A girl voice

My first class of 4/5-year-olds walked in a little late this morning. As I was pushing myself up from my desk to meet them for circle time, something on my computer monitor caught the attention of a child. He wandered over, exclaiming, “A Power Ranger!” A few more heads went up, and soon I had a small crowd of boys around my desk, with the rest of the class drifting over slowly. I shooed them gently back towards the circle and came to join them.

As I made my way over, a girl looked up at me wonderingly and said, “Maybe you’re a boy.”

I asked my next class to sit boy-girl. (I always cringe to differentiate like that, but in some groups it cuts down on distractions and conflicts, as they’re already socialized to interact more with their own gender.) I watched while they puzzled out the arrangement themselves. Eventually, having settled things, they looked towards me, trying to figure out where in this pattern I fit.

One child–the only one who ever calls me “Mr.” while the other children have no question about addressing me as “Ms.”– looked over at me and asked, “Are you a boy or a girl?”

Usually my students ask this question about storybook characters, or stuffed animals. In return I tend to ask, “Why does it matter?” But I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of my own students ask, right to my face, that question of me.

I can make teachable moments out of storybook characters and stuffed animals, but I can’t be frank about myself. Not here. It’s not safe.

So I grinned at him. “I’m a teacher! I don’t count.” I took my regular place in the circle.

He smiled back briefly, then looked down, pondering. Then he countered, “Are you a boy teacher or a girl teacher?”

Well. Can’t dodge that one.

I suddenly became aware of their teacher, recently departed and possibly still waiting outside, as she does, listening to see if her students need help settling in.

I grinned again, and laughed a little as I asked, “What do YOU think?”

To an adult’s ears, I hoped it sounded charmingly amused that anyone would ask me such a question. To him, I think it sounded like a playful challenge. As it was meant to.

He caught my grin. He repeated, “Are you a boy or a girl?” I repeated my question back to him.

Smile wide, he replied, “–a girl because you talk with a girl voice!”

I laughed softly again, and he settled back into his place as I called the rest of the class, thankfully self-absorbed during these moments, to attention.

My voice, I thought. Not my clothes or my face or the fact that everyone else says “Ms.” and “she” and “her.” A girl voice.

Well, but I like my voice, I thought.

I stopped short. I like my voice? The voice I sometimes can’t stand to hear in recordings because it sounds so much like my abusive mother’s?

Huh. I like my voice. I do.

And I am content with not having given the questioning child an answer.

Burying dresses

The boy next to me looks down at the outline of a dress in the picture he is coloring, pencil paused over the page. Then he starts scribbling over it. “I’m burying this because I can’t wear it. It’s for girls.”

My heart breaks a little. For all the subtle education I can do with my students about consent, sexism, ableism, cultural sensitivity… this is something I am not allowed to touch for fear of my employment.

Another boy glances over at the puddle of colored pencil seeping over the dress, then down at his own page. “I’m burying mine,” he announces too, and starts scribbling.

A girl lifts her head and watches for a moment. “I’m coloring mine in,” she says, selecting a purple pencil, “because I can wear it. I’m a girl.”

“But you can’t wear the boy stuff,” counters the first boy.

“I know,” she says.

“And that’s a lot of stuff,” he adds.

A brief silence falls between them. There is chatter in the background. Then another girl, watching, speaks up.

“My sister wears boxers. Even though she’s a girl.”

“Boxers?” says the first boy incredulously.

“Uh huh. She’s a girl and she wears boxers.”

“She wears boxers,” he repeats to himself in disbelieving surprise, coloring away.

I feel a tiny smile stealing over my face.

(more teacher stories)

What my first graders think about consent, Year 2

(What my first graders thought about consent last year)

Before we left the field, I stepped back and lifted my voice a little to address the class as a whole.

“Brush yourselves off well before we go inside; a lot of you have grass on your clothes and we don’t want it getting anywhere.”

In tandem, almost everyone looked down at their clothes. (Despite the fact that they were literally rolling around in the dry grass a moment ago, several children looked surprised to find themselves covered in it.) Small hands began pushing at fleeces and sweatshirts and leggings.

“There’s some grass on your backs you may not be able to reach. If you want someone to help you brush off, you can ask them. It’s not OK to brush someone else off unless they ask you first.”

I signaled the line-leader to follow me and I turned away before I could be disappointed at the lack of effect that saying this would have. All day I watch my kids shove, grab, pinch, hit, and flail at each other. Every moment is an opportunity to reinforce the idea that it’s not OK to act out their feelings on someone else’s body without asking, but it’s very, very slow going.

As I unlocked the heavy door back into the building and hauled it open (“Who’s my door-holder? Door-holder?”) I heard a child hollering my name from further back in the line. I took a breath, feeling my face rearrange into an open and inquisitive expression, and turned around to face her as I caught the door with my heel. “Uh huh?”

“Everett was trying to brush me off and he didn’t ask me first!”

Immediately, Everett started protesting. “Well! Well–Julie was brushing her off!”

Louisa snapped back, “Yeah because I asked her to!”

“Unless she asked you to,” I said to him, “It’s not OK to touch her. Remember? You have to make sure it’s OK to touch somebody before you do it.”

“Yeah,” she said to him emphatically.

“So we can’t change that it happened, but what can you do to make Louisa feel better?” I asked him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I think that’ll work,” I said, looking at Louisa. She looked up at me wordlessly, then drifted back into the stream of children entering the building.

Everett looked back to me, frustrated.

“But if she didn’t want me to touch her then she should have said for nobody to touch her!”

I blinked slowly, and sighed as I went through the door and ushered him in behind me, knowing this was going to be difficult to clear up for Everett (whose understanding of appropriate social interaction is a few years behind his peers’). But I took a breath, and started to explain again as we went into the classroom.

We have a long way to go. But it’s something. It’s progress. A year later, and it’s progress.

Fighting little fights

Child 1, a girl: Why are you coloring the dress purple? Is it because it’s a girl thing?

Me: Not all purple things are just for girls, you know!

Child 1: (laughs uncomfortably, teasing voice) It’s a giiirl thiiing!

Me: My dad wears purple. He has a purple shirt.

Child 2, a boy: Yeah, I like purple!

Me: My brother wears purple too.

Child 2: (sadly) Yeah, I like to wear purple. But my mom wouldn’t buy me any purple stuff.

Child 1: …because it’s a GIRL THING!

Me: Purple doesn’t have to be a girl thing, either. You know what?

(The class looks up from their work.)

Me: I don’t like pink.

(silence)

Child 3, a boy: (deeply curious) Even though you’re a girl?

Me: (a pause, as I figure out how to answer that without affirming the idea that I’m a girl) I don’t have to like pink!

(a silence; the class goes back to work thoughtfully)

The kids didn’t care

Midweek, my boss sat down next to me. “Are you coming on Friday?” she asked.

I grimaced. “I didn’t realize it was this week,” I said. “And I was out last Friday too, and I don’t have a sub–”

“I bet I can find you a sub,” she said.

Within five minutes, it was arranged for me to join my students at a historical event a few days later.

“You have to wear a costume, though,” someone else at the table said.

I must’ve looked panicked. “You can just wear jeans and a flannel shirt,” my boss said, reassuringly. I brightened.

A few hours later she forwarded me all the information on the event, including costume suggestions.

“Jeans and a flannel shirt” was the dress code for men.

 

I was nervous when I showed up wearing that, but I didn’t see what else I could do. I knew the women there would be wearing long dresses and aprons. I didn’t have anything like that, I didn’t have time to get anything like that, and I’d feel positively horrible all day wearing anything like that.

And my boss said it was OK.

I tried to soften it down–I put on eyeliner, little studs in my ears. I don’t think it worked. When I showed up, surrounded by parents and students and teachers milling around before the start of the event, I looked almost exactly like the men there–just half a foot shorter.

I found a mom wearing pants and a plaid shirt. She was the only woman there wearing that. And, granted, she looked femme wearing it, but–I sidled up beside her and murmured conspiratorially, “Thanks for making me not the only one wearing plaid.”

She laughed: “I told my son: I’m getting done what I have time for, and if I don’t have time for a costume–well, this is what it is.”

Other parents’ eyes slid off me, met mine only briefly if at all. I saw the parents of the student I’d once caught saying, at eight years old, “No homo.” They wouldn’t look at me, didn’t acknowledge my presence.

My boss–in a dress–came up to find me and, with a smile, gave me a hug. “I’m so excited you made it!” she said.

 

At lunch I sat with mostly colleagues. Friendly faces.

“Hey [Samson],” one of them said. “How’d you get out of wearing a dress?”

“Yeah!” another chimed in indignantly.

“[Boss] said it was OK!” I said, laughing to keep from cringing that they were bringing it up.

“Well we’re gonna have to have a word with her about that,” they said. Their voices had a teasing note, but I wished they’d forget it.

 

As the hours wore on I started deliberately approaching people, mostly parents. I found out who my friends were. I found easy warm smiles in some, mostly mothers. A few fathers thawed to me as we stood side by side, arms crossed, talking quietly as we watched the kids.

 

The kids never so much as batted an eye. We laughed, we teased back and forth, we played together. I bandaged a scraped leg, low-fived a hand, was the first to try the food to show them it was good.

One student walked up to me at lunch as I was eating. He stopped in front of me. I smiled at him. He smiled back.

“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

And that’s why I was.

Sensitivity

Today I found myself mourning in an entirely unexpected way.

I was tucked into bed for an afternoon nap, and rather than curling up to sleep, I started shopping on the Lunapads site, and… I started feeling tearful, in a cathartic way. I felt like it was helping me process grief, which is, I suppose, an odd thing to feel about shopping for reusable menstrual pads.

It’s been a rough couple months for my reproductive anatomy and company. I turned up at the gynecologist in August with a UTI, a yeast infection, and bacterial vaginosis, concurrently. I already had a highly sensitive system; then I’d had lots of sex with a new partner, been exposed to lots of new chemicals and materials we were using for safer sex, and had an allergic reaction to one of them (unsure which). My vagina (and everything around it) was pretty unhappy. (And so was I. You can imagine what it was like to have all three of those infections at the same time.)

I turned up at the doctor again a few weeks after finishing treatment, having symptoms again, and, lacking any true infection, I was told I may actually be irritated by my own cervical mucus. It’s a mild oversimplification to say I’m allergic to myself, but that’s about how much sense it makes. I had never heard of anything like that (and my Googling hasn’t made me much wiser). I was prescribed a course of vaginal antibiotics, as my gynecologist said there is sometimes bacterial involvement. Depending on how I reacted to them, he said, I might go onto prophylactic antibiotics long-term, or have my cervix cauterized to reduce the amount of mucus it produces.

The antibiotic turned out to be metronidazole, which is carcinogenic in animals in long-term use. The fact that I was willing to put five doses of that into my vagina should probably tell you a lot about how hopeless I was feeling, and how unappetizing the thought of cervical cautery is.

So things are changing. My list of allergies and sensitivities is now up to disposable pads/pantyliners, conventional lube, most soap, spermicide, and my own cervical mucus.  Thankfully I didn’t seem to be allergic to the antibiotics, and I’m now attempting to eliminate any and all potential irritants in hopes that I can reduce my discomfort and avoid cauterization. I switched over to a DivaCup and reusable pantyliners quite awhile ago, but right now my skin is so delicate I don’t even dare use my DivaCup. I’m having to step back, reevaluate, and throw out things that aren’t working anymore.

So there I was today on this website, buying more pads to compensate for not being able to use the Divacup, and I started feeling like I was going to cry. Here was everything I could need for what my body is going through: organic cotton pads, wet bags, laundry bags, rinse bottles, detergent. It wasn’t relief I was feeling, exactly, though I am very relieved and grateful that there are resources out there to deal with cranky bodies. It was more that finding myself there was an acknowledgment of the ways my body is changing, and that I’m facing them, dealing with them.

It is frightening to me to think that you can break your own body in irrevocable ways, that you can do things to it that cannot be fixed. That it can break down in ways that cannot be reversed. As careful as I am with my reproductive system, I’ve apparently exposed it to enough things to bring it to this point–even though those things (pads? lube? soap?) are mostly innocuous to almost everyone. And meanwhile my joints are getting more painful, my sensory problems are getting stronger, my spine is curving more. I’m now taking medications to ameliorate side effects from other medications. I had a period so painful this week that I considered going to the hospital. I’ve realized in the last several years how wrong the impression of medicine I had as a child is–there is very little that can be treated without scar or price, and there are many things that cannot be cured.

It’s a funny thing, as someone who spent so many years suicidal, to be so afraid of my own mortality and fragility now.

However, I’m not here solely to complain (surprising, right?). I have recommendations, and I have questions, because I know there have to be people out there dealing with the same things. I want to tell you how I’m dealing, and see how you are.

First, if you’ve ever been told your own bodily fluids are an irritant to you in any way, or if you know anything about such, I’d like to hear about it.

Second, here’s a rather exhaustive list of everything I’m using to deal. I’m going to be linking to a lot of products and companies–I’m not in any way being compensated by any of them, and I can’t say they’ll work for you… I just want to have ideas out there for anybody going through the same sorts of things.

• Soap: DivaWash is the only non-irritating cleanser I’ve found that I can use on my genitals. It’s botanically based, it smells nice, it’s an effective and gentle cleanser. I’ve heard lots of recommendations not to use any soaps on the vulva at all, and especially not inside the inner labia, but my skin overproduces keratin, so it’s necessary for me to use a cleanser to keep inclusion cysts and abscesses to a minimum. I get mine at Whole Foods, but you can order it on the Lunapads site too. (I have sensitive skin in general; I use castile soap (Dr. Bronner’s) on the rest of my body, generic sensitive skin shaving creams, and mineral salt deodorant.)
• Cloth: I already have a couple Lunapads (very kindly sent to me in return for publishing one of my blog posts on their site) and I have more on the way; I like their system of a base pad with changeable liners that go atop it. (They even have wing extenders so I can wear them more easily with my boxer briefs!) I also have many pads and liners from Randumosity; the plastic snaps are kinder on my fingers and the velour liners feel amazing on my skin. I know GladRags is another cloth pad company, and many independent folks who make pads and liners can be found by Googling and looking on Etsy. There are lots of styles of pads and liners that work differently, and you’ll probably like one above the others.
• Detergent: I use All’s “Free & Clear” detergent, but I’m considering switching to a washing soda or similar to avoid chemicals and get my clothes and pads cleaner. If you have favorites, please let me know.
• Stain remover: I recently tried Ruby’s Red Wash to help remove stains from my pads–they very kindly sent me a travel-sized bottle to try after hearing about my allergies. It definitely works! Amazingly so, really–it downright wiped out some fresh stains, and even got some very old, set-in stains out. And so far, I don’t think it’s an irritant.
• Lube: I use Emerita lube, but I think this is also starting to irritate me. I’ve heard aloe suggested, but I think this is also an irritant for me. If you have suggestions, I would appreciate them.
• Rinse, don’t wipe: I’ve noticed some toilet paper irritates me more than others, and I’m less irritated when I manage to wipe as little as possible. I’m trying to get my hands on a rinse bottle (these are spoken of favorably) so that I can just blot dry afterward.

Man. I’m making a resolution to write more happy blog posts.

No wrong way

“You do you. No one else can do you. No one else can live your experience.” - @amaditalks

—

Lovely had left me a tearful voicemail, saying she’d gotten an upsetting call. I left a friend’s house and tried to call her back outside; no answer. A few minutes later a text hit my phone:

“[Samson], I don’t think you’ll be happy until you come out more generally. I think that if you live in a state of always being seen as a woman you’ll always be miserable. It’s hard living out, but I think you’re strong enough to do it. I threw away a couple of nice versions of my life to be out and I’ve more or less survived. Being out to a few friends in a secret Internet identity will never be good enough. I tried it and it didn’t work. I’m sorry. You’ll figure it out.”

I think my eyes emerged about a millimeter from their sockets.

I’ve talked about being “out” and “disclosing” and not–these things get very much under my skin, especially on National Coming Out Day (every damn year). This sort of eye-popping policing, especially from other trans* people, pushes me to talk about it again, especially as a nonbinary trans* person “living quietly.”

(First, an acknowledgment that terms surrounding these issues–”outness,” “stealth,” etc.–are problematic. Additionally, as @ericainchoate points out, many have been weaponized. I use these terms with a wince, scare quotes, and the general intention of turning them on their heads.)

“Stealth,” for me, is being read as my assigned-at birth gender. Unless my presentation is read as particularly androgynous or masculine on any given day, I am consistently read as a woman. (Given the cisheteronormative conflation of gender presentation and sexuality, I know I am frequently also read as “a lesbian”–but, regardless, still as “a woman.”) Based on my appearance and my name, which society considers feminine, I am generally considered a cisgender (if gender-non-conforming) woman unless I choose to disclose. “Stealth” is my default, and it means a very different thing for me than it does for many binary-aligned trans* people.

I disclose in one of two ways: I either explicitly state my identity (a nonbinary genderqueer trans* person), or I ask for my pronouns (they, them, theirs). I have disclosed my identity with many trusted friends, two very close coworker-friends, and with people in the queer community at large. Online, my blog and my profiles explicitly state my identity and pronouns. I have not disclosed my identity in my workplace at large or to my family.

This set of choices, as @pyroshy points out, “is not a binary… and not a spectrum. It’s context-dependent and complex.” There is no wrong way to disclose or be out. The results of “being out” that are visited upon people based upon disclosure or nondisclosure are not our faults, and to imply that we are responsible for others’ treatment of us based on disclosure or nondisclosure is to victim-blame. Plain and simple. It is not someone’s fault when they are attacked by a partner for not having disclosed earlier in a relationship. It is not their fault when they are fired for disclosure. When they are turned down for a date because they disclose in advance. When they are misgendered for not wearing a sandwich-board sign disclosing to all comers in advance.

To tell me that the ways in which I disclose and do not disclose are wrong choices is to blame me for the ways cisnormative society treats me. To imply that I am going about my “outness” in the wrong ways is to police my handling of my own identity. It is out-of-bounds, uncalled for, unacceptable, and even more repugnant coming from another trans* person.

Thus ends my main point. But, furthermore: a binary-aligned trans* person telling me that I need to disclose in the same way they have is to ignore not only the differences between our individual situations, but also the significant differences between the issues facing binary-aligned versus non-binary trans* people.

For Lovely, for example, who literally came out in her local paper, disclosure-at-large was part of a social transition. It came with a change in presentation, a change in name, a change in pronouns, the beginning of a struggle to reassign legal gender markers. It was a transition from being seen as occupying one binary gender to embodying the “opposite” binary gender. Certain things about her presentation continue to disclose her trans*ness for her, beyond her control. It is a struggle that is highly misunderstood and shamed by society-at-large, but a narrative that that society is becoming increasingly familiar with.

Me, on the other hand? In many ways I am already living as I would like to. Yes, it’s true that I do sanitize my presentation for work in subtle ways, but I generally dress and present as I would like. I have chosen to keep the name my parents gave me and am content with it (and fond of it). I have changed my body in some ways and am continually pondering others, but they are not part of a social transition.

I do not have a socially recognized gender role to “transition into” via disclosure. There is no legal gender marker available to me that is appropriate; the little “F” on my driver’s license is equally wrong as a little “M” would be. Most people are not familiar with gender-non-specific pronouns and would not apply them to me (or to anyone) based simply on disclosure. There is no simple way for me to disclose: imagine the difference between stopping someone on the street or in conversation and saying and saying, “No, I’m a man” versus “No, I’m nonbinary and genderqueer”–both may require a conversation, and both may end in a lack of acceptance by the other person, but there is a much higher likelihood that they’re familiar with the former narrative as opposed to the latter. Making some sort of public announcement would not change the fact that anyone I meet is unlikely to perform anything other than a “stealth” misgendering.

In short, some sort of blanket, megaphone-assisted disclosure would do little to nothing to change the prevailing way I am misgendered and treated by society at large. In my specific case, the implication that it would is to imply that the way I live, without broad disclosure, is somehow inauthentic, incomplete, or inappropriate.

The ways that disclosure might change my social existence–and I assume this is at least partially what Lovely was trying to get at–is that more people who personally know me MIGHT begin to see me as “other-than-woman,” and MIGHT use my pronouns. I didn’t realize how much getting my pronouns made a difference in my comfort until I spent the summer with people who use my pronouns and then went back to work with people who don’t.

But: I know that even friends and acquaintances to whom I have disclosed fail to consistently see me as anything other than a woman, or to use my pronouns even after my continued insistence. I know that disclosure would mean being fired from my current job and possibly blackballed from my profession (teaching K-12) in a majority of states. I know that disclosure would mean immediate further rejection from a family who is already emotionally controlling and abusive, and currently working to accept my sexuality.

Given all this? Disclosure-at-large ain’t worth it. I weigh those risks and benefits and come out with–well, with what I’ve already been doing as far as (non-)disclosure.

All this description of my own situation and justification of my own choices of disclosure, by the way? are absolutely unnecessary. Nobody needs to justify, explain, or defend the choices they make surrounding disclosure. I’m doing so here mainly to highlight some contrasts in different experiences. (I don’t mean to claim my experience or Lovely’s as typical or representative of all or even most nonbinary or binary-aligned trans*/GNC people.) And perhaps I also do it because I have been stung to the point that I feel the need to protest, to protect myself and justify my choices against the prevailing bullshit of “outness-as-ideal.”

—

“I feel like you always want to tell me about these same problems,” Lovely said, by way of explaining where that text had come from.

The problems I happened to be sharing that day? The ways my experiences and struggles as “quietly” nonbinary are often ignored, minimized, or dismissed by binary-aligned trans* people.

Q.E. fucking D.

It really does hurt more when it comes from your own.