“When the bird and the book disagree, always believe the bird."
-James Audubon
Children are interested in the unfamiliar—it’s what allows them to return excitedly from a hike bearing the bleached skull of a lizard or a mangy raven feather. I once worked at a summer camp where we encouraged kids to treat mystery with reverence. Upon discovery of a spider hole or a wayward raccoon, it is a faithful act to believe that which you don’t understand is only a lesson waiting to be learned.
I find myself on the receiving end of this curiosity frequently. Whether I’m teaching in pristine classrooms, sweltering school portables, or the belly of a museum; whether it‘s a shy whisper, a genuine inquiry, or a vague accusation, the question is inevitable: “Are you a boy or a girl?”
I crouch down so the child and I can face each other. I smile and ask, “What do you think?” They see my collared shirt, my boots, my baseball hat, the sprawling tattoo on my forearm. They propose a clarifying question. My favorite came from Andres, a ten-year-old I taught poetry to in Fruitvale: “Do you skateboard?” I tell him I used to. “Boy,” he says confidently.
They always say “boy.”
“I’m a girl that’s more like a boy,” I tell them on some days, to make it easy. Nods all around. Of course.
I know that parents release kids into a world where they are charged with recognizing incomprehensible dangers. It is true that children can lack literacy around what might hurt them, so it seems that, often, a bit of shorthand develops. The older the child, the more pronounced the sentiment: unknown = dangerous.
Though there are protective qualities in this idea, the result is that an ignorance has been transmuted—often unwittingly—through yet another generation. To be afraid of what one doesn’t understand may simplify things, but it also makes the world a claustrophobic, violent place.
Like most children, I grew up with positive ideas about hybrid creatures. Centaurs were majestic, mermaids were beautiful, unicorns were innocent, a dragon played a starring role in my favorite folk song. During a class at the natural history museum in Pittsburgh, we were to draw objects from the Egyptian exhibit. I picked the friendly-looking Anubis. What could be more magical than the strangely familiar?
It seemed appropriate, years later and a week after surgery, to think of unicorns when I saw my new chest for the first time. Smooth and scarred, hairless and flat, nipples and pecs—I was a myth of my own making.
However, my exposed and tender flesh unnerved me a little, as I remembered the heartbreaking tapestry I once saw at the Cloisters in New York. Intricate and relentless, the rendering from the Middle Ages was of a brutal unicorn hunt. The unicorn, muscled and docile, stepped out of a creek and onto a bank, only to find himself surrounded by waiting spears.
Unlike a unicorn, my scars are not benevolent and clear. They are, instead, reminders of the blades that made them, of loss and ritual and a new kind of myth. That first day, they glowed bright red and bold on the white of my skin. I, too, am a hybrid, a volcano erupting naked, human parts from my core.
I am a product of massive integration. Every moment I absorb and add to the stacks of moments before it—I categorize when possible, I learn to tolerate what cannot be categorized. I study science with a poet’s heart.
My body grows older and my skin and bones are all new and my breasts are gone, which mostly means that my hand can cover my heart without interruption. I regenerate. My anatomy is mine alone. I am four, the day my father discovered me reading a book on the human body. I am fourteen and it is my first kiss with my first girlfriend in the pouring rain under a makeshift canopy of trashbags in the park behind her house. I am twenty-four and eighty-miles-an-hour to San Francisco in a beat-up Nissan. Time moved along and space collapsed into it.
The space between breaths is a tiny, suspended glimpse at death. The focus on the next breath, the next step, the other side, can cocoon so tightly around us we forget that there’s even a mystery that we’re being protected from: for each of us, at some point, the crest will not come. When we forget the space between, we forget the wonder of that.
Despite my affectionate childhood understanding of hybrids, both centaurs and mermaids are vilified, portrayed in their unclassifiable bodies as violent and primal or wild and lonely creatures. They are warnings, used traditionally to promote the importance of man’s separation from the baseless, animal world surrounding him. The truth is that these mythical creatures were also uniquely qualified to see, with clarity and understanding, the spectrum of life around them.
Unicorn hunters believe that force makes you powerful. Real power, however, is as invisible as love, mutable and omnipresent as rushing clouds. I am the unicorn, torn open at the chest, healed and scarred, at once; but I am also more than that. Listen: I am the mermaid calling sailors home, not to a watery grave but, instead, toward a clear and complete reflection of themselves.
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