We are sitting on the jetty, a plate of perfect sunshine yellow watermelon slices between us. The plate is made from blueish-green glass spotted with bubbles, slightly uneven in a way which is supposed to suggest that it was made by an artisan, and each slice of watermelon is miraculously proportionate in relation to the …
Tag Archives: my experience
Beyond the Binary: Let’s Go To the Doctor!
A note about terminology in this post: Unfortunately, we’re forced to rely on the language of the kyriarchy when it comes to talking about gender identity and gender issues. The kyriarchy is pretty firmly convinced that people like me don’t exist, and if we did, we shouldn’t, which means that there’s not a lot of …
Beyond the Binary: Getting Dressed
This is a bit of a Western-centric entry in this series, because my experiences lie primarily in the West, where clothing is very much gendered. Thanks to the imposition of Western values on other societies, I think that gendered clothing is probably becoming more of an issue in places where it probably wasn’t in the …
Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are
“Tell all the Truth,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “but tell it slant.” It occurs to me, gentle readers, that I have not told my coming out story. And that is, in part, because my coming out story does not involve a grim talk around the dinner time, “father, I have something to tell you.” That’s because …
On Pasta
When we lived in Elk, we used to make a fair amount of pasta. My father would work in the woods a couple of days a week, but on other days we would putter around the house, working in the garden, cooking, and doing odds and ends. I remember making pasta vividly because we used …
Shaming and Blaming
Shaming and blaming are, of course, practically American pastimes, and they play right into each other in a tangled morass of “morals” which are wrapped around women’s bodies and minds from a very early age. Indeed, so deeply embedded are these things that even women who think of themselves as progressive buy into them on …
Beyond the Binary: Meeting People
When cis binary folks meet new people, they generally don’t need to think about the gendering issue. They might accidentally be misgendered because people have preconceived notions about what men and women look like, but they can correct the misgendering in a relatively straightforward way, and the person making the mistake will usually be very …
