 | By Sarah Wildman Staff Editor, Opinion |
The pandemic era will be remembered for its myriad difficult contours: the isolation, the loneliness, the fear. It has been a time of sickness and grief, of loss of public life, public experiences and support from friends and family. |
But there has also been a kind of freedom in our time at home: from social pressures, from opprobrium, from the expectations of others. It has been a time of introspection and reflection. We've been able to ask ourselves, expansively, what are the things we truly miss? What would we like to return to, and what would we like to let go of? Who will we be, and how will we be changed, when the world fully reopens? |
As Alex Marzano-Lesnevich writes in an Op-Ed this morning, that gift of time and freedom allowed some of those who have come out, or are in the process of coming out, as nonbinary or transgender to fully emerge as themselves without having to perform for others what that self should be. |
Alex, who identifies as transgender, is a master of intertwining the personal, the traumatic and the political. We first met at the Wesleyan Writer's Conference in 2014, when they were finishing up a book, "The Fact of a Body," which wove a painful family history with a death penalty case. Now they are working on a new book, "Both and Neither," which digs deeper into the questions of life beyond gender binaries. |
"I have been transformed by this time alone, in which I have had to shore up who I am without the gaze of others defining it for me," Alex writes. "With the gender binary all but gone, what did it mean to be nonbinary? How do I define my gender when I — accustomed to how visible my gender usually makes me — am no longer being watched?" |
For their essay, Alex spoke to a therapist who primarily works with trans teens — a group used to endlessly observing and being observed, and to the policing of conformity to norms, gender and otherwise. Many trans kids in supportive homes, the therapist explains, have thrived away from public expectations. |
This morning's piece pushes us all to consider how we impose on ourselves, and others, structures that do not serve us. "We have all had to find our own paths over this year, we all learned more about ourselves," Alex writes. "And have had to ask: Who are we, when no one is looking? Who are we, without what once both held us back and held us up? Whom do we wish to be?" |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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