WSQ: Women's Studies Quarterly

Metal has memory, or at least that’s what I tell people. It always wants to be the way that it was. My coworker squinted at the bracket we were working on like he was searching for some universal truth in a piece of cold rolled steel. He took his gloves off and ran one hand over it, gently, the way you would greet a sleeping cat. I waited. He glanced at me and with inexplicable somberness said, “The more you work it, the harder it’ll fight to get back to its manufactured state.” This was explained to me when I was twenty-one; it was my first week at the fabrication shop where I would spend the next five years.

I mulled over my coworker’s words, tuning out his following directive to prepare the material for processing. I instead contemplated a version of life where I would fight to return to the way I was. I would bypass my manufactured state, I would want to go straight back to ore. That is the memory it holds. Not a shape but a state, buried deep in the surface of the earth, unaware of anything.

As a trans person, I have a complicated relationship with the way things were—with the way I was. There is no return to it. I used to be from somewhere; in this somewhere I was different. My name was longer, and I would pour sweet words into the throats of anyone who wanted them. I used to wear skirts with scalloped hems. I used to write poetry about motherhood, marriage, and the unshakeable idea that being loved by someone was the only way I could feel real. I used to think I was a girl; it never occurred to me that there was any other way for me to be.

She and I are stuck somewhere together, in between holding on and letting go. I often find her just beyond the walls I’ve built for those who know me now. She is waiting to be acknowledged for making me who I am. The [End Page 253] space we share is full of plurality; it serves many purposes and it takes many forms. I find her wrapped up in stories that are told less and less often; she is not deserving of my fear. My relationship with her has made me realize that rather than experiencing gender euphoria, I instead experience what I can only describe as gender foyer.

The foyer is neither where you came from nor a destination. It toes the line between necessary and forgotten, socially constructed and utilitarian— but only when it has been built in. Unlike other rooms in a house, there is a slew of alternative familiar language for this space. An antechamber, a mudroom, an entryway, a vestibule. It’s the place for things used outside that cannot stay outside in perpetuity: jackets, boots, bikes, salt for icy steps. There are many ways to capture a poetic and physical immersion into this interior-exterior, public-private, in-between space. For me, being nonbi-nary is one of those ways.

Claiming nonbinary further entrenches my heart in purgatory because the only good word I have for this thing that encompasses my identity begins with a negative prefix. Like ex-pat, misandrist, deconstructivist. Nonbinary divests from the binary framework of gender while paradoxically acknowledging and upholding it. I feel as though I have spent five years borrowing words that made more sense than others while also feeling like the words aren’t quite right.

I have been trying to capture what was a private revelation in my head for all of twenty seconds before it simply came out over dinner one night. I don’t think I’m a woman. My best friend’s hand frozen midair on the way to the stem of a wine glass. A pizza on the table, still too hot to eat. The second half of “woman” reluctantly falling out of my mouth. Sitting between us like a third unexpected guest: wo_man. Two syllables, neither one of them mine anymore.

I readily disinherited one word, and in its...