I am Emily, she/her and sometimes they. I’m kind of down for whatever, honestly. I am technically an illustrator. I’m classically trained, but I have a corporate job. So, I’m a flight attendant, that’s my day job.  The illustration thing is what I went to school for eight years, but then I did not really want to be part of the whole freelancing world because it’s just too much. So, on one hand, I hate corporate, but on the other hand, I take their money and then I can fund my hobbies and I can draw whenever and however I want, which I love.

Nat Urban

Yeah, as a baseline, I would love for you to kind of give an idea of what your relationship to masculinity and femininity has been like, especially in girlhood. What do those things mean to you? What do they mean to you now?

Emily

Specifically, when I was a young child, I didn’t really have a concept of gender, or care so much, until I was around 8 years old or maybe 7, 2nd grade or first grade even, I was like; ‘I want to wear boy clothes.’ and kind of had a feeling, I wish I was a boy because boys get to be cool and I want to be cool and most of the time I wanted to be a leopard or a hyena. So that was my thing, I’m an animal. After a while, my other elementary school friends, they weren’t as interested in let’s be animals. Or then that became, let’s be Pokémon and all my friends were playing kickball. I was just like, I suck at kickball, I don’t want to play. I was just like, well, I guess. But I had a strong aversion to- not because they were, quote traditionally feminine, but it just seems like the only thing that my peers or young girls would want to do- is play house and I hated playing house. I was like, can I just be the dog? If I can’t be the dog, I don’t want to play, like it was just too weird and I hated it. I wanted to do fun stuff like be pack animals. Like, I’m a Black Panther and I’m a female Black Panther. I was always specific about what gender the animal was that I wanted to be. I’m a male hyena. It was very specific for some reason. And I don’t know.

Nat Urban

Oh my God, I love that so much.

Emily

I don’t know what it’s called but- Oh man, I’m trying not to go on tangent mode right now. So, I was definitely a tomboy, but not quite the stereotypical tomboy, you know, like I have short hair and I play baseball. I wanted to keep my long hair and was not particularly good at sports. I wanted to be, but I just was not. And in young adolescence I admired many characters who I would now describe as androgynous. Like when I was 10, I wanted to be Darth Maul from Star Wars episode one for Halloween. My Mom was like, alright, so she helped me. She did everything. She made this costume for me and we were going trick or treating with some other family. I don’t remember who the families are, or who the children are. They must have been friends of my parents or friends of friends or something. And it was kind of far, it was not in the city. It was like in Jersey or like not here. I feel like maybe other parents would have been like, no, why don’t you want to be something cute or something more age or gender appropriate, but my mom was totally with it. She’s like, alright and then she painted my face for me. I remember going trick or treating and I think I was the oldest child there and someone opened the door, ‘oh the girls look so cute and and the boys look so cool” and I was just like ‘I’m a girl.’ So, I wanted them to know that I was a girl, but I was like they don’t know that immediately by looking at me. Which on one hand is OK, but I look at that now and I think of it as I wanted to not follow what was being presented to me as traditional gender roles. I really wanted or felt strongly that I was outside of that, but I still wanted to just be able to be myself. So, when I was in high school, I had frequent feelings of melancholy based on that. I wished that I was a boy instead because I thought that I would be more likeable and more attractive.

Nat

Get that old timey diagnosis! Melancholy.

Emily

I was just like, man, if I could just wake up one day and be different. I thought, well, I could dress as a boy and try to make myself seem like a boy, but everyone would see right through me. I thought, ohh my hips are too wide, you know, I have thighs. They’d be like, no. So, I was just like, whatever, what’s the point? At the time I had a crush on two boys and I was sad and thought, well, they wouldn’t like me if I was a guy. Then later on, like almost 10 years later, I found out that they’re both bi. One of them told me himself and I was just like, what? Army dude like

Nat Urban

Ohh my gosh.

Emily

Buff nerd type. I was like, huh? I was like, ‘why didn’t you fucking tell me?’ He’s like, ‘I was ashamed.’

Nat

You’re like me too! We could’ve helped each other.

Emily

Oh my God. Anyway, so that that’s neither here nor there, but it’s kind of funny, weird thoughts like that. I was still pretty boyish even throughout high school I kind of started embracing my femininity more. I want to say one of the first things that made me really like, feel cool about it was seeing a Japanese manga series called Revolutionary Girl Utena where the main character, in childhood, tries to drown herself in a river and then a Prince rescues her and says don’t lose your noble heart. Then, she grows up feeling like I want to be a Prince, I’m going to be a Prince and she had long fabulous hair, but she’d wear the boys uniform and shorts, and she’s athletic and so I was like, damn, she’s so cool. So, seeing this character, I was really inspired. My first cosplay costume that I ever made, when I was 15, was Link from the Legend of Zelda series, and I always like really liked this character. He’s a bit androgynous and I didn’t know until pretty recently, I want to say this last year, I saw an excerpt from like an interview with one of the developers of Legend of Zelda saying that when they designed Link’s character, they wanted him to be kind of gender neutral because they wanted both boys and girls to relate to this character. I thought, Oh my God, they’re geniuses because it worked, you know it worked. Then another character is- spoiler alert, 20 year old spoiler alert. It seems like this really cool ninja guy and it’s Princess Zelda in disguise. Shiek is the character and in Super Smash Bros now you can be Zelda and she can transform into Shiek, which is very cool. So, she’s kind of a gender fluid icon for many people that I know, which is pretty rad honestly. But I was one of those people that was like, Oh my God, Shiek is so freaking cool, and then when I found out that it was Zelda, I had this strange elation that it was Zelda. On one hand, I was like, what? It’s not a guy? but then knowing that it was actually Princess Zelda, it was so cool at the same time. I think when I started to do cosplay at age 15, I started to feel more in tune with femininity in general because a lot of characters that I really liked were very feminine. Before I felt like, oh, they’re nothing like me, I’m not tall and skinny and perfect like Sailor Moon, I’m short and round. I like to say I’m very durable thanks to my bone structure. Got the climbing physique for foraging and rocky mountains.

Nat Urban

Listen, I’m Eastern European, built to survive a famine, I know what you’re talking about.

Emily

Yeah, some Scandinavians are tall and willowy and some are thicker stock and I’m one of those so, yes. Famine and cold.

Nat Urban

You’re built for them!

Emily

Like, oh, I have to live off lichens? OK. No, that’s reindeer, but- I remember as a young child, I felt very disconnected from femininity, and in particular my own femininity, and I remember the time when I finally was free from that feeling was when I saw a very cool fashion exhibition at my old college. It was called gothic dark romance or something like that. It was a collection in the school’s museum of many designers that had been influenced by Gothic subculture and so seeing a lot of those pieces, some stuff by Alexander McQueen. One of my favorites was by Hussein Chalayan, It was a dress that was completely shredded and falling apart and looked like maybe it was partially rotting. The way that he made it, it looked like something you’d find in a shipwreck. You could see parts of the garters and just bits hanging loose, and that was so cool to me and it made me think of- I don’t know what it is, but that entire exhibit really changed me in a way and I felt like this is what I’ve always wanted, and that I never-this dark type of- I don’t know how to describe it. I’ve always loved things that were feminine and I’ve loved things, like when I was a kid, I had Barbies, and then I had Ninja Turtles and Batman and I absolutely loved Catwoman, who knows why?

Nat Urban

Anybody’s guess.

Emily

Who knows? I mean she is the coolest. She’s always been the coolest, but I loved all of those things, and I was so frustrated with people telling me: no, you can only be one thing. You can only like 1 type of thing. Like it’s unusual and that frustrated me so much. I think a lot of those feelings had to do with society. How society treats femininity in general. Being subjected at an early age to obvious misogyny made me feel like- I don’t want to be subjected to this, and I knew that no matter what I do, I’m going to be subjected to this. So, like dressing a certain way to avoid cat calling and things like that started to become a thing, but that type of treatment endured. I was like well, I’m going to have to deal with this shit no matter what. No matter how many piercings I get, no matter how crazy I dye my hair. I remember guys on the street on my block, were like ‘it’s Barbie’, and then I was like, I’m getting a septum ring. So, I was like, I want to look like a freak, so nobody bothers me. Then they’re just like, ‘Lady Gaga.’

Nat Urban

They find a new one.

Emily

It doesn’t matter. So, then I was just like, you know what? I’m just gonna wear whatever I want and that was freeing in a way. So, now I’m 34. I’d say around five years ago, I still felt like, oh, I’m kind of androgynous in general, maybe my bone structure, just the way that I look or I can be androgynous and I liked that. But as I get older, I find myself clinging to my femininity and worrying about losing it, which is kind of strange. Then I think about like, I want to cosplay this male character, how can I do that? I haven’t done any cosplays in many years, but I enjoy the idea of being able to dress as a cool guy character, but also as extremely feminine characters and whatnot. I feel like, just my day-to-day going about lifeI feel that I’m neutral. In general I just feel like a neutral being, but I know that people perceive me as being very feminine. So, it’s kind of a strange back and forth. Yeah.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I love that. I love that for you gender is a place of play, it sounds like.

Emily

On a good day, yes.

Nat Urban

On a good day, it’s a place of play. Fair enough.

Emily

The weird days it’s like, why is this weird?

Nat Urban

Another thing that was really interesting to me is that you described yourself as coming out very late in life.

Emily

Oh yeah, I think.

Nat Urban

Like define late.

Emily

So, as a preteen, my bestie told me she is she/they. She told me, ‘hey, so I like boys and girls’, and I was like, alright, that’s cool, let’s play Diablo. So, she came at as bi very young and she went to different high schools and hers had a very large – what was it? GLAAD?- and so I would go to their events and hang out. So, a lot of my friends in school were out queer, some were on their way. It felt like everyone has it figured out. One of my other very good friends- we’re like 15-16- and she was in a long distance relationship with this really cool J-Rock Girl in Vancouver, and she was like, I am a lesbian! She was very dramatic with like any interests that she had. And she had very strong,I don’t want to say phases, but if she liked a thing, it was all about that thing. Hardcore J-Rock fan, hardcore Phantom of the opera fan. Everything was that thing. So, I was very familiar with this. Now I’m remembering being like 7 and I was walking with my mom in the park and I said, ‘can boys get married to boys and girls can get married to girls?’ she was like, ‘yeah, you went to a wedding with two guys. Don’t you remember?’ I was like. Yeah, I think I was like 4 and my friend’s friends had. I remember it was a good time and everyone was super nice to me and one guy had a black tux and the other guy was wearing a white suit with like fun giant colored dots on it. I remember, pink, blue and purple big dots all over. So, I was like, that’s nice. So, it’s always been not a weird thing or not shameful thing to me. So, I always felt like I was outside of the norm. Now I’m looking at it as like heteronormativity or comphet. I think that I was one of those kids who was in the the comphet thing. Meanwhile, after asking my mom, oh, can girls get married with girls? OK. I think I want to marry my friend Rachel. She was like, yeah you can if you want to, but you have a lot of years to think about it. I was like, yeah, OK, that’s cool. That makes sense. We are kids after all.

Nat Urban

Yeah, fair enough.

Emily

But my mom was never like, no, you can’t do that. She was like, yeah, you can if you want to. But, I guess I wasn’t really into people romantically, until I was in my later teens, still I just wasn’t really super doing the whole dating thing, so I didn’t have any experience and whatnot. I think I may be on the ace spectrum and when I was in high school, that wasn’t super a thing yet. One of my good friends from high school, years later was like, hey, guys, I’m asexual, I have never been interested in dating anybody and I am still not interested in dating anybody ever. I was like, oh, that’s cool. That makes sense. It’s definitely not the same type, but looking at it now, I’m like, yeah, I guess that makes sense. So, I guess not having much exposure or experience with things, I didn’t really recognize stuff. So even in my college years and after there were times where I was definitely romantically interested in girls, but then I thought ohh, but it doesn’t count. I had so many friends who were whole hog on everything that anything ambiguous was like, that doesn’t count. I’ve even had good friends or even some of my best friends who kind of laugh at me and say, haha no, you’re so straight like ohh, you haven’t even this and that and this and that. I was just like well, guess I’m straight then! I said kind of sarcastically and I was like, alright, cool, I guess I’m just never gonna mention this to either of you ever again because I cannot trust you with my deepest feelings, which is really fun. But the friend who I talked about when we were 11, she has mentioned it for years.

Nat Urban

Did we talk about the girl costume? I feel like we touched on her tangentially.

Emily

Yes, I’m trying to remember. In what context? I think, in general, when I would dress particularly feminine or even when when I felt like I was just neutral, but people would treat me or view me as being very, very, very feminine. It made me feel like I’m wearing a girl costume. People just look at what you look like and that’s it. They don’t care what’s under or anything regarding your personality or your interests or whatever. It became very strange for me and I would often feel like, OK, so I am just my body? Like, how weird is that? So, it often made me feel like I was wearing a costume or performing femininity.

Nat Urban

Oh, you know what I don’t think we ever defined what coming out late meant.

Emily

Oh my God- I went in a roundabout. So, I was so used to everybody else either being so sure of it or very vocal about that aspect of their lives. I had always felt like even though you could say, well this is an obvious sign of being queer, I always felt like I was not enough or that I didn’t count. So, I thought, ohh well, that doesn’t count so what’s the point of me saying anything? Because people will accuse me of wanting attention. So, I don’t want any of that, so I’m just going to not talk about it. I had a weird feeling. I just was like remembering stuff or I don’t know what I was going through at the time, but I mentioned it to my bestie who was like, this is so obviously you. Bitch, you’re gay, she literally said that.  I was like, are you sure? She was like, bitch, I told you years ago you’re fucking queer. She’s like, you’re fucking queer. And I was like, OK. At this point, I think I was 28. To me, in my mind it feels like, oh, it was like 2 years ago, but even then, I still didn’t believe it in a weird way. I didn’t even say anything, anywhere until maybe two years later, I was like, (whispered) ‘I’m bi’. I was like “I don’t care what anyone says.

Nat Urban

Say it quiet just in case though.

Emily

Right. So, I guess that’s coming out, but then I would still feel very closeted. I still kind of feel like that. I’ll meet people at work and I’ll just feel like, do I say anything or do I just keep it to myself or can they tell? No, they can’t. They think I’m, like if I have makeup on, I’m Barbie. If I have no makeup on, I’m the girl from- any blonde character with glasses and bangs, that’s me. They’re like, has anyone ever told you that you look like so and so? I’m like blonde character with glasses and bangs? Yeah. I’m just at work like, ‘coffee or tea?’ ‘Coffee please.’ ‘Wrong, it’s tea.’ ‘Would you like something to drink?’ ‘What are what are my options?’ ‘Yes or no?’ Chuck! I wish I said that. I have a meme, I love when people have stock photos and then they add silly shit like that but yes.so, that was the costume and the late coming out. Yeah, I feel like it’s a need to know base.

Nat Urban

Fair enough

Emily

Cause my friend who is older than. They/he looks like a big bear, and has a complicated- he’s very vocal about it now. He’s like, hello my podcast was called spooning boys for 8 years and people think that’s straight. And I’m like, I Love you. But, he said that sometimes he feels alienated by like people on TikTok saying non binary means that you wear clothing like this and this and that. He’s like since when is when is being non binary a freaking fashion statement like, can’t you just be? and it’s OK to just be? and I was like, yeah, that’s very valid because I feel like on one hand it’s incredibly valid for people to express themselves through style and fashion, I love to do that, but it’s also extremely unfair to say that this is the only way to do the thing cause it’s just untrue. I do respect, he’s like, hey, I’m always here to talk about this stuff, and if anyone needs to talk about it, I’m here. But, I personally don’t feel comfortable with telling every single person that I’m bi and nonbinary. That’s very personal to me. I respect that a lot because he was in many situations where he’s like, I’m in danger, and that’s true for lots of people. So, I feel like it’s unfair to be like, you have to do this and that in order to. Yeah, it is what it is.

Nat Urban

The argument about who gets to be a real queer and who isn’t is.

Emily

It’s so upsetting or like.

Nat Urban

Yeah, it’s pervasive and really, we have bigger problems.

Emily

We have so many fucking bigger problems.

Nat Urban

If I’m being honest, we’ve got bigger problems, bigger fish to fry than whether or not some rando is playing pretend if we find.

Emily

Exactly. Exactly like. There was such a fucking thing about it years ago. ‘oh, these teenagers are pretending to be nonbinary” So? They’re teenagers.

Nat Urban

Teenagers pretend to be all kinds of things.

Emily

Yeah, let them be teens.

Nat Urban

It’s being a teen baby.

Emily

Who gives a shit, you know? God, I hope that, I don’t know. There’s so much shit. I’d like to see queer people attacking other queer people less, that’s one thing that I would like to see in general, because heaven knows.

Nat Urban

Yeah, it’s rough out there. I’ve been asking a lot of people about experience of girlhood especially with relationships with other girls. There’s these really close, romantic almost, relationships that get formed in girlhood often. Sometimes they get maintained through adulthood, sometimes they don’t. But I was wondering if you had any stories or experiences around those relationships. Sometimes, in secret. Sometimes, when there’s no adults around and it’s just girls. Where you’re like, Oh, nobody’s watching me right now, who am I going to be right now? If you have anything around that, that would be awesome.

Emily

Trying to think. Besides avoiding playing house like. I was just like, oh, please, no- anything but that.

Nat Urban

Well, or close female relationships/friendships weren’t a thing, what was happening instead?

Emily

I did have a few. One of my good friends, the one that I was like what if I marry this friend, we hung out every single day. I would go to her place after school and we would just, watch National Geographic. I don’t remember what the series was called, but it was a nature documentary series and I think it was called like eyewitness Nature or something? But it had an iconic theme song, it’s like. “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo. Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo.”  So, we’d be watching nature documentaries all the time, cause we were both so into animals. And she was a really good writer, and she always had several hamsters or little gerbils. So, we’d be playing with the hamsters and building little things for them and writing stuff. We would write together a lot. She was very into red wall and stuff like that. So, if you can imagine a person who is super into red wall and just being a little critter, that type of thing. That was us. She was very book smart and I admired that and she was never. I think it was when we weren’t in the same class anymore or at recess, she was always down to be animals. Until, we didn’t have the same recess or something like that, I was sad. A lot of my friends went to a different middle school and I was sad. But, I had a lot of close female friends, but that friend in particular, she was very free. I don’t know if it’s because she had a little sister. She was like we should take a bath together and I was like, I don’t know about that. One time she was just like, I don’t want to wear clothes and just took off her clothes. I was just like, this is too much and I was like, please put your clothes back on, I’m uncomfortable.

Nat Urban

You’re like, I need to act so normal right now.

Emily

I was like, this is extremely uncomfortable for me. Kind of funny, but they are now very queer which I think is pretty funny in a cool way and they work at a bookshop and I’m like, that’s rad. We’re Facebook friends. So that’s cool, but we were very, very close friends. I guess one of my closest childhood friends was the friend that I mentioned in the beginning and we’re still really good friends. Like, that’s my ride or die. Even though my other bestie would sometimes get like a little judgmental about shit or just whatever. This other friend, I know she would never fucking judge me, which Is pretty cool and that’s kind of rare to have.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, we’re coming up on time. Know you have places to be. So, do you have any last second thing, where you’re like, I gotta say this.

Emily

I believe very strongly young children should not be forced into gender roles and I feel like I’ve been seeing a lot more inclusivity in that sense. I’ve seen a lot of parents saying, my son wants a baby doll and I said that’s fine and he’s so happy and just stuff like that. Kids should just be able to be kids. Stop torturing trans children, please, but I feel like me saying that here is not to the audience that needs to learn that obviously, but

Nat Urban

Yeah. Preaching to the choir, you know?

Emily

Bring back the guillotine!

Nat Urban

Eat the rich.

 

My pronouns are she, her, hers. I am a trans woman. I don’t know if I’m a non-binary trans woman or a binary trans woman, changes by the day, and queer, specifically queer. I always say I’m not emotionally attracted to men. I am actually a therapist for domestic violence survivors. Yeah, so that is my job. That is my passion. I’m a social worker and I’m a child therapist.

Nat Urban

I would love to hear actually, as a starting point. about what you define girlhood as for yourself, because there’s a very traditional definition of when that is in your life and what that means and I would love to hear your take on it.

Adrienne

But this is really interesting to me because, you know, I’ve actually been thinking about what does it mean, now that I am transitioning, now that I’m actually coming into myself as an adult, to go back and give myself those experiences of, what we’ll call girlhood, that I didn’t get to have, being a trans woman. So you know, I was kind of a lost girl, right? Like I didn’t know that I was a girl. I didn’t know that I could be a girl. I really wanted to hang out with girls. Most of my friends were girls. I was so admiring of all of the women around me. I was obsessed with Barbie dolls and movie stars and I just loved everything about womanhood and girlhood. I didn’t realize that that was a sign of something, nobody had the language to give that to me. For a long time, I identified as a trans girl, not a trans woman, and I think that part of that was, I didn’t get to have that girlhood. So, for me, girlhood is about like it is a space of becoming, a space of possibility. I think a lot about how Beauvoir talks about it as this open period before the rigid confines of adult femininity and all those expectations of heteronormativity come down. Obviously that’s very different, right, given how gender policed our culture is, but I like the openness and the fluidity of it. Are you familiar with internal family systems? So it’s a kind of therapy, it’s based on the idea that our minds are multiple and we all have parts, right? So some of our parts are younger, some of our parts are teenagers, and some of our parts are adults. I’ve been going back to each of my parts and letting them know, “Hey, by the way, you were a girl this whole time. This is what was going on. This is why you were so confused. This is why you were so lonely.” and it’s been really healing to be able to give those childhood and teenager parts that experience that they didn’t get to have. So, you know, we talk about being the adult that we need to be for our younger self, that’s kind of what this is for me, but it’s just sort of some more internal work. So I’ve been healing those internalized transphobia, internalized transmisogyny, going back and giving myself that access to girlhood, access to femininity that I didn’t have. So, girlhood is not a time for me, it’s sort of like a liminal space that I can always go back and access if I need to.

Nat Urban

So, thinking about that, thinking about girlhood as a liminal space that you’re accessing when you need it, or when you want it. What are you looking for when you access that space of girlhood?

Adrienne

I am accessing a sort of aliveness or connection with myself that I didn’t have when I was little, that I didn’t have when I was younger. I have spent so much time in my life trying to find some sort of stability, some sort of security, some sort of self love in all of the wrong places, like eating disorders, overworking in school and work, you know, relationships, and what I needed was some real core self compassion. Being able to access that girlhood, access my trans identity, access that space has been really healing and has allowed me to step into like, I don’t have to. Have all this shit figured out. I don’t have to be some perfect adult that has all of her shit together. I can be in my power, be in those aspects that are fun or enjoyable, right? So for so long my body has been like, this is for other people. I need to look a certain way. I need to be a certain way. Girlhood is like those moments when I’m able to be in my body for myself. I’m able to be in my style for myself, I’m able to be in my agenda for myself. In the ifs, we talk a lot about self energy, that core that we’re all born with, that compassion and curiosity, creativity, courageousness, confidence. That’s the energy I’m looking for when I look for girlhood. That’s the energy I know I’m sort of getting a little bit mystical about this, but I really see my gender as connected to that core spiritual essence, right. Like those things are really connected for me. Being in touch with myself, energy is really what I look for when I’m looking for girlhood.

Nat Urban

I love that you see girlhood as a space of freedom, and I’ve been talking to a lot of people about unsupervised girlhood, which I think is part of what you speak to is this like, you know, not the part that other people see, but the part where girls are alone with each other and we can get up to the weirdest stuff we’re trying to get up to and I would love if you have any experiences of that freedom or community or even something that happened that was, just you that you would like to share.

Adrienne

I think that I have probably had some of the richest friendships I’ve ever had with women, both before and after I knew that I was a girl. Especially after, though being able to like access that energy. I’m trying to think about how to answer the question because there’s a lot here. I don’t know. Like I just danced for myself naked in the mirror this morning like I was just happy, right? Like I just. I just loved like, just. I just love like, you know, estrodial is wonderful. I just love being in my body. I just love being in this space like. I don’t know. My mental health has been the best it’s ever been since transitioning. I have really great friendships with women that I cherish, I don’t know if this is answering the question but like, I don’t know, There’s a deep energy that I feel I feel very connected to other women all across the cis and trans spectrum. I love women in all the meanings of that word; in a feminist way, in a sapphic way, in a platonic way, and that admiration, like “wow, women are just really cool” way. So, having those deep relationships, I don’t know what- I’m trying to answer this unsupervised aspect because I don’t really feel like. I feel like so much of the way I embody womanhood is resistance to patriarchy, right? Like I’m not trying to be a CIS woman with a capital W like, that’s not my goal. I’m not trying to be attracted to men. I’m not trying to be a good patriarchal trad wife. Like, that’s not what’s going on here, right? Like you know, it’s like. I don’t know. I don’t know. Does that answer the question?

Nat Urban

Yeah, I think you’re headed in the right way. I think sometimes I use words and I just assume people know what I mean by them, and that’s on me. When I think about unsupervised like so thinking about like quote UN quote traditional girlhood, whatever that means, because you’re being raised in it, there’s this supervised quality, but because you’ve brought yourself to it, it’s almost like every bit of girlhood you get to experience is as unsupervised as you would like it to be.

Adrienne

I think that’s it, right, because that’s the sort of like- because for me every sort of like- there is no. None of it was forced on me, all of it was something I had to fight for, right? Like that’s, I think, the real magic of trans women, is that every bit of femininity, every bit of girlhood, we get access to, is we’ve had to fight for it. So, I don’t necessarily have to like every single trans woman I meet, but I admire them in that way, we might not click on a personal level, but I admire the fact that you fought for the identity that you have. I admire the fact that you fought for every scrap of girlhood that you had to get. And I think that that’s something that’s really underappreciated in a lot of feminist discourse, in a lot of sapphic discourse is that, like transwomen are out here fighting for our lives. Trans women are out here, especially black and Latin X trans women, indigenous trans women, and just like, I really admire that spirit of self creation that like, oh, you not only had to put up with all the patriarchal bullshit saying like, you know, this is what it means to be a woman, but you had to put up with all the patriarchal bullshit saying you don’t get to be a woman at all. So like the double exclusion. So yeah, like that space of self creation I think is a resistance to that surveillance you’re naming, right? Like a lot of trans women talk about the joy they find in femininity, and that is not something that patriarchy wants them to have. Like, if you’re amab, you are not supposed to enjoy being feminine, you’re not supposed to want to become a woman, that’s supposed to be like the ultimate taboo, like cause that happened all patriarchy crumbles. So, I think, yeah, I think that speaks to that.

Nat Urban

Is it weird coming to femininity, coming from a space where femininity was kind of like- How was femininity presented to you growing up and how does it feel like to come to it on purpose?

Adrienne

So this is where it gets weird, right? There are aspects to femininity that when you’re inside it, oh, that shit can be real toxic. From the outside, It’s got nice branding on it, so you know I was attracted to that. As I’ve come into my feminist self, right? I have a masters degree in women’s studies. I’m very like- and you can’t see it, whole bookshelf behind me with feminist books like. That’s where I spend a lot of my intellectual and emotional time is in feminist thought. So like, I’ve really had to grapple with, what is it that I appreciate about women? If gender is not essential, if gender is not, if gender is performative, right, what is it that I appreciate about femininity and womanhood? And I think a lot of it is those aspects that are resistive, those things that escape closure. The things that are in excess of what the patriarchy wants capital W women to be. OK, so it was presented to me as very, very like, OK, like Cinderella, princess, literally I was obsessed with Cinderella, Barbie doll, all of that pink shit, OK, except, well, that’s really exciting for me. I want that. Like my choices are blue, like boys are stinky and mean as hell over here where like the girls are doing something like, they are having emotional intimacy, they’re doing some cool shit over here, I want to do that. So, if I have these two options that the patriarchy gives me, I guess I’ll pick this one. So, it was weird because I didn’t really- It was sort of like outside of both, but if I have to choose one, this one sounds a lot nicer and there are like a lot of- this is really good branding on this over here, right? So a lot of that pink sparkling magic that we associated with branded girlhood, yeah, I was into that. That said, the more that I have found out about queer femininities the more I found out about feminist femininities and feminist womanhood and girlhood, the more I have still been enamored with whatever that thing is. So, I went to Hampshire College, which is in Amherst, MA. I took classes at Smith, I met a lot of really cool queer women in that space. I was so excited, like, I want to be part of this world. I felt sort of like I wasn’t allowed to, there was a lot of stuff going on with that whole trans women of predators mindset. But, every single time I’ve been introduced to femininity, it’s been exciting to me, so whether it’s the patriarchal branding I got in childhood or whether it’s the sort of more queer, more feminist stuff I got in my adolescence and college years, like, it’s been exciting to me, and it’s been this really cool, like, everything that they say about it, that you get deeper emotional connections that you get access to experience different parts of yourself in terms of fashion or playing with appearance, like the different things that are foreclosed to masculinity, that’s all pretty cool to me. So, whether it’s the patriarchal shit or whether it’s the feminist stuff it’s all been good. So I think in terms of girlhood, I think probably the biggest for me was, you know, I really liked playing dress up and I liked wearing dresses, I liked wearing makeup, I liked wearing high heels when I was really little. I was obsessed with really glamorous actresses. I liked Meryl Streep, I liked Leslie Ann Warren, I don’t know if you’ve seen the Clue movie, but Miss Scarlett, she’s this very glamorous 1940s sort of, I mean, I didn’t understand this at the time, she owned a brothel. But like, she’s a Madam, she’s got that glamour to her and Miss White, Miss Peacock wore this really glamorous 1940s, 1950s fashion, I was obsessed with all that shit. Sorry, long answer, I’m almost there, I think really enjoying my appearance and being in my body, I think that’s a new thing for me as being a trans woman and I think that’s something I was trying to access when I was little. I think that’s something that, I don’t wanna say AMAB people are denied, but I think that it’s presented in a different way. I think being in your body looks different under patriarchy for an assigned male person than it does for an assigned female person, and I was more interested in the way that women and girls were invited to relate to their body than I was in the ways that men and boys were, because I don’t have any interest in being the biggest, strongest, stinkiest. Like, I remember being a little kid in the bathroom and the boys were having some conversation about who could pee for longer than a minute and I’m like, I literally don’t care. This is so stupid. What the hell? So, the way you can enjoy your body as an aesthetic object, I don’t know. Because we usually bring that as a negative thing in feminist discourse, but there’s positive elements to it as well, when you’re in the flow of it, not when you’re being objectified, but when you’re able to be one with your body and see yourself in a way. That feels authentic. I think that’s really enjoyable. Hope that answered the question.

Nat Urban

Yes! OK, I know for me that my relationship with my body is crazy and there have been times when we’ve been enemies and there’s been times where we are relearning to like each other, there’s been times where we kind of tolerate each other, I’m wondering if you can kind of speak to your experience of that?

Adrienne

Yeah. So, I’ve actually been really grappling with this recently. So, I have had an eating disorder since I was early high school, maybe 12-13 years old and I am trying- I’m now finally at a point where I’m like, I’m ready to let go of some of this shit. I think the estrodial fucking helped. You know, I was just thinking about this question because you know, a lot of transphobic discourse compares having an eating disorder to being trans right, like, oh, this is the same kind of mutilation like we don’t encourage this kind of mutilation, so you shouldn’t. And like actually for me on a level of phenomenology, they are the opposite. Because when you are in the state of an eating disorder, when you are in the state of anorexia, you are terrified for your body to change. You don’t want to gain a pound. You don’t want anything to shift. You don’t want to be bloated, you just monitor yourself excessively. When you are taking estradiol and you are watching your body grow and change, you are marveled of your body. You are alive in your body. You are connected to your body. You want things to change. You want things to shift. You want your body to be alive. It’s like you want your body to be dead. You want your body to be alive. That’s how different it is. So, my relationship with my body has been wild because I was the fat kid. People bullied me relentlessly. So by an early age I had a ton of shame and I just thought it was my fault. I thought I was supposed to hate myself and like, that’s why you get the eating disorder because you don’t get to have a life until you’re thin. So, working through all of the different ways I’ve related to my body, I’m finally at a point where I’m like, I’m not- like I still have some of the baggage, but I’m ready to let go of it. And I think that being able to embrace girlhood, being able to embrace my body as a woman’s body, a woman can have any type of body, I feel more alive than I’ve ever felt. I feel more at home in my body than I’ve ever felt. I have a lot of chronic illness stuff, even with all of that. Even with the diabetes and all the other things that I have, like, I feel more alive and at home in my body now than I ever did when I was at my lowest weight, than I ever did any other time in my life. I think that being trans and embracing that and being out has helped a lot. I think just getting to a point where I accept that my body is actually mine. Which embracing girlhood has really been helpful with because for the longest time, I thought that my body was for other people in the sense that, I have to be thin or nobody’s going to like me. I have to be gender normative or nobody’s going to like me. I have to be this, that, and the other. And just like, when you get to a point where you realize that, actually, your gender is your own. Actually, your body is your own. It’s like so freeing because all of that self monitoring bullshit that’s in my head, like I have to objectify myself, I have to watch my weight all the time, to just let go of that. Embracing girlhood, those pieces go together for me, because, again, it’s that openness. It’s that, I’m alive. I’m in touch with my body. I’m in tune with my emotions, like all of that connects.

Nat Urban

It sounds like girlhood is a space of creation for you. What has been your favorite moment or relationship or thing of creation that you’ve gotten to experience so far.

Adrienne

That’s such a good question. I really like getting to have authentic direct connect relationships with other women. That’s been really great for me. That’s something I’ve been craving ever since I was a little kid. Like I wanted to be, I wanted to have those deep friendships I saw with girls. I hate to be essentialist about this, but I remember this very vividly, this experience, where it was like these two girls that I was friends with, this was in kindergarten in the 1st grade, one of them was crying and I was really concerned and I wanted to help and they were like, no, go away. And I knew something was going on here, but I couldn’t tell what was going on and it’s possible I just wasn’t close enough friends with them to be part of that conversation, but I think part of it was that I was being perceived as a boy and to be able to have those really deep, unmediated relationships with women has been great. Other things have been like, I get to like the way I look in the mirror. Not because I’m like 30 pounds underweight but because, like, oh, like my chest is coming in and my skin is soft and like that kind of stuff. Like, I feel really good about that. And the last thing I’ll say is I got myself a pair of- I’m not wearing right now- but I got myself a pair of heart earrings. I have wanted heart earrings since I was in kindergarten or preschool, like I wanted that for so long. I finally did that for myself. When I get to do these little things for myself, when I got my ears pierced, when I got the heart earrings, when I noticed my body starting to change, like I have felt- like I’ve just noticed myself smiling, just like this joy that I have not experienced in any other moment in my life. So, I think that, I don’t know if I have one moment, but it’s just these moments of like oh, this is what it means, this is what womanhood means to me. This is what girlhood means to me, is being able to be alive, be absolutely, fully alive in my relationships, in my emotions, in my appearance, but not like in a like-  other people see me way, but like I see me way. My mom told me once- I would talk about facial feminization surgery just to tell her what it was. My mom told me, oh, you don’t need that. You have a very feminine face. Like that made my heart swell 3 sizes, you know? Like that’s just really good, that sort of connection, that sort of experience like woman-woman bonding, that really makes me feel good.

Nat Urban

I would love to talk more about female relationships because that feels like somewhere that you have a lot of strong positive experience and want for.  Something I’ve talked to a lot of folks about is romantic friendships between girls. It’s something that a lot of like queer people who have varied attraction have experienced in their girlhood is these deep, almost romantic friendships with girls. It’s something I still do. It’s something a lot of people still do as grown-ups and I was wondering what your experience around those kind of Relationships has been.

Adrienne

It’s been very pleasurable to finally be able to access something like that. It is something I have wanted ever since I was little and like again, this is where, I’m very mindful as I’m having this conversation, there’s a voice in the back of my head that says like, maybe it’s JK Rowling saying, like you are a predator, that you want this thing, that you should not have access to, but also like fuck that voice. Because I don’t want it in a predatory way. I have wanted to have these deep relationships with women ever since I’ve been little and I think that, more than anything to do with my body, has been the motivation of my transition. Like I want to be able to experience these deep relationships that I saw and that I have wanted to be part of. I have some really amazing friends that I’ve been able to connect with in a deep way and we’re able to support each other emotionally and have really deep conversations about like, what does it mean to be in a relationship.?What does it mean to be an adult? What does it mean to grapple with all of these scary things that are going on inside of us? and like able to connect in that way. Trying to think of my examples here, I work with a lot of DV survivors, who can be anybody, but it happens to be that my caseload is mostly women and I feel a real connection as a therapist with all of the bullshit, all the patriarchy that my folks have been through and trying to help them open up and connect with, what do I want now? I’ve had someone else tell me who I need to be and what I need to be, what do I want?  That connection of helping another person come into their aliveness and just come into their authentic self. You know, relationships with family are hard, but being able to connect with my mom in a new way has been really rewarding. It’s different when you’re someone’s daughter than when you’re someone’s son. I don’t know how to put that in any other way. I don’t want to be- again, I’m really mindful not to be gender essentialist, but things do feel different. I think that I’ve always had really deep relationships with women. When I was little, I was- my mom owns a store and so I was raised by all of the women that worked for her. And, you know, just really growing up around women, really being in awe of women and finally getting to a place where I am accepted as like, I’m not some creepy guy over here. Like I just wanna have a deep passion and authentic friendship with you. It’s a really great rewarding experience. I’ve been connecting with people from my past and now we’re able to relate in a new way. It’s really cool. It’s like, oh, OK, like you’re a person, I’m a person, let’s have a deep, authentic conversation about emotions or what does it mean to be a grown up now, like we were kids together, what does it mean to be grown-ups now. I don’t know, a lot of this is just about, like, been finding myself and figuring out how to have a deep relationship with someone, but a lot of it’s tied to gender.

Nat Urban

You mentioned feeling like you had been denied a girlhood. And I have questions about the choice of the word deny. What does that mean for you and also now that we’ve passed that space where- there are still people attempting to deny you it, but you’re grown up and you’re doing whatever you want, cause fuck those guys. What has shifted there and what are the things that were denied to you that you are chasing like, are there rights of passage that you saw other girls getting that you wanted? Yeah, that’s very big. Go where you want.

Adrienne

Oh God, I think about this a lot, right? I think those deep, romantic friendships we’re talking about. And that’s part of it. I’ve been a very lonely person for a very long time, and part of that is the neurodivergence, part of that is first the fatness, and then the eating disorder. I’m not going to say that being fat is bad, but other people think it’s bad, so they isolate you. You know, but also part of it was gender non normativity and being cut off from the people I want to be friends with, like the people that are offered to me to be friends with, I don’t want to be friends with and the people that I want to be friends with don’t want to be friends with me because of a lot of bullshit, but a lot of it has to do with gender bullshit. I think-  so, accessing those relationships, accessing pleasure, again, I want to be really mindful because I don’t want to say like, you know like. There’s a lot of bullshit that goes along with being in an AFAB body and being forced into this box, but there’s also pleasures in accessing your body as an aesthetic object that is not something I had access to. I don’t know what it means to be a pretty man, but I love being a pretty girl. I love this. like not in the, not in the sense of I’m gonna like be insta baddie whatever. But like in the sense of I am going to- I’m going to smile when I put on my heart earrings. I’m going to put on a pink shirt, and I’m going to look good. I am going to like the way that my body looks. I love my long hair and I just love this, right? It feels good to be connected with my body and like, be able to enjoy the way I look. Not because I meet a beauty standard, but because I feel like I’m authentic. I feel like I’m aware I’m supposed to be. When I think about being denied, I think a lot about all of the bullshit that is put on children in terms of gender, I really mourn for, not just myself, but for every child that is put into a gendered box because I think as our culture we have done a really terrible job of allowing kids to just be their selves. We assume from their birth that they need to be in these narrow, narrow boxes, whether they’re boys or girls, or whether they’re non binary. I don’t think any child was born deeply gendered, of course there’s gender identity, but I don’t think of it as like, pink and blue. I think of it as like, people are weird. Gender is a spectrum. Gender is beautiful creation, and we put them in these narrow boxes and then we subject them to all of these rules and punishments that they don’t fit. And so when I think about being denied, I think about being violently cut off from people I wanted to be in relationship with, activities I wanted to do, relationships in my own body like. All of this. And then when you come back, it’s like, you feel like you’re a fraud. You feel like you are taking something. You feel like you’re a predator. All of this language we have around trans femininity, right, around men in drag, right, that fairly violent policing of you should not be doing this. You should not be over here. I remember one time I was exploring my femininity in college and I was wearing makeup to class. I think it was lipstick and maybe nail Polish and from cis women I got weird looks. I’m like, what the-, why do I feel bad right now? Why are you taking something away from me that I was just enjoying? And like I’m not even mad at this person like, I don’t even know if she was like, giving me a side eye. I don’t know what that was. I just had my makeup maybe just badly done like, girl maybe you’re looking out for me. You know, it just feels like you’re stealing something. It’s really harsh. It’s really harsh to feel like your authentic self is a fraud or your authentic self is like theft or predatory, when literally all I’m trying to do is live. Like all of these bills against trans people, all I’m trying to do is live. All these kids are trying to do is live and it feels really bad. So Sarah Ahmed has this concept called gender fatalism, this idea that boys will be boys and girls will be girls, like this idea of this will happen. This is fate. This is fated. This is fatal. And I think a lot about that violence like, I was at a gym once in my teenage years and the gym owner, this was a small gym, he came up to me and said something along the lines of like you’re becoming a man and it felt like a threat. It felt like a fucking threat. It’s like you were becoming a man like. What if I don’t want that? What if I want something? But it feels like- for the longest time I felt there was no other option and I had no language for what it was. So the culture denied it. The patriarchy denied it. The lack of language denied it. The punishments from peers and adults denied it. There’s a lot of really rigid rules around gender that you find out are fake when you get to be a grown up, but then it’s still sad because you didn’t get to have that freedom when you were younger. So there’s parts of yourself that you have to find out late and maybe you never get to fully explore.

Nat Urban

Yeah, staying on that brain track of denial, I’m really thinking about rites of passage, like the prom dress and things like that and like, were those things that you wanted? What was it like to watch other people get them and not be able to have them? And/or are those things that you’re now pursuing getting to experience as an adult?

Adrienne

I think very vividly of one experience I have that I think probably should have been a very clear sign for me, but wasn’t. This was- we were getting ready for prom. Boys in one space, girls in another and I was thinking about the girls getting ready in the bathroom together, putting on makeup, putting on perfume, and doing their hair and I was sad because I was like, I want to be part of that, but then I’m thinking at the same time, what would it mean to be part of that, because at that time I was still laboring under the illusion that I’m a boy, I’m like, you put on a suit and you’re good to go. So, what would it mean to be part of that, it felt like a private shared experience that I’m just denied and I’m having some very disenfranchised grief like I don’t have any language for this. So not necessarily a dress, but it’s like those again, it comes back to relationships a lot for me, it’s those experiences that-like, I remember being really excited because I got invited to this girl’s birthday party in 1st grade and this was when the Lizzie McGuire movie came out so, it was a very girl oriented birthday party. I was very excited to be at this birthday party, and I again don’t have the language for it. But, little experiences like that, things that were rare for me because I’m in this box. I don’t want to be over here but, anytime I could go over there, that was really fun. I remember being weirdly defensive around things that were like-I loved playing with girls toys, girls computer games, girls whatever. I felt really defensive because on one hand it was like, why are these things only for girls, but also I want them because they’re for girls. It was a weird experience. It was something like the McDonald’s toy. You remember how there’s a- they always would ask- they don’t ask: Do you want the Hot Wheels or do you want the Barbie? Which is the sensible question. They asked: Do you want the boy toy or do you want the girls toy? and we would always lie and say, oh, this is a girl, right? Or this for a girl, because I wanted the Barbie doll. I didn’t want a stupid car, right? So it’s just really weird being confronted again and again with, this thing is off limits to you. You are not allowed to have this thing. And at the end of the day, it’s not that Barbie dolls are that exciting. It’s just plastic, but it’s all of the culture that goes around it. It’s all of the identity that goes around it. It’s all of the relationships that go around it. And I think that that’s really something that I really appreciate. So more than any one rite or experience, I think that all of the culture around these things is what I missed out on. So yeah, I would love to get a big dress and party but, part of the thing is that those experiences, those experiences of transition, those experiences of becoming a woman, that ship has sailed. So like, I don’t necessarily feel like I need to go- also, my idea of what a woman is and what a woman should look like has transformed dramatically since I was 5, right? Like, I’m a woman now. I don’t need to put on any type of thing for patriarchy, right? So like, yeah, I had a phase where I was painting my nails and it felt really great and then after a while I was like, OK, I enjoy this, this was also a lot of work to do every, you know, week or so. I’m going to give myself permission to not have to have some kind of makeup on and then that permission giving felt good too. So, I think at this point I’m trying to transition away from the I missed out on specific things to I am in relationship with my body and my life and my friends in a way that feels authentic and that’s what womanhood is. That’s what girlhood is. So, we think a lot about the culture around girlhood. I think it’s really sad that in order to access these exciting experiences of gender, you have to conform to such rigid rules, right? Because this is, this is sort of the double bind, right? As feminists, we want to say, like, this is patriarchal bullshit. As trans feminine people, we want to say, like, there are things about gender that we like, and I think it’s both, right? I think that the play and the enjoyment and that authentic aliveness is wrapped up in this whole culture of conformity and rigid rules and punishments so that if you get anything good out of this, it’s like the whole system, you have to endorse the whole system. And it’s like,I don’t know. I like a lot about femininity, but I don’t like all the rules and punishment that’s wrapped up in. So yes, there are things I miss like, again, that prom memory really still haunts me sometimes, but there are also ways that I can access what I enjoyed about that now without having to go through all of the hoops, right? Like I don’t have to spend $500 on a prom dress, I can just buy myself $50 heart earrings and feel pretty. It’s nice. You know, or I can have a really deep, beautiful conversation with a friend, right? And we can, like, cry some tears and like, feel a deep connection and that’s the same thing. So, I think at this point I’m moving away from the idea I need to have these experiences to be a girl and I get to create whatever girlhood means to me. part of that is being 27 going on 28 and being like, OK, I’m no longer accepting what the culture gives to me. I am creating my own life, but like part of that is also the feminism coming through, also like the I am going to embrace who I am. Yeah.

Nat Urban

What’s it like to be your own creator?

Adrienne

It’s beautiful. It’s really beautiful. I have felt more alive than I’ve ever felt in my whole life, and my mental health has been better than it’s ever been. It’s really nice to be at a place where I don’t feel like I am having to prove my existence anymore. On the gender front, on the job front, I have a career that I absolutely love. On the friendship front I have friends where I actually feel like these are my authentic friends. These are the people that I am connected to. I don’t have to prove myself to them anymore, right? For the longest time, I felt like I have to prove I have myself in order to have friends, I have to demonstrate my value to these people. I no longer feel like that.I feel worthy. I feel worthy in my family. I feel worthy in my friendships. I feel worthy in my career. I help my clients, right? I can treat PTSD. I am a good therapist and that’s not me thinking I’m god, that’s me thinking like ohh I I’m a healer. I can do this shit. That feels great and all of that’s connected to gender for me. When I approach femininity, I approach it very intentionally. It’s about compassion. It’s about connection. It’s about empathy. It’s about showing up from those traditionally feminized roles of care and nurturance and how do I embody that intentionally. Not just the forced in this box because the patriarchy says you have to be a servant to men in children and culture but, I choose to be a healer, and that’s been very empowering. It’s been very affirming gender wise too. I think being my own creator has been really powerful as a trans person, as a trans woman because I get to choose the pieces of gender that I like and I get to leave everything else behind. You know, if I want to paint my nails, I can. If I don’t want to paint my nails, I don’t have to. If I want to do the emotional labor, I’ll do it for the people that really matter. I’m not going to do it just because everybody expects me to slap on a smile and be nice all the time, right? It’s been really nice. Again, I come back to that, I have no other language for it, that aliveness. I felt like I was sleepwalking for the longest time, but to be at a point where you feel like your body is your own. People like you because of who you are, not who you’re pretending to be. The work you do is meaningful and puts you in touch with your spiritual self. All of that’s been really great and I think that part of that is really coming into connection with, I get to choose my own gender, I get to choose my own authentic connection to myself and my body, and I don’t have to choose what my culture gives to me because be honest with you, the options for gender that our culture gives people are terrible, absolutely terrible. Like they’re all really, really bad. That is my biggest wish is that we could as a society get to the point where we are past patriarchy, where we’re past gender and people are able to be their authentic selves. We talk a lot about that self energy in internal family systems, that’s the modality I use. I think a lot of people are looking for self energy, but they’re finding it in gender, they’re finding it in roles that are given to them and the secret is, no role is going to protect you. No role is going to keep you safe. No role is going to love you. You have to be in a place where you are creating your authentic self and I think that that’s a beautiful gift that trans women, that trans people give our culture is that you have to find your authenticity in some space of self creation, not in a role that you’re playing and I think that that’s something that everybody can learn from. I think that that’s why I think trans liberation is so important to our culture because we have to get to a point where we are no longer spending so much energy and so much resources on forcing people into boxes and forcing women into servitude and forcing children into very violent, very narrow ways of being and we can just let people live. So, my wish is that that self creation that I’ve had for myself, that everybody could experience that because I see cis people and I’m like this is sad, on some level, this is sad because as much as I love cis womanhood, I also have a lot of problems with it. And as mad I am at cis man, I have a lot of sympathy for them in the sense that, like, oh, you are in a box that you did not choose and you were cut off from your emotions and you were cut off from authentic relationships and it’s really sad. Like we could be humans, we could all be human beings, and trans people have access to that and it’s really sad to me when I see cis people denied that. So, I think that’s what self creation means to me.

Nat Urban

We’ve got about 10 minutes left, so this is generally when I ask the question of, is there anything you wanted to talk about, any stories you wanted to tell, that you’re like itching, kicking the walls, trying to get out that I haven’t brought up.

Adrienne

I think that the biggest thing for me, and if I may get on my soapbox here.

Nat Urban

Get on it.

Adrienne

I think that we need to find a way to come into solidarity, all of us who are marginalized by patriarchy, we need to find a way to come into solidarity because all of this TERF bullshit, pardon my language, really upsets me because as a trans woman, I am, whether I am honest or not or not, no matter what stage I am in my transition, I am not a threat to cis woman. Trans people are not a threat to cis women. We need to come together and find a way to be in solidarity across all of our intersectionalities of difference because if we cannot do that, the patriarchy is going to win. They already took away Roe. They’re taking away rights for trans children, it’s the same fight and it makes me so mad that people are not seeing these connections like I see my work against DV and I see my work as opening up space for trans women, and I see my work like being a career- I see all of these things are connected. If we cannot see how all of the web of oppression and liberation is connected, we’re all going to drown together. And it’s like, all of these sniping at each other about who’s more oppressed, like Audre Lorde tells us, there’s no hierarchy of oppressions. Yes, we need to acknowledge privilege and those intersectionalities, that is a reason to be in solidarity with people. That is the reason to see your liberation as bounded to my own. No woman is- “I am not free if any woman is unfree, even if her chains are very different than my own,” I live by that Audre Lorde quote. Sometimes I think a lot about the way we talk about trans womanhood, trans femininity, as like, I’m going to put on makeup and high heels, and I’m going to take my estradiol and that’s all it is. And for me, it’s spiritual. For me, it’s political. Those things are important and I think they help us access that self energy, but I think we really need to see the real revolution is when we live in a culture where trans people, trans women especially, are affirmed, and are allowed to live our lives because if we can open up that space of self creation and authenticity for everyone, especially for children of all different assigned identities, we’re going to be so much richer as a culture. We’re going to be so much freer as a culture. I also want to put in a plug here for internal family systems for trans people because I think I have done some of my best healing through internal family systems. This is a model of therapy that you could do with yourself. Go back to those parts of yourself that were denied access to womanhood. Go back to those- and this is for all queer people. Go back to those parts of yourself that were denied the right to be your authentic self. The child, who is 4 years old and loves somebody of the same gender and doesn’t know what that means. The child, who is 16 years old and desperately wants to put on a dress but can’t do that because she thinks he’s a boy, right? All of these pieces, right? If you can go back to that self inside of yourself and you can let that self know that this is fake, you can be whoever you want, and give yourself that experience, that healing. A lot of my dysphoria, a lot of my internalized transphobia, has melted away because I’ve been able to give myself that. So I think those are some of the things I would say right that you can give yourself that aliveness. You can give yourself that compassion and that love that you need, and that our culture really denies queer and trans people and those have been my biggest plugs. We’ve got to come together in solidarity and we can give ourselves the healing and the experiences, what we call in therapeutic spaces, the corrective experiences that we didn’t get to have. And that’s my biggest hope, right, is that as a culture, we’re going to be able to get to a point where we’re past gender, where we’re past patriarchy because it does so much damage, it really does. We need to get to a point where people are able to be alive in theirselves and that girlhood, femininity, whatever the gender is, can be a space of freedom and creation and it’s not a set of rules. It’s not a set of punishments. So I think that’s my biggest soapbox.

 

Content warnings: reclaimed use of the d slur, mentions of sex and sexuality and abuse. 

My name is Andie. A-N-D-I-E I know there are multiple ways to spell it. My pronouns are they them. I identify as a non-binary lesbian (woot woot) and I am a working poet slash a TA in the English department at the University of Irvine.

Nat Urban

Okay! So well, I’ve been telling everybody the thing that made me want to talk to them, and I think that made me want to talk to you, is obviously your poetry, I adore it and you write so beautifully about girlhood.

Andie Klarin

Thank you, Nat.

Nat Urban

And I would love to hear like, why is girlhood such a spot for you, especially in conjunction with your queerness?

Andie Klarin

I was talking to my mom about this last week and I think my party line, like the line that I go to when I’m asked that question is, I think being a girl is the most interesting thing that’s ever happened to me. I think that my image of girlhood has always been intertwined with this idea of, like decadence and intricacy, and like when you think about the aesthetics of girlhood like. They are so layered, UM and it’s just something that I’m very, very interested in unpacking, but also something that I feel very, very special and very, very lucky to have gotten to be a girl and a lot of the sadness and a lot of the hurt that comes in my work and comes through like the expression of gender is also like very, very rooted in this, like faith in girlhood that I see is like a really good starting point for my expression of myself.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I’m going to, as a jumping off point, bring up this thing that we said to each other often, which is that we like talking about girlhood with each other because we handle it with white gloves, like little archeologists. Can you talk about the idea of, like, girlhood as a dead culture? it’s something we talk about a lot.

Andie Klarin

Yeah, I was actually gonna use the word dead culture. I feel like in the work you and I do in particular, it’s the examination of girlhood. I feel like a lot of what I am doing, it’s unpacking those intricacies. It’s taking apart its layers and examining them, which in a lot of ways does feel like dissecting a corpse. And like when I talked about, like, the sadness that comes with gender and the sadness that comes with, like being on a gender journey, I think a lot of it is grief. Like, it is a special, sacred thing to be a girl and I’m not a girl anymore in a lot of ways. I always will be in others because I always will be a part of that community and I always will have those experiences. But there’s a lot of grief, and like the feeling of writing about girlhood and the feeling of just dissecting those feelings through art often feels like talking about something that looked like a dead lover, you know, like something that once was very, very intimate to me and the letting go of it was just as intimate, you know?

Nat Urban

I wonder if you could talk about what you mean when you talk about it as an intimate experience? Like what about girlhood is special? What about it is special, can you put it into words if you can?

Andie Klarin

Yeah, I think I can. I might lead my way into it-

Nat Urban

Do it.

Andie Klarin

with some thinking. What about girlhood is special? I’m a Jewish person and a lot of my beliefs about life and my beliefs about value are rooted in the idea that existence is a miracle, and the acceptance of existence as a miracle, wherever you take that gift from like it is a gift and it is a gift that you were not even asked to take, you were given. AndI feel like for me, like girlhood is a very, very similar type of gift. It is something that I was given and had to learn to accept and had to like to learn how to accept gracefully. And I think like, a lot of these things can be said about all sorts of expressions of gender and all sorts of expressions of personhood, which is why it feels difficult to answer the question about, like, what about girlhood is special? And I think, like. My real answer, Nat, is like I’m special and you’re special and we are special within the context of girlhood, and I’m interested in talking about that, you know.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I think something that I also love is you think a lot about girls when they’re not under surveillance and what are girls doing when it’s just girls, and so I’d love to hear, any stories you have about experiences like that or even just your thoughts about the idea of unsupervised unsurveilled girls.

Andie Klarin

Yeah, I mean like, I don’t know my immediate thought when we talk about this is about sexuality. 

Nat Urban

That’s why I brought it up. 

Andie Klarin

And about early experiences of desire and how grotesque desire can feel within a girlish body, and that’s something I still wrestle with a lot. I feel like a lot of my conversations, in particular with you, are often about the images of femininity and want and how that want is often ugly, like we talk a lot about rage and jealousy, I think the two of us do a lot, and for me like they’re those images are inseparable from images of desire because they’re intimate, and because they are private, and because they are something that you were told, as a girl, other people cannot see you doing and then there becomes something intimate about that, you know, and something you do with yourself. And I’m interested in the things girls do to take care of themselves and each other in secret and like by that, I do mean masturbation. But I also mean like, you know, the way we look out for other girls on the Internet in particular, I mean, like, the way we cry over our friends, all sorts, everything that girls instinctually know they have to do behind closed doors.

Nat Urban

I love to listen to you talk.

Andie Klarin

Thanks

Nat Urban

Yeah, we’ve talked very, we’ve been very big. I want to talk about you. That’s why we’re here. I am really interested in your experience, maybe with not with these words, but with masculinity and femininity as a child, and then growing through girlhood and how that relationship has changed, and, I mean, continues to change.

Andie Klarin

Yeah, I mean, like, OK, I grew up in a hyper traditional white privileged household and I think my first experiences with femininity were relentlessly positive because I was a child and I was told because I was a girl child, I was always going to be taken care of in some way. Like you know, I think as a girl, your job to a certain extent is to be preserved. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. You gave me that image of like those little patent black shoes you have as a little girl with the little bows and it’s like, your job as a girl is to be ready to put on those shoes at any moment, is to be preserved and to be displayed and there’s a lot of safety in that as a child, because what you’re supposed to do as a child, you know, not necessarily to be displayed, but you’re supposed to keep yourself safe, and you’re supposed to be able to count on the people around you to keep yourself safe. And like, that was my experience growing up and then I think at around 12-13 that box started to feel really, really small in a way that I really like heavily identified with, like second wave feminism at the time. Like this idea that the way gender had been presented to me limited me and like infantilized me in a way, and I was just so full of rage, and I didn’t understand at the time that that was something that a lot of teenage girls go through and that it was equally beautiful. I started being very, very angry, and if you’re angry enough, I think that if you do anything for long enough, you start doing it gracefully. And I think that I got very gracefully angry. I started writing a lot. I started presenting very differently, still very like feminine, but a little punkier. And then you know, and I was an angry teenager and I felt like I had something to prove and I felt like I could prove that from being a different type of girl and like, I feel like I felt like I was kind of inventing that type of girl as I went and then I realized obviously that that was a very naive place to come from. Which is such a comforting feeling to realize that you have a history of people who have invented the thing that you thought you invented, and like every single one of them has been on that journey and it has led them beautiful places. And I really started to identify kind of with this like- punkier identity of like womanhood and this like poetic identity of womanhood as like a place to get in touch with your feelings from or a place to get in touch with nature from or like a perspective on the universe that gave you a particular access to like the scope of human emotion. All of these things are things I felt at 15 and 16 that felt very, very real. And then I continued to grow up and I would say like my journey with femininity had hit a rage spike at like, 15 and 16, and it was beautiful and I would never regret that, but ever since then, I’ve kind of mellowed out. I think, like, as I’ve come to be more comfortable with my identity as a lesbian, I felt a lot more peace and I felt a lot less desire to prove things to people because love feels more real. Because it feels more right and like, you know, I’ve mellowed out. And like the journey I am on now with my femininity and my gender is not towards proving anything to anyone and is not towards escaping any boxes it’s towards finding peace and comfort with myself and accepting that the places that the peace and comfort come from might change. So that’s a very long winded answer to your question.

Nat Urban

I love a long winded answer, I would love nothing more than the longest winded answers you can provide me. Hell yeah, I’d love for you to talk about your lesbian journey because it’s so intertwined with girlhood.

Andie Klarin

It is! like do you just want the facts of it all? The cold hard truths of it all? I went into high school and I was angry and I didn’t know why, but I was really angry. And I went to a Catholic High School and I played water polo and I felt uncomfortable in my skin. And then one of the girls in my friend group came out as a lesbian and I was like, well. That’s very, very interesting, but that is a part of myself that I simply can’t examine! 

Nat Urban

As usual, you were busy.

Andie Klarin

I was, as usual I was busy, I was on academic decathlon. Yes, there was this person on my academic decathlon team who at the time was identifying as a woman and I was just, like, obsessed with them. I was obsessed with everything about them. I wanted to be around them all the time. I hated their long term long distance boyfriend, as one often does. Yeah, I just like I had a very authentic little teenage crush on them. So yeah, I was obsessed with this person. They were all I wanted to think about, and then I went off to college and I wanted to think about other people. And I realized that I didn’t want to think about boys ever and that when I did, it was usually I was usually always thinking about my parents actually, like whenever I went on dates with boys, I was thinking about whether or not he would get along with my dad and like what it would look like to like, bring him home to my parents, and that felt really, really good and really, really affirming because I love my parents and I wanted their pride really, really bad. I still do. And so yeah, I was like well, I don’t know if I’m a lesbian, I think I could still be attracted to a man, but I only want to be with girls and that was my answer for a minute there. And then I dated someone pretty long term. I had my first long-term girlfriend, which you were there for the thick and the thin of and like I think the reason that relationship expanded in my mind is because for the first time I thought like I could be with someone who loves me forever, and that was so hopeful and so real and so beautiful. I was also 19 and so I didn’t really have a scope of forever. And I think we were both very, very young and very, very dumb and when that relationship fell apart, I was left with myself. 

Nat Urban

In a canoe.

Andie Klarin 

In a canoe, I was left with myself in a canoe. Famously my best friend in the world, who like if you want to talk about like asexuality and like platonic intimacy, I consider Kate my long-term partner, but yeah, no, I was left with Kate, but also with myself and Kate being the intuitive and sensitive person, knew that that was a really important time to me for me to be on my own. I came out the other side with myself and with a self that I had created through all of these experiences and like I think ever since then I’ve just kind of known like, people can come into my life and I can love them and I am going to leave the other side of me and like me is a lesbian and like my gender expression is very, very fluid. You’ve heard the narrative, it has a lot to do with where I’m at intellectually, like where I’m at as far as what I want to give to other people and how that comes out. The love is always for lesbians and like that part of my heart is always for queer people and yeah, and I was left with that and I’ve just kind of been carrying that around in my pocket ever since.

Nat Urban

Every word you say, I feel so thrilled. Alright, well, lesbians. 

Andie Klarin

Lesbians! 

Nat Urban

We love them.

Andie Klarin 

We love them! 

Nat Urban

Can we talk about why we love them? We’ve talked about what’s special about being a girl, what’s special about being a dyke?

Andie Klarin

What’s special about being a dyke? Can I answer your question in a way that’s going to seem irrelevant? 

Nat Urban

However you want, this is your interview. 

Andie Klarin

I’m going to do a wrap around, so I’ve started working on this series of poems that are all kind of love letters, musings, portraits of the boy that I thought I’d be dating at 22, when I was 12, and like the reason I’m writing these poems is because I’m insanely lucky and like I am living my dream life like we’re sitting in my gorgeous apartment right now that I have because I make money writing poetry, which is nutso, but the thing that’s crucially different is I don’t even have a single boyfriend. So I’ve been writing these poems that are these kinds of musings to this boy and at first it was a really, really fun project. Because this boy is kind of an amorphous figure who can take on all sorts of different personalities and bodies and projections. He’s really just like a cloud I project things onto and it gives me a lot of space, but in that space I’ve been filling in a lot of what my desire for love looked like at 12. I’ve been examining that closely and I think what I’ve found is the end goal of this project is to write love letters to like the lesbians, particularly masc lesbians who like, have romanced me in a way that’s kind of taken me off my feet. Uh, which sounds a little cheesy to say out loud, but I think that there’s something I’ve always wanted to be loved in a way that is nurturing and that is building and in a way that feels safe and like when I think about being a dyke and when I think about the love that I have for like you, Nat, and like the friendship that we share that is so sacred to me. Like I think about safety and I think about the safety that comes with intimacy, the safety that comes with opening those doors that you’ve been told, these are things you always have to do in private, these are the parts of yourself you have to hide in order to be a person. The safety that comes with opening that door and having people love you and support you and reflect the things you feel in your rage and your jealousy and your lust back to you is so incredibly intimate, and I love dykes for it. And like, I want to be a part of the community that creates space for everyone to come in and to feel that intimacy and to feel like that is just as human as the parts of them that they are allowed to show to a more normative public.

Nat Urban

I love dykes. 

Andie Klarin

I love dykes! Shout out to dykes!

Nat Urban

Shout out to dykes doing it a way nobody else is doing it. Ohh well Andie, you’re a poet, I’d love to talk about words with you. And in fact, I would like to talk about the word dyke and the word lesbian because you talked about how it’s hard to be a lesbian when you’re 14.

Andie Klarin

It’s hard to be a lesbian when you’re 14. It’s hard to be a lesbian when you’re 22. 

Nat Urban

and it’s a hard word to accept. I know both of us went through our little “I’m bisexual because that’s less scary” moment, and that’s not because bisexuality is less valid, we were just hiding in it because it was less scary.

Andie Klarin

I was praying for a chance that I could bring a boy home to my family, you know? I still think that’d be so cool and that’s why I collect men. No, I have a lot of male friends who I love, who I call my boyfriends because I’ve got reasons. They’re my boys. But yes, the word dyke and the word lesbian within a poetic context?

Nat Urban

Just in general. Whatever you want to talk about.

Andie Klarin

I mean like, yeah, I was thinking about this last night a little bit. I’ve never written a poem with the word dyke or the word lesbian in it, which is nuts and I don’t really know why. Like I do, I know why, but I also like those feelings of fear and those feelings of disgust are something that I’ve confronted so intentionally and so daily in my life outside of my work. But like even in the world of poetry, which is so based in art, and it’s so based on expression, I think that I still have this thin film shield around my sexuality, that I’m trying to deconstruct, but like, you know, it’s a long process and like I think that like thinking about girlhood with you and thinking about how being a girl, in my experience, and your experience is kind of inseparable from being a dyke, has made me think about, like, why that narrative doesn’t exist in my work yet and what the space is for it. So yeah, I think that I was around a lot of lesbians in undergrad, and it was such a crucial daily part of my identity, and it still is, I’m still lesbian every single day, but I think that as my environment has changed and as I moved into doing things more professionally with my career and like just so happens that not everyone around me is a dyke anymore. (Nat boos)  I know, right? I like it’s this confrontation of my own isms about being a lesbian has come slower and has come less intentionally in a way which this is a great reminder that that it’s daily work and that is work that isn’t done if it’s not difficult, and if I’m not confronting the things that are hard about it. Yeah, and like I love my cohort. I love my peers. I love the poets I’m around. But like my experiences of being a lesbian are unique because I’m plus size and they’re unique because I have an interesting relationship with sexuality and an interesting relationship with monogamy and an interesting relationship with abuse and all these things, and you know, those are still things that I have thin film walls of shame around that it’s daily work to deconstruct and like, I think that the word dyke and like saying that word out loud for me is an intentional part of poking at that film, and reminding myself that there is a history of shame, and there is also a history of people like me taking ownership of that shame and, you know, and transforming through that.

Nat Urban

I know we always talk about weird little girls. Yeah, we always are thinking about weird little girls. How are you feeling about weird little girls right now?

Andie Klarin

I feel like recently I’ve been- yesterday I wore all black head to toe,  like a very long skirt and a turtle neck and then I did my hair all funky, which is something I really wanted to do at 14 when I started Catholic High School, I thought that was the epitome of fashion. And so right now, I’ve been thinking about like the awkward space between, like the safety of little girlhood and like the assurance of big girlhood and, the feeling about growing up like, I’m talking like 12 to 13, 14, 15 even, girlhood. And I think that the part of the reason that I’ve been thinking about that is because like, I’m starting to feel like the role model I needed at that age, which is a really interesting way to reconnect back to my girlhood that, like, could not have happened if I didn’t kill off my experiences of being a girl, you know,. I think when you get to the other side of something and when you get to the other side of something that you very intentionally broke like you get this really incredible opportunity to look back on it with a lot of love and a lot of tenderness. And like for me, like, punk culture and in particular is  inseparable from love and inseparable from like radical tenderness towards others and like I just want to give every 12 to 15-year-old girl out there who feels like she is outgrowing her body at a rapid speed, just like the biggest hug. Yeah, I when I said earlier that I’m seeking peace, I think what I mean is I want to feel like all my actions are movements towards giving that hug, you know?

Nat Urban

Yeah, I do. Ohh, I love that you said you had to break girlhood. You had to break her. 

Andie Klarin

I gotta break her. 

Nat Urban

How did you break her? What did you do there?

Andie Klarin

How did I break girlhood? Let me think, I think that the first step is understanding that the space society has created for girls, I’m looking at the text Blue sent me about Caroline Rose, speaking of girls. Yeah, I think the first step of breaking girlhood is understanding that like the quote UN quote safety and the quote UN quote, security and preservedness that comes with being a girl in society is falsified and that understanding that this position of sacredness is dehumanizing and very intentionally so. It’s this kind of very, very soft way to tell someone that they are best sequestered and like, yeah, I think that the first step, for me, of breaking girlhood was realizing that it was too small and that it was built too small. I wasn’t too big, it was too small, and that’s just my experience, but I feel like it’s very, very true to this societal image of being a little girl. And then I think then there’s the breaking, you know, then there’s the pounding down of those walls and the breaking of it as like a box where you have to sit and then you’re out of that box. And I think that there’s like, where I’m at right now is there’s some real joy in being out of that box, doing the really hard work of breaking it and then coming out the other side and being like, well, I am still a beautiful feminine person and all the things I loved about myself as a girl are still true, they’re just free. They can just, I can just go wherever I want with that energy. So I feel like the process of breaking down girlhood is like you know, you rip through, you rip through it, and then you come out the other side and it’s not holding you back anymore. It’s  just there.

Nat Urban

It’s just there. Jesus, I want to go back to what you said earlier about lesbian desire as a secret when we’re little girls, because I remember that. I know you remember it. I would love some stories.

Andie Klarin

I always talked about this with my one of my really, really good friends the other night, I was talking about, I’ve been talking a lot about Lindsay Lohan recently to you, to everybody. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are big hot points when I think about young lesbianism for me, because I think there is this like forbiddenness to girls who were bad in ways that my parents weren’t willing to tell me about. That, just like, always reeked of sex for me, because sex was always forbidden and so you know, those women, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, they were hurt by the boxes of sexuality and the boxes of forbiddenness that were put around them, like deeply, deeply damaged and I would never try to speak to those experiences for them or speak to like what that did for society? But for me, being a bad girl was hot and I looked at girls who were doing things wrong and facing consequences with a very intimate eye from a very, very young age in a way that I think shaped my sexuality. And like you know, I think that led me into a lot of perilous situations. I think that people don’t often talk about how dangerous it is to be a young queer person, because if you’re doing everything in secret, you’re not getting proper support and  some of those things that you’re keeping a secret, you’re keeping secret because you know they’re dangerous and like in a young mind is sometimes hard to tell the difference between something you’re keeping a secret because you’re ashamed and something you’re keeping a secret because it’s dangerous for you. But it goes back to freedom as well, like the freedom to keep a secret. But yeah, I think as I’ve gotten older and my sexuality has developed, I think it’s also like the freedom to tell a secret, which goes back to dyke love and dyke community. It’s the freedom to tell a secret. It’s the freedom to share intimacy with people and trust them with it you know.

Nat Urban

It’s like being in one big room of secrets when you’re hanging out with dykes, except you all know em. 

Andie Klarin

Yeah, it’s not- they’re not secrets anymore. They become something else. It’s like the idea of girlhood becoming something else in a lot of ways, you know. My project is in a really interesting place. I guess I’ll give some background.

Nat Urban

I was gonna say, tell the people who cool girl is.

Andie Klarin

1. How graphic can I get? 

Nat Urban

As graphic as you would damn please. 

Andie Klarin

OK, so this summer, I was having a really interesting coming to know moment with my sexuality, where I started talking to someone who was very formative for my sexuality, who has recently come out as a trans woman and kind of tangentially to that, like I had nothing to do with it, It just so happened fate, I believe in magic, we reconnected right when she started coming out as a trans woman, and I was also in this position where I was taking ownership over my sexuality and I was like, that’s very cool, by the way, I would like to have sex with you. Which is something that I don’t usually say to people, and it’s a type of my desire that I don’t usually take ownership of but it’s a type of desire I know I have. When I was up there having sex with her and her wife, I was thinking a lot about who I became when I take ownership of that desire and like when that part of me comes to the surface, who am I? And I thought a lot about straight women, and I thought a lot about the really hot straight women I know who feel no shame about their desire and who are so at peace with it and how I want to be just like them, but me. And the cool girl is kind of this hyper feminine hyper traditional but also like radical in that fact, version of womanhood for me, that is like every desire on the surface, every desire you can think of and truly like every desire you can think of a woman having, and that’s what I mean by typical. And so I started writing these poems from the perspective of and to the voice of cool girl. And like, they’re weird, they’re funky, they’re strange. They come out almost as enchantments or spells. I have one called Cool Girl Come Blood, when I read it aloud, I ask the audience to every time I say cool girl, they say come blood in like in that it kind of has this like invoking power, it feels like we’re summoning something and it’s really fun. And I love this cool girl project, I love cool girl. And cool girl opened this door for me into this kind of work I’m doing right now about the origins of womanhood and what it means to summon femininity and where we summon it from that has led me down a very biblical path. So the way that the cool girl project has kind of taken me into now is I’m thinking about girlhood and I’m thinking about womanhood in many, many forms, and I’m trying to build these forms from the ground up. So, I have this cool girl work and I have these portraits of these boys that don’t exist and that are, like, very clearly ghosts. And then I have very, very personal dialogues with my stories, with girlhood, that kind of exist in this venn diagram of three and they kind of all sometimes blend together and then kind of in a circle around this venn diagram, I have this work I’m doing which I’m calling all girl Genesis which like the party line for the project is it’s like the Book of Genesis but every single thing in it living or dead is a girl and just kind of seeing how that changes the story. And I’m in a position with this project right now where I’m trying to figure out to what end, but like that’s always been my experience of girlhood is like I’m doing things because they feel right and then eventually, I figure out why I’m doing them and why they feel right. So yeah, that’s my work around cool girl. She was my doorway into this idea of invoking femininity and summoning femininity and the creation of femininity.

Nat Urban

Oh, cool girl. let’s talk about femininity baby because we’re both very fem, for the most part, what does that mean?

Andie Klarin

I don’t know, Nat. I think about it every single day. Femininity is magic because it’s behind a thin invisible shield that I can’t name and it’s in my life every single day and like femininity is my root, the tradition I’m rooted in like I want to be just like my mom, for better or for worse with all of her flaws, I’ve always wanted to be just like my mom. I’ve been thinking a lot about the perfume, beautiful by Estee Lauder and how that smells like my mom and sense memories of femininity and how particular those are. That is not a universal feeling. But for me, like that is womanhood, and that is femininity and like there’s magic in the fact that everybody understands that. There is magic in the fact that that is like, particular to my childhood but it’s something that is understood by the people around me. And it’s like it’s the magic I choose to embrace. It’s the magic that makes me feel good. I’m particularly interested in punk femininity and edge femininity, Like bottle blonde kind of stuff and there’s this idea of femininity as natural as the of the Eve of it all that I accept but then I also like this idea that femininity is something that is forced and something that is, you know, uncomfortable in the fact that women are forcing it to exist, even if it makes men uncomfortable. And I’m using the terms women and men loosely and because they are the terms that I have access to right now, I think that there’s probably a better way to say that. But yeah, I think femininity is magic. I think it comes from everywhere. And like, I think part of its magic is it’s something that comes out in every single thing I do, and I make every single one of my choices actively but femininity, I think, sits subliminally under the surface. And then, like, sometimes I make those choices on purpose because I love being a girl and I love magic and I love that being a girl happens to me magically.

Nat Urban

What’s it like to be a girl and not have a gender?

Andie Klarin

It’s so weird. It’s like it’s very colorful. I would say, like, I think of gender mostly as we were talking about that breaking of girlhood, I think of my, my experience of girlhood is a gender that existed in like that pre break era and then the experience of breaking gender left this kind of free loose girlhood behind that’s like very, very floaty and very, very free and like. When words exist without the weight of societal definitions, they become tools of expression and I see my girlhood mostly as a tool of expression and I understand that’s not what girlhood is for everybody.

Nat Urban

That wasn’t the question.

Andie Klarin

Yeah, but like for me it is one of the tools I have to show who I am and like who I am is someone who was once a little girl and who, like, really fucking dug that and like really dug playing with femininity from this naive expression point with no understanding of its dangers and like. Everything I have I have because I started there and now I get to invoke that, I get to summon that version of femininity to express myself.

Nat Urban

That was beautiful. Let’s talk about violence, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about the violence of girlhood. Yeah, I just. I’m thinking about cause my tummy hurts right now.

Andie Klarin

Yeah, I was a very angry little girl and I’m a very angry adult, which is something I feel a lot of shame around because, yeah, anger is often- like I’ve also been like victimized by my anger and by the anger of others and made to feel unsafe by anger and I think that anger can be really, really bad. But I also like- I would like to rephrase, I think that anger can be used really, really badly. I think that anger is not a bad tool and I’m trying to teach myself that my anger is not the problem, the problem is when anger and violence are used to make other people unsafem or as someone who like has felt victimized by anger and violence like, when those things show up in me, they do not mean that I’m victimizing myself or others like they are tools. Like I’m starting to think about anger and violence, and this is not something that I’m all the way around yet, but this is where I’m starting from. I’m starting to think of anger and violence as tools of expression, similar to how I think of girlhood as a tool, and more so because I’m a writer, like tools of communication. I think one of the most powerful things that someone can be as angry because it invokes a lot of other things because you are angry for a reason and anger requires this big storming that eventually softens out into reason and like I, in my work, I love to do a big storm and then a softening and so I’m starting to see anger as a tool. Could I read you something that’s been published of mine? OK, let me pull it up, I’ll tell the story. While I do it. So, my mother.

Nat Urban

What a wonderful start to a story.

Andie Klarin

My mother was a little girl once and she had a different girlhood than I did, and the circumstances of it were just as interesting to me, if not more so than my own. And when my mom was a little girl, she grew Mormon and her parents got divorced and her mom left their community for a lot of different reasons and moved them to California. And my mom was really alone a lot of the time at like 12 to 13 in Southern California, kind of when Richard Ramirez was at his height and this is a story in this poem that I know from my mother. This story of Richard Ramirez coming up to her back door and trying to get into her house and posing as a police officer, as he often did, and her kind of at 12 saying, well, I’m going to go call the police station and make sure they actually sent someone down here and then him just running down the hill in their backyard, that’s a story that I know from my mom. As everything that I know from my mom, I consider it mostly fable, but because it’s in my head it exists only as fable, it’s able to take on like an allegorical quality that I really love to think about, like girlhood as fable and allegory, and you don’t get to do that with your own girlhood, you get do that with other people’s. So, this is a poem I call When I Find Myself Remembering Richard Ramirez: 

I try to picture his body before the police came

the good people of San Diego turning him to a liquid

which evaporated up from the asphalt where they left him

burning on the street except the dead teeth which so scattered

from his living mouth that taking them was barely stealing

as they were brown and porous and when planted in their gardens

they grew to wine grapes and citrus flowers and other sweet things

that take well to the harsh wall of heat carried south by the Santa Ana winds

and in the taking they were saving their daughters who did not know better

than to follow the scent of rot when it puffed up around the schools

or showed up at night to lick the screen doors of their bedrooms

and left spit behind in the netting like small diseased crystals

when I think of the man, I try to think of my mother instead

how she must have been at fourteen when she ate the beast

with her angry neighbors who all together turned his body

to grey mush to a cotton ball covered in blood to a lamb

I try to picture it, the dark red meat of him raw

the Southern California summer cooking him

the stench of black road and brown rot

rising like smoke

So yeah, that poem was originally published in revolute magazine, and then I read it on KUCI radio for a segment about California history and now I’m reading it here now because I think it’s kind of a nice wrap up with everything we’ve been talking about femininity as generational and rage and figures of men kind of, and taking ownership of those figures and kind of reusing them in narratives about girlhood.

Nat Urban

If people wanna find you because they’re like, oh, my God, that poetry was incredible, I wanna keep up with you. Where can they keep up with you, Andie?

Andie Klarin

OK, so I have a Twitter specifically dedicated to my poetry. If you only want to hear poetry news, that’s Andie_Karin. That’s A-N-D-I-E under score K-L-A-R-I-N and then if you are interested in hearing my less literate musings, I have another Twitter where I like to goof off which is under the title bratzdollnofoot, that’s B-R-A-T-Z-D-O-L-L-N-O-F-O-O-T. And if you’re curious whether I’m hot or not, I’m on Instagram under andieklarin. All one word A-N-D-I-E-K-L-A-R-I-N.

Nat Urban

Well, for the people, are you hot?

Andie Klarin

I think so. I like to think so.

Nat Urban

Ohh my goodness, thank you so much Andie. 

Andie Klarin

This was really fun.

My name is Persi. My name is also Tom. I am a Hongkonger-American, second generation. I identify as non binary, specifically as a Demi girl [unintelligible]. I am AFAB. I grew up as a girl and outside of just existing as a human, I suppose I work as a freelancer in this capitalistic society. I do anything that I can to scrape up change to survive. In my free time I have about a dozen hobbies to feed my ADHD. I do armored combat, roller skating, weaving, sewing. I’m with the medieval historical reenactment organization that does a lot of different things.

Nat Urban

Alright, so I’m interviewing the coolest person alive, alright, calm down. When I say girlhood, what does that mean to you?

Persi

To me, girlhood is the period I explored expansive ideas of gender, I suppose. Because my gender identity is as a Demi girl, so I’m still kind of in that space, but identifying exclusively as female, which for me is girlhood, is tied to my childhood and I’ve aged out of that in a way. But again, this is very specific to me and I do not expect other peoples gender journeys to be like this at all.

Nat Urban

Totally. So, because we’re talking about experiences of queerness and girlhood, specifically, and I’m wondering, growing up ideas of femininity and masculinity, what did that look like? Who are the people in your life who embodied femininity or masculinity, whatever that means, and what did that, what did that mean to you?

Persi

Well, I grew up in a nuclear household with a mom and dad. That being said, my mom was a massive tomboy and anything feminine was kind of looked down on. She was very like, I’m not like the other girls. She did judo and gymnastics. She had longer hair when I was younger, but she never taught me anything about cosmetics, about skin care, about how to do my hair. I never picked up any of that stereotypically traditionally feminine stuff from my mom. I don’t know. There’s just a kind of imbalance in my life, I didn’t have super feminine role models like that. As for masculinity, well, my dad was around. Still is around, unfortunately. He’s kind of a terrible person.

Nat Urban

That’ll get you.

Persi

Yeah, I mean, both of my parents are terrible people, but my dad really takes fucking cake. I mean, he’s a man. He doesn’t cry. He’s kind of a piece of shit. He’s the breadwinner.

Nat Urban

So, being second generation is always its own adventure, is there a difference in what girlhood entails at home, in that culture versus American culture at large?

Persi

Yeah, there’s this thing, and I’m not saying necessarily that I was personally subject to this as much, but there’s this thing in Asian cultures at large called eldest sister syndrome, or eldest daughter syndrome, where the eldest daughter is expected to be like a second mom essentially, and take on a lot of responsibility with household tasks and the like. I never really got that treatment because I guess my parents are a little bit more progressive in that department. Like I said, my mom was a bit of a tomboy and so some of the expectations of a daughter, especially an eldest daughter, were not as heavily foisted upon me. Also, we were relatively well to do so we had a hired domestic helper to help us with household stuff. That being said, compared to if I had been born a male child, I was definitely coddled less. Don’t remember the original question.

Nat Urban

No, you’re good.

Persi

Sons are definitely given preferential treatment in a lot of ways. They’re given a lot of slack, they’re allowed to do whatever they want compared to girls. I didn’t really get that.

Nat Urban

You do a lot of really cool crafts and I know that you mentioned that coming from your ADHD, but gender and craft is really interesting and I was wondering how you came to those crafts and what it means to interact with them in a unique way, in a way a little bit outside of girlhood.

Persi

Well, kind of going back to your last question about the differences between American childhood, or white American childhood, I suppose and HongKonger-American childhood. My dad didn’t teach me how to do any woodshop shit, right? I didn’t have any of that education at all. At home or at school, because that was the 2000s to 2010s. All of those programs had been unceremoniously gutted from the public education system. That type of thing just wasn’t really accessible to me, whereas fiber arts, everybody can go out and get a needle and some thread and just start, right? Not so much with learning how to use a machine necessarily, but anyone can embroider, anyone can cross stitch as long as you have the ability to. The materials are very cheap and so I taught myself how to do that from a very young age. I just kind of stuck with fiber arts and continued developing my craft and I’m only continuing to develop my craft into other mediums of fiber arts like I’m doing tapestry weaving. I’m going to be doing inkle weaving as well. The difference between that is tapestry is your simple up and down warp, weft, plaid and inkle weaving, you weave belts, it’s a Scandinavian art form. Sorry, what was the question again?

Nat Urban

We were talking about craft and gender, yeah.

Persi

So I guess I fell into a stereotypically, traditionally, in some ways feminine, associated art because that was what was accessible to me and I just stuck with it. That’s not to say that I’m not necessarily pursuing interests in the artistic field that are more stereotypically masculine. I am hoping to learn some forms of carpentry and CAD design and engineering adjacent things as well. And, of course, I partake in martial arts, which are very traditionally masculine for the most part. There are definitely barriers to it, but I don’t think they should hold me back.

Nat Urban

Let’s see, when you signed up or when you reached out to do this interview, was there anything you wanted to talk about? Where you were like, I want to do this because this is the story I have to tell.

Persi

I suppose not really, it just seemed like an interesting project, but now that I’m thinking about it, my number one story, I suppose that relates most of the topic of queerness and girlhood, is the first girl that I ever had a crush on in middle school. I am bisexual, forgot to say that at the beginning, but I could count on one hand the number of women or girls that I’ve had romantic interest in in my lifetime. And back then she went by Jennifer. I went to middle school with her. I had originally gone to elementary school with her. I switched schools around a lot. I was in the same school system from kindergarten to 4th grade and again in 7th and 8th grade and we were classmates in 3rd grade and then I saw her again in 7th grade and 8th grade. I just started  following her around. She never liked me back, not in that way, but she was like my first crush in a way.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I mean, do you remember anything about how that crush manifested? What did you feel about it at the moment? Like, was that something that felt OK? Did you know it was a crush? Did it just feel like a really big friendship?

Persi

No, I definitely knew I was into her and I came out as bisexual in 7th grade very dramatically in bio class because I’m a dramatic little shit. This was like 2012 so being gay was something that was more talked about, especially on the corners of the Internet that I hung around. So, I wasn’t necessarily a stranger to any of it even if I never encountered it in my day-to-day real life.

Nat Urban

Yeah, you said you came out very dramatically in bio class, what’s the story of that?

Persi

Yeah, I stood up in the middle of bio class and I said, “I can’t take it anymore, I’m bi!” and then I sat back down, which is certainly a coming out story.

Nat Urban

Certainly a coming out story! How did that go for you? It’s middle school.

Persi

Yeah, I don’t know. I didn’t get bullied for being gay. I got bullied for being autistic. 

Nat Urban

Yeah, that’ll get you.

Persi

Usually I make that joke about being Asian. This was bio, so my bio teacher went and talked to my parents which, looking back, was maybe not the best decision, Miss Nida, but she had my best interest at heart. Yeah, my parents are moderately homophobic. We just never talk about it.

Nat Urban

What was it like trying to find a queer community at that age? Or did you find one at all?  That includes the Internet and stuff, that’s real.

Persi

I don’t know about community per se, I fell in with a group of, when was this? Well, yeah, I didn’t really have much of a community. I kind of hung out on the fringes of pages and blogs and things, people putting out information online, but I never really was in groups or discord servers, you know? I was never really in any of those for a really long time and I only started joining groups in later high school after high school, but I hung out on the fringes of, I guess you could call them communities. It’s just on the fringes of creators, more than communities, if that makes sense. Just hanging around and absorbing creators’ works and not really engaging with anyone starting in middle school.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I get it. I was a lurker too. Yeah, awesome. So thinking about being a Demi- girl and coming to that, I wonder how much of that journey are you willing to share?

Persi

Sorry, could you repeat?

Nat Urban

So thinking about coming out as non binary and heading towards being a Demi girl, what was that journey like?

Persi

I don’t know it just all never really sat right with me the way that people referred to me in a feminine way as kind of like a -I don’t know if diminutive is the right word, but like calling me a girl, calling me miss, calling me a lady, kind of just felt like an insult in a way. I don’t know, I don’t really know how else to phrase this, like they were thinking of me as less than because I was female and that always really rubbed me the wrong way and so I started insisting on people calling me with gender neutral terms, using they/them pronouns, and I know there’s nothing inherently negative about being female, about being feminine, but that’s how it felt to me, especially in these contexts, from these people. So, one day I was just like, OK, I reject these labels. You can respect my non binary pronouns or you can get the fuck out.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I’m curious about the choice of the label Demi-Girl. Where does that come from, the choice to remain affiliated almost, would be my choice of words there, where does that come from?

Persi

I still present very femininely and engage in a lot of feminine things like dressing nice, dressing very high fem and I do feel tied to certain aspects of femininity, not necessarily in a in a girlish way per say, but the aspects of femininity that I feel more closely tied to are the Black Widow, Jessica Rabbit type archetype of very high fem can and will kill you. So, I do still feel tied to those aspects, but not all of them, I suppose.

Nat Urban

I’m just curious if you can give any examples of things that come with girlhood that you don’t feel connected to, finding that spot of disconnect.

Persi

I mean, going back again to the differences between typical white American childhood and my childhood. I didn’t get to do those girly things, right. I didn’t have a mom that showed me girly things like dressing a certain way or  dressing fashionably, I suppose. My parents do not have good taste. Doing my hair like I had to beg for my hair to be put in braids and my mom could barely do it. And makeup, that’s not something that my parents showed me at all. I had to discover that on my own. Even the traditionally feminine fiber arts that I did, I discovered all of that on my own too. My mom never taught me how to sew,  or she did once, maybe, but I really had to teach myself how to do that. To cook, I was taught to cook, kind of sort of, by my mom. I had to kind of mostly teach that myself as well through YouTube and stuff.

Nat Urban

Yeah, yeah, totally. I want to go back to your first crush. I’m a big fan of first crushes. As a fellow 2000s era baby, I’m 22.

Persi

Yeah. How old are you? OK, I’m 23. We’re right around. The same age.

Nat Urban

Right around the same age. So, I have a very similar context of girlhood in terms of the time and so I’m really interested in just whatever you want to share about that.

Persi

Her name was Jennifer. She started going by Jay, I think she still does. I haven’t talked to her in many years and I doubt she would be interested in talking to me. It was middle school, we were both incredibly awkward. She seemed more confident in things than I was. She was definitely a ringleader in the group, she would throw parties in her massive mansion. She had real bad Daddy issues because he was literally never around. He was like a businessman, so it wasn’t like he was gone for no reason, but he was definitely neglectful because of capitalism. Her mom was, I think, addicted to Internet mahjong. She had an older brother who was, I think, in college. I just started hanging out with her a lot and her group of friends and I just kind of followed her around annoyingly, for two years.

Nat Urban

I mean, yeah, you say you followed her around, when you hung out with her friends or hung out as a group, what were you all up to?

Persi

we would play card games at lunch. We would- they would play basketball. I almost never did because I had always been bad at PE and cause I have asthma and I was kind of self-conscious about my being bad at sports. I guess that’s really mostly what we would do. We’d  go see movies as a group sometimes and we would go to parties at Jennifer’s house.

Nat Urban

Yeah, those moments are where my interest lies, where there’s no adults around and it’s just girls. You know how they’re always like, oh, Like when girls play with their doll, here’s how they’re gonna play it, and then when you play dolls,  You’re like “you’re getting beheaded! Welcome to crazy land.”

Persi

I never played with dolls. I only wanted them because everyone else wanted them, and then I would just leave them in the box and leave them on the shelf because they were too nice. I was always like a creative type of kid. I always like to make things. I always like to draw and to sculpt and to create not so much to play pretend.

Nat Urban

What kind of stuff were you creating?

Persi

I don’t know, I’m autistic so when I was little and when I was bigger as well, I would just repeatedly write the alphabet. I would write like Alphabet samplers and all of my notebooks over and over and over again. I also won a penmanship award in preschool and it went to my head, and I’ve been obsessed with having perfect handwriting for the last 20 years.

Nat Urban

I love thinking back on my girlhood cause everyone I was friends with is now queer and autistic. I don’t know if you had that experience.

Persi

No, because I switched around places so much that I don’t have friends going that far back. Anyone that I know from that long ago, for the most part, it’s been with massive interruptions in our relationship and we are not that close like there was one girl, Mariel. We met in second grade, we were in the same friend group and then I left after 4th grade and came back in middle school and we weren’t that close either. Then we ended up going to the same County High school and we weren’t that close either. We just kind of had our lives at parallel for a really long time.

Nat Urban

So it sounds like school was not necessarily a great place to find friends just because you were moving around so much. I’m wondering if there were any other besides school, any locations that were really important to your girlhood?

Persi

Well, I moved around schools not because we were moving house. I moved around schools because I had social issues. I was living under the same roof the whole time. I was a Girl Scout for 13 years, from kindergarten to 12th grade, and I shifted from troop to troop. So one of the scouts, I don’t know how familiar you are with this.

Nat Urban

I’m a lifetime Girl Scout.

Persi

So you know what a rainbow troop is? Rainbow Troop is a troop with different levels of girls and one of the troops, the troop that I ended up in at the end for several years, was a rainbow troop. I joined right on the tail end of a big group of girls who were one or two years older than me, who had all been at the same level and all aged out at the same time. I joined right as they were leaving and so everyone else was significantly younger than me and so I didn’t really have any peers there, but I suppose it was a way to socialize with other girls in a way.

Nat Urban

Did you ever go to camps or anything?

Persi

Yeah, I think we went camping with them once, maybe twice, or maybe that was with another troop. I don’t remember, it all kind of blurs together. I did have a friend, and I should probably reach out to her sometime, Celeste in Scouts and our parents were both from Hong Kong, from Guangdong, San and so, we ended up friends. Did we do our silver award together? No, that was with Amanda, but we ended up being friends through that.

Nat Urban

Totally. I’m thinking about isolation. As a neurodivergent person navigating that, especially in youth and how that comes into what is considered group experiences of girlhood, like those close female friendships that people tend to associate with girlhood. What was that like for you? Did you have those, did you not? If not, what did that feel like for you?

Persi

I had them on and off. I had a curse where everyone I loved would leave. Not even like in a we would have a big dramatic friendship breakup kind of way, in a like their parents would just pack up and move out of state and leave. So I was born in Monterey Park and we moved once across Monterey Park, when I was really little and then the second time was when I was three or four. My mom was pregnant with my sister and we moved to a house in St. Gabriel which was in the bounds of the San Marino School District, which is how I ended up there and my parents still live there to this day. We moved in there, I was like 3 or 4. There was a girl who lived right next door and we became really, really good friends and her parents decided to move to Texas. So, goodbye to that forever. I’ve thought about trying to reach out to her over the years. I should probably try and do that. And then in middle school or in elementary school, I had trouble making friends. I was bullied. This girl named Emily, I don’t remember her last name, but she spelled it e-m-i-l-i-e., I think, maybe it was l-y. I don’t remember, but she was very nice to me and we were friends and then she moved away. Same thing with Grace. Grace, I am still in touch with on social media and the like. She was super nice to me. We were really close. I think her family moved to Anaheim or maybe it was Diamond bar. I don’t remember, but she moved away too and then I left the district. And so it’s kind of hard to hold on to those bonds when the only people who will be nice to you keep leaving.

Nat Urban

Yeah, yeah, I’m wondering when you had access to them, what were you up to? What did you guys do for fun? If you gossiped, what did you gossip about?

Persi

I don’t remember gossiping, honestly.

Nat Urban

I guess maybe a better question.

Persi

It probably definitely happened, but my memories are completely blank on that one yeah, exactly.

Nat Urban

Well, gossip isn’t important anymore.

Persi

I remember going to church with Grace. My family’s not religious. They’re just kind of empathetic about it. Nowadays, I am very put my foot down, do not talk to me about religion, agnostic. Grace’s family is Christian, Chinese Christian, so probably Evangelical Baptist of some kind, which nowadays I have many issues with, but as a child I didn’t know any better. I would go to church with her because her family was very Christian. Her siblings’ names are Krista and Samuel. So, Yep, Krista, Samuel, and Grace. I would go to church with her. We would go hang out at her house. Probably watch movies at some point. I remember a memory that sticks out to me, it wasn’t even like a pivotal moment or anything like that. We were looking at one of those  oil and water resistance toys with the drops, and she was telling me how each little drop was like an egg for a creature and I was so frustrated because I couldn’t see it, and I couldn’t tell if she was imagining or what, because I’m autistic. I don’t remember very much about the girl who lived next door, I don’t even remember her name, or Emilly, because it was so early. The only thing I remember about Emily is that we were in the previa, my parents drove a champagne gold Toyota Previa, and we were there and we were in the parking lot of lilies garden preschool, which is a place that I still drive by. I don’t know why we were there or what we were on the way to or from but that’s all. I remember that we were there and we might have taken a picture in the car.

Nat Urban

I love those little memories. I love it. It doesn’t have to be pivotal. I love it.

Persi

Yeah, I also have serious memory issues which does not help.

Nat Urban

So right now we’re reflecting on girlhood. What does it feel like to return to those moments? 

Persi

I feel like I should be reaching out to these people, like it’s been a long time since I’ve thought about them and as a form of healing, I suppose, because my childhood was very traumatic, I think I want to not necessarily relive those moments of girlhood, but reexperience spending time with these people in a way.

Nat Urban

 Yeah, what does re-experiencing girlhood mean to you? Like if you could build yourself a girlhood experience for yourself to go through right now.

Persi

Like a positive girlhood experience? 

Nat Urban

Like if you were making a theme park for yourself to go experience girlhood again. What would that look like?

Persi

My childhood was so heavily influenced by trying to avoid abuse and everything I did for enjoyment or otherwise was to try to avoid the source of the abuse, and so I would spend a lot of time in the library. I suppose I would go back there and reacquaint myself with the books, I haven’t checked out a book from the library in a very long time. Tied to my interest now, pick up a cross stitch kit and go back to doing that as opposed to free hand embroidery, which is more what I’m doing now. I don’t know, just pick up a simple little craft kit and try to make something that I think child Persi would have liked. Go to a Chinese New Year festival. Go to the carnival that my elementary school still holds for fundraising. Go back to Hong Kong again because I spent a chunk of my childhood going back and forth every summer. It’s very nostalgic, tied to my childhood.

Nat Urban

Yeah, that’s awesome. We’ve got about 5 minutes left. Is there anything that you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, if I do not say this, if I do not tell this story, I’m going to be so mad at myself later.”

Persi

About girlhood or queerness? Well, word of advice to any bisexual 7th graders who might be listening to this: don’t stand up in the middle of biology class and tell everyone you’re bisexual. It might not necessarily go badly with a capital B, but it’s probably just not a good idea. I think that’s about it.

Nat Urban

Awesome.

Content Warnings: use of the f-slur

My name is Vic. My pronouns are he, they and I identify as a guy, but not a man, mostly just a faggot.

Nat Urban

Beautiful, love this and then what do you do outside of being a guy but just a faggot?

Vic

So, for money, most of the time it could be literally anything, because I don’t tend to stay at a job for more than nine months because I get bored and I want to do something new. But long term, life passion wise is theater work. I write plays, I act, I direct and I also want to get into fictionalized podcasts, and I have a bunch of ideas that I just need to actually get writing for those.

Nat Urban

So obviously this interview series is about girlhood and queerness, and I know experiencing girlhood is different for everyone and what that looks like is different, especially as we grow and our identities change. So, I’m really curious, for you, when you experience girlhood, whatever that means for you, what was your relationship like to masculinity and femininity? What did those things mean to you?

Vic

Like as a kid? So, I don’t think I took masculinity very seriously as a child, and I kind of still don’t.  When I was growing up, I never really had any problems with girlhood. I never didn’t want to be a girl, but I wanted to be a girl in a way that the boys would also hang out with cause I feel like if I had been raised as a boy, I would have had a much worse time. I was always in dresses, I was always in heels, like I wanted to be high femme all the time. My main shoe of choice as a child was knee high black boots with little heels like always, always from the time I was 6 until I think I was probably 14, that was my main shoe. Even after that actually, because I had a pair in college. But I really loved feminine things and I love kitschy campy clothes and I really liked a lot of girly stuff. But, at the same time, I would only play on the boys kickball team and in elementary school, most of my friends, well up until the 4th grade, most of my friends were boys and I sat with them at the lunch table and I was just like, yeah, I’m hanging out with them. I don’t want to hang out with the girls, but I am also in a layered peasant skirt and a little glittery T-shirt right now. 

Nat Urban

Incredible, I’m obsessed with that.

Vic

But yeah, I didn’t ever really see- I guess when you’re kids, masculinity and femininity are so much closer to each other than people want them to be really. I don’t know when I saw boys like being really ‘boy’ I was like, you guys look kind of silly and this is kind of stupid. It  just didn’t seem.. I don’t know, it always seemed not real, if that makes sense? Iit never seemed like something that was tangible or important really.

Nat Urban

Yeah, yeah, I love that. That is a really, really interesting answer. And as a follow up to that because I know you’re a little theater, baby. So, working in theater, I don’t know when you started doing theater stuff, but when you entered the theater space. I think when you enter acting, you interact with gender in a very unique, different way, and especially throughout transitioning, that is going to change drastically and give you access to different thoughts about gender and how it functions, especially as a performance. So, what does that look like for you?

Vic

So I started doing theater stuff really early. I was only probably 4 when I started doing theater. I remember the first show I did was Peter Pan, and I was Wendy and I was very excited about it, because I loved her. As I got older and I started doing more serious theater work, I had a hard time. There were a lot of characters that I felt like should not be not accessible to me because I feel like a lot of the time in plays, especially plays that come either before the 1920s and after the 1990s, the gender of the characters that you’re playing don’t come into play that much. When you’re doing Golden Age theater, it’s way more obvious and way more important to the story that this character is a man and this character’s woman and I really don’t like Golden Age theater. But the plays before that, and a lot of the plays after, the characters are just characters and I was never really into the idea of what teachers were trying to cast me as in school because I looked very different than the way that I wanted to be on stage. So, the characters that I wanted to play were always breeches roles in Shakespeare, like the girls that dress up as boys who would have been played by boys dressed up like girls.. Just characters that were way more story driven than gender driven, and that wasn’t how anybody would’ve wanted to cast me for classical roles. They all wanted me to be the ingenue and I was like, that is not who I am. Actually, I wanna be the quippy, drunk guy, you know. I had no interest in playing those kinds of roles, but as a kid that didn’t bother me. Like in girlhood, that didn’t really bother me at all cause the way that I always explain it is, like I said, I had no problem being a girl. I just didn’t want to be a woman. The shift to me was completely incomprehensible. So, as I got older and as I tried navigating the theater world, I was like, I don’t want to play women actually, at all. Not in any way, shape or form, but then there were some really high femme characters that were just drama more than woman. My favorite is Elvira from life spirit cause she is just so over the top. The characters that were written by gay men as stand-ins for them, those women I can play. But regular housewife women who love their kids and you know, have trouble with their husband because he isn’t home enough. I’m like, I have no interest in this.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I love that. Speaking of Shakespeare and pants roles, I know you got your masters in, Mr. Shakespeare, didn’t you? 

Vic

There was a focus on him, yeah.

Nat Urban

What did that look like for you? Were you out yet when you were in your masters?

Vic

So I was out and I did get some leeway as far as the roles that I was cast in in my masters. I only really did one Shakespeare show in school. We did part of -ohh my goodness which show was it? as you like it? Yeah, we did As You Like It, and I played Celia for that and they gave me a lot of wiggle room as far as what I could do because she isn’t the breeches role in that show. She’s the cousin of the breeches role, who’s like, I think you’re going a little over the top, but they didn’t want to heighten the gender differences between those characters, so to speak. They were like, OK, we’re more interested in this being a family dynamic than it being like, Oh my God, this one’s cross dressing. You have to tell her to be a girl. Like that wasn’t it. It was way more, hey, can you not try to get married in a week than trying to highlight the gender nonconformity there. Throughout the rest of my time at RCS, I did play men and women in shows, and there was one character that was kind of ambiguous, but not canonically, that was good, and it definitely was a fun space to explore, and I think it did help me really realize that there’s a lot of these women roles that I don’t want and there’s a lot more male roles that I want that, the way I look right now, I’m not going to get.

Nat Urban

Yeah, yeah, I get that. That’s super interesting, because also that brings me to your show that I got to see in Indy, which I love. Can you give a little synopsis for the folks who obviously have not seen it or read it?

Vic

So the show that I wrote and put up in Indie Fringe that Nat got to come see was called Transitory State. Basically, one day I was looking through TV tropes and I was reading the bury your gays one and I was like, I hate that actually. And I am super into ghosts and like supernatural stories. So, I was like, you know what? I want to write a show where the dead gay comes back, actually. So, the story is about 3 friends, one of them, Riley, has passed away in a car accident, and his two surviving friends have drifted apart, they’ve had their relationship strain. On the one year anniversary of his death, they do a little seance and then he manages to manifest to one of them, to Hudson, and then it’s a story of Hudson basically trying to convince Bea that their friend is back and they can talk to him again and it’s a friendship story, really more than anything else, but all of my characters are trans. I feel like it was a story that gave a little glimpse into what trans lives are outside of tragedy because even though one of them has died, they weren’t murdered and they didn’t take their own life. It was just about them interacting with each other and  they had all come to be themselves with each other. So it was about trying to navigate life with other trans people and how you get to be your most authentic in a community.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I love that show, it’s so good, and something that came up for me when I was thinking about interviewing you, I was like, I want to talk to Vic, what kind of things can I ask him about? Something that I remembered about it was that when Riley died, his parents were still not onboard, and part of him coming back was not reconnecting with them and kind of a death of who he used to be to people who did not accept him as he was, and that was so interesting to me. I wonder if you can talk about, is that something you relate to or just stories you saw from other people? where does that come into your story?

Vic

So the not connecting part, like not reconnecting with his family, not making any attempt to get back into contact with them comes from- like my family’s pretty dysfunctional. I am no longer in contact with my mother, and I don’t ever see a reason to try to get back in contact with her, totally unrelated to trans stuff.

Nat Urban

Yeah. No, you’re good.

Vic

But, I have always been a very strong proponent of the importance of found family and the family that you’re born into not being nearly as important as people want it to be or make it out to be because those are people that you know by chance, you know? So, the people that you choose to surround yourself with, I think are equally, if not more important than that. That was what it was for Riley. Riley had no connection with his birth family, so he didn’t go back to them. The death of who he was, that’s not super related to me because I don’t ever feel- like I never felt wrong, so that wasn’t really what I was going for, what I was more aiming for with that was, socially, an issue that a lot of trans people have with their parents is that their parents mourn somebody who really never existed, and they focus a lot on the body of that person. So, the main plot point that we had in the show was that Bea, Hudson and Riley were afraid that Riley wouldn’t be able to show up anymore because his parents wanted to move the body to be closer to them because they had left the state they moved out and they were like actually, now we want this body to come with us.

Nat Urban

Right.

Vic

So they were afraid that he wouldn’t be able to show up anymore and that’s something that is a reality for a lot of trans people, is that their family and those close to them can’t get past, Oh my God, what are you doing to your body? Oh, my God, my little girl, my little boy, how could you do this? Like, you are completely focusing on the wrong things here, because the spirit of that person is 1, not any different and still going to be there. So, you’re mourning over nothing. So, that was why I had included that in the show.

Nat Urban

I love that. That is so lovely and I want to go back to something you said, which is that you never felt wrong or you don’t feel like that person who you were died, which was just so interesting because I know, when I was doing research for this, there were a couple, like especially trans masc people, who were like, I hate girlhood. I hate that girl. I don’t know who she is and I know so many people feel completely differently, like I do know that little girl and she was what she was and now she’s me. Yeah, do you wanna speak to that a little bit.

Vic

Yeah so, there were a lot of things that delayed my medical transition, delayed me trying to breach the world of trans masculinity, and I think that the hating yourself narrative was such a huge part of it, cause I was like, I don’t hate how I look. I don’t hate my body. I don’t hate the way that I was raised. I just don’t want the next step of it. This isn’t the timeline that I want. I genuinely, I don’t think that I would be happy existing any other way. I think if I had been born and raised as a boy, like a little cis boy, I would have had a fucking terrible time because I feel like I would have been so much more restricted in how I could express myself, what I would have been allowed to do because as a kid, my parents were fine with me doing contact sports. They were fine with me being in martial arts, they wanted me to be able to protect myself. But at the same time, I could also be figure skating and I could paint my nails and I could wear dresses and my little crop tops that I probably shouldn’t have been wearing at like 5 years old, but I wanted them because I wanted to be high femme and I wanted to be kitsch I wanted to be camp, I love it. That wouldn’t have been granted to me if I was a little boy. Yeah, This build that I have now, this is what I want. I cannot imagine having any other build. Genuinely, I get really emotional sometimes thinking about the girl that I grew up being cause she had some stuff to figure out, but she was trying real hard and in the last couple of years I have come to really cherish my inner child and try to nurture her and then, also do right by the much more ambiguous confused teen. There’s a singer, his name is Ezra Michael and he’s got a song out that’s called Girl Baby and every single time I listen to that song, I cry because, part of the chorus is girl baby, girl baby means so much to me, and I was just like, Oh my God, and he has a bunch of other trans masculine people in the music video and everything I’m like, yeah, that girl baby does mean so much to me because she got me through some shit and she gave me a world that I like and I would not have had otherwise. I feel like that girlhood is so much a part of queer men’s spaces and gay men spaces because I feel like a lot of them describe feeling like they were denied what is typically described as girlhood; getting to play with dolls, getting to play with makeup, getting to have more freedom and how they dress and wear pretty things and watch the the pop Divas and stuff like that. That’s girlhood, all the stuff that they’re describing is girlhood, and I’m glad that I got to experience that.

Nat Urban

So, something I’ve been thinking about a lot is, there’s a paper I read and the lead question to the paper it was: do queer girls get to be girls? Do they get to be little girls? Do they get to interact with the same milestones as “regular girls”, straight girls? And the article never really answers the question, which is why I’m here. It’s because I’m chasing that thread of like, yeah, what does that mean to be a girl and be queer, because something I remember a lot from girlhood that forced me out and was the thing that made me uncomfortable was its connection to being attracted to men and the centrality that men had to your identity as a girl, but also that didn’t become super serious, it was always kind of a thing, but it was  more joking when you were little where it’d be like, oh, you’re playing wedding, and you’re like, yeah, I’m five, I don’t know what that means. Until you’re older and then they’re like, OK, are you gonna start dating boys? And you’re like, why would I do that? But for you, you’re still attracted to men, which is crazy, good for you. (unclear) Babe, don’t tell your man that.

Vic

We’re the same. We’re both nonbinary little faggots.

Nat Urban

I know you’re both little guys. So, can you talk about- because you said you connected with girl and you didn’t connect with woman, which is something I’ve heard quite a bit of from AFAB gender queer people is that disconnect entered when they were faced with womanhood, and what that means for you and what the difference is to you between girl and woman. What is that line because it’s a really weird line and everyone describes it differently.

Vic

So as far as attraction goes, I did struggle with my attraction to boys in a weird way. So, OK, I started being interested in boys very young, like age 5, I was like, that is my boyfriend, I kiss him every day at kindergarten and then as I got a little bit older, I was 8-9, I would have like two or three different boys and I was like, none of you are my boyfriend, but if you want to kiss, that’s fine. Then, as I got a little bit older, 10/11/12, you know the tweens, that stopped being reciprocal and the guys that I was interested in were not interested in me and I was like, hmm, well, the way that I put it was they were interested in, like, girl-girls. And I like, wasn’t a girl-girl and I started to stop feeling like the way I was interested in boys was the same as girls around me. It just didn’t line up. It also was weird because I am bi and I didn’t really recognize that what I was feeling as attraction to girls was attraction to girls because it was- I don’t know you’re just expected to be closer to your girl friends than you are to your boy friends. Like there were definitely girlfriends and I was like, ohh every time I greet them I want to give them a kiss on the cheek, and, ohh, what if we play wrestled though, teehee. like. So, there were at least three different friendships that I had with girls, and I was like, oh, no, that was a crush, you had a crush on that girl and you didn’t realize you had a crush on her, but you did. It literally wasn’t something that even had crossed my mind until I was like, 17 maybe 18, and honestly, regretfully, it was because of Glee that I started realizing that. So, for a while I was caught in a weird space of being like, I don’t know, I kind of only want to be hanging out with bi guys, but I also kind of would also like to hook up with girls and, I don’t know, I don’t think that I want to be a man, but I also don’t want to be a woman and I don’t know if the people that I’m interested would like that either way. Cause like girls that like girls, I don’t know if they want somebody who feels like they’re more a drag queen than anything else. It was a weird space for a while. But, I feel like that really stopped mattering once I found a trans community when I moved to Glasgow. Every person that I made friends with outside of school was trans and they’re all queer and that kind of. It kind of just it, you know, shrug, As far as who and who you are, and what you’re attracted to started being more prevalent. Just everybody just being like, I don’t know, man, I’m hot and I like hot people. Like that works. So that was my TLDR (too long, didn’t read) attraction journey.

Nat Urban

I love it.

Vic

And then as far as what the line was for woman? I definitely feel like that started right before graduating high school. Basically, when people were like, OK, you’re going out into the world, now you’re going to college, you’re going to go start living on your own. That was when I started dating, I didn’t date at all in high school or middle school, it started when I went to college. I went to school in Manhattan for my first, technically 2 years, but it was like 14 months. Once I started going on dating apps and going on dates and stuff, I found myself trying to be what I thought that the guys I was talking to would want and I was in a theater school and I was doing really gendered roles. The school that I went to was pretty rigid as far as what they wanted, not just in terms of casting, but everything. They were very, very hard on everybody neutralizing their accents, regardless of where you were from, you had to have a neutral accent, because that’s what books the most. They were very strict on attendance. Everything was very rigid. So, that was where I think I started to get the most uncomfortable with the idea of existing in the world of a woman. So I was like, I don’t like any of this and I actually don’t like how these men are talking to me, and they’re not actually the kinds of men that I want to be talking to anyway because I want to be talking to the little bear cubs, actually, that’s what I want, but they’re not interested. So, what do I do here? Just realizing how uncomfortable I was in those spaces, the really rigid spaces, and then leaving it. I was like, oh, OK, no, I have options actually. I went to LA and it was a little bit looser over there as far as everything goes and it actually annoyed me a little bit, I was like, can we have a little bit of focus in this class please. Once I got out there and started, that was where I started dipping into more androgynous clothing and there was more queer people in the school there, like the school ratio from one campus to the other was very, very different. New York was very straight. LA, most of the classmates were queer and I was like, ohh yeah that’s fantastic actually. Then I started having more queer friends and I was figuring out where I want to be, and then like I said before, being in and seeing an active trans community really helped me figure out what I wanted. I think just online as well, the idea of what you can and cannot do as far as being trans shifted a lot and more and more trans masc people, were like, no, I am not a man. Definitely not a woman, but I’m not a man. But I am gay and I am going to wear glittery eye shadow and I am gonna wear a little crop and yes, you’re gonna see my top surgery scars, and yes, you’re gonna see the bottoms of my butt cheeks. I’m a Bratz doll but a boy, it’s great! That’s what I want actually. So, the line for woman really was when I started entering the adult world, living on my own, trying to start looking for work, things like that. Then I was like, I don’t like this sphere.

Nat Urban

I think about this a lot, I’ve been reading a lot about it a lot,  romantic friendships and girlhood. So, for me, and then obviously you take this wherever you want, but for me, the way I wanted to interact with girls when I got to an age where romantic friendships were no longer acceptable or when other people started to say that’s a little queer and I went, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, No! When those romantic friendships stopped being OK, or normal or natural, it really freaked me out and it’s when I started to feel abnormal. The way girls are allowed to navigate friendship until they hit a certain age was so queer, is so inherently queer, and I feel like there’s a lot of things about girlhood and the way unsupervised weird girls navigate the world is so queer and so unique, and I wonder if you have any like stories or thoughts or things around that that you would like to share?

Vic

So, I had a friend in middle school who moved away after middle school, so like 6th 7th, 8th grade, we went to school together. For high school she moved to Tennessee. Did not realize that I was in love with this girl. I wanted to go over to her house every moment that I could, I wanted her to come over to my house, I wanted to have sleepovers, and we were very touchy, always hugging, we did cheek kisses and all that, I was on the phone with her every single day for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours. And then when she moved, we would still try to call as often as possible and keep in touch really, really strongly. At a certain point, it kind of fizzled out, partially, I think, because she got very into Christianity.

Nat Urban

That’ll get you.

Vic

I was obsessed with this girl, like I was fully in love with her, and I didn’t realize it and I don’t think I actually realized that until I was like 23. And like we were middle school friends and I went, oh, that’s what that was. That was the only one that really sticks out as one that ended because, honestly, most of my friends ended up queer anyway, and if they’re not queer, they’re autistic and we already know that the way that not neurodiverse people interact with each other is very different. So, I feel like a lot of those romantic friendships just ended up being really strong long term friendships. Maybe nothing ever romantically developed, but like these people are still my family, you know? So, I got to keep those strong feelings about them because we ended up, unintentionally, on really similar paths. I’ve been very fortunate as far as not encountering bullying for gender or sexuality and I haven’t really been in a lot of hostile spaces so I don’t really have a lot of the same baggage that a lot of queer people have because I was always involved in theater, so there were always gay people around. Even if it wasn’t necessarily in my school. I went to musical theater summer camp for seven years in a row. I do not like musicals, but I kept going and I was like, oh, it’s cause there’s gay people there. Like I said, the friends that I had, we ended up all being some flavor of queer so I just never really had negative experiences, which I’m very fortunate, I know that. So, I never really had as strong a feeling of feeling othered as a lot of other queer people do because the people that I was around were all kind of doing the same thing. I distinctly remember one day in gym class, it was right after Lady Gaga’s 2011 VMA performance where she came out as Joe Calderon, and we all were talking about it. It  was me and two of my friends, we were talking about it, and we went, so, like, that was kind of hot, right? And we were like, oh, my God. Yes, thank you. So, we were all having the same experiences and we didn’t really talk to people outside of our group, so we didn’t really have issues with it. I forgot what the main point was here, but yeah, I know that I haven’t had those feelings of being othered as strongly as other people have. In a way, I feel like I got to explore a little bit more even though I was late coming to the party and realizing things. There was a definitely a lot of stuff that I feel like, if I had known earlier and if I had been more pressured into not being these things that I wouldn’t have been able to do. I would just say that, for anybody who maybe is feeling completely disconnected from their girlhood, revisit it. Look at the stuff that you were granted in those spaces because a lot of it, especially emotional intelligence and being able to cry, being allowed to cry like those are valuable, those are really valuable. Even if that girl didn’t grow up into a woman, she was still there. I don’t think that girlhood, in any form, is something that anybody should really be ashamed of, even if you feel like it prevented you from being who you were. I don’t think that that was girlhood’s fault necessarily. That’s a lot of external stuff, but getting to be a little girl and getting to experience a lot of the stuff like, definitely there is definitely trauma that comes with girlhood, but there’s trauma that comes with boyhood too, because we’re living in a fucked up traumatic society. So the high points of girlhood I think are worth revisiting and I think they’re worth thinking about and maybe celebrating even a little bit because a lot of what we’re taught is that so much of girlhood is shameful and something to be embarrassed about, I’m like. No, it is what it is, everything just kinda, is. So, I think to get to look for positives in it and to internalize the things that were good about it is really important.

Nat Urban

I do have one follow-up question and it’ll be my last question because I can’t believe I didn’t think to ask this because you did girlhood and you’re doing boyhood, at least a little bit.

Vic

I would say yes, definitely boyhood, because I don’t think people see me as a man.

Nat Urban

I yeah, I know I have a lot of men who get really defensive when I’m like, but you’re not really like a man, you’re just a guy, but I think that’s something you embrace, you’re like, yeah, I’m not. I’m just kind of a little guy. 

Vic

I’m 5’3”, my mustache will probably never look any darker than it is right now and if I wear a backpack. I could very easily pass for 17.

Nat Urban

So like what have you noticed about boyhood? Is it different or similar to girlhood? And how do you navigate boyhood, having also experienced girlhood?

Vic

So, that’s something that’s come up fairly recently actually. So, the last job I had was in a Barnes and Noble Cafe and a lot of the employees there were girls or women. Some of them were girls, like 19-20 and some were young women. And every now and then when they would be having a chat amongst themselves and I would join in with it, it didn’t feel like I was understood the same way that I used to be and I was like no, but babes, I know exactly what you’re talking about. No, no, no. In this instance, I am still one of the girls, like we’re having a little girl talk right now. Just because I have this shitty little chin strap doesn’t mean that I do not understand having an IUD, I do, it went through my uterus. So, that is something that I don’t actually like. Now, talking to women who either don’t know that I’m trans or don’t really have trans masc people in their life, when I talk to them and I’m relating to experiences, there’s a disconnect and I’m like, I don’t like that actually. Cause  in my head I definitely see myself way less masculine than I think people are reading me. Well, than women are reading me. At least I don’t think men read me as masculine. That’s just been a weird thing to work with recently because it’s new, it’s still very new and I don’t really know what to do with it.

Nat Urban

Yeah. I mean, you’re kind of in the midst of your boyhood right now.

Vic

Yeah, like any 80s comedy there’s the best friend guy character who wears the really loud Hawaiian shirts and has one liners and no actual plot relevance, that’s where I feel like I’m at.

Nat Urban

Thank you so much for talking to me, my sweet Vic.

My name is Morgan. I live in Milwaukee, WI. I’ve lived in Wisconsin for most of my life, and I’ve been a Midwesterner my whole life. I use she/her pronouns. I identify as a cis, white woman. How I identify in terms of my sexual orientation is very much in flux. I thought I was straight for the first, I don’t know, 39 years of my life. Turns out, that was probably never the case, but so now I just say I’m queer because that is just the easiest and most inclusive way to think about how I identify. I am a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in the English department, I teach literature and composition, I earned my Ph.D In May of 2023. I’m sorry, 2022, not in the future, last year. I also work half time in the women’s and Gender Studies department at UWM, UW Milwaukee as well, I’m the undergraduate advisor and program coordinator.

Nat Urban

So, when I was picking people to talk to, one thing that really made me want to speak to you was coming out as an adult and looking back on your experiences as a child, especially not coming out- the pandemic was a crazy time for self discovery for everyone. So, coming out,  figuring yourself out in the pandemic, that sounds crazy. So, can you give me an overview of what brought you to be thinking about this, especially in conjunction with your experiences of girlhood?

Morgan

Yes, this is the $1,000,000 question in my life right now. I mean my girlfriend- I am in a relationship. Yes, she’s wonderful and she’s always like, not so much anymore, but in the first maybe like six to eight months, she was like ‘how did you not know? I don’t get it. I don’t- like everything you’re telling me. Everything about you is reading it queer.’ Anyway, it’s kind of a running joke between us. I think as an adult, it was a lot of square peg, round hole, so to speak. I always thought the problem was me. I always thought I just wasn’t doing a good job of connecting with guys. They weren’t the right guys. They weren’t the right kind of guys and then all of a sudden this- this sounds maybe really ridiculous, but I was watching the show Supergirl on The CW and there’s the character Alex Danvers, which some people are going to know, and she basically was like, maybe the problem isn’t guys, maybe the problem is me and all of a sudden it was like ding ding ding ding ding, you know, alarm bells were going off. Like, I think maybe that’s me. And so that character went through a journey and I was like, Oh my gosh. And then I was just kind of like, no, don’t worry about it. You’ve got a dissertation, you’ve got all these jobs, you’re in graduate school, get focused on other, more important, things, which is also a way of deflecting and distracting myself. And then I think during the pandemic, I just really kind of- I live alone and my little quarantine bubble had moved away for work related reasons and so I just found myself at home all the time. I was teaching online and everything and I just started to Google-  again, it sounds really like, oh my gosh, what a weirdo- am I bisexual, how do you know if you’re bisexual and a lot of it was like you didn’t have to, like, have crushes on girls necessarily. And I was like, well, I’ve never really been attracted, like, had a crush on another girl. In retrospect, I don’t think that’s entirely accurate either, but that’s what I told myself. And I was like, well, duh, I always thought I was straight without necessarily having crushes on guys so, why did I have this standard for people of other genders, so it was just like if I heard someone else saying this, I’d be like, I’d be questioning. I didn’t really interrogate myself in a way that I should have when I came to my love life, basically. My research for my dissertation was about girlhood and girls. They’re all cis protagonists in the novels I write about so young women, I should say, not girls, young girls and young women and a lot of the research really kind of made me go back to my own girlhood, made me think about what I was interested in, made me think about what I wanted to do with my life when I was little. Reading a lot of the research about girlhood studies and throwing myself into a lot of that, I was like, this is sounding really familiar and also just like, I was really gravitating to books about girls, like I lived for Nancy Drew, the babysitters club. I always related to Christie, which again, ding, ding, ding, possible alarm bells. People always sort of read her- arguably she is coded as a queer character. So, might not be too much of a surprise in retrospect that she’s the one I also related to the most and, you know, Sweet Valley High. I mean, there’s, like basically any series with girls in the center were my jam. It wasn’t that I didn’t like boys because I did have crushes on boys, but I didn’t care about them. I wasn’t interested in them and, you know, girlhood, studies, a lot of the research and my own interrogating myself and thinking about me. I’m thinking about who I am now and who I was then. And you know, just kind of all of this colliding and trying to be quasi-objective and reading scholarship which, the scholarship tells us that objectivity doesn’t exist. So, I just really was thinking about my position, who I was and who I am now. Myself as a researcher and scholar and also a girl and it really just kind of hit me there was really more going on that I was looking for. I think I was looking for characters who were like me in the books. Like that was really a lot of it and I know George has also been coded as queer in some of The Nancy Drew books, she was always the tomboy and sporty, like short hair. I wasn’t interested in boys the way Bess was, and she does date boys and I don’t think there’s ever been anything decisively to confirm her heterosexuality, one way or the other, but I just really kind of gravitated to characters who were not attached to boys, who didn’t define themselves in terms of their their romantic or sexual relationship with other people. And so I had a high school boyfriend, like a serious high school boyfriend into college. And so I kind of was like, yeah, this is what I should be doing but then looking back at why I was gravitating towards the stories that I did, like the Babysitters Club girls were really doing their own thing. They had agency and there’s a lot of critiques about these books and this is not meant to minimize those critiques or you know, I certainly don’t want people to think I’m overlooking these critiques or not aware of them, but what I was really drawn to was really the sort of sisterhood and solidarity among the girls. And I know, like Logan’s a character and the girls do get boyfriends and Stacy’s boy crazy, I mean, one of the books is even called Boy Crazy Stacy and I always was like, oh yeah, that’s me, I’m boy crazy. But in retrospect, it was like that’s what I thought I should be doing. That’s not what I wanted to be doing, I think I wanted to be a babysitter and I wanted to be surrounded by girls. And as an adult I think I really wanted to be surrounded by women where we had similar interests. We had friendships where they were really deep and personal and I think really it was just that sort of latent homosexuality. That sounds really like, kind of a weird way of putting it but.

Nat Urban

No, it doesn’t.

Morgan

You know, that’s what I’m going to go with right now, that’s what came to my head first. And so I really just felt like that’s what I wanted and the boys were just always superfluous. So, some of that research had me thinking about what I’m seeing and absorbing in popular culture and media, I think being in Graduate School here in Milwaukee really- like I was not that I wasn’t before- but Milwaukee is such an urban center compared to where I was living previously in Wisconsin, and there was just such a really wide range and cross section of people who were trans and who are non binary and really non traditional families, trans couples raising children and all of these different kinds of familial makeups and  relationships and it was just so normalized and it was also very terrifying for certain factions of the public. The breakdown of the American family and all that kind of stuff, but I really reveled in that and loved that. And so it’s just all these things hitting me like, what do I want? And as I was approaching my fortieth birthday, I was like, OK, what do I want my life to look like and really, men were just not a factor in that other than the important men in my life like, for instance, my dad and some really important guy friends, but I just and again, as I was going back to the American Girl books and it was just independent girls figuring things out on their own. I just was like, the signs were always there. That’s what I was interested in. That’s what I wanted to be like. That’s how I wanted to live my life. You know, just like, I don’t know. I kind of lost the thread of the question I think, but just to synthesize my own rambling here is; girlhood studies really forced me to take a look at like, oh, that’s kind of what was going on. It gave a name to things. It gave validity to my feelings. It gave me a framework for understanding who I was as a girl and then who I am now. The girl who grew up to the person I am today. And then what I was sort of responding to in the books about girls, by almost always women writers or ghost writers. And I know that’s not across the board, like David Levitan is a very prominent editor and writer now and I think he ghost wrote some of the babysitters club books. But you know, I was just men, get out of here, get out of here guys, like Logan get out of here. Logan, from the babysitters club, he’s a nice enough guy, but I didn’t care about him or his Kentucky accent, so.

Nat Urban

Oh my goodness that is lovely. I’m the same way, I was very bookish growing up. What did you understand about femininity and masculinity as a girl or were those even concepts that were in your purview? Like, what did that mean?

Morgan

I mean, I didn’t really think about it in terms of femininity and masculinity, but more of the performance, which, of course, I didn’t know either when I was young. But like girls do this, boys do that and if you’re a girl who does some of the things like a boy, you’re a tomboy, and if you’re a boy, and actually I didn’t even really know boys who were not behaving in a way that wouldn’t have been or they were sensitive or, you know, there was something like that. I mean, I think the first time I heard that’s so gay as an insult was elementary school and I’ll be totally honest, I probably said it a few times, but I didn’t realize what I was saying. I think most of us probably have something we said that was offensive, even if we didn’t realize it, and I don’t even remember how or when, if someone told me or I just figured it out, I was like this isn’t very nice. Yeah, I mean, I’m the first girl born in my immediate family. I’m the first grandchild on my mom’s side and I’m also the first great grandchild. So, everybody was really excited for a little baby girl, probably would have been equally excited for a little baby boy, but everything was pink, everything was flowers, everything was dolls, you know, and part of it’s like, did I actually like these things or was it just what was around to play with? Were these my options, My Little Pony and Barbie and things like that? And I do love them, but there’s also part of me that’s like would I have loved trucks and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or whatever boys were playing with in the 80s, if that’s what would have been in front of me? But I do genuinely love pink, especially hot pink, like Barbie hot pink. (Nat gestures to their pink hair) Yes, love it, love it. And so I just grew up very much influenced by my grandmothers and my aunt. Not quite so much my mom because she wore makeup and did her nails and things, but not to the extent like my one grandma did and her sister did. So, I wanted to be like them because they were very glamorous and they wore high heels and always matched their purses to their shoes, whatever was the fashionable thing in the 80s and 90s growing up. So I was like, this is what women do. This is how girls behave. This is what women do. At the same time that I was being raised in this, I also had a mother who was like no, girls can do whatever they want. She didn’t laugh at me when I said I wanted to be the first woman president, I don’t know if she took me seriously, but she wasn’t like, oh, you silly girl or you’ll grow out of it. No one ever said to me girls can’t be president. I had kids at school who were like, girls are too emotional to be president. It was like, give me a break, but never true then, and certainly certain leaders have shown that men are just as, if not far more emotional about a lot of things than women. So, I think hopefully that’s been debunked. Anyway, so I was raised in a home and in a family and have had a lot of girl friends,and actually guy friends too – boy friends, girl friends, I guess I’m saying girl, I should say boy- who yeah, took me seriously and didn’t laugh when I had big plans and dreams and goals and ideas for myself. My mom taught me about Gloria Steinem and we had a lot of- I’m trying to think of some of the titles now, of course I’m drawing a blank but- we had feminist titles, we had a lot of opportunities to talk about things at home growing up like, well, why can’t women be like truck drivers or why can’t women be in the military or why can’t women do some of those things. Even if I don’t want to do them myself, I still thought it was unjust that people thought girls couldn’t do these things. It was like this strange dichotomy where I was like pink, girls, everything like ultra feminine and make up and this is how girls behave, and at the same time my mom was like, no, you can do what you want and be what you want and you’re smart and don’t let anyone hold you back and you don’t need a man to define you and all these sorts of things. And also my dad’s mom was very independent and I really think I take a lot after her. I mean, she divorced my grandpa when my dad was like 3. So, you know, like 1960, maybe she got divorced and she kept the house and she raised her four children, mostly on her own, and she never remarried, and she was completely self-sufficient. I mean, she would work and she wanted to go to Arizona in the summer and see her cousin, and winter she would be a snowbird, as we say in Wisconsin, and if she wanted to, you know, go whitewater rafting on her 70th birthday and that’s what she did. And it was really an incredible model for me as well. So, but again it was also like she never left her house without her full face on and all of her makeup and so it’s just these really confusing, as a girl, messages about how women behave and perform. And again, it wasn’t until Judith Butler I was like, oh yeah, they were performing these certain identities. And again, that’s why we like to learn and read- or at least I like to learn and read- it gives voice to our feelings and we know we’re not alone and it identifies what’s going on with us. So yeah, it was just like I said, all very confusing. And then the older I got, especially once I hit thirty, I was like, who am I trying to impress with my makeup and my hair and some of that. Like, do what you want, do what feels good. If you don’t want to put makeup on and go to the grocery store, don’t. Why? Like no one cares or I wouldn’t see anybody I knew or even if I did, again, who cares? Really, the older I got, especially when I hit thirty, I was just like, I don’t need to perform a certain way. I don’t need to live my life a certain way and the people who are closest to me have never challenged me, they’ve always been supportive. No one’s ever been like, Morgan, why are you wearing plaid all of a sudden? Why did you cut your hair short? or like, why are you wearing baseball hats? I mean, I love baseball hats. I just don’t have to wash my hair for a while, you know, like I love my Brewers, let me wear my Brewers hat. So these, to some transgressive, sartorial choices, in terms of my gender was like- One of my closest guy friends is gay. He’s been out for many, many years. Half his life now, and he’s been in a very long term relationship with his significant other and he, I don’t know, probably 2007, you’re very lesbian chic today because I had baseball hat on, no makeup and a flannel, and it was not like a cute fitted sort of flannel. It was like something that could have come, it didn’t, but it could have come from my dad’s closet. Just like boxy and it didn’t bother me. I was just like, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Anyway, so growing up mixed messages. Is the short answer to that. And I loved fashion magazines and I loved sex in the city and I wore high heels for years because I was so inspired by that show and what that show told me I should do if I wanted to look fashionable and I think I was just again convinced that I needed to look and act a certain way, because that’s what girls did. Funny thing is my middle sister was a tomboy, she was rough and tumble. She was much more active than, still is much more active than I am. We laugh because there’s so many pictures of the two of us when we were little kids, she’s three years younger and I’m in my pink little frilly dress or purple dress or whatever one of my grandmothers would have bought for me and I’m posing and smiling so nicely and then there’s my sister who had probably been threatened with some sort of punishment if she didn’t behave for the picture and her knees are scabbed over, there’s those huge band aids on her knees because she could trip over a pattern in a rug, she was always falling all over the place and now she’s much more graceful and I’m the one who’s a klutz and falling all over. But, she just didn’t care about- and even now she doesn’t care, but no one ever was like, is she a lesbian, is she gay. I don’t know. I’m not sure if, it was the 80 and 90s, we just didn’t have that lexicon or if we didn’t have that understanding. I’m sure some people might have thought that, especially because she didn’t have her first boyfriend until well after college, at least not a serious boyfriend and I was like, are you gay? Is that why you’re not into boys? And in retrospect, maybe she was, or maybe she was questioning or I don’t know. Maybe she was asexual, maybe she just didn’t care, maybe I just didn’t know because she didn’t tell me because I would make fun of her. I was not a very nice big sister sometimes. But in terms of my own personal experience, I was just like whatever people like, let them live. You know, I didn’t think that consciously at the time, but in retrospect. I was just like, whatever.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I love that. I’m really interested to go back to what you said about your friendships with girls and how they were super deep because in my research I’ve been looking a lot at the idea of romantic friendships between girls, especially when you’re younger and how girls act when they are unsupervised, when there’s nobody watching but each other, and so you can be up to some real big nonsense. So, I was wondering if you could talk about some of those relationships and maybe what you feel like are unsurveilled moments of your girlhood.

Morgan

Oh, I mean, I will say that nothing physical ever happened with me and any, I mean anyone really until my first high school boyfriend. We didn’t experiment or anything like that and I know that that’s something that I think is a lot more common than I was aware of. I don’t know. I was just like, she’s my friend, I don’t want to kiss my friend, but also in retrospect, I wonder if there maybe wasn’t the fear of what would that look like? How would it feel? I mean and again I would have never been able to vocalize it. It wasn’t a conscious thing back then, but there maybe is a part of me that like would have liked to. I just didn’t have a. the opportunity and b. I wouldn’t have known how to go about it. And then also I don’t think it would have occurred to me and I have very emotionally intimate relationships. I’ve got one friend, we’ve been friends since we were five years old. We were friends in kindergarten, and we’re still really good friends to this day. And another since we were ten years old. I was her first friend when she moved from the Catholic school to the public school and we actually found that we lived just like a block away from each other and we’re still best friends to this day. Her kids call me Aunt Morgan. My mom was her confirmation sponsor. Our families are, or were at one time, very close. There’s an intimacy with her that I don’t have with a lot of people at all. But I think some of that is just that we’ve known each other for thirty, thirty-one years. Sometimes I’m like, oh my god, I look at my students now, I have relationships that are longer than you’ve been alive, oh my gosh. But it’s really special and I’ve had to work hard at it and sometimes I feel like it is dating in the sense that there’s been time periods where we’re not as close and it’s kind of like, do you still like me? Do you still want to be my friend? Are you still into me? Kind of like we would maybe with a significant other like, oh my gosh, if they haven’t texted me back in a while, are they mad at me? Did they ghost me? or are they moving on? Did you find another best friend? I will say I was jealous a lot. And again, I don’t know that it was necessarily a romantic jealousy, but I did feel like there were other rivals for my friends, like my best friend was my best friend and she could not be someone else’s best friend. I just was really often jealous and part of it was my own insecurity and baggage and whatever, but a lot of it was I told her things that I don’t want anyone else to know ever and if I felt that that trust was broken, or I felt that she was going behind my back to maybe repeat things or something, it would have just been really devastating. That fear of breaking a friendship up was really more devastating to me than anything. So I think it’s just an intimacy that you get when you’re doing, like, at least my friends and I- I shouldn’t assume everybody’s relationships were like this, and I know my youngest sister didn’t really have the sleepover relationships with her friends that I had- but I mean, you don’t come home with someone after school and spend hours and hours with them and then spend the night and then as long as you can on a Saturday morning before one of the moms are like, can you send my child home or the other mom’s like, alright, time to go home. Playing dress up or putting makeup on or watching movies that we know our parents wouldn’t have let us watch or something like that. It was just breaking the rules. And I don’t know enough about homosocial relationships, at least among women. I’ve read some about men and hip hop and some of these very specific kinds of homosocial relationships, but I just know that I would have been devastated if any of them would have ended a friendship. Actually 8th grade was a really dark period of time because the person who I thought was my closest closest friend decided she didn’t want to be my friend. She broke up with me and it honestly was one of the most painful breakups I’ve ever experienced. I mean, it hurt more than some romantic and sexual relationships I’ve had. You grow and you learn from each other and again I grew up in a small town of about ten thousand people, our friends, their parents or they would see each other at the store or we go to church together. It wasn’t just about the girls, it was often about the families. Their siblings went to school with my sister or they were in my mom’s religious ed class. It was an intertwining that’s probably similar to when you date someone. You meet their family and their friends become your friends and you follow their people on social media and find out what they’re up to and then when those relationships end, it’s like, where did all those other people go to? And that was a really hard thing. So I don’t know, like I said it was an emotional intimacy that like, these are the people I trust. These are the people I would run in front of a bullet for. To some of them that’s still the way it is today and I’ve been hurt by some that have not kept those connections intact. But the two from when I was five and from when I was ten, we’re bonded for life. We’re ride or die. If I had to choose between my girlfriend and my best friend from when I was ten years old, I’m sorry, but that friendship has been around for a long time. I can get another girlfriend, I can’t get another life long BFF, and the older I get, friends are hard to come by as an adult when you get older and your opportunities to make friends don’t necessarily come across as frequently and I love my friends from grad school and my friends in my department and my colleagues and our colleagues who became friends and they’re really wonderful. My girlfriend’s friends have become my friends and that’s wonderful, but that long lasting lifelong relationship with someone, there’s nothing that can really replicate that. Again, behind closed doors it was makeup, it was gossiping, it was what do you think it would be like to be kissed or sometimes we’d be really bold and I wonder if he has a big penis. We had no frame of reference, we had no Idea what any of that meant, but it was like we were so grown up. We’d watch a movie and be like what do you think that would be like. It was the working through ideas and talking them through with someone. You know those kind of weird questions that we all have, but we don’t wanna ask out loud? Because it’s like, what a weirdo. I had my best friends to ask those questions to. That was kinda a little rambling at the end, but yeah. Just trying to figure out who we are and what we like and what we’re into and what we want to do and we could try those identities on with each other in a way that I couldn’t have done with a significant other, and even in a way I really couldn’t with my family.

Nat Urban

Yeah, I mean thinking more about behind closed doors and especially bringing it back to your experience with the pandemic and being alone. I’ve been looking a lot at surveillance and performance and how for a lot of people the pandemic was like oh, I don’t have to do that, and even when I start seeing people again, I still don’t have to. I never really had to do that. The opportunity to really be alone with yourself, without any expectations, about what that looked like and how that has affected your relationship with your own identity and thinking about your relationship with your girlhood.

Morgan

Well about surveillance, I guess I should maybe say too, when I was young, it’s very funny, all these mixed messages I was given and in inadvertent ways my parents were very,  I sometimes say my dad was a fascist dictator about how much I could be on the phone. I mean at one point I took a page out of Mallory from the Babysitters Club, from her book and I decided to go on strike. I wrote a whole list of demands that had to be met before I would watch my little sister or do the dishes or whatever my chores were. My dad was irate and he took the door off of its hinges. Which, for anyone who might ever listen to this or hear this, do not do this. Especially to your, I can’t remember how old I was I was, preteen or teenage child. I mean, don’t do this to anyone, but especially to a preteen or teenage person. They need their privacy, they need their doors. I mean for no other reason than just the practicality of getting dressed in the morning and getting your PJ’s on. So, anyway I had pretty strict parents about a lot of things, but on the other hand, when I would be at a friend’s house or even when my friends would be at my house, we could kind of do whatever we wanted. I think because we were trusted, we were good kids. We went to church together. We had good grades. We didn’t have older siblings who could buy us alcohol, not that we would have known what to do with it anyway in high school. We always just had so much fun that we didn’t need drugs or alcohol and I know that sounds kind of judgy, and I don’t mean it that way, but also we were in band and we were in the forensics and I was in German club and some of them were art club and we had jobs. All of us were either working class or maybe, maybe, middle class. So, I always had to work a lot and so our time to get into shenanigans was kind of limited. But once we were together, my parents were just like, alright, have a good night, you know where the snacks are. And my friend Stephanie, her parents were even more hands off. Her dad worked, I think second shift so we’d always have to be quiet cause he’d be going to bed or be in bed. So we weren’t surveilled in the way that I was when it was just me or even me and my sister. It was like, oh, she can’t get into any trouble or she can’t get in any trouble with this one.  Which, in retrospect, if I would have ever hinted that I wasn’t straight when I was younger, I’m sure that would have come to a screeching halt. I had both like, no PG13 movies until you are definitely thirteen and even then we may say no and very restricted, one hour of TV a week which never really lasted, but what we were exposed to and what we could do was very much surveilled and monitored, but then, OK, have fun with your friends, see you in the morning, door closed, they don’t know what we’re doing so we could have gotten into some mischief. Now, being alone, it was very hard for me for a long time, to kind of go on a personal digression here to bring it back and contextualize the pandemic and what was going on, I was petrified of being alone, of being alone, living alone, being alone in my house or apartment, dying alone. I had such a fear of just being on my own. I think some of that came from my mom’s mom and her sister, who had to be with people. I mean, they just could not be alone. And again, the older I got, and I think some of this just maybe comes with age, but not necessarily. I’m very extroverted, so it’s not like I don’t like people, but the older I get, now it’s like why? Why do I want to be around people? And I think because I was single for a really long time and I was in some not great places emotionally and mentally and things like that, and so I was on my own. For a long time, I didn’t have a good relationship with my parents or my sister. So, I was on my own and that kind of forced me to become OK with it. I don’t need a significant other. I don’t need to be getting drunk at bars. I don’t need to be trying to meet guys. It doesn’t matter. It didn’t fulfill me. And again, also signs that men were not the problem, it was just something else was going on. I just became much more comfortable being alone. I realized that being alone didn’t mean lonely. That’s really, no duh to a lot of people, but when I heard that that was like a light bulb moment. Realized that I can be alone without being lonely and certainly during the pandemic. I had to get really creative, like a lot of people did. I mean we all became proficient in zoom and teams and Google Hangout and Google meets and Facebook videos and whatever else we were doing. The explosion of TikTok was a way to keep in touch with people and a lot of what I watched in the early- I only ever downloaded TikTok for the pandemic to help pass the time and also there’s a community of people who were my age and who were just making funny TikToks about the pandemic. Even though they were maybe alone and I was alone, I didn’t feel so alone. I really just started to think much more, like so there’s super girl like, OK. But in terms of surveillance, no one knew I was doing this. I didn’t talk about this with anyone. I even went to incognito mode when I would be looking at anything about questioning bisexuality. When I came across the site autostraddle, I was like, oh, I can’t look at this in my browser, it has to be in incognito. Now I have it bookmarked and whatever. But it was like if someone sees or if someone knows, if someone accidentally pulls up my browser history or like someone looks at my phone, what are they gonna think? And what are the ads that are going to pop up when I’m teaching, and that’s a very different kind of surveillance, perhaps, than maybe what you’re asking about, but it was this concern because I wasn’t ready to figure it out, and I certainly wasn’t ready to announce it, like have a pop up ad on YouTube or something when I’m trying to show an interview with Langston Hughes or Autostraddle or I don’t know, whatever would have and probably nothing would have come up and most students probably would have been like, whatever. That kind of privacy and how much I want to disclose and how much of my browser history is going to influence the banners and things like that, which we know it does. I think I was probably surveilling myself more than anybody else would have or could have or would have cared about or cared about doing other than the powers that be on social media sites and Google. But that’s just to try and sell my stuff anyway. I did not ever feel that people were watching or tracking or monitoring or really anything like that. I think maybe if I was a young person now , hopefully, my parents would be surveilling my activities a little more and trying to be more like, let’s give her some black Barbies, let’s give her some non pink toys. Which maybe isn’t actually surveillance, but I think they would have been more monitoring what I was doing and with whom I was doing it and what I was looking at and things. I came of age before cable exploded and social media, so I don’t think my parents felt they needed to surveil or monitor what I was doing because they watched some of the same shows I watched and they read what I read, nothing really fun. My dad wasn’t reading like People magazine or Glamour. I’ll stop talking there because I forgot my point but.

Nat Urban

You’re good. Yeah, I think when I talk about surveillance, what I usually mean is surveillance of your peers and like, what do my peers think of me, what do they think of me as self surveillance, for example, am I policing myself in how I dress around the house and I’m alone and my roommate isn’t around because I’m concerned of keeping control of my own identity and reaffirming that to myself and to the people that surround me. Less like 19, what’s that book. Oh my God, that’s so embarrassing.

Morgan

1984 Big Brother.

Nat Urban

Yes, 1984 less 1984 like Big Brother, oh, the world is watching me, more like me and my circle have beliefs and understandings about who I am and what roles I meant to fulfill and in the way that they interact with me and I police my behavior and they police mine as a form of small scale surveillance.

Morgan Foster

Yeah, I mean. I can definitely see I’ve gone through some stages of that, like middle school. High school I really didn’t care a lot what people thought and I think a lot of that was just mostly a reaction to my mom because she was a little too concerned with what people would think about me, my behavior, and my grades, like anyone was going to know unless she told them. Or, what would happen if her mom stopped by unexpectedly and the house was not dusted or something. So, I think a lot of my high school, preteen/teen years was a response to that, like she cared so much so I’m not going to care at all sort of thing. But I did and I was made fun of a lot because I would wear things that other people wouldn’t wear. I mean, I wore bell bottoms when they were cool, in the 90s they made a comeback, and nobody else was. They looked at me like I was a weirdo and I’m like, you’re the weirdos. I’m dressed like Seventeen magazine or whatever. And that’s how my friend Stephanie and I really bonded, and Katie and I. None of  my close circle of friends,  we weren’t outcasts. We all had each other. We all had friends. But we were never the cool ones. We were never looked at by the popular boys and none of us really wanted to be part of that scene. It seemed really, I mean now we would say basic, we didn’t have that word back then, or at least use it in that context. None of us wanted to do that. We had so much fun, just watching movies and mocking them or playing with Legos. I don’t know, whatever random thing we would be like, let’s do this. OK, sounds fun. We go to the movies, a lot of movie watching, because, again, smallish town and none of us had a ton of money and again, it was the 90s. That’s kind of what you did, you went to the video store and checked out a video and you watched it on the weekend. Then college was where I felt like, it’s my new start and I can be the person I’ve always wanted to be who was gonna always have her hair done and put makeup on and dress trendy and I tried to fit into that and tried to dress much more mainstream and not like vintage stores or goodwill or wear my dad’s clothes, which I did go through a phase of wearing his sweaters in high school. It was just trying to dress much more like what I thought would be cool because that’s what some of my friends were like-  One was kind of judgy. Maybe a year ago or so. I love to wear scarves. I love love scarves. Part of it is because for a long time I was very self-conscious. I put on, even before the pandemic, a ton of weight. I was always very self-conscious. I also realized I was always putting a lot of layers on. Tank tops and then T-shirts, and then a cardigan, and then a scarf. It was like a protective armor. Anyway, point of all this is she was like, well, scarves aren’t really fashionable right now and I’m like, I don’t care. I love my scarves. And also when I would teach a scarf was a way to be covered up in case I would lean over, I didn’t want to accidentally flash cleavage and I know they’re college students and they’re adults. I want to have some professional whatever, not show cleavage in class, I guess. So, scarves are a way to help cover that. So yeah, she was a little more judgy, like, let’s go shopping or I don’t think that’s a good fit on you or why are you wearing that pattern? And it was microaggressions, which I didn’t know what those were and didn’t have a name for, but it really was like, alright then, I guess I’m going to dress this way. This is how I’m gonna look and this is how I’m going to act. And again, once I graduated from college and once she moved away and she wasn’t such a consistent presence in my life, I went back to what’s comfortable. Why am I wearing high heels all the time? Why am I trying to fit into this that isn’t comfortable or it’s too expensive? This is not what I want to look like. And now it’s like, is it comfortable? Does it look quasi flattering? Sure, good enough, that’s what we’re going to wear. Now I’m a professional and I work at an institution. So there’s still some societal expectations for how I should present myself and women in the workforce, I think it’s very much a damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Too much makeup and that sends certain messages. If it’s too much makeup, you’re not taken seriously and women have a lot of these expectations in all fields. In academia, we know that women professors are evaluated more harshly than their men counterparts so I’m always very conscious of that too, and how I present myself and how I walk in the classroom, but also, if someone’s not going to like me because I don’t have lipstick on that day or someone’s not gonna think I’m a good instructor because I wear jeans every day, that’s on them. That says more about them than it does me, but it took me a long time to shift my thinking to that’s a them not a you situation. My girlfriend is very, like she held up a shirt once when we were going thrifting and I was like, thumbs down, I don’t know if I like that. And she was like, I don’t care, I like it. Even though I’m now 41 years old, I was like, wow, just like because I think if she would, and she would never but, I think if she would have said I don’t like that, I’d put it back and she’s like, I don’t care. I’m gonna wear it anyway. She hasn’t worn it in front of me, but she still bought it and she still likes it. She wears it to work and is comfortable with it and happy with it. Really, she’s like, this is what I like. This is what I’m comfortable in. This is who I am and she’s just- and she’s always been. And I kind of aspire to be like that, but it’s still a struggle like, what are they going to think about me. Really, when I say I don’t care now, I really mean that in a way I didn’t in high school. That’s not reactionary, but there still is the- I am evaluated by my students. I am evaluated by my peers. I am judged like everyone is and do I want to be judged on something superficial like my appearance, or do I want to be judged on my teaching and like what I’m teaching and how I’m teaching it, and so if I can preempt some of the wardrobe and fashion things, then I think like, OK, if they don’t like me, it’s about something else concrete that I can fix. Like maybe not teach this essay in the future or maybe I can revise this assignment, you know? And it’s not like, maybe I shouldn’t have worn that shirt or something I don’t- that sounds a little more superficial than I mean to be but I think I really am not surveilling myself the way I certainly was in my 20s. Absolutely in my 20s it was constantly like, is this a cool shop is this it and I would just spend so much money on store credit cards and trying to look the part that I was trying to be and a lot of that was just I was insecure so that self surveillance was just like, if I Dress the part I can be the part at some point.

Nat Urban

Just because we only have about 10 minutes left, is there anything you were super excited to talk about or like you saw this, you were like, I want to tell this story that you haven’t gotten to tell yet that you’re like, I got to get this in before we’re done.

Morgan

I don’t know. I think just, it’s so hard. I mean, it’s hard being anybody, right? And it’s especially hard being a young person when you often don’t have agency or the kind of agency you maybe want to have or I mean some kids have too much agency, which is also a problem. So I mean, I don’t know. I think. OK, so here’s a funny thing. Sorry, I’m saying I think a lot. I loved SheRa the original SheRa Princess of Power. And I think that she was probably my root because I love, I mean, not Adora and if you know Adora or SheRa, right, Adora is the alter ego and I was all about SheRa because she had long curly blonde hair and the boobs, the knee high high heeled boots and she was so smart and I really think that is, not the thing that turned me gay because that’s not how it works, but probably deep down my obsession with her was related to my sexuality and I just didn’t understand it. So that’s kind of a funny thing, like looking back at this, I mean, yeah. And that was, a lifelong thing for so long. She ra, where did she go and trying to get my hands on anything because it was just so, it was such a powerful childhood thing for me and so there’s- I’m trying to find something insightful or something interesting, but I guess just, girlhood is such an important time and it’s so misunderstood and I think so much of what we pass down to the next generation is formed by our own experiences in childhood. I mean, girlhood for some people who identify that, but childhood in general? It’s just like, let people be, you know, and I was not good about that for a very long time. I was so judgy about my sisters and my mom like, you can’t wear that and part of it is because I was doing that to me. Like, I was critical of everyone else, but no one was more critical of me than me and I think now it’s just like, Oh my God, just let it go. Who cares, let people be. And that’s also something I would have wanted to hear when I was little. And so there’s a lot of be the teacher that you needed when you were in school or, be the adult that you wanted when you were a kid. Those are kind of cheesy, but that’s really sort of become my ethos. Like, what did I want and need when I was young and trying to be that for other people. That’s not insightful, I guess.

Nat Urban

It was insightful! It was lovely. Did you see the new- have you watched the Netflix series of SheRa, the reboot?

Morgan

I did and I was so resistant. So like, that’s not my SheRa, that’s not SheRa, but I loved it. I loved it and actually, I really want to rewatch it because it was fabulous and.

Nat Urban

I was going to say was it super affirming for your first queer crush, to actually get to be a lesbian in real life?

Morgan

Yes, I loved it. I mean, just the diversity of characters. Just all of it was fantastic. I was like, there are people who are neuroatypical and these interracial relationships and I just loved all of it. Yeah, and in retrospect too, I mean SheRa/Adora really was independent. On her own, like there was sort of a love story between her and Seahawk, but that didn’t really go anywhere. And she was just kicking ass on her own, you know, like she didn’t need a man. Beau was there, but he was.

Nat Urban

He was there.

Morgan

Yeah, that’s the best you can say about him. Well, there’s like Cowell, but whatever. But I mean, really it was Adora and SheRa who were taking names and I just really love that. Again, at such a young age, I mean, I was probably only like 4. I mean, my God, I was so young when that show first first aired, but it was like, yeah, that’s just kind of what, like beautiful and smart and, you know, taking names and kicking butt with my girls around me, whoever my real life equivalent of Frosta and Mermista and Glimmer and Angela and everybody else would have been, like  that’s what I wanted and I just, I really loved just all of that and that’s just such a root in it. I know for some people it sounds so mental like, what is this girl talking about with SheRa? But also, like I don’t care. And also my girlfriend and I bonded on Bumble over SheRa. So yes, I mean SheRa was very important to me. On Bumble, there’s a question like, ‘as a child, what were you obsessed with?’ or something about your childhood and I was like, I was obsessed with SheRa and the princesses of power. And I was like, people are going to know it or they’re not going to know it and my girlfriend, like the first thing she said was, oh my gosh, I loved SheRa and that when I was little, I had the whole castle. And it was like from there we just-

Nat Urban

You wanna hear something crazy? It’s that my Grandma had that castle from my aunts and I played with it growing up. I played with the SheRa Dolls and the castle not even knowing. And then I grew up and watched the SheRa show. Like I remember watching it and sobbing and my mom coming in, it was around the end of the pandemic or  it was over a summer or something, I was at home for whatever reason, and watching the 5th season and my mom was like, what is wrong with you? And I’m like [[crying lesbian noises]].

Morgan

So good. Yeah, that, I would say the remake of the babysitters club, also on Netflix, and there’s only two seasons and I don’t think there’s gonna- Netflix canceled it and from what I understand, I don’t think it’s going to be picked up anywhere. That show is amazing for everyone too because, again, you talk about modernizing and contemporizing stories. Sometimes that goes horribly awry, but that show is a master class on how to do it and how to be inclusive and not in a way like, here’s the black character and here’s the trans character. It’s just organic and natural and, I mean, the sitters are just, they’re actual preteen girls, or they were at the time, and I just love the empowerment. And then there’s also, like Alicia Silverstone plays Christy’s mom and there’s all this attention paid to the adult characters. So I just, I cannot say enough good. I was really crushed, like to the point where I was like, I’m canceling Netflix, when I saw that that was being canceled because I was just so heartbroken, and I’m so glad that young people, regardless of how they identify, have media. Granted, there’s not enough and representation is always an issue, but there is just so much out there and I would have really loved, you know? And, I mean, I do consume, and I talked to my 14 year old cousins, like we read the same things, we’re watching the same things. I’m like, what is going on with me. But I’m just so happy that there’s content and media out there for people so we just, you know, let them find it. Let them do it.

Nat Urban

Ohh, that’s lovely. Well, it was so incredible to talk to you. You were delightful.