a natural sort of being – by Miriam Jones
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
I rested the breast pump on top of Gender Trouble and pale milk pooled on its cover.
Gender Trouble was waiting for me to find a reference, a reference about why the sex-as-nature/gender-as-culture formulation doesn’t quite work.
in the park there are
tissue paper pinks leaching
into the soil
and shiny blues which are not
bower bird treasures
in the bellies of ducks
in the bellies of eels
Once upon a time there was a mummy called daddy.
At home we were a newborn, a toddler, a man, and a non-binary me. For three months we lived outside of normal time and normal social life. The privatised home is not known for nurturing gender improvisation. Some things known to take place within the home are the unwaged feminised labour of social reproduction, and domestic violence. But for me the parental leave bubble was a quiet place, away from the sharp and assured gender infrastructure of the outside world.
In the bounded space of our apartment we floated in a gender pool whose inflows were slow and partial.
paper confetti gluey on wet grass
plastic confetti multiplying on the wind
and pink or blue cake crumbs,
and shrivelled pink or blue balloons
Out in the world you sit on the toilet in the Birth Centre and a sign yells ‘WOMEN! Have you done your GBS swab?’ Or you hang around outside the cinema with your friends and their babies and someone approaches and asserts over and over: ‘YOU LADIES ARE DOING GREAT’. Or you go to the All Gender bathroom but there are only men (you judge) inside, and outside all the women are looking unsure and queuing up for the Ladies instead of risking a social faux pas.
The insularity of the home can sometimes be a blessing.
in the park is an archery centre
built for Sydney 2000 on a remediated
rubbish dump which can be hired
for corporate functions
birthday parties
and gender reveals
in the park there are underground pipes
that carry methane from the buried rubbish
to vents above barbecue pavilions
What I had remembered from Gender Trouble was the word sediment: gender as layer upon layer of experience; the geology of our lives. I loved its many textures. Sediment was soft silt and mud. Sediment was also ancient layers of sandstone, shale, fossilised plants and fish. Sediment was swirling motion through water, then hardened layers, seemingly immutable.
When I skimmed Gender Trouble I didn’t find the word sediment. Turns out Gender Trouble isn’t easy to skim in half-dark while you wait for the baby to wake. (Judith Butler themself acknowledges how unskimmable Gender Trouble is: ‘Some of those sentences are truly unforgivable.’)
Instead of sediment I found the less lovely ‘congeal’:
Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.
At home with two small children – one bursting at the seams with a new and urgent sense of self, the other engaged only in meeting her bodily needs and in gathering her first impressions of the world – the congealed substance of gender was held at bay, and the regulatory frame was baggy, unpoliced.
Can I hold him? Can I hold my baby sister?
in california, a gender reveal smoke bomb
sparked a wildfire that burned for 23 days
‘temperatures were scorching,
15 to 20 degrees above normal for the region’
In Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asks how we become legible to one another through gender:
Bodies cannot be said to have a signifiable existence prior to the mark of their gender; the question then emerges: To what extent does the body come into being in and through the mark(s) of gender?
In the hospital everyone asked ‘do you know what you’re having?’ When I said no they said ‘we love a surprise!’ But I didn’t get the sense they loved a surprise. When the baby was born the midwives asked ‘do you want to know what you had?’ before I had seen the baby’s face.
Where’s mummy? Where is she? I think I can hear him.
Thirty-four years after Gender Trouble – having become a bogeyperson of the Right, a feared representative of a new era of slippery gender – Judith Butler, with notes of weariness, wrote:
Whatever else gender means, it surely names for some a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world in this way.
When the toddler was a baby I dressed her like I dressed myself – which is?
Daggy campy soft butch? 80s surfer? Country singer? In the absence of her ability to communicate a felt sense of her surfaces and depths, I could project myself onto her.
A baby’s gender is baby; a baby’s gender is milk, sleep, digestion, touch; a baby’s gender is projection and desire.
Can I wear my lady beetle wings?
I need a tutu.
in the park, which was and is Wangal,
they straightened the streams and
concreted the banks
and created land on top of water
which is confusingly called reclamation
then some years later they chipped away
the concrete and planted lomandra and dianella
and created small pools with stones
as a kind of aquatic ladder
for the fish and eels to make
safe passage between fresh lake water,
estuarine river water,
and the salty pacific ocean
and they replanted saltmarsh and
released wriggling invertebrates so
that migratory birds had a place
(once again) to feed and rest before
flying to siberia and alaska
which is to say
human effort
travels in all directions
I hope later Daddy has bigger nipples. Then he can feed [the baby] milk.
Children learn the culture rapidly, but also haphazardly, incompletely. They glitch the system. They carry matchbox cars in sequined purses. They do gender like Torrey Peters describing cis people realising they’re doing gender too: ‘oh whoops I’m doing a gender, I’m being a lumberjack, I’m being a ballerina, I’m a fisherman!’
Then there’s the quick mastery: As we walked along the rehabilitated canal the toddler said ‘where are the ladies?’ and confused I said ‘are you talking about lady beetles?’ (these being an insect whose life cycle we sometimes acted out at home), and she said ‘no the ladies!’ and pointed to a place under a tree where a group of Chinese women often gather to do slow exercise to music. I didn’t recall that we’d used that word at home. The specificity of her ‘ladies’ impressed and alarmed me.
I want to wear a dress because dresses are good for running.
when unspeakable things appeared
on my feed between ads for
parenting programs and gender-neutral
swimwear and the media quoted
earnestly from the idf and the government
continued trade with israel,
the local council won a grant
to install a sluice gate that would improve
tidal flows into the park’s wetland
where the stilts and godwits and swans
and sometimes
sharp-tailed sandpipers
feed
it all existed in the same moment,
which is this moment
it was hard to know whether
it was possible to register everything
side by side
About six months before giving birth the second time, I started using they/them pronouns. I was naïve. I thought I would inform people of my decision – I couldn’t acclimatise myself to the conviction and essentialism of ‘coming out’ – and the world would henceforth address me thus. And for some people, like my partner, this was the case. His quick adoption of my new pronouns helped lend our parental leave period its levity.
Most people, however, said they were happy for me, said they’d do whatever they needed to do to support me, then continued on with she/her, business as usual. Or used they/them in a displaced fashion, for my daughter, or her teddy bears. Or avoided using any pronouns for me at all. I didn’t help myself by being pregnant while asking the world to see me as a new and newfangled gender.
I quickly learnt that the focus and anxiety I’d placed on the ‘coming out’ discussion was misplaced, which reminded me of the misplaced focus and anxiety on giving birth: all those hours of preparation for the stages of labour, the possible interventions, the approaches for managing pain, the breathing exercises. Then you do the birth thing in all its agonising discomfort and ecstasy, and on the other side you realise, oh, this is the hard bit, I’ve only just begun.
Those are all my daddies.
A lot of younger people who are embracing a non-binary identity or a they/them pronoun, it’s not so much even that people are necessarily saying, I think of myself as androgynous or I’m blending or mixing and matching. What I really hear is this deeper awareness of saying like, society treats gender as if it is non-consensual. I’m just going to call bullshit on all of that. It’s just like, I don’t agree with that perspective – Susan Stryker
once we travelled to korea
and what I remember most clearly
about seoul is the stream
cheonggyecheon running icily
and luminously through the city,
having been released from
a bed of cement under
a major highway
(I had a romantic ecological notion that
once the stream was released
and restored from its concrete entrapment
it would tend to its own health
but later I read it costs some
7 million dollars a year to maintain)
I want you to call me Water Dragon and say,
‘Water Dragon, what do you need?’
out running
I saw two large fish
quiet beneath the surface perhaps having just
travelled the fishway downstream
(under the road, over the culvert, through the pools) perhaps
readying themselves to swim upstream
(through the pools, over the culvert, under the road) perhaps
just sitting, the two of them together
The sex of a foetus can be revealed at 10 weeks, 8 grams, strawberry-size. Tiny fingers and toes have formed, but not yet elbows or wrists, ankles or knees. The heart beats at three times the rate of an adult heart. A tadpole-like tail has only just disappeared.
in the park
are parties weekly
monthly unending
revelations clouds of swirling silt
sunwarmed windbitten strata
lady beetle cheetah
ant fairy wren mermaid
thunderstorm eel
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Image: Angelo Casto - Unsplash
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