rabbit's heart

[rm]

People frequently call me sir, and it took me a long time to understand this or embrace it.

In girls' school being perceived in any way that was masculine was a step well below mere ugliness; it was a blight that came with physical risk: to be mistaken for a boy or told you could be was to be afraid. And it's with a certain sort of shame I remember standing shirtless in an un-airconditioned restaurant in Little Italy with my parents as we waited for a table when I was seven; or someone's mother pulling at my clothes at You Gotta Have Park when I was eight because she did not believe me when I said I wasn't a boy; they wanted boys to paint benches.

I am narrow, like a knife, and because I am quick and nervous and possess a rabbit's heart I am too skilled at darting through crowds.

The subway, in New York, is where you learn whether or not other people think you have a right to exist. I have learnt that I do not, and I understand that this is unexceptional. It is what most women learn on the subway. Because I am slight, I am expected to turn sideways when exiting the car so people can board before I even get off. But I refuse; I do not believe it should be a woman's lot to slide through this world. God gave me shoulders, even if they are small.

I had the male lead in lots of our plays in girls' school. I was Ko-ko in the Mikado and Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream. 100 years ago my classmates would have had "smashes" on me. But I was not given to that world, and those were the first times I started to suspect that my success came from a type of ugliness.

At the bank, people call me sir. Particularly when I wear my hair long and down. It happens even when I wear lipstick. roadnotes theorizes it is because I take up space. I do not stand with my ankles crossed in heels so as to look like an insect on a pin.

A rabbit is always frightened. It doesn't mean to be. But its heart just beats so fast it can seem to tremble. It believes the lies of its body, just like I have often believed the lies of mine and the lies of the subway, our crowded streets, and a school for girls.

But I do have a right to exist. And if that makes me a man, so be it. I will take that and my vicious smile as I refuse to beg and press and cajole my way off the train over the supposed sins of my fur any day.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

On a vaguely related note, whenever I went overseas as a teen (13-16), I was regularly mistaken for a girl. Oddly, this never happened in the US, but it happened multiple times in Greece, Italy, and Britian, despite my not being in any of these places for very long. I still have absolutely no idea what signals I was giving off that made this happen. The only time it became annoying was when there was a frantic Greek steward desperately blocking my way and trying to dissuade me in very minimal English from going into the men's room of a small cruise ship.