by Jacob Tobia
To be honest, I signed up for the trip for two reasons, neither of which were particularly altruistic. First off, I love camp in every sense. I love campy queens and campy TV shows and campy movies. I also love summer camp and summer camp–style trips, like Project WILD. I didn’t want to be on campus as much for second semester senior year, so getting away to a cabin in the woods for a weekend, for free, was too good an opportunity to pass up.
I also went because I thought it might help me get laid. Each year, when the group of Common Grounders came back singing “Kumbaya” and hugging one another, I noticed that there were always a few new queer couples in the mix. Something about sharing your truth, being super vulnerable, and challenging privilege really seemed to get the libido going for campus queers. Dating at Duke was a slow-motion disaster for me, but I thought maybe if I went on Common Ground, some gorgeous bi-/pansexual boy would come out for the first time publicly, tell me he’d always admired me from afar, and fall right into my arms. Stranger things had happened on Common Ground.
Still hurting after the election, I thought the retreat might offer me a reprieve.
Day one of the retreat introduced me to the sixty other campers and set forth the weekend’s goals. We talked about race and ethnicity and class, and it was intense. Then day two—a whole day about gender, sexism, misogyny, and, to a lesser extent, homophobia—came along. I thought I was ready for it. I had checked in with the facilitators, many of whom were my good friends, the week before. I’d asked how the gender day was structured, if it had enough space for gender nonconforming and trans folks. No one would tell me any details, but they reassured me that it would be fine; that, yes, they’d thought about this and I would be okay. Which made what happened that much more of a slap in the face.
After lunch, we all gathered in the main cabin. My friend David, one of the two co-chairs of the retreat, started:
“Okay, everyone, first of all, we want to thank you all for a great first day—and we’re looking forward to an even better day two!”
The room cheered.
“As you know by now, today we’ll be talking about gender,” he continued. “To start with, we’d like to separate the room into two groups: women—sorry, female—and male participants. Female participants stay here, and all the males, please come with me!”
Sixty pairs of feet sprang into action, sneakers shuffling, flip-flops thwacking, the group separating cleanly down the middle except for me. As people went to grab their jackets and notebooks, I approached the other head facilitator.
“I thought you said you’d planned for this, but there are only two groups? Where am I supposed to go? What the fuck, dude?”
“Well, technically you’re male, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yes of course, I have a male body. But why does that mean I have to go with the other males? Are we only going to be talking about our bodies? Are we only going to be talking about our penises and beards and how weird it is when you start to grow hair around your nipples?” I asked quizzically. “Or are we going to be talking about being men? Because if we’re talking about being men, you and I both know that I don’t have much to add to that conversation.”
“Jacob, you have to trust the process, okay? I promise it’ll be all right. Just go.”
“Fine,” I relented. “But I swear to God, if people start talking about their gender instead of their bodies, I’m gonna lose it. This better be an hour-long conversation about dicks.”
Frustration mounting, I went off into the woods with the male group. Much to my disappointment but not to my surprise, we did not spend the time talking about our male bodies. I wish we had. I love talking about my dick—what it wants, what it doesn’t want, my insecurities about it—and I’m always happy to trade best practices on masturbation, prostate stimulation, or body hair grooming.
But instead, we spent the entire conversation talking about being men, about masculinity, about gender. It felt all too classic, being sorted into a group with other people because of my body and then having an identity effortlessly imposed on that body. I resigned myself to silence, to quiet disaffection, to sitting in the woods in a circle of men even though I didn’t belong in that circle, my distaste for rocking the boat overruling my desire to be recognized as I am.
Halfway through the session, we were asked to generate a list of stereotypes about women, and I was such a little shit about it. We were supposed to say things like “slutty,” “inferior,” “bad at math,” or whatever sorts of stale tropes people hold to be true these days. Instead, I chimed in with:
“Smarter.”
“Resilient.”
“Tougher.”
“Rugged.”
“Stronger.”
“Muscular.”
“Athletic.”
“Politically savvy.”
You get the idea.
The facilitators were less than pleased with my strategy.
“Jacob, can you please stop derailing the activity? We’re supposed to be discussing the stereotypes that we’ve actually been taught about women, not stereotypes that we wish were true.”
“I’m trying to play along, but that’s kind of hard when I’m in the wrong group.”
“Would you rather go with the women’s group?”
“That doesn’t work, either.”
“Well, those are the groups that we have. If you’re not going to leave the group, can you please stop interrupting the exercise?”
“Fine,” I muttered vituperatively.
But my resignation didn’t last long. When we all returned to the cabin, lists of gender stereotypes in hand, the facilitators had arranged the chairs into two rows facing each other. People from the men’s group were asked to sit on one side, and people from the women’s group were asked to sit on the other. As if we were opposites, as if we were more different than same, as if we were opposing factions.
I was placed across the aisle from a woman classmate of mine. Immediately it felt wrong. I burned.
The facilitators asked us to scoot our chairs close enough together that our knees were touching. We were asked to make eye contact with our partner. Then the facilitators read the entire list of stereotypes made by both groups.
Gazing across the aisle at my friend Caroline, looking deeply into her eyes, it occurred to me that I was not seeing “the other.” I was merely looking at my own slightly distorted reflection. I was looking at my own image, the eyes of a similar spirit transposed into a different body. I saw not an opposite but a sister looking back. We were one. We were more similar than we ever could’ve imagined.
And in the power of that moment, something clicked: an anger and an agony I’d learned to forget long ago. Out of my heart, my childhood self erupted, bubbling up through decades of rock and sediment and dirt, gushing forth through years of respectability and discipline and punishment and social isolation and bullying, surging through twenty years of bad habits, self-loathing, self-denial, and self-sacrifice.
I was no longer my present self. I was no longer twenty-two years old and about to graduate college. I was four years old, three, even. I was a child again. A precocious, strong, stubborn child who’d yet to give up on their gender, who hadn’t yet accepted the world’s edict that their gender was impossible, who hadn’t yet relinquished their divine right to express themself as they pleased. I was a sapling; a tender green leaf; thriving, young, glowing, uncrushed by the world.
In the recesses of my earliest memories, when memory is more an emotion and less a series of facts, I found flashes of anger I’d forgotten. While I’d remembered my childhood as mostly confused, suppressed, and despondent, I now found precious memories of fighting back against a world that sought to erase me. I couldn’t remember the exact circumstances. I couldn’t remember precisely how or why. I couldn’t remember what gave me the courage to fight against a world that was taking
my gender from me, but I found memories of screaming, of fuming, of destroying things and slamming doors and stomping my feet and crying out. In the years before being mistreated by the world was a foregone conclusion in my mind, I remembered yelling back, clawing at those who dared cross me, resisting with everything I had.
And at that retreat, sitting knee to knee with Caroline, that child came back. That fiesty little femme who knew they deserved better, who struggled impolitely and with force, was back. And she was furious.
When the facilitators finished reading the lists, they asked everyone to pause for a moment of silent reflection, and then asked if anyone had any initial impressions or reflections they wanted to share. I took a deep breath and stood up.
“I have said this before, but it seems that I need to say it again, perhaps less politely this time.”
Before, it had only been one pair of eyes looking back at me; now it was sixty. I was all rage and fury.
“I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am a glimmering, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, beautiful, human person, and I don’t identify that way for fun. I don’t identify that way because I think it makes me interesting. I don’t identify that way as a hobby. I use that language to describe myself because it is fundamentally who I am.”
I paused, breathing, breathing, fuming.
“For my entire life, I have been struggling against masculinity, against the imperative to be a man, against the idea that because my body looks a certain way, I must be a certain way. I have been struggling since the beginning of my memory. I cannot remember a time in my life when I have not been struggling against this, when the world wasn’t coercing me into a gender that I wanted no part of.”
The tears were starting, and for once, I understood why my mom cries more often because she’s angry than because she’s sad.
“I have spent my life being asked to go with the boys, to get with the program, to not make things difficult. At first, when I was three or four, I fought against people who asked me to do that. I pushed back. But they have always, always had more power than me. They won every time. So I gave up. I resigned myself to a life of being mistreated, misunderstood, miscategorized in a world that could only see gender as one of two options. I gave up everything in order to fit in. In some way or another, we all do. I gave up my hobbies, my friends, my language, the way I held my wrists. I gave it all up.”
My voice grew louder.
“Over the past few years, I have been desperately trying to get my gender back, to put my heart back in my chest. And coming here, on this retreat, I thought I would find support in that effort. I thought I would, perhaps, be treated well for once. I even asked the facilitators if they needed help ensuring that the programming was done in a way that made space for me. I was proactive about it. And each time I asked, I was assured that things would be fine, that I would be included, valued, and respected.”
I crested into a full-fledged yell.
“But I have not been respected here today. I have not been heard or valued or seen. You have all, each and every one of you, done your part today in undoing me. When our facilitators separated us by gender and I noted that there wasn’t a group for me, none of you stood up. None of you supported me. You just filed back into the status quo, back into what you knew, erasing me effortlessly. That is what people do to me on campus every single day. That is what people do to me in the world every single day. I am simply erased. I am asked to forget that I exist. I am asked to dispose of my gender, to dispose of myself and get with the program. But this retreat didn’t have to be built this way. There didn’t have to just be two groups. We didn’t have to rebuild a world that only sees two types of gender, and I could’ve been accommodated. I could’ve been seen and heard. We could’ve done things differently. We can always do things differently, and the idea that we cannot build a different world, that the world is inevitable as it is, the idea that the gender binary is foundational and irreplaceable, is exactly what leads trans and gender nonconforming people to our demise.”
And then, a bit more quietly, with something closer to calm resolve, “If accommodating me, if ensuring that my gender is respected and valued is too much work for y’all, then fuck you. I’m out. You don’t deserve my sparkle.”
I turned, whirled out of the main cabin and into the woods, where I found a comfy log to sit on and began to breathe again.
A few moments later, my gender nonconforming friend Ronnie, a junior facilitator on the trip and one of my best friends in my dorm, came out to find me.
“Hey, Mama.”
Sometimes Ronnie calls me Mama.
“Did they send you out to make me come back inside?”
“No, I just wanted to come out here and sit with ya.”
We sat on the log for a few minutes in silence, playing with sticks and leaves, drawing shapes in the dirt.
“I don’t really have that much to say. And you don’t have to say anything, either—you already said a whole lot.”
“I sure did, didn’t I?” I cracked a smile. “I really gave it to ’em.”
A smile in return. “You got that right.”
I wrapped my arms around Ronnie, and we held each other for a moment, grateful.
“Do we need to go back in?”
“Nah. I think it’s good to give them the chance to process what you said. Make ’em sweat a little.”
“Okay. We’ll make ’em sweat.”
We sat there together for a few more minutes, breathing, giggling, pointing out our favorite trees, looking for birds, human stuff.
A few minutes later, the group was on break and a few other people joined us outside. David approached me across the thicket.
“Hey Jacob, I—” he murmured, stumbling on his words a bit. “I’m sorry if the way we organized things hurt you. It wasn’t our intention, I promise.”
“Yeah, I’m sure it wasn’t your intention,” I noted, trying to stay stony, holding my ground. “But it still happened.”
“For the next activity, we still have the room separated, but we thought that maybe you and Ronnie could have your own section, you know, a gender nonconforming one?”
I cut the hard-ass routine, taken aback. “That’d certainly be a step in the right direction.”
When I went back into the room after break, it was still split in two, the women’s group facing the men’s group. But at the top of the aisle, between the two groups, there were two chairs: one for me and one for Ronnie. Common Ground’s first-ever gender nonconforming group. Ronnie in tow, I walked proudly over to my new section and sat down.
I didn’t say anything for the rest of the day, I simply sat in my new section with Ronnie, content with what I’d done, grateful that—perhaps for the first time in my life—yelling about my gender seemed to have worked. As I sat in the third gender section, in a chair that was properly mine, my mind was far beyond the conversation:
People actually listened to me when I said I deserved space of my own.
I have a space of my own now.
Followed quickly by:
So what the fuck am I gonna do with it?
* * *
—
Have you ever watched a video of an aboveground pool rupturing? If you’ve haven’t, you should. They’re funny. And sorta beautiful. And metaphorically useful.
One moment, someone is just kicking around on their floaty tube. Then a wall buckles, a seam breaks, and all of a sudden, a giant cascade of water breaks free all at once, surging across the yard and sweeping away everything in its path. Any unfortunate souls who were swimming or who were unlucky enough to be standing in the water’s path are swept away, too. The whole yard is soon covered, a deluge guided by gravity, racing downhill.
That’s kind of what my gender was like at the end of senior year.
One moment, it was contained, polite, and respectable: co
nfined within its prescribed walls.
The next moment, with little left to lose, the seams burst, and my gender was all over the place, gushing forth in an unstoppable wave, sweeping me along for the ride.
I think it was that I ran out of fucks to give. While I’d found moments of gender freedom throughout my time in college, four years of trying to be someone else had taken their toll. I was worn out; exhausted from the effort of trying to fit the mold. The walls I’d built in my own mind, the rubrics I’d devised about which parts of my femininity could be seen by others and which parts needed to stay private, the mental mechanisms I’d constructed to hold back so-called undesirable parts of myself, the restraints I’d tightened long ago, they all gave way at once.
I found myself saying yes to things I never used to. I found myself embracing fashion that before had seemed too risqué. I attempted to show off my legs more. I explored just how much glitter I could wear on a given Thursday.
For the first time since I could remember, I let my heart lead my gender and told my brain to shut the hell up. At the age of twenty-two, I found myself in a moment of renaissance, a moment of rebirth, a moment of childlike creativity and exploration. Nothing was off-limits. Anything was possible. The world was my playroom, frat boys be damned, and I had the best dress-up bin in town.
These moments of liberation were sublime. To this day, they are my fondest memories of being on campus. The moments when, as a washed-up senior and a public failure, I stopped trying to make everyone happy and let my gender flow freely.
There was the time I went shopping with my brother and my mom at the Goodwill and bought two skirts before finding the dress to end all dresses. It was a vintage 1980s bright pink one-piece skirt suit with navy blue trim and a single oversize navy blue button at the collar. It was so short that it barely covered my underwear, but I thought I looked just like Jackie Kennedy in it. And my mom and brother agreed. I decided I was going to wear it to graduation.
