on this national coming out day / international day of the girl child, in this week of tweeted first assaults, a day after mental health day, (which I missed), I'd like to put this out there:
as a child, I didn't know there was an option other than girl or boy.
I never felt like a girl child, or a boy child -- that is, I never identified with one or the other. I have identified as queer as long as I knew there was a word. I never felt the need to "come out" because in many ways I am a very private person, and also because I have never been a joiner -- I have always felt that I was NOT things more than being them. Not straight, not female, not like others. I also knew my mind and body functioned differently.
Before I knew there were words like two-spirit, before I knew that there were traditions that spoke for thousands of years of each body having within itself male and female energies, I knew this thing silent and solid in myself, like a stone. I felt old, remembered lives before. Believed in things no one had ever taught me, didn’t believe the things I was told. I did not have the language to speak, to hold as light out loud in the world, even as I hid this shameful treasure like a stolen piece of fruit, visited like a tryst with myself, a secret escape from the roman catholic fear and punishment that hung around my family, already deep with ghosts and shadows.
Later, now, I can say I am energy that has a body, a body you have a name for, which is female, and I can say, I didn’t choose those words, they aren’t mine. That I have this body, but am not this body. That I believe I have been before and will be again. That the heaven story didn’t jive with me, but the magic and miracles did. I secretly sought out as much magic as I could find and began to build the world I lived in, a truer world than the words of my home, in my mind. Early american witchcraft, returned to again and again in the adult section of the library, a “safe” place I was allowed to go, one of few. Now I would say I do energy work, medicine work -- I am a conduit, not a witch. But I didn’t have language for any of this -- and when I began to try to write it down, I was condemned, punished, belittled. When it was paired with exploration with other bodies -- I was sent to confession. Shamed. I learned to keep quiet.
now, I am comfortable and happy identifying as non binary, and queer, in the sense that these encompass as many possibilities as this body continues to hold. and I'm becoming increasingly comfortable admitting my chronic illnesses and what would in the western canon be considered a mental health history (but for spiritual reasons I use other language around).
What does it mean to be mad? How can we not be sick, in this time? I am proud to feel ill, to not be able to fully function here. This is a broken, sick time, out of sync with nature and with evolution. I don’t want to be in sync with it. I don’t want to cope, and I don’t want to medicate. Look for the empathic ones, all the sensates -- some are beginning to come forward, but far more silently millions more function by dulling, by adjusting to the broken. And I support them, I support their self care, but I refuse. I want to stay mad. To continue to keep the spirit, energies and explorations into the metaphysical out of our healing is what’s truly crazy.
What those in the West view as mental illness, the Dagara people regard as “good news from the other world.” The person going through the crisis has been chosen as a medium for a message to the community that needs to be communicated from the spirit realm. “Mental disorder, behavioral disorder of all kinds, signal the fact that two obviously incompatible energies have merged into the same field,” says Dr. Somé. These disturbances result when the person does not get assistance in dealing with the presence of the energy from the spirit realm.
What does it mean to believe that bodies are evolving, and not all in the same way. I fear an emergency, even as I work against fear. But it is that I cringe to take this harmonious, intelligent organism into a hospital as though taking an infant to a garage for a tune up. Are we not becoming allergic to the poisons we’ve created? Are our bodies not taking over, attempting to save us when we will not save ourselves, and we, trying to treat our adaptations? Treating cures as symptoms, rather than seeking out the root errors, the causes?
When I land in the hospital, there is no doubt that I am a woman again, because here I am treated to my claims, complaints, my years of awareness of my illnesses being not taken seriously. To pregnancy tests when I have not been sexually active. To suggestions that I have gas, am just tired.
I know I have no gender, that I am a spirit in a body but here on earth in this land of words and traded identities like baseball cards I am, too, a feminist, which took me decades to own, and I continue to use the she pronoun -- because I have lived as a girl child, and I am not ready to erase the history that came  -- that continues to be written -- simply by living in this body.
as a girl child, I knew that certain things were expected of me. I balked at them. I balked at my older neighbor, who told me that I was a pretty little doll, and I told him I was a person. he assaulted me while babysitting me. I was very little. maybe 6. I was reminded of this later, but I've blacked it out. I was told I must have been confused, that he was a nice man, and that I shouldn't say things like that about people who are nice people.
as a girl child, I had older male relatives who kissed me on the mouth and pinched my cheeks and bottom without asking, and no one said anything. I was told to smile. be nice to people. give hugs. give kisses. sit on laps held down by sweaty hands.
as a girl child, I grew to look like a woman quickly and my mother taught me to be ashamed of my body. as soon as I grew breasts, my warddrobe changed and I was bought clothes many sizes too big. I was taught that I was attracting attention. I was taught it was my fault. I was punished, taught that I was being slutty if I changed these clothes at school (which I began to do some years later), but I was simply trying to be myself, to express myself through style I identified with. I didn't think of it as feminine. I just didn't want to hide.
I had a C cup in the 5th grade. My mother would only allow me to buy plain, matronly sports bras, to wear under the tents that were the only clothes in which I was permitted out of the house. Lacy or patterned bras were something I was shamed for wanting, told repeatedly that I shouldn’t care what they look like, because no one was going to see them -- I didn’t want anyone to see them, right? Because to want that would be slutty. And no one likes a slut -- or no one really likes one, at the end of the day.
By the end of highschool I switched to minimizers, bras that reduce the appearance of your breast size by a number of inches, by dint of a huge amount of pressure and strong fabrics. The straps are thick and wide, the clasps with 5 or 6 hooks. They rarely came in pretty colors or patterns. We bought these white or tan (not black, slutty again) on sale, twice a year, at Macy’s or Lord and Taylor, where women with measuring tapes came clucking into the dressing room poking at my flesh and running a commentary with my mother about my body as if I wasn’t there.
as a girl child with large breasts, I've been the target of attention on every street I've walked on since I was 10 years old. I've been followed, threatened, assaulted, abused, forced... more times than I can count or wish to recount here. This has continuously been used against me as proof that I somehow invited this, proof that if allowed I would make bad decisions, that I would wear clothes that made it my fault that men of all ages couldn’t control themselves in my presence.
as a teenage girl child shamed for my body, told that to touch myself was a sin, yet awash in sexual desire, I found ways to touch and be touched -- hidden ways, secret ways, ways that had no guidance and no support, ways that condemned and burned me from the inside even as I sought them out desperately, sought affection and sense making.
I graduated highschool at the top of my class, having been accepted to 10 of the top colleges in the country. I was also pregnant. I had an abortion 3 days later, paid for by myself and my boyfriend. My mother didn’t know, and neither did my friends. A woman with dyed blonde hair and bad teeth told me she was getting her third, and not to worry, they barely hurt any more once you’ve had a few. Turning towards the wall, crying, eating saltines and drinking apple juice out of a shallow cup with a tin foil closure.
I bled heavily, in pain, for days, taking meds, smiling through my teeth at the kids at camp, where I began working as a counselor the next day. The little boys asked me why I had a blonde mustache, which I bleached. Soon after this, I learned to wax.
I was used to heavy bleeding. I began to bleed at 11 years old, but it wasn’t until a few years later that I began having periods so heavy, so painful, I often spent hours in the nurse’s office, curled in a ball in the dark. She started me on 2 advil, but soon 6 every few hours were standard practice. I hated missing class, but the pain was too much. I didn’t go to a doctor because everyone told me it was “just cramps,” which is to say -- something I should and would learn to get used to. And I did.
When this pain got unbearable, a few years later, and I wasn’t bleeding, I knew something was wrong. In the hospital, as a girl child: they did tests, checked for pregnancy as always. I wasn’t, I swore. I was mortified, with my mother, home from college. They tested for STD’s, said it was probably something I got at college. I said there was no way. They said teenagers lie. My mother was angry. She asked me again and again if I was telling the truth. I was. I was just in pain I didn’t understand. They sent me home telling me to get TUMS. They said it was gas.
Girl child, rarely called woman, still called “girl”; a week before my graduation from college, even though I’d learned to deal with the pain, now constant, I doubled over and landed on my floor in my dorm room. About to go to the gym, with a friend, I ended up in a hospital in pennsylvania until the day before the ceremony. More pregnancy tests, more STD questions. More embarassment. More accusations.
Many appointments and much wasted money later, 22 years old I came to a doctor’s office with a theory, because this girl child has experience with research. I said, “maybe it’s endometriosis,” and it was. It was endometrial masses. One the size of an orange, one the size of a grapefruit. Adhered to my ovaries. And my periods, my estrogen, the very nature of my female insides, fed them. And not in any of these hospitals had they been found.
And they needed to be removed, and maybe my ovaries would come out too. Girl child, woman child, 22 years old, secret abortion, sexual shame, maybe you will never have a child of your own, they told me in so many words. Only the one that I already killed, I said inside. But they knew, and said this, too, silently, because every form asks for “number of pregnancies,” and “number of terminations.” Shame on you, you get what you deserve.
After the procedure, only half an ovary had to come out, good news, my mustachioed doctor says. You’re pretty and smart, you’ll find someone to have a baby with. Having a baby would “fix” this, he said. So you didn’t have an STD after all, he said! You’re not a slut, but I know about that 18 year old pregnancy, he said without saying, so maybe you are. This is a man who puts his hands inside me, who is responsible for the cold clench and the scraping of my insides. He says I have until I’m 30, but no longer. He says if I want to not be in pain, I should go on the pill. Wink wink which is good in your 20’s anyway.
First I go on Lupron, which induces menopause for 2 years. Then the pill, with no pause, with no period. Is it safe? I ask, again and again. Yes they say yes. Isn’t it amazing? Try this new one they say, it’s supposed to be great. 10,000 lawsuits are filed against Yazmin, the pill I take for years. Deaths, injuries, long term side effects. Not the ones rattled off on the label. Far worse.
I figure out a way to have a baby, fast forward, before I am 30. I don’t have a partner. I do it with a gay couple. I’m not sure what I’m doing, but I know I want to make a person before my body can’t do it anymore. I have to. I have to to feel I didn’t blow my chance and kill my only child.
The same OBGYN helps, he gives us a medical-grade baster to use at home. He jokes again that he’s sure I could find someone even in this 6 months before I’m 30. I’ll still pretty and smart, I went to such good schools.
Girl child, woman child. I make it by the deadline.I have a baby inside. My breasts are nearly doubled in size, acheiving their apex in usefulness as nourishment for a person. I am a miracle. I am a spirit, with my male energies too stronger and stronger and I, we, both of my selves, all of my selves, we are having a baby. She will have two daddies. No, I will not live with her. Yes, she will know me as her mother. She will call me, we will learn, “Mama Lynne.”
Women who find this out say that I am strong, in the same breath as saying that they could never, that their feelings are so strong, that they love their kids too much, that they couldn’t be without them. Women tell me that I love my baby less because I am not with her. Women tell me that I am different. I know this, but I know that this definition of love is narrow, like all the definitions I’ve known.
Men find me attractive. During the pregnancy, after the pregnancy. I am single, but I am pregnant, and I will not have a baby with me always after. This is like the holy grail. There is a whole world of kink around this. Men feel comfortable telling me, when they learn the story, how hot this is. How hot I am with a baby inside me, with my now doubly enormous, unable to hide breasts. But they often don’t get up for me on the subway. I say fuck this. I say, I announce, “does anyone want to get up for me?” and everyone scrambles over themselves. I encourage other pregnant women to do this. I do this for other pregnant women. They see you. They are just pretending.
So, she. She she she, and the history of this body I have never felt comfortable in or with. These breasts that I see every day as the strangest, most foreign objects hanging off my torso -- but so too do I feel the entire body is strange, and I cannot imagine having a male sex organ, either -- I think the truth of it is, I feel my spirit life more than my human one. My relationship to being here is tinged with the fervor of a seeker, but to say that reduces it down to something less, when it is so much more than. And so, here, on this plane, SHE.
As an non binary, female-bodied person, every day I walk out on the street I have to consider if I feel like it's important enough to wear something in which my body isn't hidden -- a body that as a non binary person I do not particularly identify with, but which has become a marker of a struggle that I don't necessarily want to avoid by removing part of myself.
if and when I choose to mask or bind, or feel masc/butch, that is my choice, but I shouldn't choose it on days I feel femme simply because I feel safer and more powerful on the street and at work, and yet I know I still make these decisions, often subconsciously, out of exhaustion.
I am proud to be queer, proud to be non binary, sad to live in a time when to be a girl child is still so dangerous.
I want a safer, less shameful life for Beckett. And I'm doing everything in my power to help that world evolve.