(I also posted this in my blog, which you can find here: https://site.icarusprojectarchive.org/blog/ashley)

Today was a hard day. Nothing particularly bad happened, but it was just hard, living in my skin, feeling full of contradictions and paradoxes, trying to structure a day and a life and a mind and a body, making choices, moving through the hours, feeling grief, feeling loss, feeling the impossibility of perfection and the requirement to be patient with the changes as they come. Sometimes I would like to be smaller, and less honest, less real. But it hurts too much in the long run. So here I am.

A lot has been erupting out of me lately about gender and sex and control and fear. I got an e-mail today that triggered all kinds of old heartache and sinking stones in the stomach, and ended up writing a bunch of things down... this is an excerpt:

Wrong

There is a part of me that hates my gender. Because it is complicated and it does not fit. One friend told me once that I have a lot of "third gender energy." The statement made me feel this strange mix of love and hate, pride and abhorrence. Part of me loves being different. Part of me wants to just fit into someone's simpler paradigm so badly I could throw up. One thing is for sure: the parts do not agree.

I loved to wear dresses when I was 3, and felt bad about that when I was 20. Dykes were never supposed to have liked dresses. You should have been different from the beginning. You should have always known. You were not real if you passed.

I loved to wear boots and jeans and mud when I was 13. I loved to wear nothing when I was 18. I wanted to wear dresses again when I turned 21. But I had made my skirts into tablecloths and filled my drawers with men's underwear. Nothing fit. And I was supposed to be queer now, anyway.

I loved the way my freshly shaven head felt. I loved the way my hair once hung long down my back. I loved life, and hated all the rules that kept me from it. I hated the expressions on my mother's face when I came home from long absences, and she would assess my shoes, my clothes, my hair, for signs that I looked gay. I hate my hair. If it was growing out, she would be sure to tell me how nice it looked and beg me not to cut it again. If it was short, her reaction would depend on how drunk she was, and how late in the day I arrived. If it was evening, and she'd made her way through a bottle, the reaction was something like: "why do you have to make yourself look like a man" or "do you think anyone will ever actually find you attractive like that" or "I hope everyone thinks you had chemotherapy, and that's why you don't have any hair." If she was less drunk, or it was earlier, the reaction might be simpler: a contemptuous shake of the head, roll of the eyes, and a clucking of the tongue. Then silence.

I always felt like my gender was wrong. The women I dated would feel insecure if I wanted to wear rhinestones or a skirt. They loved some image of me, frozen in time, when I was lean and rough and capable. They did not like me to change. The men found me curious. My best friends -- who were usually straight males -- could tell me they loved me to pieces, and I was beautiful, but if I initiated anything resembling physical intimacy they quickly found some willowy straight girl with long hair and delicate wrists to start kissing. The boys were scared and intrigued by my hairy armpits and my boots in a way that made me feel like an exotic foreign object. The women wanted someone tougher, or less radical, or more sane. I felt too queer to be close friends with straight women, and too straight to be deeply connected to queer folks. I felt like I was wrong, in most situations, with most people, and if I could just get my gender and sexuality to be simpler than something would last.

I was very hurt, and very afraid. I tried to be less. I tried to be more like the rest of them.

It didn't work.

Sometimes I think the greatest disservice we can do to the world is to lie to ourselves.

**********

I would like to shave my head again and I don't want to deal with the reactions. I want to shave my head because it feels beautiful and clean and free. I don't want to explain. I don't want to walk into the places where I sometimes work, where there are white men in suits, and deal with the double-takes and the jokes. I don't want to go visit my father and have him try, very awkwardly, not to choke when he sees me. I don't want my aunt to show how progressive she is by pretending to like it. I just want to be beautiful, as I am. I just want to be o.k. A non-event. A fact. I don't want to be compared to Sinead O'Connor, G.I. Jane, or a cancer patient. I want to be me, with big eyes and a smile. Me, who can wear striped skirts, or dark pants, or dresses, or suits. Me who can change her name if she wants. Me who can choose her pronoun. Me, whose sexual identity does not need to be understood by men or women, by Christians or anarchists. Me who wishes people would read some more goddamn books and educate themselves about gender and sexual expression. Me who is actually fluid, who is not fixed, who is not settled in one identity, who does not fit in one category. Me who is not a disappointment, not a freak, not an outsider. Me who is not wrong. Me who is your neighbor, your daughter, your lover, your teacher, your friend. Me who is not bad. Me who is good, and kind, and loving, and tender, and heartbroken, and tough, and tired...