Living Penumbra (eBook)

Prologue

I didn’t know I was gender dysphoric when I was a child because there was no such thing. Well, there may have been, but there was no word for it, and I didn’t have any idea what it was. I knew I wanted to do things a certain way I felt comfortable with, regardless of cultural and societal norms. I didn’t want to make a statement or declaration of my sexuality or desire for attention. I had no agenda that I could articulate. I remember wanting to just be. To follow my own instincts. Everyone said I was precocious. Bold.

When I finally did know what gender-dysphoria was, I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. I had gotten most of my education regarding these matters by watching people reveal their stories with my best friends of the day: Phil, Sally, Rikki, Oprah, Maury, and Geraldo. The things I thought I knew about life were informed by experiences shared with the neighborhood kids on hot, sticky New England summer days.

There were lots of transsexuals on the daytime talk shows. I didn’t think I was transsexual. If I did, it was only long enough to try it on, and realize that it didn’t fit. Even though I very much enjoyed appropriating the behavior and clothing of women, I was simply trying to incorporate them into my own aesthetic and way of being, not to become what I had borrowed.

From my earliest memories, people stared at me and asked bluntly, “Are you a boy or a girl?” I was just a little kid, so I didn’t think much of it. I didn’t realize it was odd that it wasn’t obvious to people what I was, but after a while I just flushed bright red when people asked. I wished I had the presence of mind to answer,

“No.”

I loved to hang out with girls and make up stuff together. We would giggle and laugh with glee at our creations. In the summers I used to wear a towel around my waist all the time, my own sarong, before I even knew what one was. I liked to read and loved to escape into the pictures my mind would create while I was reading. I was never very coordinated, so sports were out of the question, which was fine with me. Boys tended to like sports more, and I liked boys far less anyway (well, most of them).

For as long as I can remember, we were very poor. We couldn’t afford to get our hair cut very often, and that was also fine with me. I loved the feel of my hair when it got very long. I loved to feel it move around on the back of my neck, and how it would blow around in the wind. My mother would have the barber cut it really short, mostly so it would delay our next haircut by that much more. Our grandmother used to cut our hair sometimes, and I begged her to leave mine long.

“Boys don’t have long hair.” That was always the answer. Boys did this, girls did that. You are a boy, so this is what is, and isn’t, based on that. My mother told me that I needed to look and act like a boy, to play my gender role correctly. I wasn’t ten years old, yet already a failure.

In school I rushed through assignments, bored most of the time. Then I drew or wrote or doodled, attuned to a fantasy world that I continued to build in my mind. I needed to keep my mind busy. You know ice breaker games? The one where you say one thing that nobody knows about you? One thing that nobody knows about me, is that my mind is my greatest gift, and at the same time, my greatest tormentor.

When teachers in public school soon realized that I was smart, I was transferred to a new program for gifted and talented students. That’s what it was called. Gifted and Talented. What did that say about the students who weren’t in our group? Were they ‘less than?’ What I had hoped would be my redemption only underlined me as a freak. I stopped taking the yellow school bus and instead I was picked up at home in a station wagon with a blinking school bus sign on the top. It was the equivalent of the short bus.

I wasn’t very hairy when adolescence came around, and I was a chunk-muffin. I assumed the two were related. I know, it makes no sense, but it did at the time. And my chest. I had a stash of T-shirts that were several sizes too small. I used to wear two or three of them to keep my chest as flat looking as possible. I became an expert at inventing reasons to keep my top half covered. It never seemed odd to me that I had my buds. I guess I always assumed that they were a by-product of my being ‘husky’.

I wore oversized clothes, kind of flowy. I must have imagined myself as a pre-adolescent Bea Arthur. It took me time to learn that fitted clothes are more flattering on husky people than flowy clothes. Until then, I wore baggy, flowy clothes that I could hide inside of. I wore my hair as long as I could get away with and in eighth grade, I figured out how much eyeliner I could wear without anyone noticing that I had it on. I used to try to wash it off before I got home from school because my mother was still on a crusade for me to act like a boy.

I was always so frustrated with her, arguing that:

“I am a boy, so everything I do, and wear, is masculine because I am a boy, and because I am doing it.” When I was sixteen, I went to the mall with Phoebe to get my ears pierced. I forged my mother’s signature on the permission slip that was required at the time. I had pierced them several times myself by then, with safety pins. They always got infected, so I decided to have it done professionally. The lady who pierced them asked me what I wanted to do with the other earring.

“What other earring?” I asked her.

“The one I don’t put in!” she answered.

“What do you mean the one you don’t put in? You sell them in pairs, right? I have two ears! So put one in each ear, and there won’t be an extra earring!” She seemed perfectly shocked that I would get both my ears pierced. In her defense, those days, if a boy had any ear pierced, it was his left one only. An earring in your right ear meant you were gay. I still don’t understand that. Earrings come in pairs, ears come in pairs, and jewelry and sexuality are not linked. I would have said “Sucking dick is what makes you gay,” but now, I don’t even think that is true. Some of my favorite lovers were gay. Not all of them. You figure that one out.

Phoebe and I thought the whole thing was hysterical of course. Phoebe was my art class buddy, and she shared a lot of my interests in art and music, and my disinterests in all things fluffy, pink and mainstream. Phoebe wore her hair in a long bob, had the most interesting clothes and wore black Doc Marten boots.

She was the one who introduced me to the wonderful world of vintage clothes. She was so thin and petite it was easier for her to find cool clothes, but I was chunky and tall and awkward, so I stuck with oversized black anything. The trend for girls was hair poufs, right above their bangs. I hated poufs and bangs.

Phoebe and I had a similar aesthetic; we had our hair dyed black and wore black eyeliner. It was a little riskier for me as she was a girl. I liked her because she didn’t judge any of my behavior or fashion choices. She didn’t care if I was challenging gender roles or wearing eye makeup. To her, I was just a comrade.

While I say I didn’t think I was gender dysphoric, I thought other people’s understanding of sex and gender were fucked! Not mine. My mother used to plead with me to be a normal boy. I didn’t think ‘normal’ was anything that I aspired to, and certainly outside my capacity. Exceptional is fantastic. I couldn’t be exceptional and normal at the same time.

When it comes right down to it, had I known the term gender dysphoric back then; I would not have ascribed it to myself. It implied that I was not happy with my gender. That I wanted to change it. I saw people on the talk shows who said they felt like they were a woman trapped in a man’s body. I understood that, but I didn’t feel that way. I didn’t want to change my gender, nor did I feel I was born in the wrong body, I just wanted freedom to vacillate on the spectrum of gender at will, without having to explain or defend my identity.

Kinsey created a scientific vocabulary for organizing everyone on a scale, which described sexuality in terms of a number, zero to six, zero being exclusively heterosexual, and six being exclusively homosexual. His research theorized and proved that the majority of the population existed not at either end of the spectrum, as one may have expected, but squarely in the middle. If gender could be expressed similarly, say zero being female, and six being male, maybe most people would be at opposite ends of the spectrum, but it might reveal that gender was something that could exist in between zero and six, as a fluid concept, instead of a binary one. That is where I lived, in flux, between the two poles.

By the time I was in high school statistics indicated that the leading cause of teen suicide was denying self-identity. I wasn’t going to commit suicide, so I had to express my gender as somewhere other than in the binary structure that most people used to understand sex and gender.

I had shit to get done, no matter what gender I was, there was no room for it to take center stage. When people asked me why I was wearing women’s clothes, or why I acted like a woman, I would respond:

“These are my clothes,” or “This is how I am, and I am not a woman, therefore I am myself, and wearing my own clothes.” I came to understand that most people didn’t care, but the people who did, who were...