#gendermancy

I guess I would say...that I’ve started to unravel some major poisonous narratives that I’ve had about myself for a long time. That’s HUGE. For a really long time I thought I couldn’t be trans or fluid because those words were for legitimate people, and I thought I was some kind of dangerous sex weirdo instead.

Well, here’s the thing I’ve realized. Society very, very, very frequently constructs anyone who transgresses the bounds of gender or sexuality as a sexual threat. Queerness is just that, this vague idea of a sex weirdo. Whatever isn’t understood is treated as some sort of lewdness.

To be blunt, fuck that.

Similarly, sure, there ways in which my sense of myself has been tangled up in my sexuality. I used to think that meant I wasn’t trans or fluid. But having heard so many other people talk about a similar experience, I’ve realized it’s just the opposite. It seems like it’s actually pretty common for sexual fantasies to be places where you explore a different image of yourself.

I guess what I’m saying is that the image of the Pervert isn’t only false for me, it’s an image that’s been used to keep me and people like me from stepping out of lines. And I’m done giving it any authority over me.

I’m starting to understand who I am. And now I think I know what’s been going on in my brain. And that is so, so cool.

Also, my hair is longer now, and I’m starting to really, really like it! So that’s nice.

She’s sitting on a beach somewhere, probably in Michigan, where her family shares an old log cabin with a bunch of relatives, on the shore of Lake Huron. It’s a bit cloudy and grey, but it’s the summer, so it’s not too cold, especially if you have a light jacket, as she does. Her eyes are green, though in lights like this one they sometimes seem blue, and when she catches a bit of wry humor in the book she's reading, she flashes, without knowing, a bright, warm smile.

She’s sitting in a chair, in the slim sandy part of the beach. (Much of the space behind her has developed into a marshy ecosystem over the past decade, with strange grasses and ponds and frogs.) She’s sitting in an old collapsible chair, out on the beach, listening to the waves rush along the shore. It’s a relaxing sound, yet a loud one, too, to the point where she wonders why it’s so relaxing, you’d think it’d just pound in your ears until you had a headache, and maybe it’s a bit like that, if you stay out all day, but instead it’s really relaxing, soothing, healing. Maybe it’s the in-out, in-out rhythm of it. Like breathing. Like meditation.

She’s reading a book as she listens to that eternal rhythm, sneaking glances at the long, seemingly infinite stretch of blue that extends out into deep, mysterious depths. Somewhere on the other side lies the fabled land of Canada, yet at this distance she finds it hard to believe. There couldn’t be anything further, not here at the end of the world.

The book that she’s reading is a book called The Solitudes, by John Crowley. It is the second of Crowley’s works that she has read, and she is enjoying it every bit as much as the last, Little, Big, though she finds she understands it less. But she’s drawn into Crowley’s mysteries, into his account of a secret history of the world, and the misadventures of the hapless Pierce Moffet, washed-up historian, and she’s attempting to wrestle with the question of what in the book is real and what is fantastical, slowly coming to realize that their inextricability is part of the point. She will read it again several years later, when she is a graduate student back in Colorado, will reread the whole series of which it is a part, the Aegypt Cycle, and this time she will go word by word, as much as is in her nature, and try to catch every detail, and it will be brilliant, it will fit in just perfectly with that moment, in which she is struggling to become a historian herself, it will merge with the new ideas and insights she is discovering, it will be an experience she will always remember, and she will finally come to understand, more or less, just how the whole saga of the world’s secret self unfolds and re-folds, and at several points this knowledge will bring her to tears. But that is all still to come.

The wind is blowing slightly, and it’s stirring her clothes, and stirring her hair, and possibly stirring her spirit—psyche, meaning breath,meaning wind, maybe there’s a connection there somewhere—stirring her long brown hair, which drapes down over her shoulders, stretches down to her hips, and embraces her like a cloak. Occasionally she has been known to chew on the end of it, absent-mindedly. It’s thick hair, not glossy, but not ugly, either, necessarily, just thick, and it’s hard work to brush it and keep it snarl-free, but she likes having it. It feels right for her, though maybe one day she will try something else. As a child she always wanted to have it as long as it could possibly be.

She is an odd creature, but one coming into herself, finding herself. Once the summer ends, she intends to travel to Greece, to study in Athens. She has no idea what to expect. She will be there by herself, and in some ways the idea terrifies her, and she, as is her tendency, has a vague sense of impending disaster. But she’s thrilled, too—she has been itching to get out of her limited country, her limited corner of the world. She has no idea how much the experience will mean to her, how much it will reinvigorate and transform her, how deep a sense of her own capacity she will develop. She does not know, yet, that she will arrive, bewildered, on the doorstep of her apartment with an informational packet in her hands but not much else, but within a week she will have found people, friends, who make her feel very much at home, and she will walk up to the Parthenon for the first time with her flatmates and stumble across the temple of Olympian Zeus for the sake of a scavenger hunt.

And when, later, classes begin, she will learn to taste the whole history of Greece like a seven-layer cake and feel the city of the ancients under her sneakers. She does not know yet that she will travel to Crete, Delphi, Epidaros, Istanbul, Rome, Berlin, that she will have a stomach bug but never seasickness and take far too many pictures, and lose a lover, who traveled to Ireland, who changed her life. She does not know that she will come back more confident, having lost the shell she had begun to shed in the last years of high school, will come back with a sense of her own power and identity, less desperate to please, more careful with her puns, with a million stories to share, and will never, ever, stop yearning for Greek food.

All of that is to come.

Even now she is building herself, is building the person she was afraid to be, as a teenager, the one who feared to socialize, feared the judgment and hazing of her peers, feared that they were all laughing at her, the girl caught in her personal web of intellect, stubbornness, and isolation. She is building on the moment when she began to crack open, when she began to see that her fears were illusions, that she was surrounded by wonderful and interesting people who liked her and wanted to get to know her, with whom she had the chance to tell amazing stories, breathe life into plays as other schools could only dream of doing, begin to have lovers and friends.

It was then that she rethought her perspective on makeup, on earrings, on clothing, and realized that she could use these things to create herself without letting other people tell her story. Glimpses of that change are apparent now; she’s wearing slightly kooky earrings, perhaps stars, or, later, Pokéballs, to let her inner nerd shine through, and sometimes she braids her hair, while other times she lets it flow free, as now. And though she isn’t very dressed up, out here on the beach, she’s found things she likes for today, jeans that fit relatively well and a blue shirt that looks good with her jacket, and colorful flip-flops dangling off her toes. And she’s comfortable, and happy, even on this grey, windy day, to enjoy the sound of the waves for a while.

She loses herself in the book, as she will do with many, many more to come, often on this very beach. After a long time, the sun, descending behind her, reminds her of how much time has passed, and with extreme reluctance, she puts a makeshift Kleenex bookmark between the pages, closes the book, puts it back into the basket, and picks up the basket and the folding chair to go back into the cabin.

Sometimes…

Not always, but sometimes…