by Raven Kaldera

” ‘Sometimes,’ the woman speaker said to her rapt audience, ‘we just have to draw a line between male and female.’ Her sincerity was apparent. Everyone in the room could feel it. It made them trust her. It made me sick.

I knew I was going to have to stand up and challenge her, and I knew I could do it in one of any number of ways. I could tell her I have a medical condition (congenital adrenal hyperplasia), that I’m the sort of person they used to call a hermaphrodite back in the olden days (like the 1950s), but that now we call ourselves intersexuals. I could tell her that I was raised as a girl and now live socially as a man, that I’ve seen both sides of the line and know its transience, its fragility, its vagueness. I could order her to define male and female and man and woman and then tear down her definitions. I could argue with her on the field of reason, but I didn’t.

First of all, I knew her objections weren’t stemming from any reasonable space. She was scared, plain and simple. Scared of finding penises in her restroom and testosterone in her girlfriends and probably a lot of other things too. No matter what I said, I probably wouldn’t change her mind, because I wouldn’t be addressing her fears- fears that were, in a sense, reasonable. After all, we are advocating an entire renovation of the gender system. We may disagree on what it should look like, but we’re pretty much in favor of bringing on the drills and chisels. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise; it insults the intelligence of the frightened masses. Yes, what you fear is true. And you know what? You’ll live.

Second, I’m not just a medical condition. I’m a mythical beast. I know because when I was 10 years old, I found the word for what I am in a book of Greek myths and it said so. Two years later, when I hit puberty and grew breasts and facial hair, saw my hips spread and heard my voice crack, bled and got erect, I knew it was true. They said it was a myth, but here I am- a unicorn, a dragon, a monster, a piece of magic let loose on the world. Your reality gives ground before my undeniably solid presence. And I’m a heyoka, a sacred trickster, on top of it all.

So I grabbed the femme friend sitting next to me and hissed in an intense undertone, “Eyebrow pencil! I need eyebrow pencil! Now!” Coming from someone dressed as butchly as I was, it took her aback, and she fumbled through her purse as if I’d insisted that poison gas had been let loose in the building and I needed her lipstick to counteract its effects. She hurriedly handed me a brown stick, which I promptly used to draw a dotted line from my hairline to my chest. I’d have drawn farther, but I didn’t want to open my shirt and show off my hairy breasts just yet. Then I pulled my knife out of my pocket and walked up to the female speaker who was still holding forth on the value of women’s and men’s spaces.

She saw me, and her eyes widened. With that weird face paint and the knife, I suspect she took me for some kind of crazy coming to stab her. I indicated the dotted line drawn on my face. “Here’s your line,” I said. “Here’s your line between male and female.” Then I opened the knife and held it out to her, hilt first. “Put your money where your mouth is.”

She looked stricken, horrified, then turned and ran from the room. I don’t know what was actually going through her mind, but I know people took her aside later and told her about me, about who and what I am. I hope she got it. I hope she finally understood that whenever a line is drawn, it passes through someone’s flesh.”