of ColorLines.com, an online newsmagazine on race and politics, and coeditor of Colonize This!  Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. You can reach her at daisyhernandez@gmail.com.