For the third time within the period of my involvement with this internship, a person who I have emailed has thought that I was, in fact, a girl. This has brought back painful memories of my time as child when I was afraid of the hairdresser, and would opt to live life as a dirty little ginger who had hair to his shoulders and refused to take showers (a time period which earned me the nickname Dirtay). It was then that the first questions regarding my gender arose. Even as I crossed my arms and looked cockily into the eyes of the older kids (see picture above), telling them, “I’m a boy, boibe” that I could still not shake their perception.
And now, this curse has returned. The first instance was with my fellow intern Lishai, who upon seeing my profile on Facebook decided to express her surprise at my gender in an inbox message, “I can’t believe you’re a dude! No way!”. The second and third came from emailing last year’s intern and her friend here in St. Kitts regarding some turtle spotting. It is at this point when Jay (the friend here in St. Kitts) proclaimed his excitement for “meeting you girls from Canada”, that I’ve finally lost it. Maybe it’s the way I try to write emails professionally and politely? Maybe it’s because people believe that Eli is a girl’s name? Maybe it’s my strawberry-blonde hair? I have no idea.
But just as an experiment, let’s look at the famous people in history named Eli: Eli Whitney (invented cotton gin), Eli Manning (uses his fantastic name to win NFL championships), and that kid who loves porn from the movie The Girl Next Door. None of these American heroes are cootie infested girls, but instead are all (apparently surprisingly) guys.
Therefore, I would just like to provide clarification to any of my confused readers that despite my appreciation of the Pussycat Dolls and Taylor Swift, I am a dude.
This makes me grateful that I'm just often mistaken for a homosexual. Not that I should be grateful about something like that, but at least most people get my gender right.
ReplyDeleteYour comment has inspired me to put a dumb picture of us looking cocky into the blog to give a visual representation of what I looked like when I was telling the older kids I was a boy.
ReplyDeleteI visualized that sentence perfectly, but the picture does help. Except the guy the right definitely looks like a homosexual.
ReplyDeleteRemember when I took you to that hockey game and we got on tv and everybody asked who the girl I was sitting beside was? They were all clowns. You looked all boy. The guy on the right does definitely look a little homosexual though.
ReplyDeleteWow, I can`t believe I had finally forgotten about that. Nice one for bringing that back up, boibe.
ReplyDeletehahahaha! Maybe you should wear a name tag saying "I'm a guy" just to make sure there's no further confusion ; )
ReplyDelete