No Girl-dick of Nature: an essay on discovering my gender in a forest of language.

By essa may ranapiri, 27 April 2020

I’m going to start with the body. Because every thought we have starts with a body. There is a meat that thinks inside our skulls and we are the skull and we are the meat. We’re sitting in the dark half dozed, talking about pronouns as only two trans people can, she asks me to use she/her pronouns, it is a follow-up request. The confirmation of a blurting out while playing video games. We need these safe innocuous moments to build ourselves. We need that darkness and the white screen; those fingers on the controllers to loosen the bolts of cis-normativity. She isn’t sure if she is a woman somewhere near it at least. My heart fills up with something golden. I manage not to cry. There is saltwater in the air.

We’re talking about the semiotics of language. We’re talking about the mauri of these words, the way ‘man’ and ‘woman’ and ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ and all the gendered words in the world, try to collapse these bodies into categories. Us versus them. 

To be trans is to never not be aware of language and the ways it can be used for violence. When I first wore a dress in public I was terrified, everybody laughing; was that laughter for me? All the laughter of strangers pulsing from my cells, not out loud surely? Am I a punchline? For me and many trans people I know the world is a jagged and scary thing and this doesn’t change – it becomes background noise, if you’re lucky. I am for so many reasons, lucky.

I voice a thought into the dark of the lounge while I pull up fluff from the carpet: maybe I’m wahine, but I don’t feel like a woman. The carpet is a giant and flattened cat. Its fur encases a structure of our own stray hairs that have fallen in curled balls to the ground. My mouth makes shapes in the dark. It feels like I’m swallowing the world in reverse. Watch it birth outwards. Maybe being wahine and tane isn’t the same as being female and male … I push these kupu out into this kōrero, it feels like a waka pushed out into a great ocean. Maybe there is somewhere for me in the heart of my ancestors in the home of my ancestors. 

I’m currently learning Māori, slowly. The light green book Māori Made Easy gives my life structure – it is the first thing I read every morning. I wake up around 8am, fish my notebook from under my bed, scribble the date, [Rāhina / Tekau mā Toru / Paengawhāwhā / Rua Mano, Rua Tekau], and fill in the answers and write down the words. I puzzle out new ways to talk about the world, look at the way we put the subject at the end of the sentence, look at the way we say hello, the way we look and read and learn. It isn’t easy, it feels like it should be, the title suggests it is, but it isn’t. Also it’s fucking hard to set aside time for language-learning when you are unemployed and searching for a job. Searching for a way to survive in a capitalist hellscape. You need to be stable and have a firm base in your life to commit to these things. That is one of the reasons that we’re seeing a bunch of entitled pākehā fuckwits using the reo against us. Just look at what happened around Ōwairaka. 

I’ve just finished the section on pronouns, and am struck by the words ‘tātou’ and ‘koutou’ and ‘ia’: they offer such a wealth of information without feeling the need to qualify a person’s gender. The first time I saw the word ‘ia’ was in the index for The Whale Rider (a book I have yet to read, I picked up the book solely for the reason that it described a world where gender wasn’t baked into that singular reference at least). For every question in Māori Made Easy I change the he/her to they (singular) and chuckle to myself along with my ancestors. 

Takatāpui was one of the first words that I learnt in Māori that helped me make sense of the tohutō (macron). Takatāpui helped me understand what the tohutō really meant, how the sound hangs around the ā. I heard the word out loud for the first time from the mouth of a kuia takatāpui who sadly I do not remember the name of. We had all been gathered together as part of a photography exhibition; a showcase of queer individuals living in the Waikato. I thank you, kuia, for the gift of that pronunciation, for giving me a way to talk about myself in the air. Takatāpui is a word that stretches back in time and forwards perhaps, in that endless spiral that defines the movement of events; I can see it cast from the darkened lips of lovers and its body pulse through the ferns. 

Learning my own language is a journey of self-discovery. When I learn a kupu hōu, all the violence of the English is softened; these words say there is a place for me. However, it’s not that simple, not for all trans people, for so many reasons we’re stuck with English, and pushing it to change.

And in a way I am thankful language is flexible and malleable. I look at my body and imagine all sorts of things for it, from food for the worms, to innumerable plastic surgeries, to the softening of flesh, to the weight I’ve gained or lost, but there is surprisingly little I can do about my body. I stare at the moko kauae Instagram filter for hours, admiring how my face fits into the dubious pattern around my bottom lip. I hurt. I don’t know where to go with these feelings. I close the application and open it again expecting my selfies to change. They don’t. Who is that in those pictures? 

But language I can change. I can reclaim or place all sorts of different labels on this body as a Māori person learning the language of my ancestors. There is more to the slipperiness of language that pools inside me. And again, I go back to the land. Yes we often perceive Papatūānuku as a woman but where does this come from? Is this our own story told through pākehā waha? Is this Western, colonial gender binaries being applied to the land of my tūpuna? That sounds like a load of horse shit, like more imperialist nonsense, right? But the truth is I don’t know. But I think it’s okay to be okay with not knowing. We have lost so much. 

And yes let’s be clear and straight about this; the fact that I am writing in te reo Pākehā on a rorohiko sitting on whenua that once belonged to Ngāti Wairere is due to violence. It is due to ongoing colonial violence and the violence that was meted out against my ancestors and also committed  by my own ancestors: let’s not forget where we come from in all directions, my Clan Gunn tūpuna are a part of me as well! There is a forest floor made of death that the trees of these words sprout up out of. 

Being trans you can’t escape the tyranny of language. Being trans and nonbinary you can’t ignore what assumptions people create out of their hyperreal tower of words. There was a shift in which words people used when I came out as trans: no one except my sweet Nan had talked to me about my weight until I came out and was seen in some way as a woman. Equally, no one had called me a bitch until I went out in public in a dress – though they had called me gay and faggot long before. All of these words are tools to re-inscribe the hierarchy of power operating in a cis-hetero normative patriarchy. 

I’m hanging outside taking in the air, the Waikato awa is rushing steady and sickeningly while down below a band is playing in the heat of the underground venue. People are smoking cigarettes, mouths becoming little chimneys in the air. Long white cloud indeed. A man is asking me why I’m dressed how I am, and I tell him (as clearly and honestly as I can for how much I simplify it) ‘that I’m trying to be a woman’. ‘So I can call you a bitch?’ he responds, ‘how you doing bitch? Hey it’s that bitch in the red dress dancing at the front! What does this bitch drink?’ And so on and so forth. I feel like I’ve walked into the wrong room and I keep walking into the wrong room over and over and over.     

We’re sitting on couches at a house party. I recognize the patterns on this guy’s baggy clothes - I remember we shared a stall at Zinefest.. He calls me a misogynist for being rude about the moon. I am quoting a line from a poem by Brenda Shaughnessy in my head: ‘I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do’. He tells me that the moon is feminine in cultures the world over. I choke out a laugh. Wtf. A cis dude essentialising the moon, in order to call someone else a misogynist feels like some weird feminist point scoring to me. Am I then male to this person? Am I in this moment as masculine as the moon is feminine? Am I throwing around my power over the moon making it feel small? I don’t know but I do know that I want to tell him to fuck off. I want to tell him of the moon that Rona knows, the moon that is a man and the husband of the world. Is it sexist in this context to tell that male moon to fuck off, to scream at that moon who stole Rona from the earth and kept her to himself? I have been part of so many conversations where the feminine quality of the moon comes up and my gender is forgotten or ignored. I am always the man when it comes to the moon. Rona! Come down and take me up there with you! Then I can be that man in the moon misgendered every new month. 

I am now in our garden. I stand out there watching the full moon peaking over the pines. A sick light blurring over the grayscale leaves. I am crying. I am calling. I am folding into the language of the garden, the paradise my partner has created. The kale and the spinach and the cabbage, glistening in their growth say ‘I love you’. The corn dying and the beans dying and tomato plants dying say ‘aroha nui’ as they go. They say here is a stomach that is full, here is a stomach that won’t ever be. I can’t see the plants in the light of the moon. Two eyes staring at one; when will we climb up into that sky and put a hook in the mouth of that fucker and pull it down. When will we get Rona back. When will the good work be done? 

All of these people with their appeals to nature, all these hopeful scientists of the divine feminine, I’ve got some bad news for you: Gender is entirely constructed through language. You so often point at Papatūānuku and speak in binary. But what quality does gender represent outside of this system, what holy body part props up out of the ground as the stars descend and the earth turns? There is no girl-dick of nature just waiting to be found in the heart of the discourse nor is there some binary of sex that lingers in the heart of the mountain. When I appeal to nature I appeal to Her because I live on a giant and dead fish, a fish that we shall care for until it rots. I appeal to nature because it is fluid and because we come from it. I thank you, Maui, for finding this place for us. A place that is always moving. Always transitioning. 

To pretend that gender is built on anything stronger than paper is a lie, to think gender is built on anything but the violence of the musket, its powder and its ball, is a lie, to think gender is some sacred energy from the moon or the sea or the rivers and mountains, is a lie. But another thing that I’m keenly aware of is cis people with colonial minds are fucking good at living in lies, be they made of money or made of binaries. As I continue my haerenga towards te Ao Māori (a world I’ve always been a part of), I am glad. I am so, so, so, fucking done with colonial bullshit. 

It’s late now. It’s early. My flatmate; she’s gone to bed, so I get up to turn the lights off, and check the sliding doors are closed, there is a stubborn give as I slide it all the way shut. The click of the lock. There are birds calling out there in the early morning. Can you hear them? 

Just listen to them.

Just listen.

I lie back down.