Where I Linger

Some notes on places of overlap and indistinguishability—where binaries collapse

We humans are like our ribcages: two mirrored sides connected by a spine. We are like our spines, connecting the left and the right, while being neither and both.

As a prepubescent child, I used to bike with a group of boys. I wanted to be a boy myself. The boys rode bare-chested, t-shirts tucked into the backs of their waistbands and flying behind them like capes. I removed my shirt once I was certain I was outside of eyeshot of my house where any member of my family might have seen me. Did the boys know I was not one of them? Or did they know and not care? The pleasure of that feeling — my small, bare-chested body flying through the soft summer air upon two wheels surrounded by other children who looked just like me, all our chests the same, indistinguishable from one to another should just our torsos and limbs be photographed, our headless forms.

I had been thinking of us headless — like a black and white photograph of a group of children lined up shirtless, pale chests all in a row, dirty jeans with ripped knees and gangly arms with prominent elbows — when it happened. The group stopped abruptly. Not having the skill quite yet to grip the hand breaks of the new ten-speed bike, I slid off the seat to drag my feet and my crotch slammed into the straight bar. Even as water pooled then spilled from my startled eyes, I couldn’t quite tell at first what I was feeling, pleasure or pain. There was nothing but strong sensation swirling through my body, round and round, ripples on the surface of a pond.

We live in a world of binaries: pleasure and pain, penises and vaginas, male and female, feminine and masculine, hetero and homo, birth and death.

When I imagine a visual of the conjoined twins that are pleasure and pain, I see a snake swallowing its tail—the overlapping beginning and ending of a circle where one extreme turns nearly indistinguishable from its opposite. It is this place of overlap and indistinguishability where binaries collapse. Where the similarities between the poles become apparent. This is the place where I linger with my own gender identity. Though I carry a lot of masculine energy, I identify more authentically with my feminine energy. I love being a woman who loves women. I am not so much a feminist as a female supremacist — I mean, we literally create men inside our bodies.

I’ll be honest: I once bristled at the idea of an assigned-female-at-birth person choosing to be a straight male instead of a lesbian. Even though I know it’s not remotely that simple, and sexual affinity is not very closely tied with gender identity. I know a trans man who dates only older men, for example. I know several trans women who date women. I know both who date both. And still, I would think, why can’t you just be a butch woman? And a soldier in this war against misogyny? Instead, you’re opting into it, aren’t you?

Reading Detransition, Baby, a novel by Torrey Peters, I encountered such deft descriptions connoting emotional experiences surrounding gender and sexuality, the effect of which was a new understanding. The gender binary as prescribed by mainstream culture in the US today cannot be separated from attending systems of subordination and oppression among it.

Namely, male supremacy and misogyny are baked into the cake that is gender identity. Part of what makes a person identify as either male or female (or neither or both) is their affinity for a particular role within such systems. For example, the protagonist in the novel is a trans woman who fetishizes misogyny yet is ashamed of this and can’t bring herself to openly and honestly tell her sexual partners what she wants in the bedroom. She wants to be degraded and dominated, taken and owned, but the only context in which she can admit this is when she is paying top dollar for a sex worker. In such a context, she feels entitled to this kink and can ask for it openly. Outside of it though, she feels too ashamed and shy. She is aware of this problem and is frustrated with herself. Her internal monologue asks, “What kind of fucked up trans misogyny colonized me?”

This simple question clarified something key: when one fetishizes misogyny, one chooses and consents to it, effectively defanging it in that context. Therefore, the real misogyny is in her self-rejection — the shame that prevents her from asking for and feeling worthy of the kind of sex she wants.

What I am reminded of most in reading this novel is that the complexities of a person’s gender identity and sexual preferences are as thick and fluid as lava, and sometimes just as destructive (and creative). Often we don’t fully understand why we like what we like and want what we want, but if it’s in the counterculture, the act of giving it to ourselves is inherently anti-patriarchy. Because among the many oppressive tenets of that system is the one where everyone stays in her assigned lane, performing the role as prescribed.

I once identified as male, and interestingly, was the sub in that role to the girl, who was the dom. But it wasn’t kinky. It was all very innocent and accidental yet thrilling.

Around age nine, I went to a nearby playground sporting my new bowl haircut accessorized with red rubber boots, a blue Izod sweater, and jeans with holes in the knees. Before I left my house, I looked into the mirror and smiled: fun hair, cool outfit, straight hips. Pleased, I ventured out, the sky swelling and gathering above me, thick, taut air holding it all in. There was a group playing keep-away around the slide, girls against boys. I joined in, climbing up the slide after one orange-haired boy, his bright locks bouncing. Arriving at the top, he turned and looked at me. He thrust down his palm and held it there above my head. I stared up at him, his small eyes nearly lost among a mass of fiery freckles. Confused, I reached up and slapped his hand. With a “whoop,” he went over the top and swiftly disappeared. I climbed into position to go down after him when a girl down below pointed squarely at me, shouting: “There he is, up there! Get him!”

He? Him? I looked around, redly smiling, preparing to laugh when her mistake was discovered and pointed out by one of the other kids. I shivered. A voice behind me shouted: “Go down, man, run!” I swooped down, leapt to my feet at the bottom, and ran, settling into to the queer power of how it must always feel to be a boy. It was intoxicating yet frightening to deceive these girls into believing I belonged on the opposite team. At any moment they would notice my soft, long eyelashes, a girlish curve to my cheek. I would move in some un-boyish way and give myself away. But when I high fived the boys and took off away from the girls, they continued to believe I was a boy.

I ran fast, away from a dark-haired girl, looking back every few steps to see her still pursuing me. I tripped on a protruding root and fell, my knee slashed open on a piece of slate rock, my face hit the dirt. I lay there, splayed out on the ground with a bleeding knee and a scraped cheek. It began to rain. The girls screamed, everyone scattered.

I turned over and found the dark-haired girl crouched next to me. Our faces, so close, seemed to freeze, eyes locked, her black pupils shiny, beckoning. A car honked in the street. A truck rumbled by. The gritty taste of dirt lingered in my mouth, the smell of extinguished campfires hung, trapped under the new rain. She placed one small hand on my shoulder, tilted her head, brushed a fingertip across my scraped cheek. “Does it hurt?” she asked. I tried to speak but couldn’t get my mouth to move. The rain fell harder; a voice called from a distance. She leaned forward, summer-scented, and left the soft tremble of a kiss on my wounded cheek. She ran off. I sat there, drenched, a smile so big it ached.

What I’ve believed ever since is that it’s less about gender than it is about energy. What attracts, repels, stays neutral is the interplay of energies, which is affected by but has little to do with the sexes. Chemicals and hormones and whims and moods are more the makeup of that energy than whether a person is male or female. But more than those even are mystery and magnetism. The invisible hand pulling a rope between two people until only its taut pull can be felt, until its force cannot be ignored.

Even when two energies synch and an exquisite harmony is found, this connection has a tide of its own. The rhythm may be quick or slow, there may be no pattern to it at all, but it will have a rhythm. It will flow out and surge in at intervals of its own making, much like the tides filling and emptying a bay. Although I’ve spent much of my adult life in relationships yearning for the surge and the near flood-like conditions to stay permanently, what I realized once during a run along a coast of an emptied bay is that there is beauty to the barrenness. There is a peace about it, a stillness.

It’s comforting in that way. And too, it reveals things. Like the half ship, askew. Like the long legs of the birds. And the way they behave without floating. And the patterns in the mud, how they piece out little ruts to channel the remaining water and make shapes that fit together like words. A story; a poem even, a song

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