gender me

Boys Own

Of course I wished I was a boy. Boys were just better.

As in comics, which we weren’t allowed, with all the best jokes, fights and adventures, the climbing and effort and brains and muscles and planning skills and trap-setting and clever escapes and knowledge about machines and the military and how things worked and how to make things, all the winning of prizes, winning of girls, pushing aside of girls, laughing and sneering at girls, picking of no more than one honorary girl—an exceptionally funny, naughty or useful one—to join the gang.

As in slapdash loud voices and careless wearing of haircuts, shabby old shorts and jumpers to go outside to play, running out with a sandwich, guzzling it while kicking a football about, not having to tell mothers where they were going, not having to greet or talk to anyone, it being normal to ignore girls except when instructing how to play boys’ games, expecting them to prefer watching, on the sidelines.

As in yelling Is it teatime yet? at their mum, not having to help bring plates of biscuits out or lay the table, being allowed to stay outside on their bikes until the last minute, or stay in their own room dabbing tiny glue blobs and dainty paint markings onto Airfix model planes until tea was ready, all the womenfolk sitting ready and only then crashing their way downstairs with a righteously preoccupied air, seconds before their father appeared at the head of the table.

As in being believed. Not being assumed to be liars. As in, when their father asked them directly if they’d taken something that wasn’t theirs from a house where they’d spent the summer, where absent girls had put their special toys into high-up cupboards to indicate that those toys—not placed among others in the playroom—were out of bounds, where something had been said via those girls’ mother who didn’t want to make a fuss, but just to be clear, the boys hadn’t taken anything that wasn’t theirs had they? And these boys only had to stand squarely, looking into their father’s eyes, to say no, clearly and firmly, and at that point, obvious to everyone, they had told the truth.

As in the established order of things: even if little boys were whining leg-huggers now, they’d be fully expected to grow up into gods. Little girls might be observant or witty but no one paid any attention to them. They were irrelevant. Big girls were responsible for everyone, although they weren’t important either, except for when they had to replace a mother. And then only until all the boys grew up, at which point they faded back into the background.

As in big boys best and girls always lesser—should therefore also be smaller. Our big bodies, my sister’s and mine, bothered us for years. Then we stopped caring.

As in, live long enough and things will change. Or they might. Or I might.

vivian thonger

o

28 days

after Bracha Ettinger

1. wolf whistles cat calls
don’t act so hoity toity Sweetheart
you love it

2. come here and let me hug you
did I bruise you? I lost it that time
go mimi
I’ll make you a coffee

3. whenever a ‘person’
rapes another ‘person’ who then seeks an abortion
and goes bleeding to a hospital
‘they’ can be asked ‘did you do something
to yourself?’ and next thing
it’s the police

4. four places i know of
within walking distance of my house
– two survived two died

5. in your account of the resources
we each brought to this relationship
how do you rate my 14 week miscarriage?

6. i ask her why she’s attending
she replies:
because he won’t learn English
to get work
i’m to abandon my ECE degree
and go back to the factory
–so she’s asking our MP
she’s asking me
i expect she’s asking everybody

7. here with you
herewith
my soft word that turneth away wrath
strangely it’s your faces i don’t remember
though i precisely recall wounds i’ve tended

8. he is encouraged
to conceal his femen gift
in chest injected migrating silicone
castration surgery
infertility
denial of climax
and lifelong hormone ingestion
causing accelerated bone thinning
–because that’s the packaging
in which patriarchy has determined
his gift
shall be presented

9. but if he lowered his ego boundaries
to embrace his femen
what might a femme-male become?

10. though if he risks it
watch how the patriarchy
goes
after
him
Jesus of Nazareth for one
–then there’s Michelangelo Shakespeare
Tchaikovsky
Alan Turing John Mulgan
…we should go on

1l. to protect femen
from hostile heterosexual males
i advocate for the addition of sex-neutral
open entry weight class sport
and the installation of private
secure-haven changing & bathrooms
open to anybody
so ensuring
women’s protective & support resources
remain accessible only to us

12. Girls
if you’re wary about getting on that bus
there’s supposed to be another one coming
in half an hour

13. celebrate Queens
and the potent history of their theatrics
because drag-artists expose
manipulative femininity-as-fetish
in all its masquerade
of patriarchally imposed
subjective constituents

14. and i don’t object
to who wears whatever for pantomime
or library story-time
but i do not suspend my disbelief
if the performance claims any-body
can change sex

15. like us insist on wearing whatever you like
go on dress femme: dress homme
or a mix of them
–this scarf’s tied round my waist as martial art

16. in the bush by the path
at the back of the New Plymouth
Bowl of Brooklands
a stranger-male
groped
my genitals

17. aged ten
my mother and father
didn’t report it: too embarrassing

18. i want to embrace you
but then we can’t get to sleep
so back to back–though my arms ache

19. I’ll take care of the kids
stay here and rest
then you should go out
Yes!–to Australia if you wish

20. statistically it’s from heterosexual males
that femen are most at risk
as are we women
–but it’s not a competition

21. in all the ways they act
like us
femen by their very existence
pose a threat
to patriarchal male privilege

22. woken on a night train in Germany
by a stranger-male
with his finger
slid in me

23. as we’re forming from her entrails
in late pre-birth
we become sub-subconsciously aware
of the unknown becoming m/Other’s
compassionate hospitality
towards us
and from her besidedness
in each of us there evolves
a spontaneous capacity
to treat the unknown other
as more important than the self
–with women having a redoubled expectation
of the impossibility of not sharing
because regardless of whether we ever give birth¬
we intuit our potential for pro/creative generosity
metaphysically
in every menstruation
an aptitude that carries no sense of superiority
since traumatising

24. at a late night bus stop
he creeps close-up
and at my
fright
the stranger-male
uproariously laughs

25. anthropology
says men are circumcised
and inked
to try to establish that like women
they too can bleed
yet live

26. my take is
that courtesy of his unknown becoming m/Other
a femen is the recipient
in late pre-birth
of a superabundant
intrauterine
saturation in
compassionate hospitality
which post-birth distinguishes him
with an enhanced disposition
–he could tune out–
to treat the unknown-other
as more important than the self
his mien read by those he encounters
as offering bioethical resistance to his male privilege
so until or unless patriarchy can symbolically relegate him
to the fetishized subordinate sex-class of women
a femen will be unmercifully persecuted

27. as i changed my tampon
in that public park lavatory
through the louvre window
a couple of teenage stranger-males
stood up on their bikes to jeer at me…jealousy

28. right well we know
what femen go through
because patriarchy’s seen to it
that all of it’s been done first up
to us
but when will the day come? that femen
qua takatāpui
get recognized as inspirational
by all men
–how things stand?
never
going
to happen

janet charman

o

turnstile

o

One half of a conversation I may have had the other day with 
                                               a young professional cisgender woman...

Isn’t it simple? Gender only matters in the arenas of desire and procreation.

No, it’s not my naivety speaking! I admit I was being provocative. Let me rephrase: surely gender should only matter in the arenas of desire, procreation and perhaps health. Of course humans are never simple and it’s all been cock-eyed for so long now that illuminating the absurdity of our social narratives is very challenging.

Thank you. I thought ‘cock-eyed’ was a good pun, too.

An example? Well, I never wanted to be a woman.

Nope, never wanted to be a man, either. I kinda liked the androgeny of the child-body—it behaved predictably. Never had to think about it much—had to keep it clean, fed, clothed and rested, and that was it. My head had room for the simple joys of movement and play. But then my body had rounded into a new shape that jiggled and attracted eyes to places other than my eyes. And this is where the absurdity happened.

The absurdity of navigating my Woman-Body through World-that-Watches! My value as a woman depended on my ability to attract a man. I wanted an Italian man to pinch my bum. I didn’t want anyone to pinch my bum. I wanted to fade from view. I wanted someone to see me. I wanted someone to see me. 
          Fading was easier by far. Hunger was more bearable than the weight of flesh. I became skilled at eating small. By twenty, my body occupied far more space in the mirror than it did in reality. My personality faded, too, into a reflection of the person I felt the World-that-Watches wanted me to be.
           My self-erasure ceased over time and I worked hard to get the Jac back. But, even now, decades later, I don’t know what I look like—all mirrors still behave like they would in a funhouse. The only realistic shape of me in my head is that which is drawn by my partner’s hands on my body.
           Absurd, as I said.

I hear you—you’re saying the world has changed. You say you have equal rights by law. You say you’re on equal pay. You say you never had to sleep with the boss. You say you’ve reclaimed that word I still find difficult to say. You even say you’ve never suffered for being a woman. I say you have, but it’s all harder to see now. I say women are still seen as less. I say women are still told how to look and how to behave, within narrow parameters. I say women are still all-too-easily blamed for the actions of others. I say you may have equal rights but do you have equal respect?

I know I sound angry but it’s sadness I’m feeling. I have no answers, and even if I did, language is a huge part of the problem.

I have to leave too, but yes, I’d love to continue this conversation later. Coffee again next week?

jac jenkins

o

past lives

1.
you are ashamed of your past
the way it beats against the window
like a baffled moth

but sometimes a family says
'it is time to remember'

and then sometimes we are standing round a wishing well
or a sunset
a broken piano 
a father’s grave

sometimes there are blackbirds
and a gun to our heads

2.
Your mum has excavated attic treasure

a box-rattle of VHS
labels blacked with sharpie

time taped over memory
over time

you startle to life with a mechanical churn

3.
this is you,
red rain jacket at the duckpond
mammy mammy mammy
the camera doesn’t answer
so you start to cry
bread crusts smashed in your small fist

this is you,
graceless ballet rehearsal, hair scraped tight
half-beat out and concentrating hard in the mirror
a curl escapes
wafts across your left ear

this is you,
babbling monologue punctuated by Barbie
who you point like a finger
plastic pudenda bared
arms peeking above the hem of her inverted skirts
drowned in pink taffeta

4.
this is you
stuttering through time
your face disappearing in 
a gash of hum and static

5.
was the colour grade different in the nineties
or has the tape decayed?
washed blue in the sun
like an op shop Van Gogh

you wonder how you’re supposed to know the difference

6.
the polyester base is very stable 
chemical degradation is not an issue 
under normal storage conditions.

7.
you wonder what constitutes normal storage conditions

8.
you look just like she did at your age

dani yourukova

o

the ring of hair

His eyes gaze at her future in the light of his past. You’d think that two cannot become one (or one two), but you’d be mistaken. So it is when the company of soldiers, lumbering over the mountain pass from village to village, encounters young women in each place. The women form an excited phalanx as the jaded men approach their genkans (玄関). One among them, the 12-year-old daughter of a geisha, displays on her finger a gold band set with an opal that matches the pallor of her young skin. At the onsen (温泉), the narrator’s eyes expand in fan-like astonishment at her disinhibition, while a short distance away three adult geishas, ‘in the little pavilion in the forest’, flash their fans in order to retain composure while warding off hovering dragonflies. Whether a cherished opal risks being tarnished in bathwater, or the opals of our eyes are quickly beguiled in the presence of spied treasure, we are bound to gape at the ‘cleft-peach coiffures’ of the women who gather in large number at the hairdresser’s house—their snipped black hair tumbling nonchalantly into mounds on the otherwise bare timber floor, surrendering proprietary. One in one out.[i]

john geraets

[i] The two pieces are based on Yasunari Kawabata’s Palm-of-the-Hand Stories, Charles E. Tuttle Company, Tokyo (1958). See johngeraets.com/cubist-turnstile.