Ambiguous/Identity

Once, in a theology class a teacher related the following conundrum to me: If God is all powerful, can he create a rock so heavy that he himself can not lift it? There's no answer, because if God is the most powerful force in the universe, he should be able to lift the rock, but could he also create something beyond his own reach? And that unanswerable question was the very first thing I thought of when a friend asked me what "queer" meant to me.

Lately I've been wearing a knit cap to keep my little head warm during the cold winter here in Savannah. The cold weather has afforded me the opportunity to look on the outside the way I feel on the inside all the time. It's easy for me to forget sometimes that many people, perhaps most, see gender as a black and white issue so it's always a little jarring to hear ma'am when I'm bundled up in my winter finest. It's not that I want to be a man, or feel more comfortable when I'm called sir, which also occurs fairly regularly, it's just that I'm not totally comfortable being thought of as a lady. Where I grew up being a lady meant going to cotillion, getting manicures, and more than likely getting pregnant some time before you finished college. And I don't mean to denigrate any of those things, they just...aren't me. I own The Bourne Identity trilogy, I loathe shaving my legs, and I'd rather go to the dentist than get a manicure.

Driving down one of Savannah's beautiful streets, I got into the gender discussion with a good friend of mine. "I don't understand queer", she said. And I felt myself audibly sigh as if the wind had been let out of my sails. This is a conversation I've had many times. So many I could probably just make a chart of talking points and be done with it, but I realized, the two of us riding along, that there's no hard and fast answer for any of it. It's all a personal choice. I choose to identify myself as queer and I also decide what that means to me. Gender and sexuality are a giant and sometimes overwhelming spectrum. My friend said, if you didn't know the word "queer" is that still something you would feel? She assumed that my identity was tied to the word, and not the other way around. And unlike the God question I immediately knew the answer. "Yes", I said. "I've always been the same person, someone was just kind enough to finally make up a word for it."