by Janis Walworth
We are sprawled on the floor, cutting pictures out of magazines and gluing them onto posterboard. We talk about what our pictures represent, how we see ourselves projected into the world as women. Our images include a Maori dancer, an angel, a tiger, Hillary Clinton, the "before"picture from a weight loss ad, an older woman holding a revolver, a baby with butterfly wings, sexy women, stylish women, strong women, cartoon characters, a pen, even a man wearing silk boxer shorts. The words "The Morphing Pot" dominate our collage, our group photo of our inner selves.
It is Friday evening. Twenty-nine women have gathered at the Essex Conference Center, a mellow, safe, nurturing cocoon in which magical transformations occur almost indiscernably. They have come from New England and New York, from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Toronto, California, and Arkansas, enticed by a brochure that promised "a radically different, politically incorrect exploration of what it means to be a woman." A poetry reading is taking place upstairs. An enormous steaming hot tub waits to caress our tired bodies.
Morning reveals a gently undulating lawn with stone benches, a chattering waterfall, and woods beyond. Inside, light streams into comfortable, serene spaces that hold us as we drink coffee and eat pancakes, get to know each other, and begin the day's workshops. We are the experts who have come to teach each other and the students who have come to learn from each other. Women offered improvisational personal growth workshops, a discussion about the role models we choose for ourselves as women, a dialogue on dealing with shame and ridicule, a slide show about intersex conditions, an exercise in communication styles, a play one has written about a transsexual woman in the lesbian community.
The caring of the staff is palpable, their presence unobtrusive. At each meal, we revel in an abundance of exquisitely prepared food, gleaming with fresh vegetables and piquant with herbs. In the middle of dinner Saturday night, a woman stands up and announces, "Hey, everybody, I'm fat!" Everybody applauds. This weekend is a time of healing, of self-acceptance made possible by the acceptance of others. Some women finish songs and poems begun years earlier and left conclusionless until now.
The most amazing thing, and yet so simple it takes us all weekend to notice it, is our silent acceptance of each other as women. The diversity of our womanhood is powerful indeed. We are transsexual women, newly to many years postop, and nontranssexual women. We are women with penises who don't want surgery, who look forward to surgery, who are just beginning to think about surgery, who can't have surgery. We are women who live as men all or part of the time. We are women with bodies that naturally express both maleness and femaleness. Intersex, preop, nonop, postop, transsexual, transgendered, generic -- we are all women.
We are also diverse in other ways: racially, financially, culturally, in age, sexual orientation, health and disability, employment, and more. What, then, do we have in common as women? That is what we have came to discover. We listen to each others' stories and tell our own. We share poems we have written, music we like, a stone found in a favorite place, a teddy bear. We take risks, cry together, hug each other, laugh and splash in the hot tub. Some women do things they have never done before: reading aloud her own writing, singing her own song, leading a workshop, speaking from her heart. Some do things they have done often and well, sharing their expertise.
We are all gender educators, some of us in classrooms, workshops, and lecture halls, some through political action, others by being who we are. We talk about how we can make our stories intelligible to people who have never heard them, the vocabulary we must create to give voice to our experience, how we conceptualize the pieces of gender, sex, orientation, and expression, the resources we can access. A network of gender educators is born, and coalitions for political action are formed.
Sunday morning, women gather at the edge of the goldfish pond and sing and light candles. We listen to a young woman, a minister-in-training, a white-appearing Puerto Rican, a long-haired lesbian, a woman-identified woman proud of her fine men's clothing, a woman who grew a beard at age 17 and let it grow -- we listen to her talk about being different. Another woman reads, "At the front gate, the questioners are still asking the gatekeepers how they can be so sure of the boundaries of womanhood." It is an account of the third year of protest against the policy of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival that bars transsexual women. Several of us had been there. It is told in the words of writer Minnie Bruce Pratt, sent out into the world in her book S/he and brought back to us by a woman who was touched by the story. It is read aloud by the transsexual woman whose expulsion from the Festival in 1991 sparked the controversy. The offering is to be a donation to those planning this year's protest. "I don't want woman to be a fortress that has to be defended," she reads. "I want it to be a life we constantly braid together from the threads of our existence, a rope we make, a flexible weapon stronger than steel, that we use to pull down walls that imprison us at the borders."
"This weekend has been a turning point in my life," one woman says on Sunday afternoon. "I see things in a whole different way," says another. We are in awe of what has happened here and honored to have been in each others' presence. We embrace each other as women -- a woman with a man's name, a woman with makeup and painted nails, a woman wearing men's clothing, a woman who lets her beard grow, a woman who works as a man, a woman whose genitalia don't fit the system, a woman in psychic hiding from her wife, a woman who loves another woman. Sometimes the possibilities for woman are overwhelming, sometimes exhilirating. Sometimes another woman's view of her gender is unsettling, sometimes enlightening. What we have in common is that we call our experience of ourselves "woman."
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This page last updated November 1, 1999.
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