The Androgyny of Being and Nothingness

There is a member of my family who was born about 20 years ago, a single child to two intelligent and loving parents who have somehow managed to stay married through all the inevitable and largely unremarkable challenges to that status. The three of them have lived with much happiness and only occasional sorrow in a nice house in a good school district with solid careers. This 20-year-old is someone with whom both my own children have spent prolonged visits, at both houses, even when we have lived on opposite sides of the country. This person has been, in short, a close relative, known, loved and always welcomed.

But let's stop there for a moment, among all those flashing past tenses of verbs that do best when they continue into the present. Does my description of this relative seem puzzling in its emptiness, vague in its pronouns,

lacking the intimacy one might reasonably expect from an opening paragraph about someone not only well-known, but allegedly well-liked? If you thought so, you might also intuit that right now as I type, I am nodding. This is an empty description of a young person who has been a part of my life for two full decades already. You really know nothing from what I've said here. Why?

This is an issue I call a gender-bender. This relative is at present deeply immersed and dedicated to the prospect of becoming gender neutral. And I hereby confess that I am finding it challenging to know how to go forth as if it doesn't matter that there is no longer a pronoun to use, to know that all the customary labels that have allowed me to fit this young person into my life: niece/nephew/grandson/granddaughter/boy/girl/woman/man have all been scraped into the disposal by the concept of androgyny. It has no androgynous handle. There is no mail carrier here or fisher or flight attendant. This relative is not an occupation.

Even the first name by which I knew this person as a child is gone now. It was too suggestive of definition, not of gender perhaps but of sex. I've unfriended this once close relative on Facebook because the photos I saw made me uncomfortable, saturated as they were with sexual transformation and the reformation of identity. I don't care if my relatives are male or female, but if there is no word for them, then how far can conversation go? We are not just individuals, possessed of one identifying name. This is not some stranger, whom I can introduce to you by saying, "This is The Relative Formerly Known as *. Asterisk is a student. Asterisk wants to be a singer when * is done with college." No. My relationship with * is familial. Asterisk is my....

It's complex. When the first name we'd used for 18 years was replaced with a new one, there were some murmurings in the family. "I only know the person of the old name...I love the person with the old name...what happened to that person?" It's just a name. A rose by any name, etc. But if this was really true, why would the rose rename itself a mum? Like I said, it's complex. Secretly, it makes me glad I've never had a significant identity crisis.

I don't know. Right now, it feels, for lack of language, that I've lost *. Language is part of every revolution. I'm ready for some new language here, that will enable me to reconnect with my lost *, and I'm really hoping it's not like some of the language that came out of the women's movement, the "wimyn" and the "woperchildren." If we have a chance to start using new words, couldn't they please be words fit for poetry?