When the moderator asked us during the poetry reading’s Q&A:
What do women know that men don’t? I froze, then made a joke,
Well, there is one crucial thing, but no way am I going to be the one to give it away…
I thought of my friend Jo who betrayed us all
by telling the boys about It’s Fun to be a Girl!—an educational film
about menstruation we were filed off to see in fourth grade
while the boys were given an extra recess. Jo was paid
in quarters to whisper the secrets of blood and white pads, pink
sanitary belts that looked like garters. The girls in the class
were furious with her. The boys were grossed out and overused
the word “period” and “cramp” to embarrass us. Don’t write too fast—
you might get a CRAMP. Wonder what we’ll do in class next PERIOD.
Ha ha ha. Thanks a lot, Jo. She shrugged, wanting to be a boy
not a girl, hoping her period would never come
if she refused training bras and Tiger Beat and the pocketbooks
the rest of us carried with our Modess tucked inside, so we’d be ready
when those first drops dribbled during math class or history
or science, we couldn’t be sure. Jo wouldn’t answer
to her birth name Jo Ann and wore overalls and baseball caps
that read Allied Auto, since her father worked there as a mechanic
and got them for free. I said something like I believe gender is a construct,
and luckily for me the other poet on stage agreed,
and the audience nodded as though I was making some kind of sense.
Still, the moderator’s question haunted me. Was there really something
I knew that I didn’t even know I knew? Was there something
he and the male poet on stage knew that I didn’t? The next morning
I took a walk through Houston before I left for the airport.
I was the only pedestrian, except for a barefoot drag queen
in front of the pink Taco Cabana who asked, Honey,
do you have any change for the bus? She’d had a tough night, I could tell—
her chin was full of stubble, her pageboy wig askew.
Before I gave her the quarters that jangled in my trousers,
I wanted to ask her, What do women know that men don’t?
But just as I was about to pose the question, she belched, a sound
somewhere between a man burp and woman burp, a sour cloud.
I walked on and bought The New York Times and read a story
about how soon Big Apple residents will be able to change
their genders on their birth certificates
whether they’ve had sex-change surgery or not.
And there was my answer—another case of l’esprit de l’escalier.
If only I could have referenced the article last night to make my point.
If only I’d whipped out my Florida license, the big M
crouched in the sex square. After standing in line for six hours
at the DMV, I came home to a tentative voice on my answering machine:
Please check your license, we may have made a mistake
concerning your gender. If the information is correct, please ignore this message.
If not, please come back tomorrow…You could tell the caller
didn’t want to offend—she was an F
or at least sounded like one over the phone. I imagined
the cubicle where she passed around my picture—does this look
like a transvestite to you? Does anyone remember taking
this picture? Did she seem like a “real” woman?
Ah, staircase wit. What I should have said to the moderator:
I’m sorry, I’m unqualified to answer the question.
I’ve been a man since 2000. There’s no way
I’m going to wait in that long line again, just to be a gal.