The Fluidity of Gender

I don’t know who in the world started the idea, but the first time I heard it, it felt like turpentine. Like all ideas that didn’t suit me, I just let it on, knowing that there’s no arguing with the world that insists on its terms, not yours, even if the critics who were talking about the fluidity of gender were describing my play, which by all intent and purposes, I meant to be a lesbian play, which is to say a joke on heterosexual society.

The trouble is, but for a handful of women readers in the audience, who enjoyed the cussings and the semi-nudity, everybody seemed to have missed the point, including the producers who staged it. I don’t know what is that guy doing there, but they couldn’t seem to conceive of a lesbian play without a daddy inserted and so the gay director put in some flashback device where a family (Mommy, Daddy, and two tykes) was to be seen at the play's opening, looking every inch normal as a sunny day. So one gay critic demanded that it was good alright, but where’s the resolution of the conflict, and by resolution of the conflict he meant, will the family situation improve from abnormal to normal? It can get depressing, people's obtuseness, I mean, like couldn't they see there was no freak of a family to laugh at up there?

But what could you do when you had been overly congratulated that your non-winning entry to the Palanca, Little Sister, got lucky enough to be selected among the 17 plays to be mounted in a playfest crowded with talent? Wouldn’t you feel happy and grateful enough that you’re entitled to free tickets to all these 17 winner plays if you paid for your own airfare from the province to Manila and way back, and never mind if the contract that they sent you weeks after the playfest stipulates that your play will fetch you an honorarium of P3,200.00 withholding tax deducted, and what is that scary provision saying there about the honorarium being a matter of confidentiality and is not to be revealed to anyone?

And about a week back, that was what someone was saying. Isn’t she 57, that old, she said, how come these younger lesbians on the scene here are so conservative, playing butches and femmes and oh so full of sins to confess, isn’t she supposed to be the old-fashioned one, the lola here?

I got lucky to have gone out to listen to her lecture on gender and sexual orientation and thank Heavens, she did not talk about the fluidity of gender, only that you could have as many sexual orientations to choose from or fall into, from the first categories of lesbian, gay, bi, transgendered, transsexuals and intersexuals on to the combination of two or three or four and so on of these categories to make up a new one. Or say you may start off thinking you are oriented to be sexually attracted to the opposite sex, which makes you a hetero, then discover later on that you have been all along actually sexually attracted to women, which makes you a lesbian, then later on you go bi, then graduate a transsexual man and turn into a fag, then a lesbian fag, who may then marry a dyke. I’m not joking. Neither was she. There’s no playing with these things and the LGBTI categories anyway are so limiting; life is much more painfully complicated than what the book says.

Fine.

Gender fluidity sounds to me like political pluralism, it sucks, people made that up because they don’t want to problematize anymore the world they inherited. So I protest. For instance, I have always thought of myself a sep (a lesbian separatist) since the day I realized that you could not just count on the most revolutionary of men to give up the perks of manhood and the Glory and the Power of the Pope for the sake of liberating humanity, and especially the rebelling other half of humanity. But at the same time, I felt at a deadend, knowing that I have to work with other social agents (who aren’t feminist lesbian like me) if I want to get anywhere at all. So in a way, it was a way out for me, a promise of liberation, you could say, the idea that I could and may one day go to bed with just anyone I meet on my street and hopefully share a trench with him or inherit his rifle, too. (I think of Gwendolyn Brooks saying she doesn't like deadends, where there is no one to meet or to berate.)

So compulsory heterosexuality did not exist now? All that is old feminism? I still cannot think of the dykes in Bankerohan, the vendors and the cartpushers, saying that of themselves, that their gender is fluid. Or my parlorista gay and bugaw friends now in their retiring years. Easier for the privileged sex and the privileged classes to say that.

And if I ever so much as broach it to my cousins in the province that they could be gay, they will just bash me in the head for the plain crazy old woman that I am.