Please Forward

Raider and I have been through gender transition with enough people that the process feels familiar. When Tiny Tornado asked us to use male pronouns back in May, we had a pretty good idea how it would play out: you start out using the new pronoun and it feels a little strange. You slip a lot. Gradually the new pronoun starts to feel more comfortable and the slips get less common--I'd say at this point I'm slipping less than once a week, for instance, usually when I'm tired. Eventually, the new pronouns feel so natural and right that the old pronouns start to feel wrong. Even more eventually, it gets hard to remember using the old pronouns, to imagine that person being the old gender. I've already had a taste of this--the other day I came across some photos of the Tiny Tornado from just a few days before he finally talked me into cutting his hair short. It's right around his third birthday. He's wearing jeans, sneakers, and a hand-me-down red t-shirt from his older brothers; it has a lizard on it. Only the sloppy puff I've pulled his hair into on the top of his head suggests that he is a girl.

Already these photos looks odd to me. At the time, he looked to me like a beautiful little girl in jeans. Today I see my beautiful boy, and wonder why it took me so long to cut his hair after he started asking me to do it.


Here is how he looked just a few days later:



Now the Tiny Tornado has asked us to use a new name for him, because he became worried that his name might make people think he's a girl. His name is uncommon; it's a Russian girl's name, and people here don't seem to pick up on its gendered-ness. But he prefers for now that we use a shorter version of it, just in case, and, with his teacher's cooperation, he'll be starting school under the new name next week.

So we've started this process again. It tends to go much like the pronouns. Eventually the old name so completely loses meaning that you almost forget about it. One time when we were trying to think of baby names, I said, "How about Margaret?" and Raider looked at me with one eyebrow up. "Are you serious?" he said.

"Sure," I said. "It's a nice name."

Raider said, "It's also so-and-so's former name, from before his gender transition."

Honestly, although I had called this dear friend by that name for many years before his transition, saying it hadn't called up any associations with him ten years later. In our experience, that's how the mind works. It does an extraordinary job of forgetting.

We call the stage we're in right now with TT's name "the mail-forwarding stage." Uncle Toots coined that term a long time ago, and it's the period when the change hasn't become automatic, when your brain has to pause as it tries to access the new name or pronoun. Your brain goes to "she," sees the forwarding order, and produces "he." And you can feel it happen, like a stutter or a pause. One so short that the people you're talking to probably don't notice it, at least not most of the time. But you do.

The new name has become automatic when the mail-forwarding stage ends.

The most hilarious part of the mail-forwarding stage is that your brain starts checking to see if other names and pronouns need to be forwarded as well. You call non-trans friends by the wrong pronoun from time to time as the system over-corrects. When one close friend was transitioning a decade or so ago, I was once stopped dead because I suddenly couldn't remember whether one of my closest friends--a non-trans woman, as I know perfectly well--should be referred to as "he" or "she." Tiny little postal workers in my brain were dashing around chaotically, running back and forth between stations, flipping through piles of memos, trying to find the paperwork. I was frozen and stammering for a moment until they got it sorted out.

The first syllable of the Tiny Tornado's name and the first syllable of Raider's name end with the same consonant. Raider strongly prefers to use his full name--think Michael instead of Mike, Christopher instead of Chris, Daniel instead of Dan. I know this perfectly well. I have called him by his full name for the duration of our relationship. I have never called him Mike, Chris, or Dan.

Except in the last few days when, primed by my efforts to call the Tornado "Torn," I have also been calling him "Raid." He'd be cranky about it except that he knows it's just an error caused by an overloaded mail network and the coincidence of consonants, and it will pass.

You may wonder if I ever feel sad about the Tiny Tornado's gender. Once in awhile, I do. I feel particularly sad about the dress Word Boy is wearing in the picture below, a dress he chose for himself at the consignment shop and wore all summer long the year he was two. I could not wait for my daughter to get big enough to wear her older brother's hand-me-down dress, both because that's an amusing thing and because I find this particular dress adorable.

For a long time, I kept girl clothes around in the TT's dresser and closet, "just in case." "I want him to know he has options," I would say, although it was more and more clear that he'd already chosen. At one point, he asked me to stop suggesting those clothes to him when he was getting dressed, so I stopped including them among his choices for the day, but I left them where they were.

Gradually, I came to accept that he would probably never want to wear girls' clothes. I stopped accepting hand-me-down girl clothes from friends, and I sorted most of what we had into bags for Goodwill. Except a few of the cutest things. Except the daisy dress.

One day, the Tiny Tornado came to me carrying the daisy dress. "I don't want this to be in my drawer anymore," he told me.

"OK," I said, and I didn't let him see how disappointed I felt as I added it to the donations bag. "It's foolish to hold onto it," I told myself strernly. "Just because you loved that Word Boy wore it, just because you think the Tornado would look so cute in it. You're just the mom; you don't get to choose. Give it away."

I hope some boy or girl out there enjoyed the daisy dress. I loved that dress. I loved the little boy who wore it. And I love the little boy who refused to.

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The Real Thing

Found this in my drafts folder. I had forgotten about it! Just needed to edit it a little.

Years ago, when I was the mother of just one baby, I met a woman who had several kids. One of her children, she told me, had been very challenging as a toddler and preschooler. "She just didn't like being a little kid," she told me. "It wasn't fun for her, it wasn't interesting for her. She got a lot easier to deal with when she got old enough that she could do the things she'd been wanting to do all along."

I thought that sounded very odd. Children are supposed to be children, after all. The years from 2-6 are something every kid has to live through. Surely the pleasures of the age are universal? It just didn't make sense to me then.

A few months ago, I was doing one of my periodic sweeps through the rec room in the basement, getting rid of stuff nobody was using anymore. With the Tiny Tornado about to turn five, I finally gave up on keeping things around in case he got interested in them in the future. Among the stuff I hauled off to Goodwill, or donated to his preschool, were two large bins of food and cooking toys.

The Tiny Tornado counfounded us for all his years of baby- and toddler-hood by not playing with toys. I tried to get him interested. I bought all kinds of toys in the vain hope that we simply hadn't found the right ones yet. I tried to play with him. I removed nearly all the toys from our living area on the theory that such a quantity was too overwhelming and disorienting, and that maybe one smallish bin of toys would be more appealing that the wide variety we'd collected in 8 or 9 years of parenting.

Nope. Toys, he made clear, were just not interesting

People ask me, "What did he do with his time?" I hardly know. I know he wandered around the house exploring and getting into things. It was from him that we learned you can draw pictures under the water in a toilet if you use a pencil, for instance. He was talented from a young age at putting boxes on stools on chairs to get to things on high shelves. He never, except when watching a movie (and not always then) sat still in one place long enough for me to, say, use the bathroom in peace. But he wasn't unfocused; he was very focused on looking around, getting curious about things, imagining things one might do if one could only get to that shelf, or through that door, or into that cabinet, and then doing them.

Usually he followed where I went. Lots of little kids like to help their parents around the house, dusting or sweeping or wiping tables. It was a passion for the Tiny Tornado, to be doing what I was doing.

I was halfway up the stairs with a bin of plastic food when the obvious hit me between the eyes: the Tiny Tornado never played with toy food because, before he was even 2, he wanted to be in the kitchen with me, cooking for real.

He always wanted to be doing things that were "for real." He loved to watch us do things, and try to emulate us. He dressed himself from an early age; fed himself from an early age; toilet-trained himself--not early, but when he got tired of waiting for me to do it.

 

One of my favorite stories is from when the kids were maybe 10, 7, and 4. Word Boy--the 7-year-old--has asked me for a snack. I say, "Just let me finish this up and then I can help you. Or, if you don't want to wait, you can get yourself something."

 

Word Boy went off, whining, to his older brother, who said, "I'm right in the middle of something, but if you can wait a bit then I can help you."

 

Word Boy collapsed, still whining, into a living room chair. The Tiny Tornado--age 4--said in a resigned tone, "All right. I'll do it." And he did. He got up off the couch, went into the kitchen, and fixed his older brother a snack.

 

Sometimes we say that the Tiny Tornado did a thing earlier than his brothers, and people say, "Oh, that's really common for younger kids, they want to emulate their siblings." And we say, "No, you don't understand. He didn't do it at a younger age then they did. He literally did it before they did."

 

Back to the staircase and the bin of plastic food. I don't just realize that the Tiny Tornado has never been interested in play as much as he has been interested in doing real work, but I realize, that like the daughter of that long-ago mom whose name I have forgotten, he didn't really enjoy being a toddler. He is still busy and into things, and that's still a challenge--because he often does things I don't want him to--but it gets easier and easier to pass the days with him as his abilities catch up with his aspirations.

 

It also gets easier as I learn to help him find real things he can do with his time. You can see from the picture above that he is quite adept in the kitchen. Yes, that's my big chef's knife! No, I don't let him cut anything but tofu and mushrooms with it, so far at least. But he can measure ingredients, mix and pour them, stir a pot at the stove. Like his older brothers, he likes to cook with me, and like his older brothers, he does most of the work when he does.

 

We took a class called "Small Dogs, Big Fun" this summer, where he learned some training techniques. Not only was he almost completely in charge of his own dog in class, but he has been working with Gemmy every day at home, sometimes for more than an hour. Gemmy has become a very happy dog, and very attached to the Tiny Tornado. He has also become reliable off-lead, something he never was before.

 

Our wonderful teacher took this picture of TT calling Gemmy to him after working on "stay." His summer class ended last week, but in the fall session we'll be taking our dogs to "Circus Dogs," where they will learn to jump through hoops and other neat tricks.

Likewise, he is surprisingly adept at archery:

He looks like an old pro at the pottery wheel at the clay studio:

And he just likes to goof around, to see what his body can do:

He is happier now that he has real work to do. He helps take care of the hamsters and the dogs. He does hands-on science experiments with his brothers and me. He has his own crate of "school" supplies and is learning the rudiments of reading and writing. He likes the clay studio, where he works side-by-side with artists of all ages, doing the same work they do. He likes helping me make the shopping list and pick out groceries (though I do have to watch for the many extras he likes to slip into the cart). He liked preschool, too, where his favorite activities were the open-ended craft projects, and doing a very thorough job of wiping the tables when it was clean-up time. And he's very excited about an outing he and I are taking to a nearby horse farm early next Saturday morning, where we will help with the morning barn chores. He is nervous about riding horses, though he wants to. But he will sincerely enjoy learning to take care of them as he gets bigger and more confident.

As a toddler, his most common morning greetings to me were, "What are we doing today?" and "Where are we going today?" His special gift is competence at planning and carrying out tasks and activities. Most often, he wants to be in the world and interacting with it not as a kid at play but as a person at work.

I hope some kid somewhere is having a great time with the kitchen toys. I know the Lego Savant loved them when he was little. The Tiny Tornado, in the meantime, would be happy to cook your lunch.

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That Went Well

Our meeting at Gitche Gumee Elementary School went as well as could be hoped for on Friday. Both the teacher and the principal were immediately accepting of the Tiny Tornado's choice of name and gender, and both of them immediately understood that information about his gender status was for sharing only on a need-to-know basis. The principal ran through his list of who he thought those people were, and it primarily included folks like the classroom aid who will be taking the kids to the bathroom from TT's classroom. I might have questioned some of the list; I wasn't sure on first thought that every professional who deals with TT in any capacity needed to know. But, on reflection, it seems to me a good idea that they do. Just in case something extremely unlikely happens, like TT being "outed" by some kid who catches a glimpse of him with his pants down, the adult in the room needs to be ready to respond appropriately. So we were comfortable with the principal's list.

Miss Erica, the classroom teacher, had made a chart on the wall showing all the kids' birthday months. I was happy to see that she had used balloons as name tags for it, rather than flowers vs. firetrucks, and I couldn't see anything else in the room that was gender-specific in a stereotyped way. When I commented on this, she affirmed that she tries to run a gender-neutral classroom. She also said she'd make a new balloon for the TT to reflect his new name.

One of the two bathrooms nearest the classroom has been converted to an attached bathroom for a special-ed classroom, so TT's class will be using a single gender-neutral bathroom this year. Everyone in the room agreed that that had worked out very well, and TT was thrilled to hear about it when we got home and told him.

You could feel the pressure the principal is under as the school year approaches--he practically sprinted out of the room at the end of our meeting--but he stayed long enough to hear me thank them. "Some parents we know have not had such an easy time with their children's school," I said. Both Miss Erica and the principal were surprised by that. I have noticed this phenomenon for years; there are people who, without necessarily having any specific background in trans issues, nonetheless feel that it is no big deal at all. These folks can be genuinely shocked to hear that others do not think the same. This is not always a good thing--it can be hard to convince folks with that "what's the big deal?" mindset that there are social issues that need to be addressed, or they can sometimes see trans folks and their allies and loved ones as being a bit dramatic.

When it comes to my 5-year-old starting "Begindergarten," though, I have no problems with their cheerful naivete. Because they have so much control over how this plays out--they create the reality in that classroom and that school for the Tiny Tornado. And if that reality is a bubble where being transgendered is accepted as casually as being left-handed or brown-eyed, well, I am not sorry for TT to spend some more time there.

 On another topic, I had a bit of a challenging day with the Tornado earlier this week. Of course I posted about it on Facebook, because I post about everything except sex and poop on there. Well, my poop. I'm pretty sure I've posted once or twice about someone else's, a dog or a kid.

Anyway, I was remembering that we used to have this wonderful but very difficult Moluccan cockatoo. His previous owner had named him Loki, and he lived up to that name. After a few years of struggle and love with this beautiful bird, we decided to change his name in the hope of shifting our own perception of him and giving him something else to live in to. So we started calling him Stevie, which fit his sweet and cuddly nature.

It occurred to me that TT's internet pseudonym might be like that. Call a kid a tornado, and he'll be a tornado. I thought that perhaps I should start calling him The Peaceful One instead. Because a mom can always hope.

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Boy is a Boy is a Boy

On Friday morning, Raider and I will be meeting with the Tiny Tornado's teacher and principal to talk about his gender status. I have just spent a little time working on my notes for that meeting, and it feels tricky. I know exactly what I want to say, and nothing is negotiable. We're not going in there to have a discussion about "how should we handle this?" We are going in there to make sure they know how we expect it to be handled. But I don't want to sound like an obnoxious lecturer, and I know it's hard for people to listen receptively when it seems like someone is hitting them with something unexpected, and laying down the law. So I am thinking about how to be gentle and at the same time communiciate that these things are firm, and not "suggestions" or "ideas" that we have.

This morning, the Tiny Tornado expressed concern that his name might make people think he is a girl. It's such an unusual name that this doesn't seem to have happened yet, but I share his concern. One of his nicknames is a shortened version of his name that does not sound girly at all, and I suggested that we start calling him that full-time. He loved the idea. I think his timing is good; it will be easiest if he starts school with this name.

My notes for the talk so far:

The Tiny Tornado has exhibited a consistent interest in boy things, clothes, etc, since toddlerhood, and in May asked to be referred to by male pronouns. Since May, he has been living as a boy full-time. Therefore, he is starting Begindergarten as a boy. We are fully supportive of him in this choice, as is his doctor. It is in keeping with current best practices for gender-nonconforming children.

He is concerned that his full name will make people think he is a girl. He has asked to be called "Nickname," which does not have that problem. Nickname should be the name used full-time in class, on papers and anything written. He should be introduced to other children, parents, and staff as Nickname and with exclusively male pronouns. His full name and trans status must not be disclosed to any children or parents, or to staff who do not have access to his records. Staff who do have access to his records should be given this information so that they do not disclose inappropriately by accident.

He will use the boys' restroom.

It would be great if there wasn't a lot of "boy/girl" divisions in the classroom--nametags with flowers vs. firetrucks, lining up by boys and girls, boys vs. girls in a game, and so on. He needs to be supported in his chosen identity and activities like this draw attention to his gender status in a way that can make him uncomfortable.

So far, my plan for making this all sound less like a lecture is to smile a lot, and say, "Do you have any questions? Do you have any experience with this kind of thing? Is there anything you'd like to know? Would you like some links to resources?" That may be the best I can do.

My Three Sons

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Someone is Wrong on the Internet

I was browsing my rss feeds this morning over breakfast, just passing the time, and happened upon Lisa Wade's post at Sociological Images, "Gender-Variant Children Continue to Confound", a discussion of the recent excellent New York Times piece, "What's so Bad About a Boy Who Wants to Wear a Dress?" I enjoy Sociological Images, though I sometimes find their analyses a bit reductive. But today I was amazed that Wade could pack so much wrongness into such a short piece, starting with the title. I'm not sure who is "confounded" by gender-variant children. The Times article she linked to, for instance, is full of stories of parents who have come to accept and support their children, despite challenges. Psychologists and doctors who work extensively with gender-variant children have a pretty good understanding of what the various paths that such kids take look like; Raider and I had the chance to hear some such people speak at TransHealth this spring, and they didn't seem confounded at all. Neither did the parents in the parent support group we attended. Neither did the tweens and teens who came and went from the Teen Center, where I volunteered every day.

Sure, they had their questions, their anxieties, their concerns. But nobody was "confounded."

I think Wade is confounded because she is making a common mistake: she thinks it matters why these kids are the way they are. And the only answers she can come up with stem from her view of the way sexism plays out in our culture. This leads her to dismiss children's gender expression as inauthentic. Tomboys don't wear boys' clothes because wearing those clothes is an authentic gender expression, but as a way of "rejecting one’s maturing body" in order to "put off the sexual attention that comes with growing up." She says that male-bodied gender-variant children adopt a "sexualized...adult hyperfeminity," basing this on a photo of three kids dressed up for a fashion show at a camp for trans kids.

To my eye, those kids don't look either especially adult or sexualized. The "heels" she decries on two of the kids' feet are modest; the nail polish on one kid is a playful blue on one hand, pink on the other, and the ring the same child is wearing is a plastic flower. One child has a temporary tattoo; another is wearing one of the rubber bracelets that are all the rage these days. Their skirts are flirty layered skirts like I've seen on a gazillion cisgendered girls. They look like children dressed up, to me.

One of my friends on Facebook pointed out, too, that they are dressed for a fashion show. If I were dressed for a fashion show, I would be more made-up and more "feminized" than I am in my daily life. It's a bad sample Wade is drawing on here, and a wide generalization she's drawing from it.

She assumes, for instance, that this picture represents "their (or their camp counselors') idea of what it means to be a girl." I see two things wrong with that sentence (at least!). First, it reflects her assumption that children don't know their own minds, by bringing in the possiblity of them being dressed not as they prefer, but as an influential adult prefers. And second, she assumes that this picture is both an accurate and complete representation of what they think it "means to be a girl." My partner took a picture of me at a party last Saturday; I was wearing a dress cut so low I had to use double-sided tape to keep the neckline in place. Today I'm wearing a modest cotton sundress. Yesterday I had on pants. In my closet there is a beautiful princess dress for wearing to Renaissance Faires. Which of those outfits defines my idea of what it means to be a woman?

None of them, you say? You win the prize.

Wade should know better--she says, "even most biological girls don't dress/act this way most of the time." But she assumes that these kids do. It's sloppy thinking, driven, I think, by her own ignorance and prejudices.

She should meet more gender-variant kids. TransHealth is a free conference; she should come some time and watch and listen. She would see, yes, tween girls dressed in ways that could arguably be seen as sexualized and too-adult; a friend of mine who is a mother of cisgenderd girls that age calls it "the slut phase," and gender variant girls are not the only ones who go through it. But she might also meet the male-to-female tomboy I had pizza with one night, or the 10-year-old whose gender identity was explicity and firmly "boy" but whose gender expression was profoundly feminine. What was he saying about what it "means" to be a boy or girl? Nothing, I think. His self-expression spoke profoundly about what it meant to be him.

Wade says:

In contrast, girls, when they enact a tomboy role — and now I’m off into speculation-land — don’t seem to go so far into the weeds. We don’t see girls dressing up like lumberjacks or business men in suits and ties. They don’t do tomman, they do tomboy.

I take issue with so much in these three sentences. "Enact a tomboy role"--Wade loves language like this, that says these kids are performing gender rather than experiencing it, or expressing it authentically. These girls "don't seem to go so far into the weeds." So, we assume that the kids in the picture, waiting their turn at the fashion show, are off-track? They've made some kind of mistake? And so do tomboys! Sorry, "girls who enact a tomboy role." They're "in the weeds," too, just not so deeply. How should kids dress and act that wouldn't put them "in the weeds"? If a female-bodied child dresses "like a girl," is she out of the weeds? Or in the weeds in a different way? What can a child do that Wade would see as powerful, authentic, and worth taking seriously? How can any human being have an authentic gender expression in her view, especially if it is explicity "feminine" or "masculine"? Or are we all in the weeds, all the time?

And when she says, "We don't see girls dressing up like lumberjacks or business men in suits and ties," she really means, "I haven't seen this." Little persons whom Wade would call "girls" certainly do. Ok, not lumberjacks--that's a ridiculous example. What child these days has lumberjacks as a possible role model? But male athletes? Sure. Male police officers? Sure. Male superheroes? Sure. I wrote a hasty comment on the SocImages this morning, linking to this old blog post of mine. Scroll to the bottom, I said, to see a picture I flash around way too often: the Tiny Tornado in the vest and tie he insisted we buy him a couple of years ago.

I don't even know where TT found out about suits and ties at age 2 or 3. His dad goes to work every day in a t-shirt and jeans. But, somewhere, he found out about them. And by god, he wanted one. "We" do indeed see "girls" [sic] dressing up like business men, Dr. Wade.

A hint for folks whose theory has outpaced their experience: just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If the only thing you have to offer is a projection of your theory onto the lives of people you know little about, and self-admitted speculation, perhaps take a moment to consider broadening your experience. I am sure that, like most liberals, feminists, and intellectuals, you think of yourself as open-minded. Practice opening your mind to the lived experience of human beings living in their bodies--including children, who can be surprisingly self-aware, knowledgeable about their own experience, and forceful in their demands that they be respected for who they are.

 

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Partying with the Freakiest of the Geeks

Last night, Raider's company, FluidHost, threw its annual open-bar riverboat party for employees. We've been going to this party for enough years now--this, and the super-elegant holiday party they throw in December--that I have friends there that I am always happy to see.

There is a relatively small tech sector here in mid-Michigan, and as a result, Raider and some of his co-workers have been crossing paths for years.The new project manager, for instance, used to work with Raider back at Tiny Internet Provider a decade ago, before it went under. Raider's boss at FluidHost interviewed at TIP at the same time Raider did but didn't get a job; the new project manager was offered a job at FluidHost five years ago, when Raider got hired on, but opted to go to work for the other tech company in town, CodeCrafters, instead. And so on.

So, they were talking about the corporate culture at CodeCrafters versus FluidHost, and the new PM was saying that CodeCrafters was just that little bit more buttoned-down. FluidHost has lots of guys like Raider--fairly ordinary-looking guys who don't stand out as a "type" until you see a bunch of them together and can only tell them apart by subtle variations in facial hair ("Look!" one of the other wives and I said to each other. "They're stroking their beards in exactly the same way! Isn't it adorable?")

But there's also a sizeable contingent of people who would stand out anywhere they went: a nice lesbian with pink hair, some visibly trans people, men with long hair and dramatic beards, people with gauged piercings and dramatic tattoos, goths, sexy fat women in scarlet corsets.

Watching a crowd waiting to embark during one of the boat's stops at the dock, the new project manager said, "You just don't see this diversity at CodeCrafters."

Raider said, "Yes, FluidHost gets the freakiest of the geeks."

The simple explanation is that most of the people who work at FluidHost are not software engineers like Raider and his team. They are tech support, working around the clock on the phone. The kind of job that is perfect for freaky smart people. I love the freaky smart people. I feel at home among them.

Raider and his cohort are much of a type: super-smart but taciturn and introverted, with a dry wit. They read science fiction and relax by playing Red Dead Redemption and Halo 3: ODST. Their passion for their smartphones is almost adulterous. To a man, they are possessed of colorful vivacious wives who do the social heavy-lifting for them. Last night, the other DevTeam wives and I were joking that we are such a stereotyped bunch that it's like there are factories producing us somewhere: one assembly line putting together guys, the final step being to outfit them in relaxed-fit jeans, dirty sneakers, and a t-shirt that says, "There are only 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't."

On the other assembly line, a line of women who start chattering as soon as their heads are attached. They're dressed in bright pink with sequins, or black skirts chosen for their "twirl factor." It is hard to keep them separated so they can be packaged with their mates; they keep clumping up together to admire each other's shoes, laugh about child-rearing, and make affectionate jokes about the men they love.

By 8:30, the wives are on the dance floor. The husbands do not dance. With one exception, the Young Genius, who takes to the floor for one song with his Beautiful Wife, flinging himself around the floor and twirling her with a dorky abandon that the wives find charming and that causes us to cast hopeful glances at our own gentlemen. The husbands chatter more during this song that they have all evening: "Look at the Young Genius!" they say to each other. "He looks ridiculous! I will never go out there to make a fool of myself like him."

The wives sigh. And when the next song starts, we flood the dance floor again, together. Sometimes we are joined by one or two of the nice lesbians, though the sweet young butch who danced with me last year has, alas, moved on to greener pastures. It is a dance party so completely female that we might be back in high school, having a sleepover. Perhaps later we will give each other facials and try out dramatic new makeup looks.

A song comes on that stops everyone dead. "I don't know this song," the Young Genius's Beautiful Wife says. The others shake their heads and frown; they don't know it either.

Only I am still dancing, bopping around the floor singing, "I always feel like...somebody's watching me. And I got no privacy. Wo-o-o."

They look at me.

I shrug. "It's from when I was in high school."

The Beautiful Wife asks, "When were you in high school?"

I say, "Um, 79 to 83."

She says, "Teach me how to dance to it."

So I try to, explaning that it's all vertical, no butt and hips, all bouncing and arms and little girly kicks. Basically I am trying to teach her Molly Ringwald's moves from The Breakfast Club.

She almost gets it. But the effort nearly kills me. All that bouncing is hard on the knees at 46, and of course, my orthopedic sneakers are like anvils with magna-grip soles. After only a few minutes, I can barely breathe.

I love that she is game to try it. I collapse back at our table to drink a big glass of water and catch my breath, but the Beautiful Wife just keeps dancing.

Some final moments from the evening:

The New Guy's wife tells a story. Apparently, he came home from his interview dejected. "They took me out to lunch," he said, "but I don't think they liked me. Nobody said anything."

She told him, "They liked you. They will hire you because you will fit right in."

She was, of course, right.

And:

We are watching people arrive, and Raider says, "There's so-and-so and his partner." We sat with them at dinner last year. "His partner?" I say. "Are you sure? He introduced him to me as his friend."

Raider looks at me with pity. "Because we look like a middle-aged straight couple."

Me: "Oh, my god! And I fell for it!"

And:

I spend some time with the Life of the Party wife of Raider's Silent But Sexy co-worker. Life of the Party got me to do my first shots ever two Christmas parties ago. It involved pouring the booze through an elaborate tunnel carved in an ice sculpture, and the drink was called a Buttery Nipple.

Anyway, I score some points with Life of the Party by recognizing her Bettie Page tattoo. I am only able to do this (although I of course know who Bettie Page is) because a few minutes earlier Raider had said, "Hey, is that a Bettie Page tattoo on Life of the Party's calf?" but I don't let on. Turns out Life of the Party collects Bettie Page memorabilia. Beautiful Wife and I comment that we would love to see the Bettie Page memorabilia sometime. "I don't know," Life of the Party says. "It's pretty racy."

Beautiful Wife and I are totally up for racy. This, we think, sounds much better than a FluidHost wives tupperware party.

Eventually, Raider and I sneak away. We find a quiet spot along the rail on the second deck; above us, the drunkest partiers are smoking and being raucus; below us, people are at tables, trying to talk above the music. We're snuggled up as close as we can get, Raider's arm around my waist. We watch the riverbank pass slowly by in the twilight. We see ducks, swallows skimming the water, a kingfisher. We share a hard cider, passing the cold bottle back and forth, and chat quietly. Every now and then, we kiss.

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In the Old Days, We Dreamed About the Old Days

Some of my readers may be old enough to remember the butch/femme renaissance of the mid-90s. Joan Nestle, also one of the founders of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, published The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader in 1992. In 1993, Leslie Feinberg published Stone Butch Blues, a memoir about living as a transgendered butch in the pre-Stonewall days (this also was the start of a new awareness of, and debate about, transgender issues in the lesbian community).

Feinberg's lover Minnie Bruce Pratt followed up with S/he, a collection of short pieces about (among other things) her relationship with Feinberg, their exploration of gender and butch/femme, and their shared nostalgia for the days when the police raided gay bars, women had to have on at least three pieces of women's clothing when they did, and there was a back entrance for people to slip out of when the cops pulled up in front. (Pratt mentions the secret exit; Feinberg says smokily, "Only a femme from the old days would know about the secret exit." Then they fall into bed. Again.) The ever-prolific Leslea Newman edited The Femme Mystique a couple of years later.



For awhile there, it seemed like everybody was all heated up about butch/femme. I myself actually began wearing makeup again during this era, and sometimes gave readings in a blue velvet strapless cocktail dress and high heels. This get-up was very effective at attracting exactly the kind of woman I was attracted to: butches in black t-shirts and motorcycle boots, the kind of woman who'd open your car door for you, steer you through the door of the restaurant with one hand in the small of your back, take you home and tell you to take off everything but the shoes. I had one girlfriend who liked to slow-dance with me at the Lesbian Center, whispering a little fantasy in my ear about being in one of those dim old bars. Pehaps, she thought optimistically, she might have gotten into a knife fight over me!


It was a form of cosplay, I think now. Of historical re-enactment. It was a playful erotic fantasy brought out into the light of day. It was also an honoring of our foremothers, women who bravely lived their lives in a time of repression we didn't experience. Each of us hoped we would have been among them, that we might have shown up in some blurry photo Joan Nestle and her colleagues pulled out of the archives, that we would not have spent those decades as obedient daughters, wives, and mothers.

Lesbians at the bar, circa 1950

I've been thinking about those days lately--those long-ago days when we dreamed about long-ago days--because of how I've changed. I was young enough then to think that I was growing into the authentic expression of my sexuality; it never occurred to me then that I could be in a phase. I was a lesbian; not just that, I was a femme lesbian. Not just that, I was a femme lesbian whose attraction to stone butches bordered on being a full-blown fetish. One woman I dated said to me, "I'm afraid I'm just not butch enough for you." I was afraid of that, too. We didn't last long. I had high standards in those days. High, and inflexible.

And then, you know, Raider happened. But I didn't generalize from him. I didn't think, "I like men now!" (This is an interesting contrast to my original coming-out, when I declared myself a Lesbian for Life as soon as I'd kissed my first girl. I was wedded to firmly-bounded identities back then). I figured I was still basically a femme not-lesbian-but-something-kind-of-like-a-lesbian who liked stone butches...and Raider. The very special exception I'd chosen to spend my life with.

I am interested to discover that this isn't as true as I thought it was. In my mid-life renaissance, I am discovering that I am attracted to a lot of people. I have a profound appreciation for women in all shapes and sizes and forms of self-expression; indeed, I've had to force myself to stop complimenting women in my homeschool group on how cute/hot/charming/lovely they look, for fear they'd think I was hitting on them.

I'm also attracted to people on the female-to-male genderqueer spectrum (note: not actually a spectrum per se). If you knew how many of my "stone butch" ex-lovers were now living as men, this would totally not surprise you. But I like the softer ones, too, these days. And strong femmes with a core of steel. And persons born in male bodies who wear beards and skirts and sparkly hairbands. And I spend the occasional week or so enjoying the torment of a hopeless crush on a man I know perfectly well is as gay as a daisy in May.

Back then, though, I was so into my femme self that I wrote an essay about lipstick. Leslea Newman published it The Femme Mystique. Lambda Literary Review gave the book a lukewarm review, but called me and my piece out by name as highlights. I created a file I optimistically called "reviews" (plural!) and put it away in my filing cabinet. At the moment, my heart is broken, because that file apparently doesn't exist anymore. In that drawer, you can find copies of every magazine I published in from 1994-2001 (More than I remembered! Almost none you've heard of!). You can find 20-year-old submission cover letters that really should be recycled, ten copies of a chapbook I published in 1995, and the synopsis for a Star Trek novel I knew I'd never write but couldn't resist outlining because it was as much fun as a day at Disneyland. But you cannot find a copy of what I believe may have been my only published review. You have only my word for it that it was a good one.

But you can judge for yourself. I have braved the deepest cellars of my computer hard drive and brushed the cobwebs off "Lipstick." I have resisted the temptation to re-write it, to tone down the overblown rhetoric a bit. This is the writer I was twenty years ago. This is the woman I was twenty years ago.

Lipstick

I pull my lipstick out of my bag. My lover is across the room. We're separated by music, smoke, crowds of other women. I roll the lipstick up from its tube, spread it, wide and generous, on my lower lip, press my lips together firmly, delicately fill in the arches of my cupid's-bow with the pointed tip. As I re-cap the lipstick and drop it in my bag, I glance at my lover. She gives no overt sign of having noticed my slow touch-up, but her hand rests unobtrusively on her belt buckle. I bend to smooth my stocking at the ankle; from the corner of my eye I see that her fingertips are lightly stroking the inside of her thigh, near where I know the head of her cock is hidden in a fold of her black jeans. This is a part of our lovemaking. It begins in our separate houses with my lace underwear and her crisp white shirt; I can't tell you where it ends.

* * *

 Watching my mother, I learned the right way to get dressed for a party without getting makeup on my nice clothes. After her shower, she left her dress for the evening hanging safely in the closet or on the back of the door until she had finished with hairspray, nail polish, and powder puffs. Of course, she put on her underthings, stockings and slip; it would be indecent to remain naked. She slipped her feet into her pumps, to protect her hose from runs and snags. Her white slip was a pale suggestion of the evening's dress, full or narrow where the dress would be full or narrow, slit up one side or dropping deep down her back. Her arms, shoulders, neck, and face were bare and clean. Her hair lay tight and wet against her head, the comb-lines visible. She stepped into the bright light of the bathroom. Her pumps clicked on the tile, her brushes and compacts of eye color and lip color clicked on the counter as she laid them out. I was breathless as I watched her lift the first jar: she would be beautiful when she left this room.

I learned this ritual from sitting in an easy chair in the corner of my mother’s bedroom and watching her, and I practiced it all through my teen years. In my bathroom, wearing my slip and heels, I curled my hair, running the hot comb or iron through it again and again, rolling the hot curls around my fingers. I loved the feel of the warm ringlets on my neck and shoulders, and then the shiver that ran through me when I pinned the curls up and the cool air hit the back of my neck again. I wore a pink demi-cup underwire bra that lifted my breasts from underneath, as I imagined I might hold them in my hands to offer them to a lover. I dusted their tops with soft beige powder the color of my skin, the inner curves with blush a shade or so darker, to deepen my cleavage. The bra's clasp was in front, between the cups, and when I unsnapped it with two fingers, my breasts fell out abundantly, apples from an overturned bushel basket, loose gems from a velvet bag, tumbling out for my lover to catch. I practiced that movement over and over.

I loved the greasy act of putting makeup on. I pulled all my colors out of the drawer and arranged them before me, opened all the compacts and considered their contents. I was willing to make up, take it all off, and make up again to get it right. I sometimes spent whole evenings trying out new ways to wear eyeshadow, new lipstick colors. From magazines for girls I learned to smooth foundation under my chin, down my neck, around to the back, into my hairline. Its ending had to be a secret; no one should see the line. Powder followed, then blush in two shades: lighter on my cheekbones, darker blush below to create shadows. I brushed on eyeshadow in four stages, and dipped my eyebrow brush in sugar water; once dry, it kept each shiny hair in place. I pulled my lower eyelids down and smeared eyeliner pencil inside, behind the roots of my eyelashes. I was extravagant; I wore lipliner pencil and two lipsticks at a time—the lower lip one shade darker to make it look swollen and pouty, like I’d already been kissing for hours.

Eventually, I discovered department store cosmetics, and stopped buying waxy two-dollar lipsticks at Perry Drug. I threw away my Revlon eyeshadows, and the cheap plastic applicators with sponge-rubber tips that had come with them. In Hudson's Aisles of Beauty, the applicators for the blushes and eyeshadows were bits of soft chamois cloth on smooth wood, or brushes sold separately; some were made from real hair, like artists' brushes, and they were round, flat, angled, beveled. There were tiny brushes for liquid eyeliner, and huge soft brushes for loose powder. Loose powder! That was a revelation. I gladly abandoned pressed powder compacts, with their abrasive puffs and powder that clumped and streaked on my face and neck. Loose powder came in a beautiful wide-mouthed jar. I loved to unscrew its lid, plunge the brush in, tap off the excess, and brush the powder on with a light motion of my wrist, rapid and even, from my forehead to the top of my bra.

The lipsticks at Hudson's were heavy, greasy, meant to stay on for hours without drying, meant to soften and ease the friction of two mouths connecting. I loved those lipsticks. I could spread samples from the testers up the back of my hand nearly to my elbow, studying my skin tone, comparing the colors. Even the powder eyeshadows were moist, clinging to my eyelids like humid air. Cheap cosmetics were stiff and powdery; they flaked if I smiled, if I frowned, if I talked too much. Good makeup was a soft veil; the weight of it pulled my eyelids to sleepy half-mast.

I learned to be sexy from my mother in her slip, leaning toward her mirror with a lipstick in her hand. My mother in her slip turned me on. I wanted to be sexy that way, boldly, my lipstick a challenge and a declaration: yes, I know I'm sexy. I dare you to look at me. I dare you to look away.

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