Minnie Bruce Pratt

The long-awaited reprint of this classic work of lesbian literature. Pratt's brave memoir recounts her struggle to overcome the repressive traditions of the American South and live her life honestly. It chronicles her youth, marriage, her eventual decision to come out and her life with author and transgendered activist Leslie Feinberg.

S/He

Lindsay

“I care which pronoun is used, but people have been respectful to me with the wrong pronoun and disrespectful with the right one. It matters whether someone is using the pronoun as a bigot, or if they are trying to demonstrate respect.” 

what we do not know is how many ways of being human have been hidden in the word woman. We don’t yet know how large is this other that has been made the opposite of the narrow rod of man.

crossing gender boundaries as women does not automatically make us feminists, but the consequences of doing so may, if we live.

I don’t want woman to be a fortress that has to be defended. 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.

The last and only time I’d been at the festival, I’d walked uneasily around the temporary town of six thousand or so women, on paths that wound between tents, performance stages, and masses of ferns. This women’s land, this refuge, felt unreal and dangerous to me. Finally, after walking by thousands and thousands of white women, I realized I’d never lived, even briefly, in a place that had so few people of color. The only space I’d occupied for any length of time that was more segregated was the whites- only schoolroom of my childhood.

, ten years later, I find that to be admitted here I and the other women have to pass a biological test: Are you a pure, natural- born woman? Surely I can’t be the only one who fears a sisterhood based on biological definitions, the kind that have been used in the larger world to justify everything from job discrimination (because women have smaller brains and aren’t as smart) to hysterectomies (because women’s wombs make us hysterical). And I can’t be the only one who grew up trained into the cult of pure white womanhood and heard biological reasons given to explain actions against people of color, everything from segregation of water fountains to lynching. If this gathering of women in the dusty fields beyond the gate is a community based on biological purity, then it offers me, a “real woman,” no real safety.

“When you live between opposites, you cannot escape the s/ he who will follow you, who must either be wrestled with or embraced. And I have seen the beauty in that embrace.

“You weren’t the one that started the trouble, were you? And of course you mouthed off, femme tactics to make a scene out of danger, to get people’s attention, to get help.”

Itold her about my classroom discussion of the word cunt, how I speak of the goddess Cunti, the source of law and life, order and death, creatrix of the world. The one whose name is origin of country, kin and kind, of cunning, ken, and cunnilingus. How her powers and ours were divided and defamed. The power of the universe reduced to one part of woman’s body, cursed on the street and at home as cunt. For thousands of years, the word caught and caged like our beautiful, furry, bony part. But if we don’t use this elegant word, what are we to use? Do we go on saying down there, as if our bodies hold hell, the underworld, a place forbidden to venture?

“You are not only a lesbian, but very, very queer. You love a woman who is manly, and yet do not want her to be completely man. In fact, you desire her because she is both. And how often has she found someone who really wants to touch, hold, lie down with both at once?”

Over the clatter of the lunchtime rush, she says that she did “the femme thing” for a while to prove she was a woman, but now she believes in not denying her past. In the past I have denied I was a woman. The pronoun she was a trap set by others to catch me. I watch her talk, cheeks flushed pink, eyes gleaming silver and green. I imagine wrapping womanhood around me like a length of shimmering metallic cloth. She looks at me frequently as she talks, careful to divide her attention between you and me. How my aunts talked to me as a little girl, curly- headed and new in my mother’s arms. No words from them to me without sex or gender.

This is not a man passing on the street who sees you as a man, arm in arm with me, a woman. This is not a lesbian who watches us dancing at a party, and sees you as either a butch lesbian or a woman trying to be a man, and me as femme or deluded. This is someone who lives in a world where gender and sex are fluid. Not an academic exercise, but what she tells the kids about who she was as their father. The shock to me of you sitting here as him, at this ordinary Formica table, though of course that is the pronoun that suits your masculine spirit, short hair, Oxford shirt, men’s slacks. The word spoken about you, not in hostility or misperception, but because, for you both, that is how flexible gender is.

Meeting you for the first time over curried chicken and masala dosa, she is socially appropriate to refer to you as him. Meanwhile, you are saying that you are a woman and transgendered, that your masculinity is a range of gender expression that should be available to all women, as femininity should be to men. You insist that you are him and also her. When I enter the conversation, I call you both by your given names to be respectful. The either/ or pronouns suddenly are the jaws of a steel trap snapping shut on infinities that exist where body, self, sex, gender, the world, and lunch intersect.

your clit with its tongue out waiting for my breath.

the arc of your hips turning inside out my ideas of sex and love.

I argued with her about marks. I said that we make them—alphabets or tattoos—as a human act to place the self in time, in location. If my beloved agrees to my teeth on her neck, then the tiny bruise is like a poem written to join the self passionately to another. The mark only becomes a trap when we begin to use it to save ourselves, when the wedding ring becomes a gold coin to buy security, eternity. Then we fix the other with an X: mark the spot, stay the same, be mine forever. We become unable to possess and then relinquish.

The tips of her fingers leave small burning circles on my right breast, like the imprint of a lit cigarette ground out in beach sand.

Maybe I can drive into a third space that is lesbian, and not woman or man. I’m ready to live outside of femaleness, the hedge of roses, thorny and beautiful, that has encircled me wherever I’ve sat waiting.

On summer mornings, lying very still in bed, I closed my eyes and waited for someone to touch me. Hours dreaming of someone stern, determined, almost rough, who could break down the door into the intolerable white sunlight of my lonely room. Then I would be seen. Then I would be made translucent with desire.

Standing in a dusty field, she’d gotten her first hit in twenty- five years— a single over third base. The energy flew up from the earth through her cunt, belly, shoulders, into the bat. The power of the hit, her arms lifting and winging her toward all the other women running in response to her.

When I am with her, I have no idea what sex I am or what gender, whose body I have, or the meanings of my gestures. One afternoon I spread her legs with my hands and her labia with my fingers and dart my tongue deep into her. Satiated, I coil around her and fall asleep. In my dream I feel something swell between my legs, heavy and hot. Waking with a start in the dim twilight, in the rank sheets, first I am lying on my husband, his penis engorged against my stomach. Then it is her penis that burrows and bumps against me. Then I shift and know: perhaps it is my own, writhing and dreadful between my legs.

Do I desire her because she spoke the secret out loud, because she broke through the barrier between us? Do I desire her because she made herself vulnerable, showed me her wounds, a beckon to me to hold and heal her? Do I care for her only as a guide to follow down a path to myself? I wander between word, dream, fantasy, desire, action, man, woman, woman, woman.

I wish I were running away in a car with another woman, driving farther south into the heat, sweating inside the translucent blue voile dress I wore the summer before I married, the one that no longer fits me after two children. I might argue with her all the way, but I’m arguing with myself: How to be a woman? I don’t want to be. They do not see my mind, they only see my body. I don’t want to leave my body. I want to feel full and humid, thunderhead about to crack with lightning. I want to walk in danger by myself and survive, the way she holds her head up, clenches her teeth under blood- red lips, and dares anyone to stop her. I don’t want anyone to think I am like her. When we meet in the hallway at work, I can barely look at her, and she also looks askance.

And both inside and outside lesbian space, there is another assumption held by some. No “real” lesbian would be attracted to as much masculinity as I prefer in my lesbian lover.

As women and as lesbians we wanted to step outside traps set for us as people sexed as women, to evade negative values gendered to us. We didn’t want to be women as defined by the larger culture, so we had to get rid of femininity. We didn’t want to be oppressed by men, so we had to get rid of masculinity. And we wanted to end enforced desires, so we had to get rid of heterosexuality.

S/He

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