Friends, this is a meditation on gender written from love, for love, and by love. 

It is for this time and it is like this:

Gender is a Place

Imagine a planet

much like our own

with beaches and swamps and alleys and sunrises and such. 

And imagine on this planet a great ecosystem of cities and towns and histories. 

Traveling to one, we find the Realm of Woman.

With beautiful gardens and comfy homes.

Mechanic shops with greasy jumpsuit butches.

Fluffy kitty kiosks run by bisexual femmes in frilly skirts and cat ears. 

There are women with vaginas and women with penises, and mothers, and scientists, and musicians, and priestesses, 

and everything that it might be to be a Woman and all these things are being co-created and tended by all the beings for whom that word woman is resonating. 

And at the center of the realm is a temple that houses the infinite mystery of Being a Woman. 

And to be a woman is to worship this mystery. 

And it is the same in the great Realm of Man.

Where there are basketball games, and drag queens, and farmers markets, and goofy smiles, and spitting competitions, and bragging rights, and going on adventures, and coming home, and men with penises, and men with vaginas, and fathers, and carpenters, and doctors, and dancers, and everything that it might be to be a Man. 

And at the center is a temple which houses the infinite mystery of Being a Man. 

And to be a man is to worship this mystery.

And there are other realms. 

Some are very small, some are nameless and unnameable, and some are ruins lost to time.

There are queer realms with community closets like the Library of Alexandria,

And hair dye shops like ice cream parlors,

And experts in fermentations of all varieties,

And spidermen in crop tops, 

And seven people riding a tandem bike who are all named Newt. 

And at the center of these realms are their own

mutant, 

prismatic, 

orgasmic,

technicolor temples

And the devotees arrive in the style of their mysteries

with offerings of nighttime winking at possums, catching minnows, picking up your friend’s meds at the pharmacy, silk bootlaces, laying naked on the rock, gardening dandelions, orchids, and wearing your mother’s coat. 

And to be this mystery is to worship this mystery.

And to worship this mystery is to be this mystery.

And between these places of gender stretches a still yet greater wilderness that contains in itself its own great mysteries and places that call to us and places we can call home. 

The realms do not stand against one another.

They are not opposites. 

Some of the realms have similar shops but the infinite mysteries that flow from their temples cast them in slightly different lights. 

And these mysteries call to us in our own way and we have our own relationships with them. 

And these mysteries are a love more powerful than any human law or cruelty.

Sometimes we live in one place for a while and then move on 

or we live somewhere and visit others from time to time 

or different parts of ourselves might even live in different places at the same time

or nowhere at all. 

These places can change in ways beyond our control. 

But no one can keep us from our temples

No one can force us to live anywhere

And everyone is able to travel and find our own way of belonging. 

And in this way, we are free.