What is gender?
As the title indicates, the overarching thematic concern of this memoir is the nature of gender. Which is a somewhat ironic way of putting it since the complications arising over gender in the last few decades are the result of what once seemed the epitome of natural being called into question for the first time. Gender has historically been inextricably tied to sexual organs: being born with a penis meant boy and being born with a vagina meant girl. Advancements in a number of different scientific disciplines has completely challenged that notion. Part of the message of the book is that anecdotal evidence of this new scientific inquiry has existed for as long as humans have been around. The author’s story specifically explores the middle ground existing the idea of a purity of male and female even apart from the initial evidence of sexual organs.
The Search for Self-Identity
At heart, the book is a painful search by one person who fits comfortably neither within the construction of biological gender or self-identified gender. As the author grows up and is faced with new experiences and new information, all the familiar identifying tags fail miserably: male, female, gay, straight, bisexual, asexual, transgender…nothing really perfectly fits. At one point, a timeline of the author’s younger years reveals that a major crush on a boy hit hard almost immediately after coming out internally as a lesbian. This relatively minor episode of confusion reflects a much broader and comprehensive problem with coming to a satisfying mode of self-identity.
The Struggle for External Identity
Think about how the rest of the world identifies you. Probably the very first thing that one person will tell another when describing you is whether you are male or female. (And then, depending upon the sort of people they are, most likely the next item will be the color of your skin pigmentation which, fortunately, is not a major obstacle for the author in arriving at a self-identity.) Now imagine that you do not really consider yourself as either fully male or female. You were born with female parts and while you do lean heavily toward identifying as male, the reality is that your circumstance is somewhere mixed in between. If you can’t even identify yourself as male or female, imagine the difficulty that others will have. The issue of pronoun choice plays a major part in the forward progression of the narrative with even the author not coming to a choice that is satisfying until nearly the end. The only problem—of course—is that this choice carries the baggage of feeling like yet another obstacle because of the burden it places upon those unfamiliar with the terminology.
