Being The Feast
Discovering, and delighting in, the genderqueer body
She’s sitting back on her knees, looking between my bent, open legs as I lay on my back. I am naked, sprawled, arms outstretched on the bed. She’s telling me how beautiful I am. Specifically, how gorgeous my vulva is and how lovely and soft my natural hair is as she runs a finger slowly, softly caressing, and how delighted she is at how wet I am and I feel like I’ve been starving my entire life, hungry for this unnamed thing, this feeling that wasn’t knowable to me before now.
I was raised in a conservative, religious household where we weren’t supposed to have sexual body parts until the night we got married, at which point you were supposed to somehow know how to be good at it and make your husband happy and oh, I guess, like it also? Women were seen as valuable insofar as they were virtuous and unsullied for their wedding nights and subsequently able to populate the earth. I was told it was better to die in the struggle of keeping your virginity than to be raped and survive. According to that standard, I was ruined before kindergarten.
There was only one right way to be a female and I wasn’t it. There was no place for a little girl who felt like a boy most of the time. My mom would sew me a new dress that was just what she thought a little girl aged six would want to wear…
