One Thousand and One Ways to Make Your Own Gender Trouble

1.

I am thirty-six
I am marrying a man again
I have frozen five embryos
my popsicle babies saved for a rainy day
when I’m old enough to be someone’s mother
Someone on the internet says Anna Paquin can’t be bisexual
if she’s married to Stephen Moyer. Someone else says the word “bisexual”
is trans-exclusionary. The most powerful bisexual
person in America flips her blonde hair
wears a bedazzled denim vest in the Senate
as she gets paid parental leave

2.

I am twenty-eight
I have five ex-boyfriends and two ex-girlfriends
I stand in line for a chair at the barbershop in Temescal Alley
with the flavor of the month and the other hipsters and butches
A kid trying to sell me his demo CD at the 19th Street BART station
shouts after me asking why I want to cut my hair so short
“You wanna be a boy, don’t you?”
Hollingsworth v. Perry makes same-sex marriage legal again in California
A girl in the class below me at Berkeley Law tells her friends I am a sexual
predator after I kiss her at a bar but never call for that second date

3.

I am twenty-two
The woman I love will only sleep with me
if it’s in a threesome with one of a rotating cast
of too-eager boys, until the night we win the
What Would You Do For A Dollar
party by putting on a show for the wolves upstairs
I slap a hand that tries to touch her
We zigzag home cackling in our matching boots in the snow
clutching our trophies, full handles of Jack Daniels and Absolut
We drip melted puddles between the hookah burn marks
pocking the floorboards of her apartment
I think I have never been happier

4.

I am sixteen
My mother buys the spinning bike
so she can work out twice a day
once at the studio and once at home
I discover if I punish my burning thighs
for an hour a day they will still touch
but I can eat whatever I want
Ninety minutes and I can wear the sky
blue tube top Maggie lent me
A boy at a basketball game leaps over two rows
to sit with me. A firefighter in his truck winks
at me in my school uniform, navy polo and pleated khaki skirt
It’s a few months after September 11th so I don’t say anything

5.

I am fourteen
My friend Lina weeps when she tells me she is scared
she is a lesbian. I thinsmile sweat at her and tell her I’m sure she’s not
A voice inside me shouts that it’s contagious
That someone already knows I like Rose
better than Jack. Even though there was room for both
of them on that floating door

6.

I am twelve
I have learned to hide the betrayals of my body
under my father’s castoff Boalt Hall T-shirts
and two sports bras. I hold the shirts away
from my waistband with my fingertips
so they won’t show the cave of my bellybutton
My soft stomach. My Bok-Po in her horn-rimmed glasses
eyes blued by glaucoma strokes my hair at Thanksgiving
calls me by my cousin Garrett’s name and asks me why
I’m wearing a braid. I stuff my flushed wet face
with Gung-Gung’s fivespice shortribs and Uncle Brian’s candied yams
in the bathroom where no one will see

7.

I am four
I have slipped my babyfeet into my Po-Po’s lavender kittenheels again
My mother strokes the photograph stuck to its plastic sleeve
moistened by three decades of Santa Monica breezes
“You always loved high heels” she sighs
I loved the sharp sound they made
when I slammed them on the cool speckled tile of our townhouse
“You loved dresses too. The froufier the better.”
The fullest skirts were best for parachuting from the garden wall
For gathering sand for castles

8.

Someday I may be sixty four
(“Live and be well,” my bad Bubbe would say)
I will leave out my copies of The Paying Guests and Frog Music
for my children to discover for themselves
To make their own good trouble

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash