This was written for the pride issue, but lost in the ether because of a change in email address and an outdated address book.
I walk into a room and take off my clothes, keeping one hand cupped over my crotch. Everyone stops to watch. I smile and lift my hand, revealing that I am completely smooth.
Unable now to assign me a gender, the people in the room fall on me and rip my body to bloody shreds. They paw through my entrails looking for proof of my sex. Fights break out. No consensus can be reached. My body is left for the dogs and the crows to worry.
My spirit, floating in the air watching all this, wonders what is the big deal? It zooms off in search of kindred spirits, no longer hobbled by arbitrary physical traits. As it goes, it sings a simple song.
I do hope there is some kind of existence after bodily death. I'm so tired of running the gender gauntlet day after day, always presumed to be or trying to be this or that. And such limited choices! Blue or pink? Gack! What a disaster!
But there is no other choice in US mainstream culture. There are no words, no pronouns, no honorifics, no sexual orientation, no box for me to check. The hospital, the government, the university, the bus driver, the sales clerk, and the voice on the other end of the phone assign me a gender of male or female, whether I like it or not.
How can I correct these people? What words do I use? No, it is I who am expected to correct myself, to not confuse other people when they make their simple choices.
What else can I do? It is not possible in most parts of the country to live in queer space, nor can I reasonably live in a shack in the woods, cut off from society. So my daily life must be either a constant battle of gender transgression, or an effort to 'pass' (or at best, a little of each).
Here is a point I find very difficult to get across to people, even to many transgender people. I did not like growing up labeled as male; so I thought of myself as female (those being the only two choices I knew at the time). But as female, I think of myself as tomboy, not quite butch, perhaps a kind of grunge femme. That's not because it's the best I can do, it's because that's where I feel at home with myself. (See how difficult it is to talk about sex and gender using the vocabulary we have in common?)
I am not upset to be known as a transsexual person, as a freak, or as genderqueer. I am upset to be thought of as male, (perhaps because I've had more than enough of that already, thank you). I also am often upset to be categorized as female (depends on the motives involved), and I am very uncomfortable with the assumption that I will joyously leap at the chance to do anything 'womanly.'
No, sorry, that is not the point. It is NOT the point!
As to what exactly is the point, I do not know what to say, and I am unapologetic about that. Why should it be my task to discover how to tell you, using your words, how I feel?
I've spent most of my life trying to pass as one thing or the other, because that is the safe thing to do. So it's an uphill battle trying to figure out who I really am. Often I despair of ever getting it right. But I keep trying.
[Written in spring 1999.]