I don’t think a day goes by I don’t read somewhere, “Lesbians are reducing women to their genitals!!” This whole genitals argument reminds me of seventh grade, when a kid speaking the word “penis” aloud brought gasps to the classroom. Any time genitals are invoked a distraction is created by their mere mention: oh boy, we’re talking about private parts! That distraction is being used to stifle rational statements made by lesbians again and again and again.

Yes, lesbians like vulvas and dislike penises. But vulvas and penises are part of a bigger picture. We need to focus on the bigger picture.

While I’ve been watching this old TV movie of Phantom of the Opera, I’ve still found myself drawn to the Phantom. He’s wearing a cape and a broad-brimmed black hat, for heaven’s sake, and white gloves with a ruffled shirt and a silken bow at the neck. He moves like a ghost, so elegant and restrained; he speaks in low, gentle tones and says everything poetically: “When you sing I live in the heavens; when you do not, down below.” Be still my heart, Erik. His character is so very sympathetic and at the same time awesome in his own way. When I was thirteen I stayed home from school to pause a frame of the VHS tape over and over to draw his portrait. I don’t blame myself at all.

I was fascinated by him. By the clothing. By the character, the personality. But the clothes and the personality don’t make the man. There is very little to be noticed in the dim lighting of the film – a hint of sideburn beyond the edge of the mask, perhaps – that would denote masculinity. But even those little bits were enough. As much as I loved him, he irritated me, frustrated me in some way I couldn’t put my finger on or put into words. I was supposed to love men, after all. Why didn’t I love him enough? He became one in a string of male characters I was fascinated by but always disappointed with in the end. I loved the costume. I loved the personality. I just couldn’t embrace the whole package.

This is where, I think, a lot of straight people miss the point of homosexuality. A straight woman probably never finds another woman enjoyable, likes her clothing, her smile and her personality, then asks herself, “But why aren’t I attracted to her more?”  After all, in our society, women aren’t supposed to love other women. If a woman finds another woman overwhelmingly attractive, well then, you’ve just stepped into another realm.

But growing up gay, I was constantly lost in the realm of “Why aren’t I more attracted to this man?” Men I met, men I saw, men all around me I was supposed to fall in love with. It was confounding. I just could never seem to like them the way I was supposed to, the way I was meant to. It would have remained confounding if being same-sex attracted had never dawned on me.

Enter our knight in shining armor.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was eight-years-old. Knights in shining armor have been in my life a very long time. In fact, I always used to roll a Fighter, and later with a new rule set, a Cavalier. I did a report on knights and the Crusades in 8th Grade including a large, intricate drawing of a knight with his lance on horseback. I still find myself fascinated by medieval armor and weaponry and wish there was a HEMA or SCA chapter nearby.

But all of these knights in my life were male, even my own characters. Knighthood seemed to me to be the realm of men, in every historical image and in my brother’s eyerolls when I’d roll my knightly characters. Perhaps it was that personal chastisement that disillusioned me; perhaps it was that the only female knights I ever saw were wane and sacrificial depictions of Joan of Arc looking like a frail girl in armor going to meet her God – but I never could really grasp the idea of a female knight, no matter how much I loved the armor and the role. As I got older, knights lost a bit of their shine. I had a friend who absolutely fell for Aragorn when the Lord of the Rings movies came out. You couldn’t find a more noble, stately, glorious knight than Aragorn in Return of the King. But he didn’t do anything at all for me.

Then came Brienne of Tarth.

I have not watched Game of Thrones, but in every Brienne clip I’ve seen on YouTube she embodies that Knight in Shining Armor ideal. She is brave, and self-sacrificing, and skilled, and noble. She wears the armor and carries the sword and looks fantastic on horseback. The costume and the personality are the same as every knight I’ve ever known but with one difference: there’s a woman inside. And I am left swooning on the floor.

Have I reduced this Knight in Shining Armor to her genitals alone? If we’re to invoke female genitals I would assume she has them, as she’s defined by a body with two X chromosomes. That embodiment is the key. She could be shorter or softer or thinner or have darker skin and eyes, curly hair or no hair at all. She could have a beard on her face and hair on her chest; she could have higher than average testosterone levels and an enlarged clitoris that could be mistaken as a penis. She could have lost both breasts to injury or disease; she could have been subject to female genital mutilation and now have no clitoris or vulva at all – but she would still be a woman, she would still be the embodiment of the expression of two X chromosomes in an adult human being, with all that entails, body and soul. And I would still be on the floor swooning over her.

But what if, what if she was cursed by a wizard, and must now live in a male body, until she could be changed back into a woman? Would I still so love her then?

Game of Thrones might take place in a fantasy world, but we do not exist in one.  That is not the reality we live in.

But that’s the fantasy world the trans activists keep pushing upon us, that one sex can change into the other, that appearance and personality are all that matters in attraction because the underlying body is mutable through transition. But it is not. We do not live in a fantasy world. People cannot change sex at will, not through years of hormone therapy and surgeries and certainly not through a mental decision and a dress. It is simply not a reality.

That is why this tension exists between homosexual people and the transgender movement, and it’s focused on lesbians because of the power men hold over women. As Magdelen Berns asserts, “If you accept the mantra ‘Trans women are women’, lesbianism doesn’t exist.” Likewise, to reverse the thought, if you accept lesbianism as existent, then trans women can never be considered women. The truth of the matter just happens to be on the side of lesbianism, as lesbians have always existed throughout the natural world and human history, and changing one’s sex is simply an unrealistic fantasy.

I have all the sympathy in the world for people who cannot live the role of their birth sex and transition allows them a way of life free from psychological pain. I have tasted that pain, and though I’m grateful I’ve found another way, I believe for some transition to living as the opposite sex may be their best option. But there is a difference between living as the opposite sex in order to cope with psychological issues and believing you actually are the opposite sex, which is a psychological issue in itself.

For society at large to understand this, perhaps they also need to understand – at last – the nature of same-sex attraction, through the experiences and needs of LGB people. As much as the transgender movement looks like a civil rights movement in itself, in another way it is merely the catalyst for a greater gay rights movement underneath. If we are to maintain our ground, we must be understood in a deeper sense than ever before. If that understanding can come about, it will engender a culture that is more fully accepting of all expressions of humanity, male and female. It is ugly on the surface now, but the truth remains indelible underneath. It is only a matter of time until it rises to the clear light of day, like a knight in shining armor riding up from the battlefield.

I have an overly-complicated method of picking out new paint that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. But I will share it with you anyway.

At the paint store, I pick out at least 15-20 strips of paint colors and other samples that seem interesting to me. Sometimes I have some idea what color I’d like the room to be, other times I’m looking for something I’ve seen somewhere else, other times it’s just “Oh, a yellow might be nice.” I take all the strips home, and in the room I’m going to paint I start cutting off those hues and shades that definitely won’t work, usually those that are too light or too dark. Some strips get thrown away entirely.

Everything left over gets held up next to light switches and woodwork against the old color, over and over. Generally through doing this I can narrow it down to five or six choices. These get separated into individual chips (if they haven’t been already) and neatly arranged on the floor.

They stay on the floor a couple days while I kick them around, walk over them, and begin to decide what I don’t like.

The last two chips remaining are then slid under a light switch plate and left until I figure out which one draws my eyes the most and feels right. At last WE HAVE OUR WINNER.

I just went through this process to pick out a new color for my studio-art-space-room, a neutral grey, no less, which is always a trial. Warm grey or cool? A bit lighter? A bit darker? How warm? Too warm? Too cool?

The point is, I needed to go through a lot of colors to find “smoke embers” (Benjamin Moore 1466).

I needed to see and experiment with a lot of colors in order to figure out which one was right for my eyes and my living space.

While doing all this cleaning I found myself on my computer, reading my LiveJournal entries from 2007 telling the story of coming out as gay. That’s not a story for this blog (though that blog is coming soon) but what struck me was how it came about in part because I was roleplaying, and finally identifying with, an unquestionably female character. A very feminine character, in many ways. I wrote that playing her made me feel like an actual woman for the first time in my life, instead of the “genderless blob I’ve felt like since I was fifteen.” I don’t know what stars aligned to make that happen but it shifted my perspective immensely: not that I wanted to, personally, put on nail polish or wear dresses, but somehow through that experience I was able to embody a woman and feel comfortable expressing myself – so comfortable, in fact, I was finally able to face the feelings I had for other women and realize I fit the definition of a word for that.

It was almost as if I had to recognize myself as a woman in order to acknowledge myself as a lesbian.

What does that have to do with picking out paint chips?  Like bringing those samples home, like scattering them on the floor or wedging them behind the woodwork, playing with characters gave me options, and they were all safe options. I’m not putting paint all over the wall in a dozen colors. I’m not going through the trouble of getting out the rollers and brushes. But I’m trying to see what works, for myself and for the environment I live in, out of many, many choices.

If I had come home with two colors, a pinkish grey and a bluish grey, I would have been frustrated – as frustrated as I had been as that genderless blob, unable to figure out who or what I loved because I was unable to figure out myself with only “feminine girl” and “masculine boy” as my choices. I had to create a woman I could relate to in all her complexity and depth, even if she did wear makeup, to somehow prove to me I could be a woman, too. I know I talk a lot about how representation matters, but it’s more than representation because it’s not like I had never seen a lesbian before in the 30 years I’d already walked this earth. It’s more about having options, and feeling free to bring those options into my life and see how they fit with no strings attached. But how often, oh, how often, are there so many strings attached.

I find myself bringing back into my life things I had abandoned over a decade ago. Today in the attic I found a little terra-cotta essential oil warmer and bottles of lavender and sage oil. I brought it into my room and lit a tea candle beneath, put a few drops of lavender above and let it burn while I cleaned out my desk. The scent surprised me at first – somehow not what I expected – but then settled in with a deep sense of nostalgia. I used to have this scent in my room often, before my mom took an inheritance to Ethan Allen and the designers came and told me that if I wanted a nice new room I had to get rid of a lot of stuff. The oils ended up in the attic. My Buddha ended up high on top of a bookcase where I could barely see him – just those little sacrifices we make to have what we’re assured we want to have.

I think of all I packed away – in the attic and inside myself – trying to be friends with people who were not fully accepting of me. I wanted friends, I did, and I set aside so many options, so many colors, so many facets of myself to try to be like them, to be understandable, to be familiar and not jar against their own colors. Just the little sacrifices we make to have what we’re assured we want to have.

It all comes back now as I rediscover myself away from them all, a flood of colors across the floor, almost too many to choose from. This scent of warmed lavender oil means something to me. This one I’ll keep.

What would we choose if all options were safe for now, if we could gather what we loved like a dozen paint chips and give ourselves time to see what each means to us? What would we learn, truly learn with that deep knowing of encountering a truth (I am woman) if given both the option and the opportunity, free from judgement, no strings attached?

Last night I thought of one of my favorite movies from when I was young, a TV version of the Phantom of the Opera with Charles Dance as the Phantom. Oh, I had just loved that Phantom when I was thirteen. I began thinking of how no wonder I had related so closely to the character – he and Edward Scissorhands both, the same year – these outsiders, these “freaks” who so loved the girl but couldn’t dare touch her. No wonder! That was my adolescence, more or less. No wonder! But then I thought – oh, I thought, stepping back with a gasp – what if the Phantom had been a woman, a lesbian? Oh! OH.

And suddenly I’m rewriting the book, suddenly I’m rewriting the ending after Christine has left with the Count, because oh, if the Phantom is a lesbian she can’t just be left in the catacombs to die alone.

What a wonderful little train of thought, but I had never seen it before. I had never even seen that color before, no less held it up against my woodwork. How beautiful it was. Oh.

Thank goodness, I say to myself now, that the kids these days, the twelve and thirteen-year-old girls who are just beginning to look at all this with wide eyes, thank goodness there’s such a thing as gender-bending characters. Thank goodness there are gay and lesbian characters, here and there (some even surviving) or at very least fan fiction, fan art, to stumble upon. But how twisted would it be to take a young girl’s suddenly lesbian Phantom of the Opera and say, “Oh no, you can’t just take a male character and make him a she. Not unless she’s trans. Maybe a trans woman lesbian or maybe a trans man but not just a woman who loves another woman. That’s exclusionary.” But that’s what they are being told. Even my character, feminine as she was, maybe should have been born a man. All the makeup and nail polish must have been to prove she was a woman. She was so “queer” after all.

We struggle so hard and so long just to find our own colors, only to have them torn off our walls. No, I can hear Ethan Allen tell me already, I should really choose a blue for my bathroom. Blue is a very popular color for bathrooms. Blue is approved by the mainstream and everyone loves a blue bathroom. Don’t you want everyone to love your bathroom?

The bathroom is being painted a faded greenish yellow called “sweet spring” (Benjamin Moore 1500.)  It took me six days to pick out. This is my color, and no other. You can keep your blues to yourself.

I had one of those really great dreams last night in which I was with someone I really liked, and she really liked me, and we really liked each other, and as hijinks ensued (some kind of haunted house) there was a good deal of reaching for each other’s hands. It certainly didn’t hurt that this person happened to be a sort of super-casual Gwendoline Christie, who told me I could call her “Winnie” (thanks Wonder Years actress I reblogged the other day) – even though I did get a little nervous when she stopped to sign autographs for Game of Thrones fans. Anyway, despite sleeping rather badly otherwise, that dream was like a massive serotonin injection straight to the center of my brain. Feels good man.

My first year of college I took a Psychology 101 course with a professor who was big on dream theory and had us all do dream journals for the semester. Ever since then I remember most of my dreams with a great deal of clarity as soon as I wake up, and some have stayed with me for years. They’ve always been vivid – I can still clearly visualize some childhood nightmares – but with the detailed recall I’ve been able to pinpoint some recurring emotional themes. When I’m stressed I often dream of being unable to control my car as it hurtles down the road – it often crashes, after which I pick it up and put it in my pocket. When I’m particularly overwhelmed I’ll dream of travelling with all three cats and no cat carrier. How do I hold all these cats?? When I’m grieving a loss, I tend to dream of houses being built on my grandparents’ land, unbearably sad and disturbing. But I haven’t had such a present and lasting dream of that loving, personal companionship in a long time.

I know why I did. I’m not a religious person – I gave up on God and the afterlife in my early 20’s – but what’s never left me is a kind of respectful awe for the connection that appears to exist between living things. Between animals and people, people and people, animals and animals. I even think there’s quite something to plants and trees and things. I don’t know what is there in the energy or the atoms, but I do think there is some underlying shared bond that is our source of compassion and gratitude. Those animals at veterinary hospitals that choose to curl up next to sick or injured patients. Those animals at nursing homes who will sit on someone’s bed as they are dying, with no one having to tell them to. Those people who go out and collect dogs and kittens from trash heaps and have the unfathomable ability to make the sacrifices to make these little lives well again. Those people who go out among the lost and homeless and suffering of the world without any thought for themselves and try to make things better if only in small ways.

I don’t think it all occurs due to an indoctrinated sense of morality that stems from religion. The most powerful stories are always of those most unexpected, unfounded connections. There just seems to be, at the basis of all life, a simple “We are all in this together” theme, and when it shines through all the other cruelties and negligences it is just stunningly beautiful. Maybe it is because we are all star stuff. Maybe we all know, deep down, we are all tiny, momentary bits of something much bigger.

My faith in that is something I have neglected for quite a few years now, partly because it didn’t fit in with the mentalities of my friends. When you’re used to being with pretty firm Christians, any atheist is a breath of fresh air, anyone who says they don’t believe in all that Bible stuff. But there’s a difference between not believing in all that Bible stuff and not believing in anything at all, and I did feel a bit ashamed of my kind of “silly” grasp on the metaphysical. The nice thing about Buddhism, I would always tell myself, is that it’s very agnostic – nothing is certain, you can go either way. There are Buddhists who believe in deities and those who are entirely secular. I could call myself a secular Buddhist and fit in with the atheists. But the wave is the water and the water is the wave still, right?

Anyway, I find myself believing in these connections again, and more importantly, allowing myself to feel them. It is an opening, and a vulnerable one at that. And it’s just one of several things that has balled up to bring me to this cusp I find myself at now.

I’ve found myself at these cusps over and over again, sometimes after months, sometimes after years. The last time I was at one was last November, when I stopped to get my shit together after everything I had learned and gone through last summer. Getting my shit together then resulted in six months of really well-structured art study, not to mention writing on my novel and this blog, which has been a big deal. It also included centering women in my life and concentrating on being more comfortable in myself. All of it resulted in, well, better drawing, a great deal more connection with others I could relate to through the blogging, a more grounded sense of myself than I’ve ever had, and, as a result of all of that, some major changes in who I hang out with and how I want to spend my time.

Not bad for six months. I planned to take a week “off” in June to do some housework – I’ve got two rooms in pretty desperate need of new paint and three closets and an attic that need some serious reorganization. But I hit this past week – not even June yet! – and everything just rolled to a stop. No drawing. No writing. No progress at all save for a sense of “I need to restructure my life.” Well, that’s a sign. It’s one thing to plan to take off work and another thing to find yourself just not doing it because there’s way too much in the arena right now to deal with – and that reintroduction of the metaphysical thing seemed to be the last straw.

(When I talk about “taking off work” for a week or a month I know it sounds like a bit of a luxury. My main source of being able to live comfortably is actually being a helper/companion to my mother – I do almost all of the cooking, a good deal of the driving/shopping, I mow the lawn, fix things around the house and cook/prepare for her social gatherings as well. In return she pays for my essentials like health insurance, car insurance, etc. I can’t “take off” from those obligations – that all is a daily life arrangement. But my own work, which has earned me decent money at times, is something I do take breaks from from time to time in order to get my shit together so I can come back to it in a better frame of mind.)

It’s all a bit like building a go-kart. I take some time to put together a vehicle, push off at the top of a hill, and see how far I go. Depending on the landscape and what I pick up along the way, at some point it all just slows to a stop. Then I’ve got to get out and make some adjustments or build a new go-kart to go further.

It’s apparently time to build a new go-kart.

Yesterday, one of those perfect rainy warm days, I read one book and started another. The first was Let Go: A Buddhist Guide to Breaking Free of Habits by Martine Batchelor. She’s the wife of Stephen Batchelor, who wrote Confessions of a Buddhist Atheist – I’ve been a fan of his for some time. Her book similarly concentrates on the basic practical principles of Buddhism and how to apply them to everyday life, and it had a lot of simple but very detailed observations about looking at what our minds do every day. I’m especially interested in breaking my habit of looking at the Internet throughout the day as a distraction, and getting focused in on how my mental states affect my physical states and vice-versa. She also spoke of compassion in a creative sense, which I liked very much, as “Love everybody!” just does not work. But creatively applying compassion to everyone – including ourselves – is fascinating to me, as it’s so much more about an active involvement and less about just telling yourself what to do.

The second book that I started – and bear with me here – is Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Workweek. Oh yes, I went there! By accident, no less. Sleepily clicking on things on Facebook on my phone, I started a podcast just to see how long it was and couldn’t get it to stop, so listened to his entire morning routine. I did like what he said about meditation and journaling, though, and ended up downloading this nifty Five-Minute Journal app that focuses your intention and gratitude for the day. I’ve heard a lot about his book from various sources so decided to check it out, and it’s a bit of a trip, to say the least. The funny thing is, the last guy I worked for must have been a huge fan because he was trying his best to run his website the way Tim describes this magical lifestyle – hands off! delegate everything! it must run by itself! – but all that means is that you’ve got everyone else doing the work for you. I know from experience. I worked my tail off for this guy while he was flying around the world trying to be a rich dude. Something was just not right about all that and it was one of the main reasons I had to pack up and leave.

However! There are some interesting tidbits in the book about maximizing time and efficiency.  I finally got an understanding of the 80/20 rule – 80% of results come from 20% of causes – and how it can apply to all areas of your life. Like you get 80% of your happiness from 20% of the stuff in your life, so by narrowing things down to that 20%, life gets a little lighter. Like my tumblr dashboard, if 20% of the blogs I follow bring 80% of my positive reactions, I should cut out all the other blogs I just waste my time scrolling past. At least in theory.

Besides that, I really would like to make some money, and I’m hoping the more sensible tips in the book (beyond hiring someone to do everything for me) inspires me to get some kind of product up that can bring in some income. I haven’t made any real money for myself in over a year, and no matter how I try to shrug it off it is not the best for the ol’ self-esteem.  I’m terribly fortunate to be able to live comfortably as I do, but I would also really like the freedom and ability to like, buy myself a new shirt or something now and then.

Ah yes, those material rewards after talking all metaphysical! I would take another dream like this morning’s over a new shirt any day. In a more perfect world, however, I would be able to get myself a new shirt so that I looked super-cool and comfortable in myself when introduced to someone I might feel a connection to. Maybe in the great scheme of things the shirt would matter. MAYBE. We are all on a path of becoming.

So over the course of the next few weeks I’m going to try to cultivate the garden to try to grow that kind of life. A life more connected, more nurturing, more open and healthy, possibly more prosperous, too.  I feel like, this time, it’s less about getting my shit together and more about getting back to myself. Clean some closets, paint some walls, feel a little lighter and more authentic, and breathe a little easier.

I feel like I’ve gotten to a point now where no one can take it away.

For years I lived with this bag in the closet. Nice golden-leather bag with smooth handles and a big bronze-toned zipper to secure everything inside. It had been back in there since I was a child but every now and then I’d see a glimpse of it. Sometimes I would wonder what was inside. Other times it frightened me.

Sometimes I would wake from a nightmare that it was sitting out in the middle of my bedroom, exposed, unavoidable. I would be terrified, terrified anyone had been privy to my dream, and I would hurry to get up and check and make sure it was still back in the shadows, well-hidden.

Then I started seeing other people carrying similar bags. Fascinating, that they went out with that satchel over their shoulder and lived happy lives. What was in those bags?  Someone gave a glimpse, opened that zipper and grinned a  knowing grin. Could all THAT be inside?

I thought about that bag more and more.

And one night, I dragged it out into the darkness and let my hands drift over the leather, scraped my fingertips along the zipper. I maybe peaked inside. The next night, maybe I opened it entirely.

Then I knew. Then I knew everything I had had with me all along.

I could keep it secret, though. I could keep my bag well-hidden in the closet and only take it out when I wanted to indulge in all that it held within. I couldn’t help but tell some people about it – those people who I’d seen with their own bags, I had to tell them!  But word leaked out and others found out I had that bag. They said I shouldn’t have it. They said it was wrong to look inside. They even told me it wasn’t mine.

I almost believed them, they scared me so much. After all, you know, people get killed for carrying this bag around. People lose friends, lose family, lose homes and everything. Maybe I should get a new bag. A different one. One that would be more acceptable. I tried. It wasn’t the same. Awkward. Heavy. Oh, so heavy. And I couldn’t relate to those with bags like mine anymore.

So I went back to them. And I asked them, for the first time, what do I do with this bag in my closet? What do I do with it when it holds all the most wonderful things but it’s so frightening to bring it out into the light?

And they told me: Be brave.

And they told me: We all feel this pain.

And they told me: We all help each other as much as we can.

No one else had ever understood. No one else had ever offered those things, a hand reaching out to mine as my other held that golden leather bag and carried it with me out of the closet. To carry with me. To open as I pleased. To share. To share. To share. In the light of day, because it was mine to share.

After all that, how could I ever put it down again?

 

I wasn’t going to write another blog until I had figured out what I meant by saying “put on some shoes” in my last blog. I was mixing metaphors, I know, what with the walls and the shoes. I will get back to that once I figure out what I mean by shoes exactly.

I had one of those moments last night, however, when things suddenly came together and made sense. Real sense, not just the “I read that and know it reasonably applies to my experience,” kind of sense. This was more like describing the laws of physics while watching a trebuchet. It made sense because I could see it all happening at once.

To begin, I must again make the confession: For the years between my twelfth birthday and my thirtieth I was convinced I was straight. I was CERTAINLY NOT GAY. One of the main reasons why I knew I was CERTAINLY NOT GAY was because I was deeply involved in writing this novel – or series of novels, or collections of short stories, or poems, or long, involved journal entries – about a man. There were also a lot of drawings. Like, a lot of drawings. Like I would probably say the foundations of my current drawing skills all go back to trying to draw this one face. I wrote once, “You have been a fact of my life for years – every story, every image, every song.”

Some serious dedication there.

When I finally came to my senses the summer I turned 30, I said, “Everything is broken. It’s all broken.”  What I meant was that I could finally wipe out all those years of being dedicated to the search for That Man from my Books. I was quite happy to do so, too, because by 30 the whole ordeal had become very tiring and a little embarrassing. Still looking for that guy you wrote about in high school? Yeah, that’s normal. It was wonderful to throw myself into all the actresses and singers and female characters I’d held at arm’s length for years, grin foolishly at attractive women I saw out in the world – glimpses of them everywhere! –  and feel like I was finally experiencing real life. I kept writing, of course, but now I wrote about a varied cast of female characters, all different from one another, all unique. I reveled in their differences and how none of it was at all like that man in that story I’d been obsessed with for so many years.

But it didn’t stop bothering me that for 18 years of my life I had been, as far as I knew, dedicated to the idea of loving a man. It wasn’t just the idea, either – the whole “I need to be in love with a man/a man will fix everything” was entirely subconscious.  What I felt in day-to-day life, what I felt while writing, while drawing, while searching for him in the faces of men I would certainly never meet, was a very intense emotional attachment and, dare I say, love. I don’t know how else to describe it except to say it was really deep-seated, really emotional, and really loving. As mad as it was, it brought an amazing richness to my life because it allowed me to express my own love – it allowed me, at times, to open up wholeheartedly to the richness of human feeling – and that’s where the whole key to this lies.

In the past year I’ve been introduced to a lot of terms I’d never heard before. Heteronormativity. Compulsory heterosexuality. Internalized homophobia. For the first time, I felt like I had an explanation for those eighteen years. I grew up in a very heterosexual household with very clear gender roles and not a hint of an alternative anywhere. Combine that with all the movies and TV shows stressing how romance between a man and a woman is the key to a life of happiness and what else was I to reach for?  So all of that writing and drawing, right down to the “find my Alexander” goal I had published under my photo in my high school yearbook, all of that must have simply been an elaborate coping mechanism for a terribly repressed young lesbian. I may never have gone on a date with a boy, but no one – including me – could suspect I was gay with all those notebooks and sketchbooks filled with this man.

All that makes perfect sense. Heteronormity. Compulsory heterosexuality. Internalized homophobia. I was dedicated  for 18 years to finding this very specific man to love because I couldn’t wrap my head around being a lesbian. Makes perfect sense.

But it still bothered me.

It bothered me more when I started writing my book over, that very same story I had written when I was fifteen, with the characters who had been in my head since I was twelve. I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to rewrite it “correctly.” The first thing I did was banish Alexander, that male love interest, from the plot. He was The Man. He could not be used in a story of a lesbian who now would fall in love with another woman. But he kept sneaking back in as possible side-characters; I just couldn’t get rid of him. Finally, I said, okay. Fine. Be that way. Stick around a little longer. But now, instead of being a man named Alexander you’re going to be a woman named Alis. Go right back into the plot as you were and we’ll see how we all like it.

The way everything clicked into place once I did that was almost spooky. Back in the day, I had beat up on Alexander as much as I could in order to make him fit the narrative. He was at times a recovering womanizer or a recovering alcoholic, he had one leg cut off at the knee. He was a tortured creative soul forced into the military, forced to make war instead of music. He was homeless, he was jilted, he was broken-hearted. He was downtrodden. He was – somehow, somehow he had to be – oppressed.

What magic happened when I made him a woman I never would have understood until now, until I’d grasped the basics of feminism and what the patriarchy is. Alis, the woman, doesn’t need any of those contrived character attributes. She has two legs. She doesn’t drink to excess or play the sympathy card of being a recovering anything. She hasn’t been deeply wounded by not being allowed to chase her dream of playing the cello. She’s simply a woman and a lesbian in a patriarchal culture which oppresses her. Her entire story, all its heartbreak and triumphs, unfolds naturally from there. The entire plot, including the relationship between the two main characters, suddenly makes perfect sense.

And the character never changed. I find myself writing the same looks, the same smiles, the same phrasing of dialog that I wrote for that male character over a decade ago. The same exact personality. It has disturbed me at times, making me question if I ever really left Alexander or still have some ties to that man. I think we all question our sexuality sometimes, and this kept making me question mine, until it all unfurled last night as I was trying to get to sleep.

You see, radio dramas have been bothering me, too. I’ve been listening to BBC Radio 4 Extra while I draw lately, and I can tell, nine times out of ten, if a drama has been written by a man or a woman by the way the female characters play out. At times it’s been really, really grating. I’ve heard similar perspectives from female artists who have said they can almost always tell if a woman has been painted by a male or female artist. One female artist I was listening to on a podcast this past week was asked why she most often paints women instead of men. She said, “It’s the body I live in. It’s the experience I know.”

That was lingering in my mind last night as I tried to get to sleep. I was thinking of Alis and the deep, emotional attachment I feel for her – that feels just like what I’ve always felt, a fact of my life for years. And I was thinking about the creative process and what it means to be a man or a woman, and how often I see reblogged by radfems, “A man can’t feel like a woman. A woman can’t feel like a man.” The experience of the opposite sex is something totally foreign to us – I learned that when I went through my trans thing last summer.  We can learn about what it means to be a man or a woman and try our best to replicate it, but it’s always a replication and never the real thing. How the hell did I think I could write a deeply emotional portrayal of a man when I was fifteen? What was I actually writing? What was I actually so attached to?

Sure, we’re surrounded by men. Our media is inundated by men, and by poorly-constructed women created by men. That struck me, too – my female characters are nothing like the female characters I hear on Radio 4 Extra. They are, however, just like me, and just like the voices of women I read in blogs, in articles, in intelligent online arguments where they pull out all the stops and state things as they are. They are like women written by women – even though I never thought they could be. How ruined was my image of women by the world around me, by the media I consumed? So ruined I couldn’t relate to the women around me. So ruined I couldn’t accept myself as what others called “woman”. So ruined I could certainly never realize I was actually writing a woman – what I knew, what I loved, what I was myself – and not a man.

How could I have written anything but a woman? In my own voice, in my deepest, most sincere desires for love and attachment, with no effort at all – oh, it never took any effort – how could I have written anything but a woman?

After all, that man Alexander – I never drew him naked. Not once. I never wanted to. I never described his body in any other words than the most soft and elegant. I insisted he was soft and elegant and not hard-edged or “masculine” in any way. I toned him down from the default male excessively, which made him almost impossible to draw. I kept trying to draw a man who was actually supposed to be a woman. Page after page after page of the same face, the same portrait, never looking quite right to my eyes, because I was using the wrong body, the wrong format, all along.

I can draw Alis without thinking. She falls onto the page. Last week while practicing short poses I gave every one of them her hair and her face because the model had a body like I imagine hers to be and gosh was that ever motivating. When she’s introduced in the book, her features are described as “tight and hardened” because her innate female “softness” is automatically covered by her sex. There’s nothing to prove, nothing to search for, and all the same love.

This realization flowed over me last night with the kind of comfort that only comes by seeing a theory proven, by knowing the laws of nature and watching them play out before your eyes. Maybe I had gotten the body and the pronouns wrong because of all those other things – because of heteronormativity, compulsory heterosexuality, internalized homophobia – but I had been writing her, loving her, all along. I had been a lesbian all along.

It would have been so much easier, had I known. So much less angst and loneliness. So much less tearing myself and the world apart searching for what I loved. That what I loved should be female hadn’t been an option for me for 18 years. Thank heavens it is now.

This is all deeply personal, deeply internal stuff, I know. This is all stuff up in my head, all fiction, really – but you’d better believe if I happen across a grey-eyed, ginger-haired woman with a particular smile I am asking her out for dinner. What matters in all this, though, is the latent personal truth so often flowing just beneath our consciousness, sneaking out even when we’ve closed ourselves down, even when denying ourselves has become part of our daily chores. I scroll through the creative richness of tumblr sometimes – and yes, it is so often madness – and I see the drawing, the writing, the anguish and the desperate hope for love all spattered across the screen. Set against all that expression rings the constant questioning: What am I? What am I? What am I?

Some night, some afternoon, some dark and rainy or clear and sunny morning, the pieces fall into place, and you know. Some afternoon, far in the past, more than a decade ago, I watched a TV show I can’t remember and heard the words “No love is ever wasted.” Those words made me start sobbing when I heard them. They have always stayed with me, have always meant so much, and I never knew why.

Now, I know.

I keep reading lately about women and walls. Maria Catt wrote a week or so ago:

The people in my life generally are not great at letting me talk, at length, like an adult, about these experiences. They just mostly don’t get it. They don’t like that my stories are messy and complex and challenging. I sound like a broken record. My sister once told me I was the angriest person she knew.

Oh my gosh, yes I am! And my anger has stuck around because I keep running up, again and again, against the parts of reality the people around me won’t acknowledge. Now that I’m getting some reality confirmation through this blog oh my gosh I feel so much lighter. I feel like, ok, I can start not running up against the same stupid walls. It’s just so much easier to move through anger to action when someone will confirm you’re speaking about reality.

Then this morning, I read on Glosswatch’s blog:

I didn’t realize, at 18, how hard it is for women to tell their stories. By which I don’t mean write a novel or a blog, but just have the simplest utterance absorbed by another person, rather than bounced straight back off an impermeable wall… You won’t find the right words. Even if you can write the most beautiful, passionate books, it won’t be enough to give you the last word on who you are.

These two quotes keep running through me, parallel to each other. On one hand, we know that when our experience of reality is confirmed by another person, things get easier. The walls dissipate and we can move forward. I think this is why therapy, even simple talk therapy, is so helpful and healing – just to be heard and have your reality confirmed.

On the other hand, that confirmation is a rare find. Society is, unfortunately, made up of walls more than anything else. We like to talk about personal freedom these days (maybe because for so many of us with the time and ability to write blogs on the Internet, we don’t have more pressing concerns to worry about) but our society is less like the openness of the natural world and much more like a carefully constructed labyrinth. Even if you’re wandering on your own, choosing your own way, you’re still surrounded by walls.

This comic has been going around tumblr lately, doing a really good job of pointing out the persistence of walls. It can easily be applied to a lot of my usual conversations here. Why should I need a box in order to see over this wall? Why should I need to call myself a man in order to wear men’s clothing? Why don’t we just remove the wall? Why don’t I just wear this comfortable shirt that fits me?

Lately, I’ve been getting reacquainted with my body hair. Last year while doing the trans thing I let it all grow out (getting up on my box as a male) but never really accepted it. On the surface I said oh, I don’t like the way the breeze feels through my leg hair, and oh, it’s hard to apply deodorant through this armpit hair, but really I was self-conscious. I wanted to look “right” again. I wanted to be able to go out in shorts and not feel like a hairy beast. I wanted to see smooth, unhairy armpits in the mirror. So I shaved everything again, and all was right with the world. No bouncing off those walls at least.

I remember when I was twelve going to a lake with a friend and her family where they had a membership and could swim, have picnics and so forth. All the families there were familiar with each other and we found ourselves swimming with a classmate I wasn’t well-acquainted with, just knew from seeing her face in the halls. She was very Italian, had deep olive skin, huge brown eyes, thick black hair and full eyebrows. While we bobbed in the water on a sunny summer day, I caught sight of something else – little wisps of dark hair straggling from her armpit, shocking against her teal-and-pink swimsuit.

I was appalled. I was twelve-years-old and I was appalled. All the walls that had ever been built around me – my mother’s armpits, my grandmother’s armpits, all the women’s armpits I had seen on TV and in movies – were perfectly smooth, or – at worst! – showing a little dark stubble. What even *was* that stubble? Is that what it would grow into? Straggling dark hairs that clung to the skin, that floated in the water?

My own dark stubble has grown into nut-brown wavy hairs that are softer than I expected. I made up a batch of natural deodorant based on coconut oil that rubs in easily and works as well as any chemical stick I’ve bought in a store. The hair on my calves is darker and longer and not as pleasantly dense. I’d almost rather it be denser, in a weird way. I am still unaccustomed to how the breeze feels through it. I still haven’t worn shorts out this year.

I have sat down in the midst of the labyrinth to study the walls.

We, as women, want to define what a woman can be. We want to proclaim our experiences, we want to say yes, we can have body hair – it’s only been a century of razor use, if that!  Our voices echo off the walls. And, more frustrating, we see other women – and men, too – grabbing boxes to clamber over, take short cuts, use the walls to get where they want to go. Is there anything more frustrating, after all, than seeing a trans woman in makeup and ultra-feminine dress rewarded for her courage while a butch lesbian in a tuxedo is escorted away from her prom?

We, as women, want to define what a woman can be. But all these walls seek to define us. I recently watched – and highly recommend – the historical documentary The Ascent of Women by Dr. Amanda Foreman (it’s on Netflix.) As she tells the story of important women in history she reiterates time and time again what they were up against – the walls, so often literal, surrounding them. At least once in each of the four episodes she reminds us of the ancient Sumerian law (ca. 2350 B.C.) stating that if a woman should speak out of turn, her teeth should be smashed with a brick.

How many of the walls around us have women’s teeth scattered at their base? Is that not intimidating?  How many of us hurt from the bricks we’ve already received?

Returning to Maria Catt again, she left a simple, short list of lifestyle advice for managing dysphoria in her guest post at the very important Youth TransCritical Professionals blog that I just happened to stumble across the other day. The first piece of advice:

Making reducing stress the number one goal of my life- reducing stress about money, reducing stress about bodily safety, reducing stress about accomplishments, reducing stress by separating myself from stressful people

One of my favorite Buddhist stories talks about a man who was afraid to leave his house because the floors inside were worn and smooth and the paths outside full of stones and thorns.  A monk said to him, “Would you walk the outside the world if it were all covered with smooth leather?” And the man said, oh yes, he certainly would, but how long would it take to cover the whole world in leather, and where would so much leather even be found?  Then the monk said, “Why not simply cover the soles of your own two feet?”

For the past four weeks now I’ve been working with having had my words rebound from a wall like a brick to my teeth. I’ve been trying to figure out how to handle the experience, what to take from it, and I’ve been comforted by learning it is not an uncommon one for many women; it is written into our very history. These walls are only slowly being worn away, and in places, in these times, they’ve been reinforced. What can we do for ourselves? How can we cover our feet?

I used to think there was a way to transcend it all. Listening to Paul Simon the other day I was reminded of lyrics I had printed up and taped to the wall when I was just into my twenties:

I said Take this child Lord,
from Tuscon Arizona
Give her the wings to fly through harmony
and she won’t bother you no more

But I never sprouted wings. I never rose above the society that had made me such a bother, and after years of trying I’m thinking it’s an awful stressful way to go about it. We’re so often encouraged to work with our problems, to find solutions, to put up with people, to keep turning this way and that through the maze as if at some point it will open up into some blissful space where there are no walls, where we can sit and talk and listen and grow out our body hair – maybe that is the haven I hear about when Michfest is invoked. And I find myself trailing back to what I’ve spoken of before and why I titled this blog the way I did – the need for a personally defined space, a space to be, to breathe, to heal, to share. A space where our words don’t bounce back at us because they’re caught by someone else before they strike the walls that still surround us. It isn’t a mythological space that needs to be worked towards – again, this isn’t transcendence. Perhaps it’s just a matter of defining our lives for ourselves within the walls that exist.

Removing stresses. I made a new tumblr over the weekend, a whole new fresh account, simply because I didn’t want to feel the walls of so many people who have watched me for years. I wanted to be able to post lesbian stuff without offending anyone; I wanted to be able to post my art without thinking of how former friends would judge or critique it or how they would tell me they just didn’t like that style. I wanted a fresh start, a stress-free space where I didn’t feel the constant need to edit and censor myself.

It doesn’t remove the walls – for heaven’s sake, it’s tumblr, and I expect to get TERF’ed by the end of the month – but it’s an act of self-love, self-acceptance, of giving myself the space and the right to exist in that space. I’ve tried for years to do it the other way – to conform, to be lenient, to be quiet. When I was a teenager, my dad told me, “There will always be people you don’t like and people who don’t like you.” and I thought I could just grin and bear it. There will always be people appalled at body hair. There will always be bricks and there will always be walls. There will always be stones and thorns in the road, but I have to do more than grin and bear it.  The very least I can do is put on some shoes.

The alternative is best described by another popular internet comic:

And that doesn’t work out well at all.

A must-watch.

The Wanted Project grew out of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and it’s designed to inspire and support gender nonconforming women. From their Facebook page: “The original WANTED project was inspired by and for attendees of The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, an event intended specifically for women that were born and assigned female. Womyn sent […]

via The Wanted Project — Purple Sage

Finally got some time this weekend to work out a basic outline for the Lesbian Handbook PDF/pamphlet!  I’d like to keep it short and sweet, something that someone could download and skim through, but packed with as much info as possible. I’ve tried to concentrate on things I wish I had known before now – not just the obvious stuff I wish I’d been exposed to in high school but also the deeper “the patriarchy’s been tough on us” kind of things that helped me through the roughest patches.

If there’s anything you feel I’m missing please comment!  All of these are just topics for now and will each have following explanations, etc. Most words are just notes for myself for now.

Here’s to hoping I can copy/paste right from GoogleDocs and keep my formatting!

 

How do I know if I’m a lesbian?

• What is sexual attraction/orientation?
  • Not just “sex” in sexual attraction – attraction to a particular biological sex plus sympathy and admiration
  • the “straight crush”
  • lesbian feelings and relationships with men positive and negative
• Am I bisexual?

Accepting yourself as a lesbian

• Comfort in your own skin – appearance, clothing, etc.
  • Photos of lesbians
• Lesbian sexuality
  • masturbation
  • overview of lesbian sex, sexual health, etc.
• Expressing your orientation, from creativity to crushes
• Coming out – to family, friends, publicly (as needed)
• Lesbian relationships
  • The nature of lesbian relationships (equal partnerships)
  • Marriage and weddings
  • Children
  • Flying solo
  • Community
• Finding other lesbians
  • local/women’s groups/festivals
  • online/social networks/websites/apps

Lesbians and Gender Identity

• Gender Dysphoria – causes and symptoms (desire to not be a woman)
  • Coping skills for dysphoria
  • Non-binary gender identities
  • Transition/trans men
• Lesbians and trans women/non-binary males

Lesbian History

• Examples/presence throughout history
• Reasons for underrepresentation/misrepresentation
  • Social pressure – heteronormativity
  • fetishization/pornography
• Famous lesbians past and present
• Lesbian terminology – homosexual, gay woman, dyke, butch, femme, queer
• Lesbian symbology

Lesbian Resources

• Lesbians in Literature/authors/books/etc.
• Lesbians in  movies and TV series
• Lesbian musicians

Words from fellow Lesbians

For Mother’s Day, I went to church.

My mother still goes to the church I grew up in, where I was baptized. I stopped going in my mid-teens and was an atheist by twenty; even my mom took a break from it for a while, explored some interesting New-Agey Christianity and Eastern thought before finding her way back for the familiarity and community. I can’t blame her – at her age, the camaraderie between the elder women of the church is warm and welcoming, always busy baking cookies or collecting clothing for those in need. Having known these women for fifty years, they share a lifetime of common experiences through the church – sons and daughters, marriages, grandchildren, the passing of parents, the changes in their own lives.

I come along a few times a year, as a gift to my mom (usually with brunch at our favorite cafe promised afterwards.) Everyone is always friendly. They’ve known me since I was born, though when introduced to the new pastor I wanted to reply to his welcoming “Good to see you here!” with “Dude, I was running around this sanctuary before you knew it existed.” It is an average, decently liberal and tolerant white American Protestant church. The denomination recently voted to allow individual churches to decide if gay people could be married, which was nice of them, erasing an ancient ruling of “Absolutely not.” A number of churches left the denomination because of it. My mother’s church has an amazing and much-loved gay organist/choir director, and his partner is often present at church events like any other member of the church family.

I have never noticed any possible lesbians there, though.

It is a city church, so there’s a touch of diversity, but it was founded by middle-upper-class white people and the pews are still mostly filled with middle-upper-class white people. The men wear suits and ties and the women dresses, skirts or dress pants, hair and makeup touched up for Sunday. For the most part the kids are dressed in “Sunday Best” – perhaps not what it was years ago when I had to pull on tights and a dress but many little girls still wear dresses, and boys their better shirts and pants. Now and then a man will come in wearing jeans. I’ve never noticed a woman wear jeans to Sunday service, though.

I wore jeans to the Mother’s Day service, as I don’t have any dress pants at all right now. I wore my best jeans with my men’s brown leather chukkas (polished that morning) and a new lovely cotton/linen white and blue button-down under a black jacket. My hair, in an awkward stage of growing out, has no style to speak of, male or female, and I honestly don’t even know what makeup is. I saw no other women who looked like me in the pews on Sunday.

There was a young teen girl, however, in the pew in front of me, who came in wearing jeans and a plaid shirt and purple Chucks Taylor’s. Her wavy, natural brown hair was held back by a folded kerchief. She sat very close to her mom. I wondered if she similarly felt out of place, and if it meant anything to see me, if she did.

The children’s sermon focused on the love mothers give to nurture us and how we all can show that same kind of love to each other.  At the end, the pastor picked up a basket of long-stemmed carnations and said he’d like the children to help him pass out a flower to every woman in the sanctuary, in thanks for all the love and nurturing they have given others, as all women are – or have the potential to be – mothers in some way.  I shifted a little nervously, watching these little kids be handed flowers to pass out, guided among the pews towards women in their dresses and skirts and hair and makeup and shoes. I wondered – I honestly wondered – if I would get a flower.

I have gotten a lot of stares from children in my life. I’ve heard the whispers of “Mom, is that a boy or a girl?” since I was thirteen. Depending on a child’s exposure, they can have no idea what a man or woman might look like. My own niece asked me if I was a boy or a girl when she was three.

When the little red-haired girl with big blue eyes headed down our aisle, I watched her nervously. I saw her gently pass flowers to my mother’s friend and her daughter, and then to my mother. She came to me and I actually whispered – I actually whispered – “Do I get one?” as she handed the flower to me.

Then I had in my hand a long-stemmed red carnation, like every other woman in the room on Mother’s Day.

A year ago, hating my body so much I denied my biology, I wouldn’t have wanted one. I had Failed at Woman, after all – I didn’t look right, I didn’t act right, I didn’t love right – and was intent on being something else entirely, free from the discomfort of being a woman in jeans and men’s clothing among all the dresses and makeup. But this year – oh, maybe my uterus was showing. This year, despite everything, I was one of them. I was equal to every other woman in the room. We all had flowers. We all were women.

Later in the service, as I still held my flower, we sang “Be Thou My Vision.” There are very few hymns I will sing in church (Christmas carols excepted) but I do love the tune so stood and at very least hummed along. But in my Mother’s-Day woman-centric mindset, I kept tripping on the words: “Lord” “Father” “Son” “King”. As we reached the last two lines I saw “Ruler” coming up and couldn’t bear it, not to this beautiful tune, so dared sing something different instead:

Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my Vision, O Mother of all.

What a difference that makes.

I have read a number of lesbians and women in general who are big on the Goddess. And yesterday, I could appreciate that point of view, if only to take what man has made of religion and return it to something truly loving and nurturing – truly mothering. And perhaps that’s a female stereotype – not all women, after all, are nurturing or loving or mothering (I myself am only mother to three cats and that is enough mothering for me.) But what a refreshing change from the Father King Lord Ruler of All.

And what a point of unity for all women – mothers or no – to have a female entity at the heart of spirituality, that we could identify with on some level, if only through our shared biology. She is like me and I am like her and we are all in this together.

The Tumblr Discourse Battle of the Week has been between the “hetfems” and the lesbians. Having just begun to recover from my own personal schism of the sort it’s been frustrating to watch.  For most of my life – up until this past year – I thought being a lesbian made me masculine, made me like a man, and that was why straight women didn’t like me. That was the perception taught to me by the media, by society, by depictions of lesbians as man-like women (I won’t get into the pornified depiction of femmes at this time.) I sat in church feeling “othered” from the straight women in the room because with my jeans and my men’s shirt and shoes and my lack of makeup and femininity they would surely see me as man-like, as male, and I would not get a flower. But that is the farthest thing from the truth.

A lesbian existence is fundamentally women-centered. Fundamentally. Though there are a thousand reasons why any individual lesbian may appear “like a man” – from personal style to public safety – her life is still founded on fact she loves women. Straight women can other us on that false perception that we’re “like men” all they like, but the actual fact of the matter is that we love women and only women, and that means something.

The Discourse brought to the surface an issue far deeper than the superficial “lesbians are like men” perception. A lesbian dares offer the perspective, “You know, you can live a women-centered life, with female friends and female community, and no men at all if men are a trouble to you” and is attacked viciously. “YOU WANT US TO MURDER OUR HUSBANDS??” rises the response, more or less. As everything is always exaggerated beyond logic and belief on Tumblr, the best we can do in these times is wait for the worst to pass. But I couldn’t help but pick up through these posts subtle shades of what I’ve experienced in my own life.

Lesbians are not othered and erased and made invisible entirely because of the perception that we are “like men” and must be held at a distance. We are othered and erased and made invisible because by our very nature we challenge the system set up by the patriarchy, and force other women to see there is another possibility, another way of life. Of course they don’t want to see it when they have been shuttled into relationships making them dependent on men. Of course they don’t want to validate or value the idea that any woman can live a woman-centered life a little less oppressed – or at least without that oppression coming from within their own homes. It is, perhaps, too hard a truth to bear in the face of their own suffering.

This is not to say I don’t believe men and women can have loving relationships and live together, but I do think we need a very different, radical new way of going about it, one that releases women from the oppression of men and gives them the resources and support to stand on their own as equal human beings. And the first thing other women could do, instead of denying women-centered existence and pushing lesbians to the side, is to recognize us as their sisters.

If only in passing a flower.

While reading the comments about The Incredible Importance of Boxer Shorts, I started to get a little jealous, I admit. I am jealous of women sleeping in less clothing than I do; I am jealous of women wearing tank tops. I am jealous of the casual, almost joyful flippancy of wearing nothing to bed. Jealousy might not even be the right word – perhaps consternation.

I used to think that people are, more or less, what they are innately.  If someone is prudish, for example, it would be because they are a prude, because it’s just in their nature to want to cover up. If my exploration of the transgender and lesbian experience has taught me anything, it’s that those kinds of tendencies don’t usually arise on their own – generally, some event or circumstance brought them into being.

I have a reason why I find myself envious of women who can wear tank tops out and nothing to sleep in, and why it’s so confounding to me that I can’t.

It’s not that I don’t want to – that’s the thing. After years of various fitness endeavors (not always healthy, mind) especially the last year of lifting weights, I’ve got a body here I’m rather proud of. Broad shoulders run on one side of my family: my brother and father had them, my grandmother, a competitive swimmer in her day who was still ice skating on racing skates at age 80, had inspiring shoulders and often wore sleeveless tops. Bodyweight exercises and dumbbells have sculpted my own, and believe me, I’d love to wear a tank top and show them off. But I just… can’t.

It all goes back to my 10th birthday.

Before my 10th birthday, I hadn’t a care in the world what I had on. I grew up with 47 acres to run around on and throughout my childhood cast off shoes and tops and pants sometimes and it never mattered. I slept in my underwear just like my big brother and thought nothing of it, as neither did my parents apparently.

For my 10th birthday I had three friends over for my first sleepover, all girls of course. We did some crafts and went to a hibachi place for dinner and had cake and opened presents and took pictures of each other brushing our teeth with toothpaste foam running down our chins. It was all great fun. Then we got ready to go to bed, and the three girls changed into their nightgowns or pajamas or whatever they slept in – but they all slept in something. I just took off my clothes.

They thought it was hilarious or weird or remarkable in some way, that I slept in my underwear. They laughed and took up my camera and started taking pictures of me. I tried to hide under a blanket on my bed, begging them to stop; they didn’t, so I ran downstairs to my parents, in tears. I remember being curled up crying on my dad’s lap while my mom went upstairs to see what was going on. I don’t know what they told her because she doesn’t recall the whole event, probably just a bump in the birthday plans and kids being kids. At some point I must have put a t-shirt or something on and went to bed, as I don’t remember what happened after.

I do remember seeing the photos, though, once they were developed, my little ten-year-old body in flight, my hands holding up my yellow blanket, trying to cover myself. I remember seeing the photos and I remember throwing them away.

That year we all went into the 5th grade in the big Middle School building, and for the first time had to change for gym class. I was terrified of revealing my body to the other girls. I would put my gym shirt on over the shirt I was wearing then squirm out of the one underneath and pull it through the neck of my gym shirt. Twice a week of that anxiety throughout the school year, for eight years, firmly planted the idea in my mind that my body was not to be seen. In high school I tried to calm down about it, simply turning away like I could possibly crawl into the little locker beside me. Sometimes I would say I needed to use the bathroom and change more comfortably in the stall.

I always thought I would be laughed at. I always thought I should never show my skin. I was so excited when I bought my first nightshirt – Roger Rabbit on the front – because now I could be like them, be more accepted: they wouldn’t laugh at me now. I went to other sleepovers, always with a long nightshirt or two-piece pajamas. To this day I still wear two-piece pajamas over underwear.

That kind of conditioning is hard to break through, but for one short period of time I was able to.  A year ago, convinced I was not a woman and I should possibly try to become a man, I told myself if I was a man, I could sleep in my underwear like my brother always had. In fact, if I was a man, I could sleep naked if I wanted to. I could do anything I wanted to – after all, I was reinventing myself. And I did. Just for a week or two I slept in just underwear or nothing at all, but for that time I broke through all of that childhood trauma, cast off the pajamas and allowed myself that freedom.

At the root of my experience with transition was a rebellion: a rebellion against my established sense of self and all the expectations ever imposed upon me. Just like a bloody revolution against a despot can lead to a more just government, my experience identifying as transgender allowed me space to dismantle that conditioning and recover myself as a woman and a lesbian. I was the despot and I was the revolution; I was the lesbian trying to express herself and I was the repressive thinking decades old keeping her in chains. It took something as radical as risking everything in order to find what was really worth saving, and I am grateful for it now.

I came out of it weary and weakened, and I did cover up again, if only to heal. But now the possibility of a different way of life shines before me; I may envy those women with their tank tops but now I can say to myself, “You know you can do it, maybe someday. You know you can – you’re just like them.” Perhaps I can take inspiration from my grandmother’s amazing shoulders, her confidence carrying them. After all, she never would have laughed at me, and only would have taken pictures to show how proud she was of her greatly-loved granddaughter.

Life is cruel, and ugly, and unfair, and we are so often cruel to each other in a thousand ways, from the ignorant mocking laughter of children to the harsh words adults throw at each other in judgement and defense. That is a part of humanity I’m not sure can ever be altered, no matter how much we wish for a kind and enlightened society that does nobody any harm. But that harm doesn’t need to be permanent, doesn’t need to fetter us our entire lives. We can learn to take our shirts off again. We can learn our own freedom was never something to hide.