If you know how the story ends, why tell it?
— Adrienne Rich
My gender has been changing in waves, up and down, up and down. If you plotted it on a graph, it would almost be a sine wave. Once it changed when I was 18, when I cut off my long hair and became butch for reasons that are, in fact, complex. More recently, it changed again at 50, when the power of menopause — no more estrogen flooding me — made me feel both more confident and, surprisingly, more male as my chin hairs sprouted and I felt along with them an onrush of personal authority, fearlessness, drive.
I am NOT saying that menopause makes women more male (or even more masculine), or that the sensation of having personal power is intrinsically linked to being male. I am talking about my feelings about my gender, and feelings, of course, are inherently subjective. In other words, I felt what seemed to me like extra testosterone coursing through me and changing my emotions, but who the fuck knows?
Maybe the sense of sturdiness and might I began to feel in my 50s had nothing to do with less estrogen, and more to do with one of the the barely recognized benefits of aging: growth.
Probably my chin hairs were just a convenient metaphor on which to hang my new sense of moxie. Still, my gender felt even more mixed than it had before.
Growing up, I often saw myself as male, but it was a maleness that seemed to depend reciprocally on my mother's hoarding of femininity, sexuality, fun. When I was a teen, my older sisters and I once met covertly in the bathroom to discuss how it felt like my mother held and possessed all the sexuality in the house, and there was none remaining for us. To me, she held and possessed all the femininity as well.
I felt I had to be male because femininity was her country, a land she owned and dominated.
She signed all her cards and letters to me with a red lipstick imprint, her full lips imprinted on the paper. I did find her beautiful, but she asked me and my sisters all the time if she was sexy, modeling blouses that were seductively tight against her breasts, or having us rate her appearance in lacy bras and underwear. She was, and I would always answer yes, but I did not want her to ask me this. I felt I had to be male as an act of psychic self-defense, because I did not want to be like her, or be swallowed up by her.
Return with me, reader, to a scene when I am 12 or 13, and my mother is taking me to the dentist somewhere in the vicinity of Stuyvesant Town, the wide-open area in the far east 20s of Manhattan. I vividly remember the pants I am wearing: high-waisted, a wool blend that fits me like a glove, with two large decorative buttons beautifully highlighting the place my hips begin. The pants are not male, nor am I at that moment.
We're on the subway near the 23rd St. station, and my mother looks at me with a strange grin. I soon realize it is a lascivious one. "You have a really nice figure," she smirks, staring at my hips. As we exit the train and begin walking the long avenues to the dentist's office, my mother tells me, "I saw the men looking at you. I could see that men are starting to look at your body!" This pleases her terribly, and her smile is rapacious. I never want to have another moment like this with her again.
Another scene: I am 19, and spending a brief college holiday with her in her new basement apartment in Brooklyn. There is only one bed, and I sleep in it with her. During the night, while she's asleep, she keeps trying to intertwine her legs with my own. Does she forget who I am? What the fuck is going on?
This is horrifying, but I glue myself to the far side of the bed and try to fall asleep with my brain half-watching, making sure she doesn't get her leg between my own again.
The intermittent maleness I take up from around age 8 to age 14 is not a sexy or enjoyable or even a playful maleness, it is a maleness of repression and tight, tight reserve. It is stoicism and grimness in the face of my mother. She can lose control, I will be a tightly clenched ball.
Thank God the full flowering of puberty comes to bust me out of this prison. At 15, I start dating an Irish girl who is an acerbic punk rocker, come out as bi in a letter to the school newspaper, and free my long hair from the ponytail in which I always bind it, letting it bloom all around my shoulders like a hippie flag.
With my new friends from ancient Greek class, I eat sensuous cheeses and drink wine all afternoon in Central Park, inhaling bittersweet chocolate cake and talking about sex and poetry. We declare ourselves devotees of Dionysus, recite poems by Sappho, and sing "Sweet Transvestite" from Rocky Horror at the top of our lungs. The Irish punk girl and I make out. I stop doing what my mother wants, for the first time in my life. Sometimes I come home at 3 AM, or not at all, pissing her off so she exhibits delightful, impotent anger. My girlfriend and I have sex at my house or, more covertly, at hers. What am I wearing during all this time? Sneakers that appear to have silver wings growing from them, like the god Hermes' sandals. OK, those are androgynous. Also, some of my old I-don't-care-how-I-look wardrobe: cheap-ass jeans, a parka that swallows me. But also, and more and more: red silk blouses from India. Also from India, gauzy tops with colorful designs in yellow or purple or flower stitching, from which my nipples are clearly visible. More silk, a dark blue tank top. Everything is luxuriant to the touch and shows my body. My girlfriend loves these clothes on me, and so do I.
On that hypothetical graph I mentioned, this is almost certainly the most feminine period of my life. It is not conventionally feminine — I never wear makeup, or dresses, or girl shoes, and my hair is absolutely untamed. I wear perfume, but it is not the corporate stuff that smells only like ethyl alcohol to me, but patchouli oil or musk oil. I am not exactly aware that these are the unisex feminine scents of the hippie culture I was born just a little too late to be part of.
And that, in fact, is the point. At this time, I am not feminine as a woman but in a way that is multigender, maybe hermaphroditic. I rejoice when I learn that ancient statues of Dionysus were sometimes sculpted with female breasts on the chest of the god. When I belt out "Sweet Transvestite," I am invoking femininity but not womanhood. Channeling Tim Curry as Dr. Frank N Footer, a gorgeous feminine-masculine man in a black leather corset with great legs. Pansexual in every sense.
This preshadows the femininity that I later feel, on occasion, in my 30s and 40s and 50s, which is not a female femininity, but that of an effeminate gay man.
Which begs the question: did I ever feel like a feminine female?
What was my gender in the beginning, before I shut my femininity down like a bud that shuts in the frost, so that the cold will not get it in the full flower of its perfect vulnerability?
In my hybrid-memoir work in progress, "Donnaville," which takes place in the "city of my mind," a beneficent female force called the divine mother is forcibly kept out of certain areas by a fearful magic, even though the residents desperately need her help to free themselves.
At 4, I enjoy the cards my grandma sends me from France, that have fascinating women on the front wearing real, lacy dresses you can touch, in black and red. I also enjoy Maja soap and perfume, with the Spanish lady on the exciting black label, and a mysteriously alive, dark scent of rose and spices. I am sometimes given either the soap or the perfume as a present. I still have a dress I wore when I was four, in green satin with embroidered flowers and sheaves of wheat: I think my grandma brought me it from Israel. I think I've saved the dress for 55 years because it moves me. Both that I was that small at one time, and that little me wanted to wear a soft shiny green dress with embroidered flora on it.
But I also love to play with blocks, building police and fire stations (sorry, fellow abolitionists) where figurines of cops and firemen preside in front. My favorite toy is a bright-red child-sized fire engine. I once imitate my father by shouting, "Bye! I'm going to get milk on Flatbush Avenue!" and tear off down the street on it, to be retrieved by my mom three blocks away, thankfully before I get into any serious traffic.
Another time, I put shaving cream on my cheeks and prepare to shave with my father's razor, because his shaving routine is so gorgeous and admirable. (I am prevented from hurting myself. No one criticizes my gender identification.) I love my father's Old Spice, and I also love how he waltzes me around the living room. My gender, early on, is various, and my eroticism too.
”Butch” is not a label I adopt for myself until I'm 18 and I cut my hair, but I recall now that it was my father's childhood nickname for me. I didn't know what it meant. My father, in fact, was very anti-queer, so when he called me this, was he attacking me, or just being affectionate?
I'll never know. My best guess is that it was both. This is the point at which I should tell you that it became normal, more or less, for my father to attack me during my childhood. Physically.
My father got violent with me at exactly the point in my life when my mother began to hoard the femininity and parade around creepily in her underwear. (Perfectly acting out, in their respective ways, crude stereotypes of male and female.) 7 years old.
It's hard to lose both my parents — for this is a real loss for me, of both of them — when I have newly hit the age of reason.
They are both reacting to my mother's cancer. She survives, but my family will never be the same.
When I cut my hair at the end of my first year at Yale, what is my intent? I have already been out to everyone at Yale, and an activist in two different queer student organizations. But somehow, this seems to me not enough. I must SHOW people I'm gay, on my body. (In high school, I was also completely out, but felt no need to change my appearance to to convince anyone.)
A couple of very different motivations are involved here, but I will not understand them for decades.
My father has just died, in January of my freshman year. (He got cancer, too.) So is it to honor him that I cut my hair? To express my grief over him? To shout, in love and grief, that I finally identify with him, after years of hating the man? (And feeling visceral disgust for him, as well: when my father started hitting me years ago, he simultaneously stopped bathing, and smelled like some of the unhoused folks on the subway.)
Curiously, I also start announcing myself as "lesbian," not "bisexual." Is this simply because the queer movement in my college, like 80s culture in general, puts pressure on everyone to choose a single box and stick to it?
Or does Leonard Minkowitz's death at 49 have something to do with it? Am I declaring that he is safe from me, no longer a love object? Am I removing myself from the love of men, to somehow honor his passing? Or am I honoring it, contrariwise, by declaring that I will stick to the thing he did, loving women? (My father's hetero-romanticism was one of the few things I liked about him, at least after he changed. He always got my mother greeting cards the size of bread boxes, with beautiful lace and flowers on top and mournfully romantic messages printed in elaborate script, "To My Darling Wife." And every Valentine's Day, he gave my sisters and me each our own heart-shaped box of chocolates with red ribbon tied in flower-shapes. This is what I was embracing, along with the idea of being a masculine person who loved fucking women.)
Am I picking my father over my mother?
There is one more dimension to the cutting of my hair. My high school girlfriend, the Irish punk, has broken up with me right before we both start freshman year at Yale. We were together for three years, and I am so hurt both from the breakup and three years of giving my heart to a cold and caustic person that I want to symbolize this by cutting my luxuriant, vulnerable, hopeful hair.
I wear my hair close to my head for the next four decades. I often wear a black leather jacket, and find it thrilling to wear male fashion in my size: lumberjack shirts, sexy, nerdy plaids, tight Levi's 501s, and engineer boots. The butch identity I develop is full of sex, yes, but also full of a certain attitude towards life: sardonic, saturnine, flinty. It is an identity of limitation, of experience over innocence. It is an attempt to contend with the pain, difficulty, and struggle that is in the world.
It is also about sex, of course, and a sense of pluck that is probably inherently queer. The way I look means explicitly that I'm turned on to vaginas, and I keep my nails short to be able to make love to them more effectively, boldly, and well.
On a deep level, I want to be able to connect to a whole person — not just their vagina — but I think the chance for that has already been lost.
There's more, of course. With my crew cut, with the classic butch profile like Jack Kennedy, I often feel like a hero, a doer, someone who acts in the world and isn't acted upon. I feel comfortable inserting myself into the hero's narrative, without altering the gender or feeling awkward or foolish. I feel fully able to imagine myself as the subject of the story.
So I go along, more or less, for 40 years. I go through small variations: being a butch top, then a butch bottom, then both at once. Being nervous in dating. Going through slightly "feminine" periods where my hair is more fluffy. Realizing that none of us are ever perfectly free from being acted upon — including me. I am vulnerable no matter how short my hair is. For a while, after I realize this, I try vigorously to hide the fact.
Eventually, starting in my late 30s, I come to grips with how vulnerable sex can make me feel when I am being fully open. (I also realize that I want to be fully open! And that what I want more than anything is a close relationship, of the kind I have not had.) I stop identifying so much as a butch, and feel (to myself at least) more like a feminine gay man. Eventually, through my sexual explorations, I even feel at times like a woman.
At times, I become nostalgic for the long hair of my teenage years. But when I try to grow it, it looks terrible during the interim stages, like a puffball, or an awkward 13-year-old. I abandon each attempt. Then, everything changes during the pandemic. When others start knitting or baking sourdough loaves, I decide to grow something that is, essentially, the product of my body: my hair. It does not matter how it looks in the interim stages, because few people will see it. In any event, nobody's going to the hairdresser at the moment: all my friends and neighbors now have more or less funny hair.
It is the perfect time to try to grow my flag again.
When the pandemic hits, I am almost 56. I have been in menopause for roughly 8 years and felt pumped with the flood of masculine confidence I mentioned at the beginning. Whether in my work or in my personal life, I now feel supremely able, more capable than I've ever felt before in my life. I feel competent to begin writing on new topics as I find it necessary. White nationalism, as its power in the mainstream surges frighteningly. Food and restaurants, because I've always wanted to write about them, and fuck it, now's the time to start. I write my first fantasy and science fiction. I don't think I have to restrict myself to anything. And when people act in ways that hurt me or humiliate me, I tell them, and if they don't stop, I give them up.
In 2018, it's the 25th anniversary of the rape and murder of Brandon Teena, a 21-year-old trans man in Falls City, Nebraska, who was killed for being trans. In 1994, I researched Brandon's life and death and published a piece in the Village Voice that got his identity terribly wrong. I depicted him primarily as a lesbian who "sought to be a man" for reasons of personal satisfaction or safety, without comprehending that in fact, he was a man who sought to be himself. So in 2018, I publish a new piece in the Voice apologizing for the earlier one.
This piece generates a lot of press. When I'm interviewed, and the interviewers ask about my own gender identity, I often say, "In my life, sometimes I've seen myself as a boy or a man, and sometimes as a girl or a woman." I'm not trans, in that I like having the body I do and I have never been interested in changing it. Nor have I ever firmly wanted to be seen as a man and not a woman. I have definitely identified as a woman at times, as someone who sees herself connected to other women in shared oppression, history, feminist activism, and in a sense, culture. But as I think and talk more about my gender identity, and as I learn more from young people and from the changing culture around gender itself, eventually I can see that cis doesn't really fit me, any more than trans does. What I am is non-binary.
Now here I am at 59, with long dyed blond hair. (Blond is inherently more feminine than brown and of course, colors are more feminine than gray.) While I still feel masculine in many ways, my hair is my flag of femininity. My flag of openness; and my flag of innocence, finally. I still wear boy shoes, and boy hats, and play with boy pocket knives, but these days I feel whole, both. Multiple. My hair is my flag of delicious abandon, my flag of sweet decadence, my freak flag, and my flag of beauty and pleasure. It is my flag of love. I do not have to pick one thing, or the other. Now I pick both.
Great essay--oh the gender of things...
So powerful and beautiful, Donna!