“Who was I now – woman or man? That question could never be answered so long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked.”
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
When I was a kid I collected grasshoppers. There was a wide open field next to our house, with scratchy pale grass that grew to the thigh. Creeks crisscrossed the horizon and roly-polies dotted the earth. I would run through the grass, causing the grasshoppers to jump, a pizzicato of insects leaping from a photosynthetic sea. I had a special interest in insects; autie changeling kid collecting bugs to impress the fae queen. My ant farm didn’t develop too well and beetles were hard to come by, but grasshoppers? They flit through the sky, a million buzzing stars clouding the atmosphere like a stellar nursery.
Grasshoppers are hemimetabolous insects, meaning that they undergo partial, successive transformations rather than the complete metamorphosis of caterpillars and butterflies. Grasshoppers go through five to six moltings before their wings are functional, with each molting increasing the size of the wing buds. As they develop they learn to stridulate, strumming across their back legs to stim and sing, their songs forming the acoustic aether of grasshopper life and the melodic background of reproduction. Stridulation is mostly associated with attempts by males to attract females, but this is not the only form of stridulation. Female grasshoppers also stridulate and grasshopper stridulation doesn’t solely communicate reproductive desire, but instead forms a complex web of individual and group communication, relaying facts about grasshopper society and the well-being of each grasshopper. Grasshoppers use their bodies to sing and form communities through song, nature’s queer chorus.
Too often we think of the trans experience in cis terms. “If only I were born a (cis) boy.” “If only I were born a (cis) girl.” This framing presupposes cisheterosexist distinctions, calling upon the mythology of patriarchy before we even begin telling our story. Boy or girl? If that’s the question, then there is no answer, no path through which to escape. I don’t wish to think in cis terms or heterosexual terms or sexist terms. I wish to think in queer terms, from queer frames or queer framelessness. For me, this requires starting from gender euphoria rather than dysphoria – not what I disavow, but the direction which my body leans in. To whom and to where am I oriented? What histories am I a part of, what undercurrents? What futures do I wish to build, what utopias?
Something interesting arises when I start from gender euphoria and the acceptance of transness. Whenever I imagine my “other” self – the self who best approximates my interior gender image, my euphoric vision – that imagined self is still trans. In a phantasmic other history, I was a tomboy – a girl who rejected conventional Southern womanhood and played in the grass with the bugs instead. Autie changeling girl digging for worms in the mud. That tomboy discovered she was a lesbian in junior high and soon became butch, mimicking emo superstars to get at something approximating androgyny. Later on, she would identify as nonbinary and use she/they pronouns. They would probably wear a packer and binder. She’d have a complicated relationship to their body. This image and me are not meaningfully different, except in our sex assigned at birth. But, even then, we are both seeking to approximate the other. I am her “other” self, their interior gender image, her euphoric vision, and they are mine.
I’ve never had much of a relationship to manhood. As a child, I would sing Shania Twain’s “I Feel Like a Woman” and twirl around with a fairy wand, much to the dismay of my grandparents. However, I’d also dress up as Batman and get wildly dirty playing in puddles and creeks and forests. Gender signifiers meant nothing to me. All I knew were these were the things that brought me joy, if “knowing” is even necessary there – perhaps just “joying,” “to joy,” as a verb. My heroes were kids going on adventures in the wilderness: Ash from Pokemon and Link from The Legend of Zelda. What I cared about was designing my own games and writing my own stories and collecting grasshoppers and lightnin’ bugs and roly polies. I cared about my cats and my failed ant farm and my books, about the scratchy grass and the mulberries and the magnolia trees and the creeks. Though feminist theorists are right to say that gender permeates everything, that the patriarchy will use even childhood joys and the natural features of the world to enforce binary divisions, there is also a sense in which joy wanders away from the constraints of gender, in which the euphoria of becoming shimmers through the clouds.
Like most trans people, I’ve gone through many transformations, many wanderings into the wilderness. These moltings, these transitions, are unlikely to ever be complete, to arrive at a final form. There is no point at which I cocoon, going from caterpillar to butterfly. Like with grasshoppers, stridulation, the queer chorus, isn’t an end-goal, but something learned and manifested over time, in each transformation. Through transitioning, through changing my name and pronouns, through playing with gender signifiers and expressing queer sexuality, I stridulate, echoing out to the other grasshoppers. The acoustic aether of my genderlife is composed of the overlapping and interweaving histories and futures of queer rebellion and queer community, glimpses and fragments of a world outside patriarchy, outside the grinding machinery of Leviathan.
I identify as butch. Like Leslie Feinberg, I consider myself one of the he-shes, not quite a woman but certainly not a man. A nonbinary tomboy, a masc transfem genderfucker, the smell of burning oak. A place of both compassion and resistance, defense and offense against a fascist system that seeks to extinguish queer life and queer joy. I feel the most comfortable in the lesbian community and within lesbian histories, though my place there is still marginal, still vibrating on the edges. The grass is still scratchy, though the geography has shifted; I have to keep moving to keep the mosquitos at bay. The queer chorus will always contain moments of uncertainty, echoes that bounce off leaves and warp out into the sky, never making it to the soil. I may never fully belong anywhere, though I can find parts of myself scattered through past, present, and future worlds, a genealogy of stridulation. What matters is to keep transforming, to look towards euphoria, and to not submit to a question posed in cis and heterosexual terms. The point is change, is following joy. And from there on into utopia.
ash. She/They.
“Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught.”
Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation
Further Reading
- S. Bear Bergman, Butch is a Noun
- Lily Burana & Roxxie Linnea Due, Dagger: On Butch Women
- Ivan Coyote, Tomboy Survival Guide
- Ivan Coyote & Zena Sharman, Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme
- Laura Kate Dale, Gender Euphoria: Stories of Joy from Trans, Non-Binary, and Intersex Writers
- I.M. Epstein, On Butch and Femme: Compiled Readings
- Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue
- Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
- Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity
- Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader
Image: Grasshopper and Iris, Katsushika Hokusai (1820s)
Fish In the Afternoon 