Today I mused over gender-descriptive words with a fellow non-binary coworker.

“I’m a hard femme or hard butch,” they profess. “Never in the middle; I’m either on one side or the other.”

Sides. We choose sides.

“Yeah, I say I’m feminine, but what does that mean, anyway?” I rebut myself.

And then the semantic deconstruction: Well, female this and feminine that, — but they’re not inherently linked! — I use the words everyone uses ‘cause I have to — And there’s the problem, nobody has the same definitions — SOCIETAL CONSTRUCTION — masculine, opening up the legs, “manspread,” “mansplain…” — ”womansplain?” — ”man-splaying”…

It’s a slippery slope. My coworker executes a cross-cultural analysis of gender-throughout-history while I scribble my mind’s brilliant cacophony upon the yellow sticky notes kept under our cash register — which I know are not supplied by Sur La Table to become my kindling for the Gender Revolution, but I don’t give a damn.

This issue is simple, but the reverberations are complex, and, for me, a little depressing: feminine and masculine mean nothing. Not intrinsically. So many of us know this already. The fact of the matter is, feminine and masculine are both words that refer to sets of qualities and behaviors. These are codified sets of qualities — very rigid and immutable in the cultural consciousness — but they are arbitrary collections of qualities nonetheless. Everyone possesses feminine and masculine qualities; and yet, we still call one quality — say, of speaking loudly and with authority — masculine and another — speaking softly, let’s say — feminine. And there is no middle ground. It’s an ideology of opposition; an ideology of war. “I’m either on one side or the other.”

As a transfeminine person (SEE?!! Look at that!! I do it!!! UGH.) — no, as a non-binary genderfluid person (Aaaaack but how do you know that I never fluidly shift to the identity of a man or an extremely masculine, butch kind of thing?!!) — non-binary, um, genderfluid person who fluctuates between boi and woman/girl and sticks mostly in the non-binary transfemme (if you wanna call that) boat where I feel like a witch sometimes and a very non-exciting person other times…

God. A mouthful. A brainful. A heartful, a soulful. …

How the hell do we break this binary of masculine/feminine? How do I, as a non-binary person, stop giving power to the masculine/feminine binary by describing myself according to its terms? Can I, even?

This is where the musings have taken us. (If I am anything, I am a dreamer.)

Imagine:

It’s raining. Hard. MASCULINE and FEMININE are umbrellas, side by side, floating handlessly above the pavement. In the sickly lamplight, you make out that the MASCULINE umbrella is blue and the FEMININE is red. (See? Already arbitrary.) The pouring rain cascades down their surfaces, wicking off their edges to splash on the ground. But beneath the umbrellas, dry and safe, illuminated in lamplight, are the two Lists: the two lists of words, on long scrolls, that are the Qualities attributed to MASCULINE and FEMININE, the magic floating umbrellas. Underneath MASCULINE, shining there, a litany of words like “aggressive, commanding, confident, wise, straightforward, cool, comtemplative…” and underneath FEMININE reads, “Gentle, nurturing, ditzy, emotional, peaceful, elegant…” (Yes, geniuses, it’s the chain of signifiers transposed onto an overly-detailed description of enchanted umbrellas. But wait, look:)

I’m standing in the wet. I need to be dry. My only options, I can see in the yellow light, are the MASCULINE and FEMININE umbrellas. No choice. I scurry under the one I decide I hate least.

Out of this stormy weather and scarcity of umbrellas comes a popular joke among non-binary Tumblr users, “Gender of the Day.” I see a thing, say a half-deflated mylar “Happy 50th!” balloon tangled up in a telephone tower and wiggling limply in the wind, and I feel a strong resonance deep within my non-binary belly, and I say, “Yep, that’s my gender today. (#GenderoftheDay)”

Often, it’s self-deprecating. Always, it’s a joke. We laugh, and we acknowledge that it’s silly to say our genders are loaves of bread, or washing machines, or one of the Sanderson Sisters. Still, the joke is the fruit of a seed of non-binary pain: I am — we are — so desperate to cogently identify ourselves and to find empathetic validation outside of ourselves that we form small, silly, and fleeting relationships with objects.

Of course, all people — cis and trans alike — experience these daily identity crises. That’s evidenced by the more mainstream “it(‘s) me,” an anybody-phrase that tethers the speaker to an external object of emotional identification (like a sleepy puppy, for instance). The difference is that, for the genderqueer or non-binary Gender-of-the-Day-er, the identification is not just about emotional expression and description; it is, more deeply, about asserting autonomy over my own body’s meaning. It is actually about (re)constructing my body’s meaning, which was constructed for me at my birth without my input.

I invite you to revisit the magic floating umbrellas of MASCULINE and FEMININE. The pummeling rain. The lamplight. The scrolls. Suddenly, another streetlamp flickers on. Another pair of umbrellas is there, pink and green: THREE-STORY BONFIRE and ARTISANAL MUD PIE. They have lists of qualities underneath them too. “Raging, bright, dynamic, crackling, dangerous, wide, alert…;” “Deep, earthy, soothing, raw, honest, disheveled…”

They are lists just as incomplete as the ones for MASCULINE and FEMININE. They are lists just as subjective and descriptive. When applied to human beings, the lists are just as arbitrary. And, the lists, the labels, are just as much jokes.

More lamplights flicker on. It’s a whole arena. The rain is pounding. I can one under one, and I become ala-asparagus today: tough, fibrous, green, crisp, … the traces of me stick with you long after we’ve met face to face. Yesterday, I took shelter as dust-bunnyine: sneaky, blowing in the wind, hiding, small, a little sad, sleepy, lazy…

Is this some sick joke? Maybe. But is calling myself “dust-bunnyine” and “ala-asparagus” just a ridiculous as calling myself “masculine” or “feminine”? Any way, I am call upon the word and the image to conjure up a bunch of arbitrarily conjugated qualities to define me.

We all need that definition. And, more fundamentally, based upon how our world is structured, we all need a gender — even if that gender is a blatant denial of gender altogether.

What I do not need, and rather, what I wish to extinguish, is my reliance upon the masculine/feminine binary to define who I am as a non-binary folk. I mean, how utterly counter-intuitive! To define a non-binary experience in binary terms!

I want the shift to be threatening. I want it to be destabilizing. So, how? Do we build a new descriptor, a word to rival masculine and feminine, to infiltrate the binary and create a trinary? Do we destabilize the nature of the binary words themselves, by messing with the definitions, the chains of signifiers (including the arbitrarily sexed and gendered bodies) underneath them? Or do we build a sense of gender that transcends masculine & feminine by embracing our Genders of the Day with sincerity, play, and childlike wonder? — All? —None? —

… To be continued, and continued, and continued.

My name is Jordan. I am a non-binary individual. I am an artist and theater maker. I am developing a capstone project to round out my time at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee as a student of Contemporary Theater.

Today I met with teacher and mentor Mark Krawczyk, who, over coffee and life talk, counseled me on my project. We came up with this graphic:

That triangle in the center is my personal Trinity of sorts. (The Catholic imagery is gonna be interspersed throughout. Fellow post-Catholics in particular: You’re welcome.) The points: NON-BINARY, CLOWNING/BUFFOONERY, and LINKLATER. These three points coalesce as my points of inquiry, investigation, and focus for now until the end of my Fall semester. All of these ideas and processes have resonated with me in my past three years at Conservatory. They balance solidly upon the central player in this process: MYSELF, as both an artist and a human being, in complete authenticity and vulnerability.

To ask questions is my supreme goal in this work. It’s work of self-discovery. It’s work of removing blocks (Linklater); exploring the endless facets of being non-binary (in collaboration with another non-binary performer/creator); and, in culmination, revealing my true clown in performance (Clown/Buffoonery).

I cannot be non-binary without a sense of humor. I would kill myself. I would not have my humor or such good emotional intelligence/literacy without the work of Kristen Linklater. No, without that I probably woulda killed myself, too. Oh! And simply denying my non-binary-ness… is just like killing myself. Thus, the alternative to doing this work and exploring these ideas is death.

I don’t think I take myself too seriously.

My source texts — or Bibles, if you will (or maybe you won’t) — are, so far:

FREEING SHAKESPEARE’S VOICE by Kristen Linklater

ROMEO & JULIET by Shakespeare

and MY GENDER WORKBOOK by Kate Bornstein

Linklater work implies work with heightened text, in my current opinion. My favorite of the heightened speech writers is, of course, WILLIAM FLIPPING SHAKESPEARE. Somebody (whose name I won’t use unless I decide to ask and I receive their consent) once told me their brilliant idea of producing ROMEO & JULIET where, every night, the actors playing Romeo & Juliet switch.

OMG. QUEER! I’m stealing it.

I’m interested in R&J because — as Tina Packer taught me — it contains some of the most powerful language on love in the entire English language — perhaps even on all the Earth — and because it has the capacity for me to play both a masc folk and a femme folk in love, which I’ve done in real life but never onstage. Har har.

When queering Shakespeare and getting all playful and exploratory like that, it only seems appropriate to bring the writing of Kate Bornstein into the mix. Cause she’s clownish and irreverent as fuck. That FREAK! (I think she’d appreciate that descriptor. It’s meant with all the love in the world. If you have a problem with that, Kate, just let me know. ❤)

Am I really going to queer Shakespeare? Will the text actually be Shakespeare? I don’t know. It’s a fun and exciting jumping-off point, at least. We need it; ‘cause we’re gonna put on a show!

— Jordan Palmer

they/them/theirs