Category Crisis

Panics over detransitioners and the word “queer” show just how much we want life to be cut and dry.

Life is like a… wall of well-organized yarn balls, I suppose. Photo by Edgar Chaparro on Unsplash

I have been thinking a lot lately about categories. I’m reaching that point, three years after starting testosterone and a year or so after my first injection, where it’s not always certain which gender category I’m being placed in until the conversation is already underway.

For instance: When I’m alone, cashiers and baristas will give me a “he” or a politely uncertain “they.” I can even get a “they” standing next to my husband. Yet if I show up in a public place with my husband and my child, I get “she,” every single time. The assumption, unspoken for most of my life, becomes glaringly obvious: If two people are raising a child together, one of them has to be a woman.

My failures are always revealed this way, in sudden trips back to 1955. A repairman asked to speak to my husband, even though I was the one paying for and overseeing repairs, because a little lady like me obviously couldn’t comprehend machinery. I thought my stepfather was doing a good job adjusting until, in the middle of a visit, he declared that he and my husband — and only he and my husband — were going to the hardware store “to be manly men.”