A Word on Identity

Growing up, I was a "tomboy" . Now, before you correct me let me share that this was in the late 80s, early 90s when there was little to no representation of the LGBTQ community anywhere that I could see. Not in my small rural mountain town in the South, not on television, not in the books I read but I apparently liked doing "boy" things so that was the label I was given. The truth was I liked playing with lego sets, video games, sports (especially football because I had a killer long throw) as much as I liked playing with dolls, make believe house, art, etc. For me, as with everything else about me, I didn't feel compelled to choose - we are complex beings in a multiverse might I remind you - except when everyone else around me starting reminded me that I needed to. So, I started looking around to all the women in my life and as much as I could see some things didn't make sense to me, the programming as insidious and tricky as it is, slipped in anyway to cope with the initiation of childhood. Most of the women around me were Black single mothers that seemed to have a inferiority complex with men and a love-hate relationship about being a woman so I was getting very mixed cues about which

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side was for me. As I moved away to college and into early adulthood, my Queerness was ready to be lived out loud which added even more layers to the complexity of whether I was a boy or girl because I truly felt like both. Reading books like Coming Out, Coming Alive by Grace Lawson; Same Sex in the City by Lauren Blitzer & Lauren Levin and my first therapist, who was an Apache shaman and licensed psychiatrist, introducing me to what being queer (or modernly called Two-Spirit) meant in Native American spirituality completely blew me open in the best of ways. Since that time of course it hasn't all been rainbows and gumdrops (or, maybe it actually has involved ALOT of rainbows, ha!) but on this side I know that I am better for it. When I think about babies from the rural south like me that have even more room to INTRODUCE the world to who they are as opposed to the world sliding them into a box, I am moved to tears. Even as "young" as I am, I did not have that privilege. In my lifetime, which is far from over, I have witnessed shifts in epic proportions around freeing love, unboxing our gender identities and being called what honors us. It gives me hope and pride everyday because I know my people and I did our part and we stand on the shoulders of so many greats who marched, protested, fashioned and organized their way to the justice of today. As we move into talking about the divine feminine and divine masculine, I just wanted to pause and share a bit of my truth in this way. And as I have come to find out in my work, there has always been purpose and greatness for those who dance between the genders and I'm here for it (more in "Gatekeepers"). I'm honored to be all of me.