Vol. 22
ESSAY | NOW READ THIS | LISTEN UP | FINAL FRAME
I submitted the following essay for a journal submission themed around “luminous gender vessel.” It didn’t get selected. It’s fine! So I’m printing it here. I’m thinking about this stuff a lot right now in particular, with the absolute onslaught of anti-LGBTQ (and specifically anti-trans) legislation and hate now rolling across our country. I am not the only one, nor nearly the most vulnerable. Please pay attention and speak up, forcefully, against what’s happening.
X.
The sun is warm on my bare, barely 5-year-old skin, the grass like soft hair against my naked feet, and I am free and capering in our small front yard when the older woman, a stranger, stops and points at me: “Little girls shouldn’t run around without a shirt on!”
I want to say, actually I am the breeze and the golden light and the feeling of a summer afternoon that is a fruit bursting with possibility. I am GI Joes who fight their battles from a pastel pink My Little Pony castle, and making soup in an old ice cream bucket filled with water from the hose and things that grow under the walnut tree. I am long, tangled hair and snot dried on my forehead. I am fascination with maps of the world and the colorful flags of its boundaries. I am energy and endless wonder.
Instead, I run inside to put on a shirt and something burns cold and hard inside my chest where once there was only the warm, tender July breeze.
Halfway through the third grade and touring my new school, a kid turns from the movie about whales they are watching and sees me in the hallway. He asks the question to no one in particular: “Is that a boy or a girl?”
I want to say, that’s the wrong question. I am tree climbing and doodling in notebooks, trying to perfect my sketch of a Ninja Turtle, architect of branch-and-bark forts and builder of fires. I am an awkward but wonderfully short bowl cut that I love, a third baseman and hitter of line-drives, a budding naturalist and keeper of small furry animals, a know-it-all and poor speller who sketches comics about superhero slugs instead of listening during math lessons.
Instead, my mouth is shut tight, holding fiercely to an answer swelling in my head that feels like a safe refuge but not necessarily the whole truth.
In middle school I shrink into my angriest self. I hide inside loose-fitting clothes and fist fights. I grow my hair out again in hopes people will stop calling me “boy.” I know I am not that. The only other option I know is “girl” and so I continue to cling to it like a life raft. I put on armor and pick up a sword and shield to protect what I know and don’t know yet about myself when people ask, “what are you?” and my only answer is a scowl and a hornets nest in my chest.
I want to say, I am a drummer and a Civil War nerd and a sugar addict. I am crying during movies and lusting after both actors in the lead couple but not yet understanding what that maybe means. I am filled with longing to be kissed and touched that is so acute I squirm in my desk in class, legs tightly crossed. I am techno music and punk rock and I am bleeding and budding and desperately hiding my new bra, which I hate, from my friends who will laugh and snap the straps and ask why I even need to wear one?! My mom says to me as I cry rage sulk, this is what young women are supposed to do. I don’t tell my mom, I am not a young woman, I am a seething ball of shapeless desire.
Glimmers:
The brash and beautiful women who perform at the club where my friend takes me in the city, the one with the faded rainbow flag in the doorway, a beacon in the middle of cowboy- and church-land. They lip-sync to divas and take our dollar bills and some of the gay boys call them names in a way that makes it obvious they aren’t meant to be compliments. But I see glorious, powerful light pulsing from their mouths and eyes and even their high heels that I could never, would never wear.
Short-haired and bound-chested women (I assume because it is all I know, all I have been taught) in smart suits or work boots and wallet chains linger by the bar or sway on the dance floor, like spring thaw after a long winter. What do they answer when they are inevitably asked those same questions which are, I understand by now, accusations? I am a hard line and a soft curve. I am a bag filled with pick-a-mix at the grocery store. I am iridescent shell and color-change flesh in the shallow sea, looking for a mate and staying hidden from predators who cannot see my colors. I am adaptation and survival alongside creatures that fail to change and become fossils instead. I am none of your fucking business, buddy.
The TSA agent watches me enter the scanner and raise my hands over my head. He squints at my shape and then at the display where he’s meant to tell the computer how he thinks I should be categorized. Under his breath, but plenty loud enough for me to hear, he grumbles, “What even is you, man?” before punching a button that says either “man” or “woman.” The machine whirs and he waves me off, no anomalies detected today, whatever he guessed.
I want to say, your guess is as good as mine. But maybe keep it to yourself next time. Why does uncertainty make you so angry?
The TSA agent watches me enter the scanner and raise my hands over my head. She smiles and tells me she’ll need to pat me down, the machine detected an anomaly in my crotch. Apologetically, she whispers, “I can have it run you again as a man,” because my button-fly jeans have given me a possible penis.
(By now I have a cock I keep at home in a drawer by the bed, and it is full of possibility, yes, that much is true)
I want to say, why does the machine need this question answered in order to tell if I’m packing heat? I want to say, the presence or absence of a penis does not make a man. I want to say, I have been misgendered so much and over so many years that I no longer have a ready response to the questions which are accusations which are invitations.
I am not a woman but I caucus with them.
I am not a man but I contain their trace elements.
I am none of those things. I am all of the above.
I want to say, we are water and space and enough longing to pump blood through busy arteries, lungs to fill, limbs to come alive to move through this wild and beautiful world.
I want to say, I am saying: I am a bleeding heart and tough skin and a head full of endless rooms, some sunny and well-kept, others still locked even to myself. I am lust and pleasure. I am variable attention span and river water tumbling over rapids. I am my ancestors and the chips they’ve left on my shoulders, the knowledge they’ve left in my bones. I am my chosen family, my many loves. I am a deep reservoir of grief and an endless waterfall of joy.
I am still learning and undoing and recognizing all the pieces of my heart and their true names. None of those names will be enough for the machine at the airport. They are more than enough for me, they pulse and say
Human, human, human.
###
Now Read This.
“Residents are outraged that their local paper is publishing paid articles calling LGBTQ+ people groomers” [LGBTQ Nation]
The paper of record in Evansville, just south of Madison, has been running paid ads by a local pastor spewing hate speech against LGBTQ people. Thankfully, some locals are finally pushing back–but the editor of the paper is doubling down. I’ll be keeping an eye on this and doing some direct follow-up.
“Death on a Dairy Farm” [Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel for ProPublica]
When an 8-year-old Nicaraguan boy was run over on a Wisconsin dairy farm, authorities blamed his father and closed the case. Meanwhile, the community of immigrant workers knows a completely different story.
“Stop Romanticizing the Hays Code, You Ahistorical Dorks!” [Kayleigh Donaldson for Pajiba]
Let’s just get this out of the way: the Hays Code was awful. It was sexist, racist, homophobic nonsense that set film back decades and reinforced a lot of cruel moralizing that weakened the gaps between art and faith, thus ensuring decades of culture war bullshit. It baffles me that I even have to say this in 2023. Anyone who knows anything about the history of Hollywood is well aware of how the code caused so much damage to the art form of cinema. Yet a tedious strain of online scorn and politically tangled discourse has seen way too many people acting as though what pop culture needs in the 21st century is a return to mandated puritanism.
“Oh No, It’s Happening Again” [Parker Molloy at The Present Age]
No, stories casting doubt on the legitimacy of transgender people are not okay. That’s not what journalism is supposed to be. Trans people exist and we have a right to participate in society, to express ourselves, and to pretty much do anything that anyone else can do so long as we’re not hurting anyone or infringing on their rights. But you need to stop doing this, “Are trans women actually women? Are trans men actually men?” things because that is honestly so secondary to the actual concerns that we can actually discuss and advance.
“Impeccable Timing, Pamela Paul! Just one day after hundreds of contributors to the New York Times pleaded with the paper to improve its coverage of trans people, the Opinion side drops a doozy.” [Christina Cauterucci for Slate]
The issue, here, is the definition of transphobia, which Paul is whittling and contorting to her own ideological ends. If transphobia does not apply to someone who would exile trans women in need from shelters and crisis centers that could support them; who believes that there are simply too many transgender children these days, and who would consign trans youth to distress and dysphoria rather than offering treatment that will allow them to pursue safer, happier lives; who believes a handful of vocal detransitioners to be more trustworthy than actual transgender people, such that public policy and social structures should be built according to the notion that every trans person is a detransitioner-in-waiting; who considers trans women inherently deceptive, conniving, and dangerous; and who has built her entire public political persona around casting suspicion on transgender people and the argument that their needs are mutually exclusive to those of cis women and girls—to whom, exactly, should it apply?
Listen Up.
If you’re in the area this weekend, I’ll be reprising my dream role as the frontperson for a Sarah McLachlan tribute band (The Sad Puppies) on Saturday, Feb. 25 at the Crystal Corner Bar. We’ll be joined by two other fantastic local tributes, to the Indigo Girls and The Bangles, and you won’t want to miss it. PLUS we’re starting at the more reasonable time of 8pm!
Final Frame.
‘Til next time.
Thanks for reading! Hit me up with questions, comments, suggestions, and tips on great hiking spots. And please feel free to forward this email to a friend and/or hit that subscribe button. xoxo
Beautifully touching writing. Thanks Emily.