Introduction To a New World of Genders Next to cutting and hanging tobacco, tomato canning (my current activity as I write these introductory notes) was about the most unpleasant summer work I remember from my childhood in Kentucky. Late August and the outdoor temperature always burned past ninety matched by a humidity even higher. Indoors the kettles of boiling water pushed it over one hundred. Sweat dripped from every pore. Canned the same day they were picked from muddy, prickly vines, the fresh tomatoes were first washed, then skinned by plunging them briefly into the boiling water, then packed into quart jars before being lowered in a rack into the pressure canner, a sealed stovetop container that if not properly closed could explode, permanently scarring anyone who happened to be nearby. Tempers in the kitchen were seldom lower than the temperature. Canning in my childhood was women’s work, like mopping and laundering and bathing the baby. Today, canning is a nearly forgotten art. Of the few people who do still can, most I know these days are men. Very few women have either the time or the inclination to undergo this annual punitive exercise no matter how much better the end result may taste when compared to tins of flavorless red stuff sold on supermarket shelves. Men, however, seem to find it a fascinating test of their culinary skills and a demonstration of how flexibly fluid they can show themselves to be in today’s gender-diffuse times, when the lead breadwinners in half the households in America are women and baby bathing and diaper changing are about equally divided. None of which was really imaginable during my early adolescence at the peak of Beatles and Rolling Stones fame a generation ago. Males in rural Georgia or Kansas or Virginia or Ohio would in those days have been banned from the poker club or shunned at the pickup basketball court had their fingernails betrayed the traces of peach and tomato flesh. I was lucky, I suppose, to have grown up in Kentucky, officially a border state, a locution that derives from the Civil War when slaveholding sons bayonetted their Yankee cousins on the battlefields. But Kentucky’s border mentality extended much farther into the psyches of men and women, boys and girls I grew up with. To be passionately both and neither and ready to talk about it across the table over a shot of bourbon was, if not a norm, an ideal—just as the Baptist preachers would hedge their Sabbath rules by coming to buy our apples on Sundays promising to return on Monday to pay the IOU they had left. Race remains a ragged and volatile piece of the border fabric, but in odd ways, gender borders were always more porous—even if the men kept far away from the house during canning time. Older men—men in the 1960s when I was fifteen—regularly called young guys “honey.” Any family with six or more children most always had one who was “well he’s just Uncle Jack (or Aunt Frances),” meaning everyone early on understood that “that one” wouldn’t marry or carry on the line (which, we will see later, is a natural
statistical distribution in large families); out of a dozen cousins one normally would be the florist or take up nursing, or among the girls one would handle the tractor and the hay baler more expertly than any of her brothers. So long as they declared nothing about their “privacies” and embarrassed no one at Thanksgiving dinner, they were welcome and even encouraged to shred some conventional gender borderlines. The perennial bachelors could even bake cakes—at least sturdy chocolate if never fluffy angel cakes. Today all of these roles and behaviors that once defined what and how men and women could be and do seem terribly antiquated, detritus on the cultural battlefield of what has for the last half century been labeled the gender revolution. The term itself—gender—would have baffled most everyone in the first years after World War II when legions of women known collectively as Rosie the Riveter returned to the kitchen after running tobacco farms and serving in wartime factories building tanks and B-52 bombers. While the boys had shipped away to Dunquerque and Yokohama, expediency transferred women onto the shop floor to replace them, even as they kept canning beans and tomatoes by night. No one then saw it as a “gender revolution.” It wouldn’t be until the late 1950s that the term itself began to seep into academic discourse, not least concerning many of those women who had discovered that they liked working for their own out-of-house independence. Even early frontline feminists like Betty Friedan or the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir made sparse distinction between “sex” and “gender.” Beauvoir’s most famous book, remember, was entitled Le deuxième sexe (and in English translation The Second Sex). Only with the arrival of the Baby Boom generation did activists, sociologists, and philosophers, most notably the Berkeley theoretician Judith Butler and her followers, begin to separate the two terms. Sex referred to biology and, to a larger degree, to nature. Gender came to be seen as learned social behavior distinguishing male and female roles—or nurture. Women canned. Men harvested. (At least in America, though those roles were always much muddier in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.) When I was a twelve-year-old visiting one of my spinster aunts in the city, she took it upon herself to educate me in proper male comportment: I was always to stand up and offer my seat on a public bus when a lady entered, always to hold the door for a lady, always to pass the plate at Thanksgiving dinner first to the ladies at the table. Generally I still do those actions though frequently young women on crowded subways stand up to make room for me when I enter. These are gestures of politeness, of course, but as many angry feminists argued at the height of the women’s movement in the early 1970s, they are also enacted statements about power and who holds it. A much younger woman who cedes her place to me now both pleases me and reminds me that I have become less vigorous, less forceful, or simply less than those people who are thirty years younger than I. To offer your arm to a girlfriend similarly indicated protection as well as a public demonstration of affection, but at the same time the gesture served—and still serves—as a statement of ownership: She is mine; don’t touch. Now when in major American and European
cities young men similarly link their arms, that too is a performance—an act intended to declare both affection between the two and pride in their affection—whereas two women linking arms indicates nothing more than friendship. Physical gestures far more subtle than these fill volumes of anthropological history—from Romans who quietly signaled their availability to one another by lightly scratching their heads with a middle finger to portions of New Guinea where pointed lips are still more often used than pointed fingers to signal directions. Smart phones and near universal Internet access, even in the remote forests of New Guinea, may have mixed and blended these steadily evolving forms of bodily gesture, but gestures do remain. Likely they will always remain with us as powerful signals of power, attachment, and personhood, regardless of how we accept or challenge gender conventions. Moreover, these essential gender expressions, whether they signal forms of personal relations or indicate structures of authority and submission in a symphony orchestra, call us to reconsider still further what we believe is “natural” in the greater realm of Nature. *** A straight road runs tight between the Colorado River west of Moab, Utah, and a line of sand-burnished red, black, and ochre cliffs hanging high above. When I caught up at last with Candace and her two boys, they were just finishing a ten-day desert trek during their spring school break back in Salt Lake City. The boys—Will, fifteen, and Luke, eleven— were used to sleeping in tents on the cold desert floor since they were old enough to carry backpacks. They helped their father tote tripods and other camera paraphernalia in what had become a lifelong quest to document the trail of petroglyphs scratched into the ferrous and sandstone walls long before the soldier-explorer John C. Fremont attached his name to the river, after which the surviving natives had the name extended to them. The petroglyphs leave little doubt that the “Fremont Indians” were irrepressible storytellers. Their markings recount their journeys, the animals they encountered—and not least the part-human, part-fantasy creatures they appear to have encountered in their vision quests. Among those fantastical creatures are not a few whose gender seems far from clear or at least mixed, reflecting the two-spirit individuals in the Mojave, Navajo, and Lakota peoples. Candace’s story isn’t easy to tell even though she seemed completely comfortable telling it. As I sat next to her in her mini-SUV, her sons bantering in the backseat, my mind wobbled. I could not decide whether to be submerged in the sublime red-rock landscape or to look intensely at Candace, at her very female exterior and the heavy, very male skeletal frame supporting it—or simply to focus my attention on what she was saying about the mystery of the petroglyphs, several of which she later pointed out also seemed to portray transsexual creatures. What images and thoughts, I wondered, were speeding through the prepubescent minds of Will and Luke, who appeared as much at ease as any two sons
with their mother, or their father, of which Candace is both? Even the language fails in the space of proximity—hardly a novel insight, as Shakespeare taught us in a half dozen of his plays, notably in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing. My role was to listen. Candace first fell upon the Moab petroglyphs when as Scott, her birth name, he began venturing into the desert with a group of wilderness explorers. Later, those exploratory treks led him to form a non-profit called Wilderness Watch that gradually turned into a young white man’s own version of a Native American “vision quest,” the rite of passage through which each individual, or at least each male individual, went out alone into the night to discover the strength of his inner soul. “This is actually the twenty-year mark of that trip that started me down this road. Where we were camping last night—that was the place I lost myself. That was the place I found myself. That was the place I got back to myself. When I transitioned [from male to female], that was a time I tried to push my old self out, and allow this new person to come into existence, that inner struggle. It was really hard. Luke would have been three or four, Will was probably seven or eight.” She recalled her experiencing her first inkling of a “second spirit,” or at least a discomfort with her masculinity, when her mother bought the then three-year-old Scott “big boy” underwear—and he would turn up his nose and take it off, replacing the shorts with the old diapers. “I knew even at that age,” she said, “that it wasn’t right.” These days pronouns—he or she, his or hers—are less and less a problem for Candace and the two boys. Luke easily learned to use female pronouns in speaking about his father, who, for a while, used the androgynous name Shannon. Candace has carried full breasts for most of Luke’s life. Will, who knew him longer as a man, seemed to avoid gendered pronouns altogether around the transwoman who is their biological father. Both sons are high performers in school. As a young adult Scott was a residential building contractor during the boom years of the early 1990s. He was a sturdy, muscular man. He had been a high school wrestler. He played soccer. He’d been sexually active with a number of women before he married and tried to settle into Salt Lake City as a young man in the Mormon church, on his way to what that religion calls the priesthood of the Latter-day Saints (LDS), a member of the all-male quorum through which the power of God is given to man. We snaked alongside the river, searching for the petroglyph markings on the rock walls to the right, a hard, painful light bouncing off the river through the windshield. Young men, and a few women, were grasping onto handholds or dangling from ropes attached to the pitons they’d pounded into narrow crevices. Will sat in the backseat, also watching for the pictographs. “I had all these amazing things,” Candace continued. “I had the life that I think a lot of people want. I had a beautiful family. I had a job running a business. I had a non-profit organization and I liked going into elementary schools. We’d go out and adopt certain parts of wilderness. We’d do cleanups, teach the kids about Native American rock art. And yet there was this black hole that was still just devouring me
inside.�