“Are you identical?”

“Are you identical?”- I always thought the answer was just more obvious. I mean, biologically speaking I always thought it was a little more straightforward. “No, I am not a cloned fertilized egg of my brother.” In biblical terms, this logic is even harder to explain. Eve always gets the short end of the stick (this sounds a little phallic). No, I am not a clone developed from my brother’s rib; though according to the bible, women were created in man’s image, who was created in God’s image. I’ve always tried to explain my brother and me in layman’s terms: there were two sperm in the turkey baster and one had a penis and one had a vagina. They were dropped into a petri dish with a couple of willing eggs. That’s sex for you.

I always wondered how something so incredibly technical, yet seemingly so random, could have such a profound impact on my identity and experience. As far as growing up, it’s always been the two of us, Noah and me, against the world. However, for the best of it and even the worst of it, we have always been out of sync. When I’m up, he’s down; when he’s up, I’m down. Even though this has made for a dark relationship at times, somehow we have always maintained a symbiosis of sorts, defying gender and adolescence, which have tried to pull us apart.

At one point Noah was shy and soft spoken, thoughtful and sensitive. He was born with a natural gift for intuition and contemplation. For all of his grace and wisdom, I was loud and gallant, unafraid to take on the world and laugh in the faces of all who thought otherwise. I was always the first to run to the door, to introduce myself; spirited and unconventional. I had an uncharacteristic brassiness probably heightened by an executive functioning deficit not common for girls my age, and my brother had an uncharacteristic sensitivity and vulnerability for a boy of his age.

We loved movies and television; whatever we could get our hands on. We were quite literally ravenous for stories, sports figures, singers, and dancers to watch, hear, and act out. We shared a room together, and at night we would parade around the house throwing balls, dolls, board games, books and chopping the hair off dolls. At the recommendation of my pediatrician, my parents had to lock the door to our room at night and remove our toys. Finally they left us together in a room emptied of all but two mattresses on the floor with some blankets and pillows. But, believe it or not, we felt completely free to laugh and run around like crazy. There was never a single Disney princess or warrior we aspired to be. We aspired to be all of them. There was never a gender norm. We would play whatever the hell we damn wanted and plan the most elaborate home shows we could come up with.

I always enjoyed pushing boundaries. Maybe that’s why my brother always had an easier time making friends. I remember one time he brought a new close grade school friend over and we all played the Game of Life. I did not want to get married and have kids to win the game and proceeded to lecture the two of them about why my plastic figurine could sit alone in the back seat or even with another pink peg. I should also add I was never good at playing by the rules.

Soon, my brother started playing town sports and I had to devise some other way to entertain myself on the weekends. I played a few years in grade school on his teams until my coordination issues caught up with me. Not feeling an affinity with frills and pink, I enjoyed wearing my brother’s clothes a little more than I should, even though I was not quite coordinated enough to be a sporty boy.

By that time, late in grade school, it certainly didn’t help that every morning I had to recite my way through the morning prayers at my Hebrew Day School. I remember reciting the birkat hashachar with particular zeal. My Hebrew was improving, but prayers were always something I read for the enjoyment of chanting and singing aloud. Once I realized though that I was singing, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, Sovereign of the Universe, for not making me a woman,” I was crestfallen. This seemed so unjust. I began my quiet boycott of the chant. I first would move my lips but utter no sound. Finally I decided to stay silent for this prayer. One day, I was chosen to be the prayer leader at the front of the room, and I refused to say this one prayer.

I took it home to my mother who was aghast, and who found an alternative prayer book for me online to use when I was prayer leader. It was a beautiful illustrated thin book of daily prayers for children. I was so proud of this book, but it was met with much consternation from my teacher. At the same time, my poor teacher was getting it from Noah who refused to believe that every species in the world could actually fit on Noah’s Ark.

Middle school was harder. While my brother relied on gender-based humor to survive the social hierarchy, even including puerile rape jokes, I became a wall of opposition. The more distanced I became from the middle school girls, the more I resented it. I would wear fake mustaches to school, wrap myself in toilet paper to be a mummy, all if it meant I wouldn’t have to compromise myself. In part, I don’t think I could have figured out how to fit in anyways, but I would have done anything to be part of my brother’s crew of boys.

When high school started that changed once again. I began to feel self conscious about my sexuality. I felt tugged in two directions, fearing I could be shamed for promiscuity on one side and embarrassed if I were to be too prudish on the other. Peers told me that no one likes a girl who is too opinionated, domineering, strident, and confrontational. I wondered why they always linked the last three pejorative terms with just being opinionated. Meanwhile, my brother tried his hardest to be numb to it at all costs, a process which had started earlier in middle school. He stopped expressing his feelings outwardly and kept them inside, even if it meant that he had to drink a little more to tell the same jokes or hang out with the boys. Strong opinions or even playing the devil’s advocate to question the rationale could get him as a boy accused of sexism. He could easily be painted as someone he was not.

When I studied abroad in Oman, I experienced an entire other side to this gender binary. On my own for the first time, away from family and my culture, is when I finally thought of myself as a woman. I was on my own and had to take care to cover my womanly features, with a scarf over my hair and a loose tunic over my chest, even at home. I certainly felt more self-consciously female, yet at the same time, also more bonded to the women around me.

I remember my host dad lamenting to me about the travesty that was female truck drivers – a total anathema to him.  A man provides for a woman, and in return, a woman obliges to live by her man’s rules. Women are no more than the value of their unbroken hymens; valued only in staying pure and untouched until it could be claimed. Women may not even ride a bike for fear of rupturing this value. Many women pay thousands on hymen reconstruction surgery, only waiting until their wedding night for a strange man with STI’s to take it away.

Meanwhile, back at home, my brother awaited the day he would finally use the condom he carried in his wallet for so long. My Savta (Jewish grandmother) would routinely remind me how important it would be that I marry a Jewish man. She didn’t say that to my brother. She couldn’t have. Like a good Jewish grandmother, all she could do was commend him for his active libido.

Now men were different to me as well. On the street I would begin to hear men call attention to my body. It made me feel vulnerable. A man suggestively grabbed his crotch in front of himself on the street and another time an older man came up to me at a cafe to solicit sex and when I walked away, he shouted after that he hoped I would masturbate with him in mind that night. It made me feel like a non-human. I found myself dressing differently and acting differently in public to avoid being harassed.  My brother would always come with me to the Holyoke Mall when we were home on break together and point out what the cool girls were wearing. In my mind though dressing was more about covering up. The business of growing up with what to wear and how to act, the objectification of it all, felt belittling somehow.

I don’t know how gender became such a fundamental part of our lives.  Even if you are not consciously taking in the media around you, society always manages to find a way to impose it on you. My brother and I were born out of a petri dish and we grew up in the media culture of objectification and consumption. We are coming out the other side, each with our own adaptations to the gender expectations in order to survive. So no, I guess my brother and I are not so identical after all.