[blog] girl, with a cane

Remember when you saw your first princess? Her skirts were tulle and glittered like the night sky. They fell about her feet so you’d never know she was walking — she was gliding, floating. Wide, demure eyes. A wisp of stardust in her collarbones. Hands at her sides, fingers spread as if testing the weight of the air, as if at any moment she might take flight.

I wanted to be a ballerina when I grew up. Then I hated everything about being a girl. Then I learned about fifth-wave feminism and relearned to embrace what I adore, and today, I am what you’d call a girly-girl. I wear makeup and press-on nails, I shave my legs, I wear frilly skirts and blouses and lacy socks and Mary Janes. I take pride in looking like an American Girl (the toy, not the existential concept). I cross my legs and flutter my hands in public; I cover my mouth when I laugh and smile. It’s how I like to present myself as a connoisseur of the #ff hexcodes — pink, pink, PINK.

I'm nonbinary, but I don’t mind the public perception that I am a cisgender woman with some eccentric sensibilities. We call ourselves hyper-femmes or hyper-feminine. I love the social construct of femininity as a drag king loves the social construct of masculinity: it is simultaneously part of us and part of a performance. I am sort of a gentle, naïve girl who is also a clown.

Anyway, when it all comes down to basics, I am always thinking of my first movie-princess — mine was Cinderella — and how all the air left the room when she appeared at the top of the staircase. How she took those steps like they rose up to meet her.

I am a bit awkward going down stairs nowadays. I hunch, take them sideways like a bashful crab. That’s what the cane is for. Mobility aids are a miracle for the ME/CFS community; they take the weight off our weary bodies and help us rebalance, redistribute, re-energize for the things we want to do. Canes, rollators, and wheelchairs are abundant on #disabled Instagram. More heartening is that they belong to people of all ages, sizes, backgrounds, severity levels. One of my favorite fashion influencers is 19 (love your work, Lumie!) and delivers incredible himekaji/hime-gyaru (姫カジ / 姫ギャル)-inspired looks. She can stand with the assistance of a cane, like me. Her wheelchair is even pink.

Canes are very fun to pose with. You feel sort of Regency, a little steampunk. Your body becomes an A-line. You have a certain radius, like the ladies wearing hoop skirts or massive feathered hats. And the whole time you’re out with it, you’re thinking that it’s a real good thing you brought it — otherwise you’d be pitching every which way! This is a wonderful invention, you think.

Sometimes putting my weight on it feels like a whole-body sob of relief.

It just doesn’t always go with my outfit, you know?

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Disability shares in a great unending well of experiences that can challenge, define, threaten, and weigh on the lives of marginalized communities. One that feels particularly bitter and edged in the mouth is dehumanization. In our case, it can manifest in the reduction of disabled bodies to obstacles, extraneous waste, dead weight, liability, statistics, spectacle.

What makes you human? Other than your cellular makeup. I expect you’ll have all kinds of answers, and certainly more than one. Maybe love, maybe your opinions on Love Island. Maybe experiences unique to our society, because we do, indeed, live in a society. We use pattern recognition to create "schemas", which are structures we use to sort and interpret the world. Concepts like race, sex, gender, sexuality, nationality, cognitive and physical functioning, political affiliation, et cetera, are patterns. We take phenotypical traits (things we can observe) and use them to organize people. The world is a bit simpler to understand that way. And humans are dealing with a lot, including the overwhelming existential burden of consciousness, so it’s nice to have some things that are simple.

Some people study the dynamics, behaviors, and tensions that accompany these patterns. Some people study the interaction between two or more patterns and make observations through a certain lens, and that is “intersectionality” — looking at how someone’s life and perspective are made unique by their many patterns. You know how when dipshits are like, What’s next, an asexual nonbinary Portuguese hijabi with crutches? Let’s say her name is Sana. You can look at Sana’s experience as an asexual person, as a nonbinary person, as someone born in Portugal, as a practicing Muslim, as being disabled/semi-ambulatory, or any and all combinations of the above. Intersectional theorists try to do that last thing. It is the furthest from simple you can imagine, and it will teach you love, among other things.

I want to talk about a specific intersection of my identities: being hyper-feminine and being disabled. To do that, we will look at how “degendering” (choosing not to ascribe or observe a gender identity) can play into dehumanization. We’ll also look at the idea of conventional femininity in America. Don’t get me wrong, gender is a social construct, but this will be part of the point. Hang in there, everybody.

So, degendering. Your friend is a transgender man. You introduce him to your friend group: his name is Zack, his pronouns are he/him. After you’ve all had drinks and apps, one of your other friends pulls you aside. “So what’s the deal with Zack?” she says. “Are they… what are they?”

Well, that’s weird. You tell her again: he’s a man. “I just don’t know how to refer to them,” she says. He/him? “No,” she says, “but they’re not…”

They/them pronouns are great for a lot of things, least of all for people who use they/them pronouns. In American cultural spaces, it refers to some degree of gender ambiguity or deviation from the “norm”. But there isn’t any ambiguity here, right? Zack is a man. He uses pronouns to help indicate that he is a man. He also has his hair cut short, wears mostly button-downs, has some stubble growing from his year-plus of HRT, and speaks in a deeper register than your friend. Zack is using recognizable patterns to tell the rest of the world that he is a man, and your friend is ignoring those patterns.

She perceives "transgender" as superseding and challenging her schema of a man, and thus strips Zack of his gender identity — something he has cultivated as part of his unique experience as a human. She is dehumanizing him.

This “bleaching” of unique identities, perspectives, and experiences comes up a lot in spaces dominated by white people, straight people, abled people. These are in turn the dominant schemas in Western society. But everyone grows up understanding the world in schemas, and when people have patterns that are more “complicated”, the schemas start falling apart pretty quick. A fat Black girl wonders why she isn’t allowed to wear a swimsuit to the beach. A Jewish boy asks his teacher why his class doesn’t celebrate Pesach. They question why the world doesn’t seem to have a place for them in it.

Likewise, what is a disabled girl?

You’re not gonna see a wheelchair at hot girl summer. (There weren’t any ramps, so she couldn’t get down.) Canes and crutches are medical devices, necessarily bare and clinical, so they’ll stick out on the runway. Girls are beautiful. Girls are white and skinny and clean and able-bodied. Cisgender, allosexual. You get the idea.

In certain spaces, just one of your patterns can become you. If you take your cane into public, you are a cane user. That is the pattern people use to recognize and sort you. I want to emphasize that this is different for everyone, as I am white and slim and those are dominant patterns, but my most sortable identity on the street is “disabled”. I am a girl, with a cane. I am a disabled person.

It makes you start to resent the way you’re perceived, even if the people around you say nothing about it. You know they’re looking at the cane first and the rest of you second. They’re wondering what happened or thinking She’s too young for that.

I would like to be a girl, pretty, instead of girl, disabled. So I dress in the #ffs, and accessorize with big skirts and ribbons and frills; I temper my body language to be “classically” and recognizably girlish, mouseish, small. I am sort of a stitch in time. I am hoping, at least, to appear so novel that the cane is an afterthought. Mind you, it’s both a presentation and a performance — as a queer person I am in impish conversation with femininity, not a crushingly loyal yes-man. I exist to subvert, challenge, and play with the pattern that is “woman” and “feminine”. That friction makes up my own gender expression.

Still, there is another friction, a more uncomfortable skin-over-gravel kind, that comprises the space between disabled and feminine. Disabled bodies often struggle with broad movement or fine articulation. When I am in a flare, my gait becomes a shuffle because I can’t lift my feet fully off the ground. My head lolls down, my hands fall limp, my mouth drifts. I lose the autonomy I am accustomed to and, in this case, the movements I carefully cultivate to make me more recognizably “feminine”. I also can’t do my makeup, apply press-ons, pluck my eyebrows, wash my hair, shave my legs, or wear anything that isn’t sweats and a T-shirt.

Doing these things makes me feel more like the thing I recognize as “myself”. When I lose them, I lose access to a major pattern that other humans use to sort me. I feel a little less human. I feel dysphoric. It doesn’t make me less of what I am, but it makes me feel less, and the way we feel is also pretty important, you know?

Anyway, the cane. It’s a lot of hullabaloo over a big stick, isn’t it? A cane is a neutral object that helps me participate in my life.

Why all this grief?

I want to be a princess; I’m disabled instead.

I can put some stickers and charms on my cane. I’m excited to do that, actually. But it will always be a foreign object in others’ recognition of me. It complicates things, and I really, really just want them to be simple.

I suppose it’s a very human way to feel!

The world is wide, and our schemas have and will continue to expand as we are interconnected, globalized, educated. It’s slow-moving for those of us outside the lines. We sort of live here for now. Existing anywhere but the dominant schemas means you’re challenging people’s perception just by stepping outside. Yes, it is tiring. And mind you, I have white, cisgender-passing privilege on my side.

But it can also mean things that aren’t massive and academic and sociological. Once I was in a museum with friends in D.C., wearing a gauzy, fluttery dress and leaning on the ever-intrusive mobility aid. A little Black girl with pink beads in her hair came running up to me and said, in a voice so small I almost missed it, I like your cane!

I thought she was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.

I said Thank you! I like your dress! and for the rest of the day, I was floating.

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Some intersectional reads I’ve loved include Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks and Unruly, Adjective by Carmen Maria Machado (you’ll have to create an account to read, but it’s free and trust me, it’s worth it).

In turn, thank you for reading my words!

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