My journey from cishet girl to British crew man to non-binary person.
“Here comes Dick, he’s wearing a skirt
Here comes Jane, you know she’s sporting a chain”
– “Androgynous” by The Replacements
I became a British crew man. Five foot two, a woman, American, and I’d never rowed in my life. I swaggered about campus in a gold chain, spoke in a deep voice, affixed a “Yale Crew” decal to my computer case, and wielded British epithets. My friends expressed concern about this sudden transformation. “When you start wanting to be a misogynistic man, there is something to unpack,” one of them told me. I had gone from an ardent feminist to loudly talking about the girls I wanted to “fook.”
My sophomore fall, the entire heavyweight crew team seemed to be in the science class for non-science majors called Planets and Stars. I stared at the mass of muscly men, jostling and play fighting, their long legs splayed, their snickers loud. They were all tall, all blond, all British or at the very least Australian, and all sporting chains. They looked untroubled. “Did you do the homework?” “Fook no, mate.”
I was an anxious, straight, cisgender girl who cared too much. I cared too much about school and the state of the world and my family and what people thought of me. I cared until it hurt inside. Singing lullabies and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with the crust cut off was how I spent my early teenage years. I was selfless for my little brother, like how my mom was selfless for me. Was this destiny for women? To care while the men walked off carefree?
In Planets and Stars, I also stared at the girls. In particular, a girl with a messy mullet who smoked cigarettes and made my cheeks tint pink. A friend told me to listen to “We Fell in Love in October” by girl in red. Fall leaves crunched under my boots.“Smoking cigarettes on the roof, you look so pretty and I love this view.” I tried to complete problem sets, calculating the distance to stars. “Looking at the stars, admiring from afar, my girl, my girl, my girl.”
Transfixed by crew men, I dressed up as one for Halloween. Backwards baseball cap, athletic shorts, and Kyle’s gold chain. I yelled the whole night in a British man’s voice. When I sat, I manspread. When I walked, I swaggered. When I danced, I thrashed. I didn’t care how men saw me, euphoric in this new embodiment.
I never took the chain off. I permanently spoke an octave lower. I shelved my bell hooks books. I talked about the girls I liked as if I was a crew man. “Yuh, she’s so hot, mate.”
It was a bit—except it wasn’t. Did I want to be a man? Did I feel like I had to be a man to be with women? “Lesbians are not women,” my roommate told me when I came to her, distressed. She was quoting Monique Wittig. Gender is oppositional—the identity of women is relational to men, and vice versa. As I desired women, and wished to be desired by women, I no longer perceived the male gaze. I flailed about in my womanness, unmoored. What I had been told all my life made me unattractive to men—being assertive, being unfeminine—made me attractive to women. My face without makeup was not ugly, but handsome.
It was my junior year, and I had settled into my identity—I dropped the British accent and the “Yale Crew” decal from my computer. I fell in love with a best friend. This was a friend I shared everything with. We held hands. We gazed at the stars. We read feminist theory together in the library stacks. I told her I wanted to raise children with her in a commune. She was straight. Until she started questioning her sexuality. Then, she started dating a man.
She took me to a bench in the concrete courtyard of her apartment complex. “This is where I asked him to be my boyfriend,” she said. “I’ll show you how it happened. You pretend to be him. I’ll be myself.” I sat next to her, legs spread slightly, so my knee touched hers. How would I sit if I were him? She told me how much she liked me. Her features blended with the dark. “Then we kissed.” Facing each other, our black eyes glimmering, we stared in silence. I want to be her boyfriend. It came suddenly and strongly. I want to be her boyfriend.
I wore ties and waistcoats. My friend said I looked good in them. My roommate found me sobbing on my bed. “I wish I had a dick,” I choked out. It was a biting wish that gnawed within me, a desire that throbbed between my legs. “Then maybe she’d be with me.” I told my friend I liked her, and sent flowers to her door. She stayed with her boyfriend—leaving me with myself.
There are pictures of me when I was little in corduroy trousers, making sculptures out of rocks, drawing with crayons, running around in the mud. I loved princesses, and I loved superheroes. My hair was wispy and shorter than my chin. There’s another, a few years later, where I’m wearing a dress, my legs crossed, my hands clasped. I’m sitting below my boy cousin, who’s raised above me. My eyes look blank. I remember thinking I had to sit pretty.
In my dorm room, I struggled in solitude. My body was ill with anxiety and my mind clouded by depression. I was peeling away old trauma, unlearning self-sacrifice and impossible standards for productivity and impulses to caretake. Underneath I discovered sexuality—I like girls!—and something else. Hidden away was a kid in corduroy trousers wanting a chance to grow up. I found my self deep inside, and it felt—androgynous.
My haircutter and I usually incessantly gossip, but this time we are strictly silent. She is concentrated. Chunks fall to the floor. When she is finished, we both look at me in the mirror. My face relaxes into a floppy grin.
Little things give me joy. A pack of Hanes boxers. White undershirts for teenage boys. Old Spice body wash with an ominous octopus on the front.
I’m wearing a necktie in a bar, swigging a shot of whiskey and a Budweiser. A person comes up to me, and I play with her hair. They giggle. He tells me I’m pretty. She uses all pronouns—he, she, they—but tonight, she says, she feels girly. My body presses on hers as we lean on the pinball machines. “What are your pronouns?” she asks. “I don’t know,” I stammer, stupidly. “Well, how do you feel tonight?” I look at her, giddy and nervous. “They,” I say.
At a bus stop, there is a grammar book stuffed behind the glass, blocking the schedule. “How to Speak Good English,” it reads at the top of the page. “If anybody thinks I’ll stand for that, they are wrong,” reads an Incorrect example. Anybody is singular, and may refer “either to a male or female.” They is plural, and refers to neither a male nor female. I discover I am ungrammatical. I like the plurality of they. It’s one word so expansive it holds she and he and everything in between. And yet, it also sheds she and he completely. It’s a pronoun of the self—beyond petty, old things like grammar books. I realize, I don’t have to be a crew man. I can just be myself. When I sit, I manspread. When I walk, I swagger. When I dance, I thrash.
– Tigerlily Theo Hopson is a senior in Berkeley College.
Illustration by Alicia Gan.