How I Queered Sibling Rivalry

This may surprise some in the current era, but there was a time where I felt that my sister’s “queer experience” was easier than my own. I told her as much about a year after she came out when she was twenty-one and I was eighteen. Even if not for some of the bigger tragedies that had befallen her, this would seem painfully naive now, over a decade later. Indeed, naïveté was a significant factor in all of those feelings, which heavily boiled down to the immature tendencies towards sibling rivalry and an outdated perception of what entailed a true queer experience.

To analyze our initial sibling relationship, one must first keep in mind our age difference. My sister is three years older than I. In this sense, there was a lot of overlap in our life experiences. We spent some years together in elementary school as well as one year of high school. We were often around the same height in childhood, leading some to occasionally ask if we were twins. Due to her greater amount of exercise from being a  ballet dancer and my precocious puberty for a health reason, we went through puberty at around the same time. That being said, it was enough for us to have some degrees of difference. It was enough for my sister to have some memory of a life without me. In typical older sibling fashion, she had learned to speak fluently at a younger age than I. Though she had some tantrums in her toddlerhood, I was more hyper and more angry. I did often think of her as bossy, something my parents often validated, though I have since learned that she and I got along far better than many siblings. It was enough for me to look up to her and parasocially glorify her friends, while I had friends who thought she was cool or hot in that “older girl” kind of way. The most significant thing about that number of years was how much it was developmentally in our youth while not being much at all. It was enough for her to know when I was being ridiculous, but never enough for her to understand it was my youthful immaturity or think of a kinder way to correct my behavior. Typical of low-support-needs neurodivergent children, I was considered intellectually mature, though my adolescent years would reveal me to be fairly emotionally immature. 

As for queerness, it is difficult to place when I specifically became aware of my own. I always felt “different,” but that could be due to a mix of factors. I experienced what I now understand to be “gender dysphoria” as long as I was consciously aware of having a gender. I knew my attractions to be gender neutral from about age eleven or twelve, about the time I began experiencing attraction. I began to first consider that I might specifically be a “transsexual” or more specifically an “androgyne” or “genderqueer” - words that have all since fallen out of favor and been replaced with “transgender” and “nonbinary” - from about the age of thirteen, though I fell in and out of considering myself such because I was not sure that my experience aligned precisely enough with others that I read about. It is a bit funny that I would be so concerned with my queer experience matching those of others so precisely when the whole point of queerness is that it is an outside experience. Incidentally, this would define issues that would arise some years later. 

I was seventeen years old and about to enter my first relationship, one that appeared heterosexual to the outside world. Inwardly, I felt otherwise, but others knew only what they saw. My sister had just transferred from our local city college to a prestigious private women’s college some months ago. She was always a superior student than myself, which did not take much at the high school level where my grades were mostly dreadful, but she was genuinely a good student and could have likely gone to a four year college straight away. Alas, she had opted to dance and get a certification for a year and then start taking classes at the city college where she was a straight-A student. As with many women’s colleges, this one was known for feminist sentiment and a proportionately large number of lesbians compared to the general population. There were several students who were assigned female at birth but identified as nonbinary, the term that was now being used, or even as men, though assigned male at birth students, regardless of identity, were still not permitted entry, something I specifically asked about. During the middle of the semester, she sent me an email and confided that she was questioning her sexuality. She said that she was aware of the cliché of girls dating girls at a women’s college after having never done it before and never planning on doing it again, not that she had dated anyone previously. I forget the exact response that I gave to her, though I think I told her to think on it, as she did not seem certain. We did not talk much, with her being so far away. Even when she and I were in the same house, we did not have too many heart-to-hearts. I privately confided in an acquaintance, asking how someone could not discover their sexual orientation until they are in their twenties, with the acquaintance telling me it was plenty possible.

About a year later, she still identified thusly and had a girlfriend. At this time, my own relationship was starting to unravel, not in the least bit because I realized that the other half of my relationship, despite privately identifying as “pansexual,” saw it as a straight relationship. Of the few issues we had had, the gender normativity had been the cause of a few things. The formal excuse I gave was that “feminists” such as ourselves should not behave according to those expectations, though there was internally some other turmoil. My sister formally came out to our parents. That and a few other things caused a slight rift between my sister and our mom. When my sister emailed me later to vent, I confess I did not respond sympathetically. I not only took our mom’s side in the bigger argument, but I went on a rant about how she stole everything from me. I told her how she never had to deal with hearing crushes make homophobic comments because she discovered herself at a women’s college where if someone held any homophobic feelings, they would keep it to themself - or so I thought at the time, though the incident that would prove this assumption wrong is another tale for another day. I brought up a memory of her saying something negative about a lesbian in her class in high school, as if her comment had specifically been homophobic or as if, even if it had been, gay people did not frequently say homophobic things prior to coming out. I saw her queer life as so easy, whereas I had to deal with being openly bisexual and androgynous-looking as an adolescent and experienced social ostracization as a teen in part because of that. I brought up other things too, how she had given me grief as a pre-teen for liking weird and “goth” things, but then began dressing alternative herself when she started high school where there was free dress while I was in middle school stuck in khakis. I may have brought up the fact that she got a septum piercing when she was nineteen, something I had wanted to do myself for years, but obviously could not at the time, being a minor, and now no longer could because I did not want to repeat something that she had done first. Looking back, it was so narrow and cruel. I did not invent dressing alternative or septum piercings, so there was no reason she should not have done those things just because of my own interest. The fact that she started liking some of the spooky things I liked after having previously considered them strange indicated growth in taste, not faking it. I was pitifully unable to acknowledge how someone could change, even though I had changed a lot myself. In that moment, I had also somehow forgotten everything that she had introduced me to that I liked. She had introduced me to AFI, Placebo, and The Meteors, read the earlier Harry Potter books to me when I was in elementary school, and suggested that we stop eating meat. She did not mention those things in her far too patient response, though. Needless to say, that email put a temporary splinter in our relationship. Retrospectively, it was inevitable that the years of frustration that I never voiced at the time would eventually bubble over. I had always been an envious sort and now I was in a situation where my envy took over. It was not just that she got to be queer while skipping over what I saw as the hard parts, but the fact that she got to publicly be so at all. At the time, I was planning on being with the person I was with for the rest of my life and I thought I would never be in a publicly queer relationship. My feelings about my gender were manifesting in annoyance at her as well. She called herself gay now and joked about being a misandrist, but some people she called cute and was generally friends with did not identify as women. Looking back, the strange protectiveness I felt over her friends’ identities as non-women was probably a manifestation of my own issues and wishing I could be respected. It did not help that, when I admitted to the person that I was with that there was more to my gender than met the eye, despite the claimed “pansexuality,” the response was not great. It was not the reason we broke up, but it did not help the worsening situation. I was ultimately put back into the closet until I went off to college, though not at a prestigious women’s college in a progressive bastion, but a Greek life-ridden state school in a rural part of my state. 

Multiple factors repaired the relationship I had with my sister. Being honest with myself and with her about myself helped. All these years later, it is almost funny how easy I felt she had things if the reasons she ultimately would not were not so sad. First off, my thought that twenty was too old for self-discovery is funny considering I now know that twenty is not old by any stretch of the imagination. As for the next part, it is no surprise that my teenage self thought that my angsty lack of acceptance was the ultimate queer pain. My sister, still more social than myself, definitely has a more established queer community than I do, but the pain that she experienced goes beyond judgemental teenagers. Three people in her life have died tragically. The only people in my life that I know who have died that way were people I knew through her specifically. She has watched people lose their housing. The only person I am close to who was unhoused was so by choice. I will not say one of us has specifically had the harder life as we have each had struggles that the other did not, but if a true queer experience is defined by suffering, she certainly qualifies at this point. Alas, I have come to accept that suffering alone is not all that a queer life entails. There is suffering, there is joy, there is monotony. What is more, no two people’s experiences are the same and we should not validate our experiences by how much they reflect someone else’s.