To A T

The weekend has arrived, or will at about 1:30 p.m. today. Catherine and I are going to a wedding in Massachusetts. Not our own, the wedding of a very good friend with whom we both once worked. She quit work a few years ago to go to Massachusetts in order to gather a Master’s degree and now works on a PhD in Sports Psychology. 

A couple of years prior to her stopping work she met the love of her life, a man who enjoys very often the wearing of “women’s” clothing. To be honest, I’m not sure exactly what that means. The range of human couture and fashion being such that if he wears a pair of slacks and a sweater, what makes it, exactly, a “women’s” pair of slacks and sweater. If he wears a scarf, what makes it a “women’s” scarf? 

Does the notion that the clothes might be bought in a department of Nordstrom that’s labelled “women’s” make all of the clothing there female? What if he’s bought the same items at Old Navy? Unlabelled would the clothes then become “androgynous?”

I think we all have this tendency to “gender” pretty much everything in our world: our bodies, our clothing, our habits of action or inaction, our animals, our trees, flowers, the very ground of Earth and the moon, stars and Sun. I cannot think, just this moment, what gender clouds and watches, necklaces, gourds, wreaths and penicillin happen to be. Perhaps some reader would be kind enough to let me know. A note would be fine, please just try not to show forth your disdain when you inform me. I sometimes have this space in my brain that shows itself when I consider gender and gendering.

Just grant me, please. some slack and, if you are truly generous, some slacks: 12P, in a hunter-green, if you don’t mind. Thank you. O, I suppose you’d better be sure to purchase them in a “women’s” department. I wouldn’t want you “deconstructing my gender” by purchasing the slacks at Old Navy or in a “men’s department.”

Gender stands, or perhaps sits, as an invisible, and also constantly visible, aspect of our lives. We cannot walk the street, attend the cinema or theater, ride a trolley or buy a gallon of milk at the grocery or convenience-store without someone, maybe everyone, gendering us. Often I think it’s very much akin to being “racialized” or, in the case of those with a mixed ethnic heritage, being wondered about racially. Just gotta place that label as an easy pathway to defining the person we don’t know, never will meet, or sit with across the dining-room table from.

When my son walks at his school to the bathroom, he’s ueber-sure to walk into “The Boys.” To do otherwise would be a huge social and, perhaps, even a moral, mistake for him that would haunt and embarrass him. This is a child who has been at the vortex of gender since he was three. He’s a child who struggles with the idea of “explaining” his three moms. I listened from the window yesterday as he attempted to nibble at the edges of that with his friend who lives two doors away, blissfully ignorant of Ian’s parental history.

He’s leery of his friends having the knowledge of his parental background as his previous experience of “telling all” didn’t work out particularly well for him. Thus, when he came in I suggested that he either not mention the fact of his parentage or allow, as the other child did, people to think their own thoughts and come to their own conclusions about how he gets three moms. The human mind, doncha know, fills it’s own vacuums. The guess proffered by his friend was complicated and didn’t include sex-changes as a means of explanation. It did include lesbianism. 

Of course that’s the other major concern of people: identifing the sexuality of a person. Neither Catherine nor I walk about with that ominous “lesbian” tattooed on our foreheads, sorry, that sort of tattoo is definitely not on the cards for us. But we watch, in our peaceful little village, the daily routines of “gendering.”

The way men will glance behind them when they hear steps to the rear at the WaWa and make a decision about holding open the door or allowing their pursuer to catch up and go first into the store. At the food-market when one pushes a full cart toward her car there are the occasional offers of help to push the cart to the car by the bag-boys or to do the same and load the car from the occasional man in the parking lot. “No thank you, I can manage, but that was really sweet of you to offer.” 

I’m simply not certain at all that one’s gender can be deconstructed, anymore than one’s humanity can be deconstructed. Our human-kind have lived so long socially with that distinction that it occurs to me that no matter how valiantly feminists of all-stripes make the attempt, no matter how acceptable androgyny or “cross-dressing” become that we’ll probably “label” people as what we perceive to be there.

A male or female “cross-dresser” or androgyne will be “identified” as the gender they appear to be, for the most part. Thus, my friend’s spouse-to-shortly-be will be seen as either “a man wearing women’s clothing” or as “a woman” when he garbs himself in the fashion of the Nordstrom “women’s department” and walks or jogs into the world outside his door. My friend, quite readily, identifies him as “male.” She’s not a lesbian, but neither is she prone to making some invidious comparison because of his “cross-dressing.” She loves him and over the past five or six years has deepened her feelings for him regardless of what he wears or how he’s perceived by others. 

I would imagine that his neighbors, not one of whom I have ever met — our friends come this way, we haven’t yet met them at their home in the three years they’ve lived in Massachusetts — probably just say or think, the guys down-the-street or the-guy-next door and his wife, lover, roommate, whatever. 

Thus, this idea: “I have no problem with someone deconstructing their own gender but the minute they try to do it to mine…….bang,” seems a bit overblown and a rather useless preoccupation to me. People will or will not de-construct my gender. I am more than well-aware of the fact they do not “de-construct” it without my giving them some idea of where I have come through my life. They apparently do not find me inhabituel or dissonant. 

 I believe it is with most of us: women or men, whatever our provenance. We are gendered by others and they pass along without any particular desire or imperative to “de-contruct” a damned thing about us. They simply notice, make that 2-second evaluation unconsciously, and go about their lives. The deeply embedded ability to “gender” seems so deeply embedded that most of us simply do not give it a conscious thought. We just do it like good little Nike mavens. 

Thus, to feel I am somehow beset by a group, or a world, of people who are busily de-constructing my gender simply doesn’t rise very high on my list of “things to worry about.” Until someone requires me to think about it, I don’t. OK, I’m a lax theoretical feminist I suppose. I’ll never go deeply, I imagine, into the matter like Judith Butler.  

Yet, here I go to a friend’s wedding who would be termed a “cross-dresser” by others. I have friends who are androgynous, female-spectrum and male-spectrum and who take much pleasure in simply being “hard-to-define.” It gives them comfort. It’s the way they choose to pass among the rest of us in this world. Do they enjoy the possibility that others wonder about them when they meet or pass each other on a road or street? Is there some kick they get from this?  Are they deconstructing my gender for me? I haven’t experienced that as being so.

Is there simply the matter that they feel somehow more complete when they are not easily defined, or defined one way and then another? I don’t know. Nor do I truly care. What I care about are their hearts and the way they touch me and I touch them. That seems to me to be the crux of any matter that pertains to ethnicity, gender-appearance, racial definition or political and religious identification. 

They do not diminsh me by their comfort. They quite enhance me through my inter-relatedness with them. Nor, have I yet while walking and talking with them publicly been somehow deconstructed by another as “not-woman” or “cross-dresser.” Thus, when it comes right down to the nub, I believe something far more surface-connected is at work among those who perceive a threat to their gendering by those who don’t fit neatly into our gendering social mores. 

It seems to me that there is much smoke, but not from fire in any way. The smoke is a product of wishing to hold a political or social principle that has been made from the whole cloth of our imaginative selves. We perceive threats to our validity or some wholesale search by the people we interact with for a deeper-text in our persons, in our comfort with being ourselves, simply because our imaginations and fears run unabated toward the Nightmare. 

I find the effort and the imagination to be rather unimportant, a figment that resembles a fever-dream that takes us in the night and frightens us. For our waking-realities are much differently lived than are our nightmares, no? Yet all-too-often we allow those nightmarish imaginings to guide the ways we live waking. As my thorny friend Lisa opined in yesterday’s comments: Most (people) live in dreams that never materialize but make for great inner movies that tug the emotions.

I find her take to be exactly the truth of my own reality, although I am not the “big picture” person she is. I am concerned with those little details of personality and fever-dreams of destruction and invalidity. For they affect, in the absolute most unusual and forceful ways, the big-picture we strive to make whole.

Fear and the wholesale adherence to to an “identity” that partakes of political, religious, theoretical ideology seldom seems either a rational or a compassionate and embracing way to travel to me. I suppose that is one reason that I claim to be a “feminist” with a small ‘f’ and concern myself more with moving into relationship and mutual interaction with others. Do I wish we could all do that more often in our lives. O, yes, it seems to me that we and they, the other, would be much more comfortable were we able to slough-off the ideological in favor of the relational imperative in our dealings with others. 

We make gods and goddesses in our own images, in our own ideological viewpoints, rather than in the azure air and the breathing wind, the fertile earth:

And in thy mind beauty,

                                         O, Artemis.

As to sin, they invented it, — eh?

                                               to implement domination

eh” largely.

                   There remains grumpiness,

                    malvagita

Sea, over roofs, but still the sea and the headland.

And in every woman, somewhere in the snarl is a tenderness.

                                                          A blue light under stars.

The ruined orchards, trees rotting, Empty frames at Limone.  

And for a little magnanimity somewhere,

And to know the share from the charge

                                         (scala altrui)  

God’s eye art ‘ou, do not surrender perception. 

                                                                              — Ezra Pound, Canto CXIII 

In our politics and our social concerns we surrender perception all of the time. We make dreams reality and tremble in the darkness of our own fears and imaginations. We define others as The Beast and avoid looking very deeply inside ourselves to check simply what is from what we loathe and harry without cause or reason. 

There’s a larger umbrella at work in our lives than Republican or Democrat, male or female, African or East Asian or European that we ignore to our peril. The larger umbrella is our own shared and vital humanity, the ability we have, as even the fearful realize on occasion, to mix and meld and feel the joy of interaction with those who believe differently yet bleed the same red-blood, cry the same briny tears and harbor the same desire for relational congress with other human beings. How trite and basically evil our small umbrellas can become: ways of allowing another to stand exposed to the rain and elements while we remain dry and sheltered. 

So, we will go now, you and I, Catherine, and witness a marriage between two people we love. We’ll laugh with them and meet new people we have never met before and feel the warm intersection of lives and habits, color and texture that is always the very basis of our lives. 

Our truest Goddesses do not arise in our minds. If we allow Them, they arise from the world outside us, granting us nature, urban, suburban and rural. That we strive to parse them like we parse sentences is to our great diminshment. As we view them whole and complete we see within them ourselves and all of those others: human, animal, vegetable and mineral who inhabit this universe, caught in Indra’s Net. 

I hope to write again on Tuesday, after we return from Massachusetts. But, you are, of course, allowed to read what’s already here in the meantime.

Have, all of you, a wonderful weekend and may Mother bless you and hold you always, as She does.