Exploring the Expansiveness

When some labels deny something and others create space.

The metaphor:

Eight years ago, on January 20, 2017, I wrote a Facebook post with my resolutions for the first Trump administration: “For me, the work of the next four years is to learn to speak up with humanity and authenticity, point out what is not okay to me, and explain why.”

On the eve of the second Trump administration, I’ll try to follow my 30-year-old self’s resolution. Last Sunday, I was struck by the sermon at the Unitarian Universalist church I’ve started attending. It had a great metaphor about gender expansiveness that I immediately wanted to share here – but rather than simply paste the transcript, I’ll try to explain why.

The story:

I’m not the only middle schooler who went to an electrologist to remove dark facial hair. I knew that even at the time, because a popular girl from my class had the appointment before mine. I’d see her coming out of the building each week, her upper lip red and puffy. We avoided each others’ eyes as we passed.

It was set up like a dentist’s office: reclining chair, bright light, whirring tools. Electrolysis kills one hair at a time by inserting a needle into each hair follicle and electrocuting the root so it won’t grow again. I had sunglasses over my closed eyes and a squeezy ball in my sweaty hand. I’d flex my toes each time the machine beeped, announcing the next shock, and let them go slack again until the next beep. At the end of the hour, the technician would show me her left hand, where she’d deposited each hair removed from my upper lip onto the glove covering her pointer finger. Progress.

I’ve met women since then who don’t seem to harbor any shame or anger about it. They grew up standing at the bathroom sink with their mothers, applying bleach treatments. They refer to hair removal with offhand ease, an accepted inconvenience like wearing a bra or stockings.

That was not how I felt. I hadn’t even wanted to shave my legs and armpits, much less shock the hair out of my face. I was lucky that my parents could afford the treatment, once I asked, but I put off asking for as long as I could stand my classmates’ taunts.

I didn’t have many opinions about my appearance as a kid: my mom picked out my clothes through elementary school, bright patterned leggings and tunics with ruffles and long necklaces. I was glad to wear whatever seemed to make her happy. I didn’t think of clothes as a form of self-expression: that was what my personality was for. But I thought I should be able to leave my body how it was.

I was early to puberty, getting my period at 11, which all the “What’s Happening to My Body?”-style literature that appeared in the bathroom said was healthy, even beautiful. I didn’t see why the same wouldn’t apply to the hair that grew beneath my arms and above my mouth. I knew others felt it wasn’t feminine, it wasn’t what should happen to girls, but it was happening to me, and I felt this should correct the matter. If this was a girl’s body, wouldn’t anything it did be natural for girls?

I didn’t understand why “girl” seemed to have changed from a label describing me to a status I needed to work to achieve. I wanted to side with my body: I wanted to be whatever that was. I would wear anything they wanted, but let my body be.

In the fifth grade, I could hear kids snickering about the armpit hair made visible when I raised my hand in a sleeveless shirt. I ignored them. In the sixth grade, I made an AOL Instant Messenger screen name, and started getting messages from handles I didn’t know to mock my face and legs. They called me “monkey” and “man,” meant to be equally insulting for someone supposed to be a girl. I started to feel like people were talking about me everywhere I went, started to avoid eye contact. I stopped being able to use my personality for self-expression, stopped offering my silly jokes. I made it through much of the year, determined not to sell myself out. Close to the end, I wrote a letter to my future self. “I hope you don’t do it,” I remember writing. “I know there’s a lot of pressure, but you know who you are.”

All this is to say that shaving and electrolysis are forms of gender-affirming care, but when I used them, it wasn’t in the glory of aligning my appearance with my identity. It was in defeat. When I finally buckled, I was desperate to become acceptable in the eyes of others, to crawl out of the white-hot spotlight of non-conformity. The gender wasn’t mine, and neither was the affirmation.

There was lots of affirmation, though. The day after I first shaved my legs, a classmate I didn’t know stopped me in the hallway. “Gwen! Your legs!” she said at full volume, pointing. “I’m so proud of you!” It felt like a confirmation of my worst fears, that even more people than I’d realized had been monitoring my body. As my dark hair disappeared, so did the disapproval, and school shifted back from a place where every laugh seemed at my expense to a place where I could bring my personality again. I got electrolysis throughout the seventh grade, motivated in part by the shame that I’d called the boy I liked to ask him out and he’d said no, then laughed about it with his friends. In eighth grade, that boy asked me out, and we dated for a year, going to the movies and the mall dressed in Abercrombie sweaters. Meanwhile, I did sports, school plays, math team, the school newspaper, the literary magazine. Suddenly, I could go anywhere.

For a few years, I was just relieved and giddy. My peers’ approval was worth the pain of the procedures, the cost of low-slung pants and tight, thin tops that girls wore in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. The time I spent blow drying my hair was the warmest I would be all day, but I had learned how to endure discomfort. By high school, though, I started to get angry about not having more options. I resented using my prime experimentation years to get good at giving others what they wanted instead of finding what I liked.

Last Sunday, Unitarian Universalist minister Eileen Casey-Campbell visited my church and gave an incredible sermon about gender. She shared a metaphor that spoke to the feeling of limited options I felt growing up, and to the broader understanding I’ve come to hold. First, she invoked a narrow coffee service where the “options are really just cream or sugar or black…What do you choose? Maybe you know right away, because it's what you always choose. Maybe you have to think it over a little bit. Maybe you're going to decline altogether because none of those sound great for you.”

Then, she described the enormous menu of a local coffeeshop. “There's flavorings and sweeteners, syrups and nut milks, all manner of hot and cold preparation and not just coffee, now there's tea and juice and maybe even some pastries on offer…Now what do you choose? Maybe it's the same thing, but maybe it got more complicated.” I loved the way this metaphor makes sense of possibilities so big that they’re a little overwhelming: “Maybe you never wanted coffee at all, but you'll take a matcha tea if it's up there.” There are options you’ve never tried, so it takes some experimentation, and even after you’ve found what’s working, new options keep coming, so you’re never done.

Someone with my same experience could’ve chosen to embrace their assigned gender, could’ve found it empowering to redefine what a woman can do and be and look like. For me, though, within the past decade, I learned that “non-binary” was an option, and it felt right. I didn’t have to endorse gender in any way, but I didn’t have to hold onto my anger and resentment, either. Being non-binary felt like a gentle protest vote against the arbitrary narrowness of gendered expectations – and the excruciating blunt force with which those expectations are enforced. I could finally side with my body without squaring off against others’.

Still, I avoid explaining this to new people. It feels dramatic, self-important, semantic. It’s always gone well, but I still dread having to explain new concepts, still don’t want to ask for special favors. That’s not how I feel about other people’s gender, but it makes me hold back about mine. “I’ll just wait until it comes up to tell them,” I think, and then a few years go by, and it never seems to come up. “It doesn’t really matter,” I think, but then again, I know I’d want loved ones to tell me if they had something like this on their mind. So, sometimes I push myself to tell someone, and afterwards, I suddenly find it easier to tell them anything – like somehow, the topic that never seemed to come up is now related to everything.

I hope you’ll listen to or read Rev. Casey-Campbell’s full remarks. When I hesitate to tell someone that I’m non-binary, her sermon covers everything I wish the other person knew. But beyond my own experience, I love the way her framing speaks to the way more options makes life better for all of us. “Most of us, though never all, can fit ourselves into the choices available to us, but when we have the freedom to expand, we usually do. We find that we're infinitely more complex than expected when we're allowed to be.”

Tomorrow, Trump takes office for the second time, following a victory won in part by demonizing people who can’t or won’t conform to narrow gender roles. Last week at church, I was so grateful to go beyond reacting to the cruelty of this power grab and reconnect to the beauty of humanity, our own and each other’s. The sermon had wonder, reverence, gratitude, and joy; I breathed deeply when I heard it, I felt curiosity and hope. I imagine the new administration will give me plenty of opportunities to speak up about what’s not okay – but I want to do it in a way that seeks connection, not retribution. I want to keep finding the courage to share.

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