"The Irrelevance Of Gender"

When I was 17, I realized that I liked boys, too.

When I was 20, I decided I didn’t give a damn about gender.

When I was 23, I found out that it didn’t really matter anyway.

I grew up steeped in the humid ignorance of the Deep South, so it’s no surprise that the word “bisexual” is nowhere to be found in my 14-year-old vocabulary.  Oh, I’ve heard of fags and dykes, but those are words to be spat and hissed, like nigger, like whore, like cunt.  I shy away from these words, keep my head low, my eyes on the ground.

It is summer, all rain and slick heat, and my best friend has discovered boys.  I realize with some surprise that I’m not  jealous of her boyfriends in the usual possessive sort of way: no, I’m jealous of her boyfriends because they get to kiss her and I don’t.  This can’t be normal, I think to myself in the rare moments when I let myself think about it at all.

A furtive perusal of the library shelves reveals little, only a few thin dry volumes about homosexuality.  I slip them between more innocent books and hope the librarian won’t notice, hope no one will ask me what I’m reading this week.  At home, I devour the books late at night, and discover that I have only two options: I can be straight, or I can be a lesbian.  Ah, I think, straight girls don’t want to kiss their best friends, so I must be a lesbian. 

At least there’s a word for it, I think.  I try say it aloud one day, but the word tastes like dry paper in my mouth and I choke back into silence.

A scant handful of years pass by, and I find myself madly in love with a man.  I’ve had fleeting attractions to men before that, but I’ve never paid them much heed; I’ve learned about the Kinsey scale and figure those attractions are just small blips on my radar, things that don’t matter one way or another. A very nice theory, that, but it doesn’t do a damn thing to explain why I’m suddenly extremely interested in fucking a man.  I am, after all, a lesbian, damn it, and that means I like girls.   Doesn’t it?
With the assistance of an even-then-antiquated computer and a very sluggish modem, I encounter the internet, and a whole new world opens up: Discussion lists!  Newsgroups! Websites!  BBSes!  For a woefully sheltered teenager in a backwater town on the edge of the swamp, the internet is a revelation, an escape, an education. 

One afternoon, on a stark website in gray and black, I discover the word “bisexual.”  From there I find the venerable BIFEM-L listserv, a discussion list for bisexual women, and a handful of keystrokes later, I’m immersed in the virtual company of hundreds of other women who don’t fit neatly into the little boxes of heterosexuality and homosexuality.  Ah, I think to myself: I’m not crazy.  I’m not the only one.  There’s a word for this. 

Move forward another three years, and a few hundred miles north; I’ve gratefully abandoned my teenage years and the backwater town, as well my confusion over my identity.  I fall in love with people, I say, not bodies or genders or labels.   I sit in my apartment in the city and write about bisexual theory in carefully measured words, and on the weekends, I stare lustfully at my best friend when she’s not looking. 

My homophobic male partner hastily assures me that this is just a phase, that this will pass once I’m older and wiser.  Later that night, he tells me that I like cock far too much to be anything but straight, and I laugh in his face even as the words sting and crackle against my insecurities.  Eventually, I will leave him for another man, hurling bitter words about his delusions over my shoulder as I go.
And so now I have another male lover, despite my increasing certainty that I’m not cut out for heterosexuality.  Ah, but this time it’s different: this is a boy who likes boys, and obviously, he likes me too.  Another bisexual!  We giggle in bed, and I listen enviously to his stories of sex with boys, wondering yet again what it would be like to have sex with a girl.  In my journal, I write of his gentleness, his beauty, the way his long dark hair falls across my face. 

Barely a year later, this same boy wakes up one morning and announces his desire to become a woman.  I listen in not-so-stunned silence, nodding here and there.  In the afternoon, we sit at our computers, researching, adding a new lexicon of multi-syllabic words and phrases to our vocabulary: Transsexual.  Gender Identity Dysphoria. Sex Reassignment Surgery.  Real-Life Experience.  My head spins, but a small voice in the back of my head whispers that I’ve known this all along.

Within the space of a few months, my partner is living as a woman.  The neighbors are confused; friends and family shake their heads and express amazement we are still together.  They ask why I haven’t run from the relationship, ask how I could possibly stay in the face of such a change.
 
The truth, I say to them, is that if my partner had been a woman and not a man when we met, I still would have fallen just as madly in love.   I smile and remind the skeptics that I’ve never given a damn about the gender of my partners, and I offer up this relationship as the proof they’ve sought: this transition from male to female is my validation, my affirmation of the irrelevance of gender.

Copyright  © 2003 Kythryne Aisling. All rights reserved.

About The Essay:
The preceeding essay was originally published in The Fence: A New Place Of Power For Bisexual Women, Spring 2003.  For more information about The Fence, contact Cheryl Dobinson.

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