“Cathy is usually a girl’s name…”

Last week, a 4-year-old looked at me earnestly, paused, then said, “Cathy is usually a girl’s name.”

I smiled and responded, “I am a girl. I just have short hair and I’m tall.”

“You don’t sound like a girl,” she countered.

I smiled again. “Some girls have deeper voices.”

Though she didn’t seem convinced, she moved on to more important topics (the deliciousness of putting potato chips in a sandwich).

When I was seven years old, I ran down two flights of school stairs and burst out the front doors for recess. Once outside, I yelled and spit. Mrs. Walls captured me. “What do you think you’re doing, young lady?” I shrugged my shoulders as the boys ran on in front of me, yelling and spitting. “Young ladies don’t run down stairs, and young ladies certainly don’t yell or spit. Back upstairs. No recess for you today.”

When I was nine years old, my Brownie troop took a field trip to Burger King. We toured the grill, walk-in freezer, and fry station – it was magical. When we were done with our tour, we each received a burger, fries, and Coke. “Small bites, young lady. Ladies take small bites.” “I’m hungry,” I mumbled, mouth full. “Well, too bad. You need to learn to eat like a lady,” as she picked at a salad and drank a Diet Coke.

When I was twelve years old, I was the only girl on after-school flag football team. “Lezzie. She even throws like a boy.”

Truth is, I threw better than the boys :)

When I was twenty-two years old (and 23 to 38 and counting). “Sir. You’re in the wrong bathroom.” I now send my partner ahead on bathroom reconnaissance to scope it out and let me know if it is single stall with a door that locks, and what my chances are to sneak in undetected.

When I was thirty-three years old... “What’ll you have, sir?” “A vagina,” I silently answered. “A Revolution,” my noiseless monologue continued. “Tecate with a lime, please,” I responded out loud.

“Oh my gosh i Am so sorry…”

“Why? Are you out of limes?”

When I was twenty-five years old, I was a junior high school English teacher. Another women’s clothing catalog showed up in my faculty mailbox for the third time in a week - only faculty had access to mailboxes. I held back tears. I quit my teaching job that year.

As a working-class daughter of a cab driver, my dad loved and celebrated my tomboy buoyancy. As the only girl of her four children, my mother cursed my skateboard and pleaded with me to trade it in for floral print blouses and pearls.

Long before I identified as a lesbian, people were identifying me as a dyke (un-reclaimed). Not because I was holding hands with or kissing another female, but because my external gender expression has always been “masculine” -- short hair, no make up, scraped knees, big burger bites. My internal sense of gender, however, has always been “feminine” -- emotional, intuitive, nurturing, gentle, apologetic. I am peaceful with and celebrate this dissonance; others, however, seem to struggle.

In US culture, social constructions of gender are inextricably linked with social constructions of sexual orientation. While I agree with June Jordan and “despair identity politics,” I do identify as a queer feminist lesbian…and as a woman.

Queer because it captures my politics and desire for social and economic justice for all. I like Eve Sedgwick’s definition of Queer: “The open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically.”

Feminist because I support choice—the choice to explore, express, transgress and transcend gender.

Lesbian because I am a strong woman who passionately loves another strong woman...and the culture of strong women.

And woman...because I want to expand the definition to include girls and women who look, eat, sit, spit, throw, cry, dress and run down the stairs....just like me. I want that 4-year-old girl to always take big bites of her potato chip sandwich, without shame or apology :)