I’ve tried on a lot of labels over the years, but none of them have ever worked completely. Now it feels like the landscape is rapidly changing, with identity as the swiftly moving current of our time.
I’m sitting in the passenger seat while the car idles curbside at the train station. My son Aidan, home from Nashville for a few days, is in the driver’s seat fiddling with the radio volume.
“What’s this?” I say. “What are we listening to?”
“Tame Impala,” he says. “This is the new album just out.”
“I like it,” I say.
Trippy synthesizer music and sweet singing fills the car. I grab my makeup bag and pull down the sun visor to study my eyes in the mirror. Outside it’s a cold, bright and snowless February, with everyone on school vacation week leaving plenty of empty spaces in the lot. I fish around in my bag to find the eyeliner and mascara, pulling one out to draw on my lash line with the black pointy tip. I’m thinking about the conversation I had with my spouse Janyce the other day on the train.
“Let me run something by you,”she said, while we were sitting behind piles of our computers and backpacks strewn on the table, the train just starting to pull out from the station.
“We might all be asked to add our pronouns to our work emails, but I don’t want to do it,” she said. “I’m not going to say She/Her.”
“What are your options? Definitely not He/Him. They?” I said.
“The reason I don’t want to, is that none of them feel comfortable to me or really resonate either,” she said.
This is a subject we’ve talked about many times. Janyce has always scoffed at the trappings of conventional femininity—the clothing, the makeup, the shoes. Throughout the years, she’s made peace with some of this female signaling, at least until she didn’t. When I first met her, during those years when she was still married to a man, she wore dangly earrings and kept her hair long and curly. Over time, and now married to me, she has gravitated toward more and more masculine clothing, shorter hair, darker tattoos, bigger motorcycles, and larger upper arm muscles.
The New York Times published an article the other day about how Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government provides students with clear plastic stickers with four pronoun options. Students can apply them to a name card they place in front of them at the start of the class. This is so the instructor won’t automatically assume a person’s gender based only on appearances. The four options are: He/Him, She/Her, They/Them and Ze/Hir.
When we were talking on the train, I hadn’t yet read the article, so I didn’t know about Ze/Hir. I have to admit that I get a little bit of a thrill at the thought of “Hir” as a pronoun for Janyce. I can’t help but imagine Janyce in a uniform with a holster. I almost want to salute when I see this tiny word written out on a page, resembling the nomenclature of “Sir,” although I’m sad to discover that the correct pronunciation is actually with a long e sound like Heer.
“Hey, I see you have missed some of my blogs lately,” I say to my son while putting on my reading glasses to check if I got the eyeliner in the right spot.
“Yeah I know,” he says. “I gotta get to that.”
“Well, maybe you can read some while you are at the dentist this morning,” I say. I look over at my youngest son, a man now actually, sitting behind the wheel of my car, and I reach out to touch his long cone-shaped beard.
“I don’t know what to write about this week. What should I write about?” I say.
“Mom, I don’t know. It’s not even 8:00 am and I’m awake—on my vacation.”
“Yeah, you’re right, drink your coffee,” I say.
In my masters thesis, I argued for the compelling proof of lesbian identity for the nineteenth-century American feminist writer Margaret Fuller, despite the heterosexist assumptions that were relatively unchallenged within the Fuller scholarship at the time. But that was fifteen years ago now, and I can see how in some ways I conflated gender and sexuality. Thanks to conversations with my sons, and the many conversations I've had with younger staff in my jobs at universities, my own thinking has changed over the years.
I’ve watched Janyce’s thinking change, too, as she has searched for an identity that might encapsulate the fullness of her own lived experience. There is a difference, we have both surmised, between what it means to be transgender and what it means to be non-binary. Janyce would not consider herself transgender for the simple reason that she doesn’t wish to switch from one side of the binary to another, although the term can and does often describe people who see their identity as falling outside of the binary, too. But I think in her case, we've talked a lot about how “genderqueer” or “non-binary” are two labels that illustrate a gender identity that is not exclusively masculine or feminine.
“Janyce might be asked to add pronouns to the bottom of her email signature at work but she isn’t sure she wants to,” I say to my son as I’m applying mascara to my lashes. “Mostly because she doesn’t think any of them fit her.”
“There’s your blog post, right there,” he says.
As if on cue, a black jeep pulls up beside the car on his side. He rolls down the window at the same time Janyce rolls down her window in the jeep.
“Hey!” he says.
“Hey there Aidan, good to see you,” she says.
“Mom is talking to me about her blog,” he says.
“Better you than me, dude,” she says, as she looks in the rearview mirror at a car approaching from behind. “Let me guess, she doesn’t have anything to write about?” she says.
“Haha, well she has something now,” he says.
“Very funny, you two,” I say.
Bottom line, I think, is that Janyce and I agree that masculinity is not exclusively reserved for male bodies only. And femininity is not reserved for female bodies only. Fluidity is a term we both like to use because neither one of us feels wedded to a rigid sexual identity either. We’re not comfortable identifying as lesbians, not bisexual, not gay, and not straight either. Janyce went and complicated things even further by choosing to also not declare a pronoun.
“Does this look ok? I don’t have too much makeup on, do I?” I say to my son while fully facing him in the car.
“I think it looks okay,” he says.
“When you are my age, you lose eyelashes,” I say.
“Why don’t you go all out and get the false eyelashes look,” he says.
“Nah, that doesn’t feel like me,” I say. “A little too girly.”
“Too bad I couldn’t give you mine,” he says.
“You have always had beautiful long lashes,” I say, and reach over to look closer at his eyes. Back when both my boys were younger, they wanted to make sense of where I was standing by choosing female partners after their dad and I divorced, they wanted to know what my new identity was called.
I’ve tried on a lot of labels over the years, but none of them have ever worked completely. Now it feels like the landscape is rapidly changing, with identity as the swiftly moving current of our time.
Janyce has since parked the jeep and is standing outside at my side window. I roll it down and she bends in closer to talk to both of us.
“We’ve been sitting here talking about your pronoun problem, and I may have changed my mind.” I say. “It might send the wrong message if you don’t put anything there.”
“What do you mean?” says Janyce.
“Like, maybe it would signal that you are too conventional and don’t want any disruption of the binary, when what you really want to say is that you can’t identify with any of the current choices, you know?”
“I don’t know, Kris, maybe you are over thinking it,” she says. “And here comes our train.”
“What do you think? I say to Aidan while gathering up my backpack, my computer bag and zipping up my coat. “Would you just use He/His pronouns on your email?”
“Yeah, I would,” he says. “I mean, right now, I would.”
I use she/her pronouns on my email signature, less because I want people to know I identify as she/her, but more because I want people who identify as they/them to feel comfortable knowing that I accept who they are. If I had it my way, my true signature would be much longer.....”male in bed, male in kitchen, female with cars, female with cleaning....and whatever goes with identity.” Oh, and my favorite line in this article is from Aiden at the end!