by Karla Jynn
In 2017, nine years after emerging from the cocoon of my original community, I was more awake and less emotionally fragile, but even my expanded life was still a bubble. I had my M and L tattoos, but so what? I didn’t connect much with life beyond my comfort zone.
I went to a “Women in Re-entry” art exhibit in North Philadelphia where incarcerated women, those just home, and some with imprisoned family members had created paintings, poems, and mixed-media installations expressing the pain and resilience of living through poverty, injustice, and generational trauma. Compared with my protected, well-fed, well-educated network, this was a devastation I’d never tuned in to.
Afterward, I drove along treeless streets with broken-down houses and piles of trash, back to my woodsy neighborhood and spacious, well-kept home. My lifelong ignorance left me brain-fried, and hungry to learn and do.
I joined an interracial systemic-justice training and fundraising course. On gender day, two non-binary speakers drew a graph of four basic quadrants, to help us glimpse the galaxy of possibilities for non-binary humans.
The first quadrant was the sex assigned at birth. Next was the sex one is, sometimes the same, sometimes not. Then one’s chosen gender expression—queer, femme, masc, androgynous, etc. The final quadrant was sexual preferences. These intersect in numerous ways; any human can show up in any combination.
Thrilled to have insights that expanded my straight, cis-gendered default views, I laughed when I imagined how aghast my mother and her mother would have been.
In a photo from one of my granddaughters’ long-ago visits, five-year-old M poses in her latest favorite costume, a pink chiffon ball gown with flounces draped over layers of a paler pink skirt. A wide rose-colored satin sash wraps her waist, with a huge bow tied in the back. Lines of tiny pearls on ribbons festoon from puffy sleeves, with more ribbons and pearls edging her neck and waist. Her head is turned to show off French braids. With arms spread wide like an opera singer, her plump open hands beseech the audience to revel in her splendor.
That grandkid, now 15, is trans. He uses his appropriate pronouns and has chosen K---- for his name. His exploration took several years and deeply self-aware conversations with parents and friends. I’ve always been close with my daughter and was grateful she kept me updated on the stages.
I love learning about K, and am floored at the honest, organic process that has let him become who he is, including through a time of they/them pronouns and a different, androgynous name.
K’s presentation to me seems more feminine than masculine, including sometimes showing cleavage in his Instagram reels. He also posts photos of his face painted with elaborate theatrical make-up, but assigned cultural markers of gender morph over time and are not innate or "appropriate" proof of how men or women should look.
I would love to ask K what makes him sure he is him, but of course I wouldn’t. Are there parts of him that feel female, and others that feel male? Does all of him just feel like him, and not some binary that needs to be parsed and defined? Does he think he will ever want hormones or surgery? How does he feel now about all his ballerina/princess/fairy costume photos from his childhood?
Instead, I revel in the complexities of a world greater than me or my imaginings, and way beyond the sermons of my first 50 years spouting “divine” doctrines like “God made men to be men down to every cell of their bodies, and women to be women in every cell of their bodies.” Categorical thinking applied to minds and hearts as well; men were rational, women emotional. But now, thank god, K is free to be and try and find out what fits him. I wish it hadn’t taken me till 50 to begin that adventure.
In a recent Instagram reel, K said, “We humans can be some batshit crazy creatures. We’ve caused so much pain to the world and to each other but how can you look at like the rise and fall of empires and not think that that's freaking amazing for a species to do? I get not liking people on an individual basis or not liking some of the things we've done but this species is one of the coolest things to be a part of.”
I laugh when I think of me at age 15: somber eyes straining for attention; head tilted, hoping to look cool; struggling through Algebra 2; no awareness beyond the tiny puddle I was trying to swim in.
The initial tattooed on my thigh still stands for primal innocence even though the name that inspired it is obsolete. And the tattoo on my shoulder will always mark the evolution of our family, all the more since my second grandkid too is non-binary and uses a different name than the L one they were given at birth.
What I understand now is that I’m simply a speck in the cosmos—not superior or a seer. And that there’s always more to learn about myself and the world. This is even clearer when I muse on the technology lying ahead. I thought that in reading about AI, I had a chance of mentally preparing myself for the exponentially greater AI life that awaits us. That too is an illusion. People way savvier than me have no idea what’s coming.
I’m 71. At each point in my life when I thought I’d won some race, it turned out I was at a different starting line I hadn’t seen. I could go to Eddie’s again for a third tattoo, but what on earth would it stand for? I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Maybe I could get a brown blob inked somewhere on my body, to signal that my wisdom in the world is a piece of bark peeling off the London Plane tree in front of our house. Some pieces look like countries or continents on an imaginary map; some like abstract art; others are shriveled strips of protection the tree no longer needs. When the time comes, all bark falls to the ground and gets raked up and placed with leaves into the compost heap.
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