A Gender
- A Gender
Once there was a gender unlike any other.Gender found a closet to hide in,but no one cameto seek it. Gender waited
to mean something to someone.It had too much time on its hands, time to wonderwhat “mean something” meant.It wondered and wandered
out of the library stacks, into the children’s room.Stuffed frogs and praying mantises, plastic dinosaurs, pillows, trucks,books about genders the gender wasn’t, and childrenyoung but already finished.
No holes the gender could fill,no questions it could answer.The gender becamea philosophical problem:
If a gender springs up like a mushroomand there’s no one to identify with it,is it even a fungus?The library was gone, the gender alone
in primordial forest, among towering trees and fanlike ferns,and mushrooms frozen in mid-pirouettelike dancers in photographs.How long would gender have to wait for human bodies
to costume and choreograph? Gender drifted among trunksneither male nor female,attached itself to a branch and ripened,the very first good-and-evil fruit
on the tree of knowledge. [End Page 156]
Joy Ladin is the author of seven books of poetry, including just-published Impersonation, Lambda Literary Award finalist Transmigration, and Forward Fives award winner Coming to Life. Her memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life, was a 2012 National Jewish Book Award finalist.
