Have you seen those “all-gender restroom” signs that show the woman-figure, the man-figure, and the handicapped symbol? I remember the first time I saw a photo of that tweeted with, “apparently disability is its own gender,” and I thought, “That’s actually how I felt for a very long time.” I don’t mean this in an empowerment or activist sense, quite the opposite. I felt left out of every gendered means of enticing one’s desired gaze, particularly where femininity was concerned. When I was a teenager, I wore lipstick, but my fine motor skills or comparative lack thereof rendered eye-makeup virtually impossible. When my cousins tried to curl my eye-lashes, I blinked uncontrollably. “Stop blinking!” Angi would say. But I couldn’t. And it didn’t help that my eyelashes were reddish blond, what the fuck is that, and not the elegant dark lashes of a Real Girl.
My eyelashes did pay off once, though. I was in 7th grade at New Orleans’ Audubon Montessori, and this heartbreakingly cool chick I would’ve given ANYTHING to be brought blue mascara to school. Everyone tried it on and sighed, because you “couldn’t really see it.” Then the little bottle of eyelash-enhancer got to me. When Cool Chick applied that magic little wand to my light eyelashes, the blue was startling. Crazy-bright. I don’t even think I bothered looking in the mirror, because that was something I hated doing, but people’s reactions were uniformly stunned. I eventually forgot I was wearing the stuff until my dad picked me up from school and greeted me with, “WHAT is on your EYES?!”
Years later, I got a serious makeover, the kind you pay up for, on Prom Night. I wish I had those photos, but I don’t. Suffice to say, the compliments engendered a lot of mixed feelings, because it was a steady echo throughout the evening of, “You’re so beautiful! I didn’t recognize you!” I wonder if Cinderella felt offended that no one knew who that stunner at the ball was. The prince got off the hook because he’d never seen her before (and also because of class privilege) but since we know that “every eligible maiden” turned up by essentially-Fascist mandate, there were presumably women in attendance who were well aware of the girl in torn clothes sweeping the cinders from the floor every day of her unfortunate life. I wonder if she ever thought, “Motherfuckers, it’s still me!”
When I got to college, I bought my first ever pair of baggy jeans which sent a gratifying jolt of vocal and enduring shock through truly everyone I reunited with whenever I went home for Thanksgiving. I had not been aware that my friends had declared me Femme because I wore dresses and stockings every day. In their minds, I did this because I was just that much of a chick, but the reality was, the fashion industrial complex is actively hostile to pants that fit me. People with my waist size are supposed to have longer legs (as, for so long, I so passionately wished I did) and so, buying pants is an infuriating practice. But not even the backless dresses I was partial to ever really made me feel like a girl.
My best friend in college, later my roommate, was a trans guy, and in the course of our spending every waking and many of our sleeping moments together for months on end without cease, I wondered if I was too. I cut off all my hair and somehow found dress slacks that fit me at our sanctuary-thrift-store in Iowa City and truly felt in my soul that my name was Sebastian. The summer that I decided to truly test those waters, I was visiting New Orleans with my dad, and as it happened, the once-iconic Cunt-Tree Club (I thought about censoring the name, but it was called that! The fliers said that!) was having an all-women night of nude swimming, and, being a product of an upbringing where nudity comes quite naturally, I attended. (I don’t remember if my dad had any idea this is where I was going? He must’ve dropped me off there. I don’t drive. Maybe the all-women thing made it safe.)
As it happens, attending this “all-women” event as Sebastian did not render me an outcast, quite the opposite. I met someone, a staggeringly gorgeous trans guy named Bradley who asked for my number. I gave him my number, but I didn’t have a cell phone, and so when Bradley called my dad answered, and when Bradley asked for Sebastian, my dad, who had no idea what I was questioning, told him he had the wrong number. I’d been terrified to tell my dad the truth, to even begin to open this door at all, but that summer, I got my first glimpse of how truly open-minded my father was. His first reaction was not, “What?! but you’re my DAUGHTER!” It was, “Well now I feel terrible! I didn’t know they were asking for you.” Damn, he was cool. I’m so sorry that too many of you never got to meet him. (He would have loved you all.)
A lot of people dismiss the term “phase” as synonymous with faddish, shallow, agenda-driven. I don’t. The moon moves in phases, and my gender identity shifted and still does in much the same manner. Despite my skinny ties and my dress slacks and my basically-mushroom-cut-because-my-notion-of-what-a-hot-dude-looked-like-was-formed-in-1996, the confidence I drew on as Sebastian did not come from me. I pictured myself as a specific person, a radiant musician and performer who lived in our college town and was something of a local iconoclastic icon. He was radiantly beautiful, but I’m convinced upon reflection that, though his gorgeousness checked every conventional beauty-box, that wasn’t what made him special. What I was ultimately chasing was a comfort in melding my own innovative universe with the world we share, and this was someone who did that without even trying. Once, at a diner after a late-night theater event, he lamented that he didn’t have any of his old material, and he now wished he could look back at it.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
He sighed, and told that familiar tale of a young artist so enraged by their own creative follies that they cast them out, but this angry disposal had a twist, which he didn’t even recognize as a twist, because his nonchalant, annoyed-with-himself tone didn’t alter: “I put it all into this dead bird and burned it.”
I looked at him for a second (I wish I could do that right now), and then I said, “Well at least that’s a lot more interesting than ‘I deleted it all from my hard drive.’”
I will never forget the smile he gave me when he said, “I never thought of it that way.”
He’s no longer with us, for reasons so tragic I truly can’t get into them here. But because he deserves to be remembered, forever remembered, I’ll name him: Jamal Areli River. I’m sure he knew how much I respected him, but he had no idea that I wanted to be him, that I actually imagined I was, and that when I did, I thought, “I have everything, now. Everything.” As is too often the case with those we idolize and of whom we so deeply believe that, he didn’t.
Having everything, the capacity to believe you can go get it, is often association with (white, usually) male entitlement, and Jamal didn’t have any of that as far as I’m aware, but I certainly do. Or did? Or do? I don’t know. At some point, at least as far as social media would have you believe, it became highly unfashionable and unfeminine for women to be assertive. When I wasn’t looking, my feed melded together in passionate declarations of being “introverts,” in part because, sayeth EVERYBODY, the patriarchy forces them into quietude. This still makes no sense to me. I’ve always been loud. In every arena of my life. And as far as timid white women being afraid to “take up space” (an experience that I suddenly felt pressured to relate to) well, I’ve never had a choice about taking up space because these sticks on either side of me require a wider path than most people. If I were in a wheelchair it would require an even wider one. So the white “feminist” notion that it’s always men who “take up space” is, like so much else that gets spouted in the name of progress, a bunch of ableist bullshit. But where were we?
At some point I claimed my metaphorical cock with vigor and decided I didn’t need to imagine being a hot male musician in order to live the way I wanted to live. One of my favorite outfits during that era was a deliberate and theatrical gender-fuck: a pink 1980’s prom dress and a grey felt fedora, back before (I swear, before) Dude with a Fedora became a modern cultural cliche. Living in Iowa City and having scared off several people with a couple of emails that were either too long or too blunt or too sexual or too who-knows-what, I temporarily decided that what life required in order to be fulfilling was a no-holds-barred shot of 1950’s take-no-prisoners masculinity. I have no memory of how exactly I came to be at a bar going on a drunken rant about this to a frat boy who was more attractive than he had any right to be that ended with me slamming down my glass and shouting, “Where is fuckin’ SINATRA?! Where is BRANDO?!” but…well…this dude agreed with me, and answered with a simple, “Let me buy you a drink.”
I prepared myself to say something along the lines of, “By buying me this drink you’re parting with some money and going on your merry way, nothing else is happening,” but, miraculously, I didn’t have to. He really did buy me the drink, flirt some more, and leave. That was it. I didn’t have to send signals or lay a damn thing down. Whether that was down to his ultimate decency or my do-NOT-fuck-with-me air, I will never know.
I forget why I told you that. It’s probably no surprise that that phase didn’t last very long: the guys I go for are girlier than me. They’ve always been. And maybe that’s another reason why I’ve never felt particularly womanly. It took me years to find conditioner that actually does anything for my course tri-textured hair, but I didn’t find it, Ian did, and he’s the one that did the research (his mixed-race curls also having specific needs). Some of my favorite clothing items, I have because Ian insisted that as dubious as they look on the hanger, they will look great on me, try them on. He is a far more passionate and fastidious shopper than I will ever be. When we first got together he told me that he has no attachment at all to being a dude. “If I woke up a woman tomorrow,” he said, “I know I would have a lot of bullshit to get used to, like sexual harassment and sexist assumptions and condescension, and that would suck, but I wouldn’t feel at all sad about not being a guy anymore.” And since we’ve already established my dudely nature, I’ll just end that thought as crassly as possible by assuring you that, looking at his sister and his mom, Ian would make a breathtakingly hot chick.
I forget why I told you that, too.
Gender is so weird. When I lived in Boston, I learned, for truly the first time ever, that it’s something people take seriously. Boston ladies never have a hair out of place and Boston men register to me as figures from Old Hollywood. And it was with Ian’s enthusiastic encouragement that one day in Boston I went to work like this:
Arriving to work that day was hilarious. Everyone assumed I was essentially making an announcement and no one knew how to address me and the one lesbian in the office stuttered like we’d never met before. The only one of my coworkers who was absolutely-comfortable was a conservative but genuinely warm much-older lady who declared with immediate enthusiasm that I looked “GORGEOUS!” She asked if Ian had seen me and I told her he was the one who’d encouraged the duds. She said, “Bet it was hard to let you get out of the house and go to work, huh?” with a wink. I’m still surprised that this aesthetic had such a positive impact on her of all people, but maybe we’re most intensely drawn to that which we’ve assumed was closed to us.
“Penis envy” is a fraught notion and I wouldn’t say I have that, much as I do wish my body could experience certain as-I-imagine-it unparalleled sensations that can’t be fully matched by expensive equipment. (Wow, I really did some word-gymnastics to make that one worksafe, did you follow?) I will admit to something compatible that I can’t deny when I see things like Ian’s tie collection:
Ian never wears ties, so I don’t remember what he was getting ready for, and of course the one he chose wouldn’t have been in my masculine-fashion-envy photo. I took that picture because the pile itself, entirely without deliberation as it was, truly looked to me like art. I didn’t put too much time into angles so I won’t claim that this photo reproduces what I felt when I looked at that tangle after he left, but…
But what?
I don’t know. Gender is weird. I already said that. If I’m repeating myself, then it’s probably time to let you get back to doing whatever it is you should be doing. I’ll do the same. This probably goes without saying, but if you’ve got any thoughts on related matters you have any desire to share, please do.