'under a genderqueering microscope'

The more comfortable I get with my girlhood, after seriously striving to embody masculinity for almost a decade, the less able I am to describe it -- girlhood -- with any kind of precision: Well, a girl's a female-bodied person, unless she's male-bodied, and she likes dresses and pink unless she hates them and prefers skinned knees and tree climbing or none of the above or all. Well, it's clear, isn't it, that the girl's the softer one, right? Except I've stroked some pretty soft boys -- and met girls rocked hard like stone and the girls are the ones who cry right except when they don't and the boys do and I'm done with layering on description and definition: femininity likes frills and adornment and paint and frivolity up to and until and unless and and it digs its unpainted nails into thick rocky soil or, yes, knows perfectly well how to turn a phrase between a girl's or a boi's legs and sings its songs with abandon until and unless it remains silent.

There's no sure thing about femininity and masculinity for me anymore -- not about either except in the know-it-when-i-see-it sorts of ways and even that is all up for interpretation and assumption, those kinds of grabs. The things that say boys are strong and girls get carried have never seen me (or you, or him, or hir) carry a box of books wearing four-inch heels and who cares if its girl or not except

I do. I thicken into the femininity my stepfather wrought for me, the tough bitch smart broad high femme ball buster prima donna that he was always just the right man for: it's that last part, of course, that leaves me nauseous, that wrote me into boyhood, into all the masculinity I'd always already carried, all my life -- they just called it tomboy but I took it out of my back pocket, fluffed it out, slicked it on and called that leather jacket and jeans and boots and shorn shorn head strong and safe

girlhood was the stuff that smeared his palms and yes, greased his chin, and I wanted to get myself far away from the staining thing that I had been. I drove a straight sharp line down between butch and femme, masculine and feminine, girl and boy and always I meant to bend myself toward the unlayerable side, unbreakable side, unbroad side, ungirl side. 'Cause boy is always and only not girl, right? We can say that at least for sure,

right?

Not in the world I come from, the dancers I live within, who question every frilly tail-marker under a genderqueering microscope. Some boys will be boys and girls will be women but other girls stripe their butts with Marilyn Monroe panties and dance on the stage with barbells in each hand and some boys like to bend at the waist when they sob or lay open to the receiving they were never supposed to want and all the lists of what's feminine and what's masculine just ends up being make believe or stereotype for me now, jogging my memory around what the folks outside the Bay Area Bubble say is good for gooses and ganders. It's longing for play I frill into, glitter that doesn't stain the eye and a kind of strong-fisted handshake that makes a grown butch do a double take.

We make our own lists every day anyway, stripped around society's damage, and when we come back home now and again, the bois will be girls will be femmes will be right

"Real" Butch

(This is a part of a longer, ongoing work in progress about this transition from feminine straight girl to butch dyke to femme…)

I’ve been defending you a lot recently in ways I never would have back when I was you. You never used the term Real Butch, hated that essentializing, that narrowing of focus, that erasure of all the other queer possibilities of the masculine gendering the female flesh. Nowadays, now and again, I tell the ones who ask me, OK, yeah, I was a Real Butch.

They can’t hear the “but…”         but you do, I know it, I can feel you peeling behind my teeth, wanting to push out the whole story, wanting me to keep on telling it like it was—and is—how there’s no such goddamn thing as a real butch and butch is as ze says it is, whoever’s wearing the skin on that body, but we both know that’s always in question, right?

The truth is I’m still grateful to you for the ways you made me know I could be safe in the world and although just recently we, you and me, got told that we had a privileged coming out because there was the semblance of a community at school when I put 2 and 2 together and got gay and because I came out into a place where gayness was relatively acceptable—we both remember that there was not much safe about my life then and your hands had had to go places they were never meant to visit and you carried all the heavy boxes of our terror and you opened the doors for our future possibility – all the things, yes, that a goddamn real butch is supposed to do. You found a way to fit this me, now, into your curvature and flank, into your faggy footwork on the dance floor under the smoke machine’s smog and the one starry sad set of flashing red green and gold lights at the local bar.

And here’s what I want you to know now: I’m sorry we didn’t make it out any deeper before my plumage and finery found its way back out again, before the girl was made possible again and you had to slide that fine black leather motorcycle jacket off your shoulders for the last time – it just doesn’t fit now; I’d wear it for you if it could. But I mean, I’m sorry that we never found those bars, those old smoky hinges of solidarity where you could have shaped and strapped the hard gear of your masculine future, where you could have butted heads with other women willing to ride the hard truth of this existence; goddamnit, I mean I’m sorry you never got to be a real butch with other real butches, be looked upon as something or someone right not just novel or different or brave or odd or whatever. Not as just a shield, but as a real self.

I want you to know I believed in you and needed you in those years, and, of course, it’s not like I can’t feel how you shaped my walk, or how you get me in trouble still, assuming I can make eye contact with anyone on the street and have it be the right safe thing to do.

Here’s what I mean to say – that there’s never anything false about us when one identity shifts and slides into another. We both know that girl wasn’t a safe place to be all those years and you stepped up like a butch does and you made a handful of things a little safer. I know I’m not supposed to say these things: we spent so much time pulling up the roots of our history to find the nascent butch inside and just look, just look where we are now—