Agnes Langston

Maybe it’s partly an effect of estrogen treatments, part of the hormone replacement therapy I began last year when I first came out as nonbinary, more feminine than masculine.  In addition to making other physical changes, the estrogen can redistribute facial fat and soften the skin, making one’s face appear more feminine.

Whatever the reason, I can’t help but smile over this newfound resemblance. It pleases me to think that maybe I’m growing into her loveliness.

With my father off at sea in the Navy much of the time I was growing up, my mom, my sister, and I lived with my grandparents, and my grandmother helped raise my sister and me. It was a little house that felt cramped at times, accommodating not only my grandparents and our mom but also, occasionally, our dad and a couple of goofy uncles. I have treasured memories of them all: my grandfather teaching me how to draw cartoons; my Uncle Dick teaching me how to cheat at Monopoly; and my Uncle Jack, the beatnik artist whose studio was in our basement and whose paintings gave me both a love of art and a source of income (I charged my friends ten cents each to see Jack’s many canvases of nudes.)

But my most beloved childhood memories are of my grandmother—the sight of her coming home from her job at the bakery down the street, or in the kitchen whipping up a favorite dessert she called “pink pudding”—a mysterious concoction of strawberry Jell-o, evaporated milk, and other ingredients that I have yet to imitate successfully.  I remember all the songs she loved—Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Old Rugged Cross” was one of her favorites and is still one of mine.

The harshest words I ever heard in that house were those she used scolding my beatnik uncle: “If you don’t shave off that darned goatee, I am going to make you start paying rent!” (People yelled at Jack with the same stern voice they usually reserved for yelling at me. How cool was that?)

My grandmother loved New York; living about fifteen minutes from the city, she would take my sister and me in on the train, which in those days only went as far as the Jersey City waterfront, where we would take a ferry across the Hudson to Lower Manhattan. As a little boy I would go out on deck beside her and watch Gotham loom up before us as I stood clinging to her hips. Those maternal hips. I’ll never forget those hips.

This maternal thing seems strong in me. When my first child was born, I felt intense envy for his mother’s physical bond to our new son before he was even born.

Freud talks about penis envy—which is the stupidest idea ever had by a brilliant man. (He concludes that because female psychology is based on envy, women are incapable of a sense of justice. QED, right? RBG anyone? It’s hard not to suspect that Freud arrived at this misogynistic conclusion first and then cooked up a psychological rationale for it.)

I suffered from womb envy. I craved that immediate, unmediated physical connection to my child. When his mother and I split up years later (by which time we’d had our second son), I took custody of our two boys. I couldn’t bear the thought of them growing up without me. Or me without them. I told their mother that if she would give me custody of the boys, I would walk away no questions asked. That was the smartest decision I ever made.

One Mother’s Day when I was a single parent, my younger son—as sweet and as terrible a boy as ever walked the earth—brought me home a Mother’s Day gift from school.

You could hear me swoon.

As teenagers, the kids would sometimes come home with their dates after a movie or a dance, and I’d be up cooking them some elaborate late night snack—mac and cheese, nachos, or spaghetti and meatballs. I have remained friends over the years with one of my son’s high school dates who remembers my being giddy with delight one such night when I was cooking for them and discovered that the secret to making great meatballs is adding some Chianti.

We joked that I wasn’t the father; I was the Italian grandmother.

Many a truth. . . .

I have tried to determine precisely what it is in me that feels, for lack of a better word, feminine. Although I was pretty successful as a man for some 60 years, I’ve always hated having to act “like a man.” It seems like a joke that I pulled it off for so long, like some grand Mulan-esque masquerade.

But I didn’t feel comfortable pulling it off. So, as I approached my seventies, I dropped the façade.

Most of my life I’ve felt radically feminine. Who knows why? I have a twin sister, so maybe the estrogen and testosterone got all mixed up in our mother’s womb. (My sister followed in our father’s footsteps and became a naval officer. The family joke is that she’s the son our father never had.) Whatever the reason, I have always identified with women. But because I empathize with their struggles, I would never call myself a woman. I have transgender friends who are women, and I love them and love their freedom to affirm their own gender identities: we each cross this desert in our own way.

But for me, calling myself a woman seemed tantamount to pigmenting my skin and calling myself Black. These terms have less to do with anatomy than with growing up in a culture that shapes you by the many ways it tries to deny you access to your freedom, your full humanity, your life.

“You are not born a woman,” wrote  Simone de Beauvoir; “You become one.”

I have my own issues with the patriarchy, to be sure. But they are not a woman’s issues. Growing up alongside my twin sister I saw firsthand the privileges that I was granted as a boy and that she was denied as a girl—liberties and indulgences that I had without asking and that she had to fight for. Even at 19, when we were still living with our parents: when I would drift in at 4 a.m., I was just “out gallivanting.” She would come home at 11 p.m. and be accused of “whoring around.”

In the locker room, I was continually taken aback by the arrogance, disdain, and outright derision my schoolmates and coaches expressed—not just toward women but toward anyone not judged to be sufficiently like them.

I’ve had the same privileges, but I never wanted to be a member of the boys’ club.

Some people noticed.

My college housemate later published a novel in which I am clearly the model for the protagonist, a writer named—wait for it—Jane Hale.

At a community retreat years ago, a couple of adult hikers seemed to have gotten lost, and the cabal of manly men who were tickled pink at the chance to throw a search party decided that I should stay with the women to watch the kids. (The lost hikers showed up on their own.)

And one time an acquaintance asked me outright, with uncharacteristic perspicacity, “You want to be a woman, don’t you?” I denied it, knowing that she wasn’t intellectually prepared for the complicated truth. But then again, at the time neither was I.

I could go on.

Woman, man, feminine, masculine: apart from the appeal to anatomy, I don’t know what these words mean anymore. The more I explore them, the more their meanings elude me. And the more slippery my own gender identity proves to be. With a habitually analytical mind, I look for definitions and justifications, reasons and rationales. But logic is not always an adequate tool for comprehending the mysteries of a lived experience. Mihi quaestio factus sum, St. Augustine wrote in the late fourth century: I have become a riddle to myself.

But another of Augustine’s lines resonates for me now and helps me answer that riddle.  Years ago, as I was working my way through the Latin of Augustine’s Confessions, I came across a sentence that seems perfectly Augustinian, for both its sentiment and a kind of poetic balance—the assonance, alliteration, and symmetry of Augustine’s phrasing. The Latin reads,

Augustine is talking about his parents here and the good he received from them as an infant, which he sees as an expression of the care they themselves received, a love that for Augustine originates with God. A master prose stylist, Augustine seemed to have taken pains to make this line poetic and thus memorable, since it pertains so critically to his Platonism and, indeed, his Christianity: human nature as a medium for transmission of a divine good.

For me, the line speaks to my relationship with my own children. It is indeed good for me that I have been able to be good to my kids, a goodness that I knew—from my parents, yes, but chiefly from my grandmother.  Augustine’s line is the perfect expression of that maternal nature, and he wrote it no doubt thinking of the care he received from the figure that looms largest in his Confessions and in his life, his mother Monica.

It is this maternal thing that I feel so strong in me, and whence comes the happiness I experience on seeing in my reflection some resemblance to my grandmother. This may be as close as I can come to defining what seems feminine in my nature. My mom was a little wild and loved having fun, and I loved her dearly. But she was not terribly maternal. I got that in abundance from my grandmother, and I have tried to pass it on, to be a mother to my kids.

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon. I find myself at the piano idly practicing arpeggios and scales. In the dim light of a late winter afternoon, I watch my hands as I play. They are small and soft for a man’s hands, but they’re strong and firm and gentle, and I have no other words for what I see: they are a woman’s hands.

And they are not a woman’s hands.

They are my own hands, and I am coming out as myself, at last.  Perpetually unresolved, perhaps, but it feels liberating.

A few months ago I came out confidentially to a dear friend, and when I told her I was going on estrogen therapy, she jokingly asked if I wanted breasts.

“Breasts? No, not so much. Hips. I want hips. Give me some hips.”

A Year Without Men

Stories of Experience and Imagination.

by I.D. Kapur

It’s 2054 A.D., and the world needs a rest from men. Women have developed a novel solution, and the men can’t wait to leave. When my taxi driver tells me he has bullet wounds from the Russian police, speaks five languages, and is teaching at Harvard, I start taking notes. After the funeral, a widow loses all her married friends. Then karma sends flowers. “Indra Kapur writes with clear insight and an acute sense of humor. The stories in A Year Without Men are varied, clever, and often delightfully surprising! Cue me rubbing my hands together with glee.” — Katherine Longshore, author of the Gilt series. “The stories in A Year Without Men create a powerful sense of place with rich sensory and emotional detail. Characters are appealing in their humor and the compassion they inspire. I want to meet these people and be there with them! Some endings surprise us, and others give us a satisfying sense of the inevitable playing out. The stories have a depth of reality that makes them unforgettable.” — Ann Saxton Reh, author of the David Markam Mysteries “Mickee Voodoo is a very entertaining parody of a “hardboiled” detective story in the mode of Chandler, Hammett, and, more recently, Robert B. Parker…witty banter ensues with the detective cracking wise in a colorful idiom both in dialogue and narrative…delights in wordplay…very clever, and is quite funny…Kapur is a talented and skillful fiction writer.” — John DeChancie, author of The Skyway Trilogy and The Castle Perilous series. Available from Amazon or on order from your independent bookstore.

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