I remember my first moments of International Women’s Day. Inside that hotel in San Salvador, the day after my heart was shredded by the stories of communities massacred and displaced. The reality of imperialism was sinking into my bones. In the same breath, for the first time in my life, I was congratulated in my womanhood. I remember the abrazos and felicidades from my Nicaraguan beloveds (especially those who identify as men) that day, and there being sweetness attached to my gender identity and expression for the first time in my life.
Fast forward to 2016, the year I decided to invite a permanent reminder on my tissues that my femininity isn’t in fact to blame. The choice of the mermaid, with her flowing locks, crossed arms, and confrontation, the way I hope to be inside myself as a woman. To be beautiful and fierce, just like my aunt we lost to suicide. Billy was who first told me about the magic of El Salvador, and her dear friend whose family fled their homelands for safety. That was the last time I heard her voice before her heart stopped; I wonder if she would have been believed & loved the way she needed had she not been a woman.
My rejection of my womanness for the sake of my safety was my own practice of self-gas lighting and victim blaming. The real entity that taught me to hate my soft, rounded body is patriarchy, the same force that says that same body is my entire value. The way its lies seeped in through a handful of boys & men in my wake. The way words, gaze, & force against my will taught me to hate myself; it was bigger and older than I’ll ever be.
Central America is at the center of my re-relating to how I’ve been shaped by systemic power-over, the belief: “I would be safe if my body was [coded as] male.” As I look for ways to feel my dignity within all of me, I also worry about embracing my gender as an act of joining the long lineage of white, feminist TERFs. Just like before, I find myself turning away from moving as a woman. How can I hold my dignity, while not moving against that of my trans/non-binary/femme loves?
I haven’t found the perfect way, and in this current body, I celebrate all of us who move against and in spite of cisheteropatriarchy. I’m in gratitude to each of my ancestors (chosen and blood) who dared to dignify themselves in the midst of men’s violence, the way it seeks to collapse & destroy us, our communities, our relationship to land. Today, I celebrate each of us as we bleed, resist, birth, create; the world is better for each of us as we invite something new. Maybe less something new, & more of a return to the practice of matriarchs shaping, relating, loving.
Today, I grieve all that has been and continues to be survived in a world shaped by men. I continue to bear witness to the ways in which bodies outside the imagined binary are brutalized. I also hold gratitude for the men in my life who have taught me that my body can in fact be safe outside the knit hands of my femme circles. That stories of being crushed by men they know and love have been heard, and their hearts break with ours, it gives me hope.
To my dad who became a rape crisis line volunteer after I finally told him the truth,
To my friends and loves who hold my hands as we fight to free ourselves from the domination loop,
To mi familia Nicaragüense who wakes me with messages of love every International Women’s Day,
Thank you for loving me inside of everything I am, including
A woman.
