begrudging woman
ambrotype by Doug Hanson
“Simply put, I’m sick of being perceived.”
These days I find myself more and more exasperated — a surprising turn of events for those who know me, given that my exasperation level (often accompanied by anger, fear, or rage) is usually through the roof.
The summer of re-entry into “normal” (another eye-roll-inspiring word) life is, to put it mildly, deeply disturbing. As India implodes, the CDC gives cover to Americans who never wore masks in the first place, and will never be vaccinated. Hawkers of diet culture (perhaps “abuse” is a better term for this) are back on their bullshit, as they always are around “swimsuit season” (cue rage), but with the added manipulative bonus of “pandemic weight gains” and other crimes of coping. My isolated world has never been that isolated, as I’ve been teaching and safely seeing people for the last ten months or so, but my pre-pandemic world was never that social to begin with. Here I am, clattering away on a keyboard, as usual. (The internet continues to be both an unbearable diversion and an addictive pacifier from which one continually struggles to extricate oneself.)
The lessons of the last year and a half, with their whiplash of cosmic scale, will take years to process and internalize — that is, if one is willing to learn them at all. So many of us have spent every moment, every drop of energy for fourteen months fantasizing about being “allowed” to remove our masks. It turns out that if you think about one thing all the time, you never open to the possibility of other things. To put a fine point on it: it’s your fault if you never learned to wear your big-kid underpants.
No doubt, one relishes being a witness to massive cultural shifts, but one also longs for the day when the shift has finally shifted. Awareness of trans people (yes, simple awareness of people’s existence is a huge step here) has increased sensitivity to pronouns to some degree, but it’s also caused massive upset to those of us who’d prefer that such a system were never invented at all. Every email signature and Zoom display is its own kind of gender reveal party: choose from boy, girl, or BE CAREFUL IT’S NOT WHAT YOU THINK.
In Visayan, which my grandmother speaks, there are no gendered personal pronouns. When she speaks English, she is constantly confusing “him” and “her”, even after decades. English feels like a trap in this regard. On days that I don’t feel quite so she/her, they/them looms like an insult: third option. Not the other things. Prefer not to answer. To me, non-binary is kind of like calling oneself a non-sculptor or a non-motorcycle-enthusiast. It’s indescribably important for people to feel at home with the words that describe them, but the binary, and the meta binary of {binary vs. non-binary}, is an invention. Can’t I just be a person who never really got into it?
Everything is genderless. Gender is a label created from a social checklist (who can purchase whom, who can rape whom, what genitals can I see from here, etc.), and it’s applied to something after it comes into existence. It’s not essential to any person or thing, just as race, species, and nationality are not essential (meaning essence, inherent nature).
Inventions have real consequences, of course. The days I feel most female are when another one of us has been killed. Collective trauma is no joke. The common enemy brings us together and tells us who we are. Identities are forged in the fire, but can I take a minute to dream of a life outside of it? I’m tired of the heat in here.
I am desperate for neutrality. Not the palliative “gender-neutrality” and the strong-armed ignorance of “it doesn’t matter to me what you are” (see also “colorblindness”), but the true neutrality of existence: phenomena without commentary. Things happening simply as they are. This is one of the practices of mindfulness: not talking so fucking much about everything. Noticing. Observing. Realizing that the whole world is not out there waiting to be described by our opinions and judgments.
In dismantling an oppressive identity system, step one is recognizing it. Step two might be expanding it. The final step, however many there are, will be destroying it.
I am annoyed by this body with its menstruation and hormones and breasts — not breasts, really, but others’ condemnation of and obsession with the existence of these nipples. Not nipples themselves, but the fact that they are there, and that I ought to do something to pretend they are not, and that that’s the only reason I will ever wear a bra in my life, lest I face the inevitable stares and harassment. Disquieting, no? But this is my home, the only body I will ever have.
I don’t disavow my femaleness. It is an identity I wear like a veil. In another time, I might have felt more male — I do enjoy high-heeled shoes and long, roomy skirts — but it seems rather silly to play the game at all, like asking which house you’d join at Hogwarts, or which Marvel superhero you’d be.
The desire to label oneself is the desire to find a home, a box to fit comfortably into, a shorthand for representing oneself to the rest of the world, and a guide for living with one’s own mind. The coming out, the diagnosis, the pronoun-naming — it is all a relief to some. But I can only hope that one day we won’t settle for shorthand. That one day, communion, understanding, and simply being — in all their challenge and improvisation and groundlessness and mistake-making — will be acceptable.
