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The only people who buy white sheets are people who have never had a period.
Fuck. Shit. Damn it.
Andy doesn’t know what the hell she’s thinking.
♀
Something’s wrong with her, definitely. She’s been hooking up with people lately, not because she wants to. She hates the way her body feels when other people touch it, hates it just as much when it’s not being touched. She lies on the sheets of strangers and surrenders, like maybe she can absorb girlness through the skin and sweat and sweetness of other women. That’s what people do in college, right? Sexy coeds stumbling into narrow beds, not needing a reason, barely needing desire? Hard to say. Pete Wentz is not, perhaps, an ideal standard of comparison. The only part Andy really enjoys about it is feeling like her body is good for something.
After, with shower sandals on, she waddles awkward and towel-encased to the bathroom on her floor. She takes the hottest shower she can bear, so the water leaves her feeling raw—all the offended, offending skin scraped away, leaving her new.
No one’s ever told her that violently longing not to be a girl is a sign that she’s not one. After all, it’s not as if she wants to be a boy instead. She feels more in common with a mannequin than a boy or a girl. She feels like an alien. How do you explain that to someone, though? Andy thinks that possibly everyone feels this way, they just don’t talk about it.
♂
Maybe she has one of those eating disorders everyone’s so worried about. She finds it hard to look at her body at all, but when she does, it’s certainly with revulsion. She obsesses about the lump of fat lining her hips. She hates the way it looks, how it squishes against her when she curls up in bed at night. Her clothes hide it, if she sticks to her uniform of basketball shorts and baggy hoodies, but she still feels it. Those thick, clumsy hips. The silhouette of a childbearer, a boast of owning a womb that feels as gross and shameful as a period stain. She would almost cut if off, just to be free of it. That’s a crazy fucking thing to think.
Andy didn’t used to think about her body this way. She never used to really think about it at all. Puberty was traumatic, yeah, but isn’t it basically like that for everyone? Lately it’s just gotten so hard. She’s surrounded by all these young people playing at adulthood for the first time, and they all seem to know who they are, or at least like they’re having fun finding out. Meanwhile Andy’s getting stuck in mirrors on the curve of her hips, her ass, the telltale bulge of boobs when she stands sideways.
It’s not like she wants to be thin. If anything she’d like to be bigger—like someone you don’t fuck with. Maybe that’s her gender. It’s the curves she hates, their softness. The things they seem to imply about her. The ways people’s eyes might linger on them, thinking they know anything at all about her. Andy starts doing push-ups, lifting weights, lunging back and forth across her tiny dorm room. Maybe if she works out enough, people will notice her biceps before her boobs. It’s hard to explain, but she’d like that.
⚥
One night she’s with a girl who tries to touch her between the legs, something Andy has always more or less been fine with. Tonight, though, she recoils. Her ears ring like a bomb went off next to her head; her skin tries to crawl off and leave her. She starts to panic.
The girl’s hand freezes, retreats. “It’s okay,” she whispers. “Show me where you like to be touched.”
But that’s nowhere. Nowhere. NOWHERE.
♀
Andy’s in a women’s studies class because she has the vague notion she’s supposed to be. It’s got to be the stupidest quintessential college trope there is, like going to uni and learning about women’s lib for the first time is a punchline and not evidence of the violence of oppression. A childhood full of EZ Bake Ovens and dollies and pink ruffled skirts, a generation raised by exhausted mothers who feel grateful to have lazy bum husbands and state subsidized wombs because it’s better than their mothers had. An entire 18 years up to that point of no-spaghetti-straps, shave-your-pubes, allow-strange-men-to-leer-at-you, you’re-prettier-when-you-smile, and not even one woman or teacher or textbook to say, Misogyny is a tactic of war, and women have been fighting it since before you were born. It’s, like, entirely too Stepford Wives to be raised into a compliant little boy-crazy lady your whole life while the political and academic structure obscures the fact that feminism even exists. First they indoctrinate you so thoroughly into girlhood that you never question your place in the ‘natural’ order, then they confess slyly that some people—hairy, unlovable lesbians, usually—think the system is broken and wrong. As if any woman can choose that path now, without giving up everything she’s been conditioned to want.
It’s bullshit is what it is.
If that whole rant makes you think Andy would thrive in women’s studies, well, you’d be wrong. Actually it makes her feel more like an alien than ever. First of all, all the readings and class discussions are just a festival of generalizations, us and them, like every person raised to be a girl has the exact same experience and needs and desires. The instructor clearly gets off on it. Then there’s all this uncomfortable solidarity, an endless bobblehead row of blond ponytails who want trophies for announcing bravely that their eyes have been opened and they would even stop shaving their pits if it wasn’t for their boyfriends. Andy’s always getting lumped into wes as an interchangeable piece of the girl phalanx, only she doesn’t feel that way and never has. She’s not like the girls in this class. It’s not just because she’s a lesbian. It’s a deeper disconnect, like the bruising place where two tectonic plates meet. Andy’s getting crushed in slow-motion by the overlapping mantle.
That, and she still hasn’t turned in any of the assignments, so she probably won’t pass. The very first week of class, the teacher assigned this reflection paper. How do you know you’re a man / woman? What makes someone a man? What makes someone a woman?
Just reading the prompt made Andy dizzy. She shoved it into the deepest depths of her backpack and she hopes it will die there. Like, what the hell are those questions? Can other people answer them? All the bobbleheads and even the surly, underrepresented boy contingent—they turn something in. Which pretty much proves it: this is basic, intuitive stuff. Everybody else knows what they are. Andy sits further and further back in the classroom until she ultimately stops going at all. After all, she couldn’t even get through the first assignment. Why bother with the rest of them?
Women’s lib, just like every other thing, just isn’t for her.
♂
It’s not that Andy hasn’t heard about trans people. People like Lucas Silveira and Billy Tipton and Katey Red have been influencing music for years, some of them even before Andy was born, and she’s taken careful note of it. It’s just that Andy and the concept of transness don’t even fit in the same sentence. That’s a real thing, for people who are sure. For people who are something, so fiercely and so true that they’re willing to step out into a maelstrom of bigots to be it. Whereas Andy doesn’t want to transition into—anything. She just wants to be what she is. Sort of. Whoever that is.
Even to herself she can’t explain it. More proof that she’s just being dramatic. Overreacting. Making it up.
⚥
She’s on the phone with Jo, staring up at the slats of her roommate’s bunk. “So basically, I have nothing to wear and I don’t know what to do,” Jo’s saying, sounding like a girl who finds it easy to be a girl. “It’s like, we perform on stage in front of hostile strangers, why am I suddenly self-conscious about how I look in a dress for some dumb school dance? But I look like a banana peel in this fucking thing. It’s nothing like the picture in the catalog.”
Andy chews on the end of her ponytail, a disgusting habit she weirdly kind of enjoys. Like, revel in my repulsive nature, trembling onlookers! “I would probably wear a genderless sack,” she muses. “Not like an actual sack, but some sack-like amorphous entity that shrouds me in a reflective light so I cannot be perceived.”
“Would you believe Macy’s didn’t have those in my size?” Jo heaves a giant sigh. “Maybe I’ll just go in jeans. I wish I’d never let Mark talk me into this.”
“Liar,” Andy says. “You loooove him.”
“Oh my god, stop. I don’t even. Here’s a real issue: what if he thinks I’m going to have sex with him after the dance?”
“Can’t you just tell him you’re not?”
“Sometimes talking to you is like talking to a boy,” Jo complains. “It’s not as easy as that.”
But Andy thinks it should be. She sits up in bed, her heart beating harder in her chest. She thinks of the ways her body’s been touched that were nice and good and wanted, and then she thinks of the way it’s been touched lately, when it doesn’t feel like hers or anyone’s. She doesn’t want that for Jo. “If Mark can’t take no for an answer, I’ll take you instead,” she says. “For real. I’m gonna get you a corsage and everything.”
“Don’t tempt me, Hurley!” Jo laughs. “Hey, though. About the genderless sack. Do you really feel that way?”
Andy’s guts are hot and cramped with sudden discomfort. “Oh, um, I don’t know. I was just being weird.”
“Gotcha,” says Jo. “It’s just that I’ve totally felt that way before. Sometimes the way guys look at me like, literally leaves a slime trail? It makes me want to disappear, except I’m not the one who should have to disappear, you know? So if I could just bend light around me so no one could perceive my gender… You know shit’s fucked when you’d feel more powerful invisible than you do as a woman.”
Andy doesn’t have any comment on that, but she agrees with the general sentiment. “Sometimes I think that if I didn’t have a body, I wouldn’t have any problems. Ugh—speaking of—did I tell you the other week I got a surprise period and bled all over somebody’s white sheets? It looked like a butcher shop. I was traumatized.”
“Okay, first? You are surprised by every period you ever have. Like, you have never bought your own tampons in the history of time, you always just skim off mine. It’s like you completely forget you have a uterus for three weeks of every month, and then it’s like, OH SHIT UTERINE WATERFALL, WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS. Second—what self-respecting woman buys white sheets? Like, was she raised by a single dad on a sitcom?”
“Um,” says Andy. “I just remembered why I didn’t tell you this story.”
“Oh my god.” Jo actually gasps. “Andrea J. Hurley. Did you spend the night with a dirty nasty boy?”
“It’s—I—no. Well, kind of. It’s not what you think.” Andy trips over her tongue trying to get the words out. Because she honestly doesn’t know how to explain herself. She’s been a lesbian every day of her life, even Sundays. It’s not like she wanted to fool around with him. But what if this whole time she’d got it wrong, and the reason she feels so off all the time is because she’s trying to force her body to be sexual in—in unnatural ways? She hates herself for even thinking it. It’s not what she believes. It’s just—there are some things she couldn’t know for sure until she had some one-on-one time with a bona fide human penis. And now she knows. She doesn’t want one.
Like Jo said: it’s not as easy as that.
♀
It’s not women’s studies that changes Andy’s life. It’s biology.
In bio, the professor pulls up this article about lionesses on a nature preserves who grew manes and started exhibiting male behaviors as, like, an object lesson about sexual dimorphism or something. Andy’s all prepared for like, a freak shame-fest, but instead the prof starts talking about other animals that transgress nature’s gender rules. Mostly, it turns out, it’s for mating advantage—which is major het culture, if you ask Andy—but she’s really interested in hyenas. Apparently, all hyenas have penises and testes. It has nothing to do with their gender or sex behavior or any fucking thing about them. It’s just genitals. Some of them have uteruses and others don’t. You just can’t tell by looking from the outside.
And it hits her: that’s what Andy wants. For people not to be able to tell from the outside. For her sex organs not to dictate who she is. To not be ‘she’ at all, and not ‘he’ either.
It trembles in her chest, this knowing, fragile and thin-skinned and precious, incendiary with its heartbeat. One sharp thought could puncture it, so Andy thinks softly. Andy doesn’t want to crush it. She wants it to grow.
♂
Andy’s up all night Googling. In Australia, people can get Xs on their ID cards instead of Ms or Fs. In India, people can respond to the census with ‘Other.’ There are people out there who feel like Andy does—and apparently, in indigineous cultures, there always have been. They/thems and xe/xems and e/ems, even sies. Her fingers hesitate over the keyboard like moths and then she plunges in, typing the word for the first time.
Nonbinary.
⚥
Andy doesn’t end up taking Jo to the dance, but she does take the bus to Chicago to see her friends that weekend. They all go to a show together, and they all wish they were playing it instead.
Jo’s wearing her formal gown because she ‘doesn’t believe in only wearing things once.’ “Maybe only once in any given weekend, though?” Pat asked, looking self-conscious, when they picked her up; but Andy thinks Jo looks beautiful. The dress she wore after all is pale yellow, a satiny floor-length affair with an empire waist and some kind of tulle under the skirt that makes it go kind of floaty around her combat boots. She’s wearing a thick gold necklace that sits like an armored collar, and these big gold spike earrings that stab out of her hair and graze her collarbones with their wicked points. The hair she’s left wild and huge, and instead of high glamor makeup, she’s got black eyeliner rings and thick mascara and heartsblood lipstick like punk rock Belle. She looks—
“Dude, stop staring at me,” Jo laughs, slapping Andy’s arm.
“Want to dance with me?” Andy blurts out.
Jo wrinkles her nose. “To this shit? My farts are more harmonic.”
“So ladylike,” Pat mutters, pushing past them to the pit, where Pete has of course already gotten herself and the world’s tiniest skirt entangled with the drunkest guys out there.
“Well, since you stood me up for the dance? It’s kind of the least you can do.”
“Gross rhetoric, Hurlwhirl,” Jo says, clearly unimpressed by Andy’s teasing. But then she grabs Andy by the hand and tugs her out onto the floor. Even Jo’s familiar hand feels different somehow, situated in Andy’s new hyena awareness of who she is. Of who she might one day be brave enough to be.
And it doesn’t feel made up, dancing with Jo. It doesn’t feel like something Andy’s doing for attention. It just feels like where she wants to be, with the people she wants to be with, getting closer every day to the person she’s always known she is.
Andy doesn’t say it out loud. Not yet. Not even to her best friends. It’s a new thing, and tender; still too fragile to survive being spoken aloud. But she whispers it to herself that night, out there on the deafening yet tone-deaf dance floor. It’s like an incantation, letter by letter showing her the road to becoming whole.
They. Them. They. Them. Not a boy, not a girl.
It’s the first explanation Andy’s heard that they think they can live with.
⚥ ⚥ ⚥