I’m sitting in the car at a red light. It’s 6:10am, just on time to get my sisters to school. The man with the hand wiper and the Pepsi bottle full of diluted dish detergent walks up the car expectantly. For once, I let him. He smiles wide, happy to have a customer that wasn’t first a hostage this early in the morning.
As he wipes, I pass him a $100 note and he beams from ear to ear. He thanks me profusely, saying,
“Blessings mi sistah!”
I don’t correct him, as he collects the cash, still wiping the glass; a practiced motion to beat the light and avoid the cacophony of blaring horns that would erupt at the sight of traffic being held up. I simply reply my usual,
“Yeh man”, with a nod and a smile.
For a moment, he thinks, still cleaning the glass dutifully. He considers the pitch and timbre of my voice. “A suh ooman fi sound? Oh rahtid is a man,” he seems to realize and begins a routine I’ve become all too familiar with, a ritual of profuse apology. An almost desperate attempt to correct what he sees as a grave transgression against one of his fellow men.
“Tanks mi general”
He laughs nervously, worrying over my “male” pride almost as much as he worries the glass. I smile weakly and release a chuckle that dies as it leaves my throat.
The light turns green.
I drop my sisters to school.
I go home.
I cry a little.
Something I find exceedingly interesting about gender and how it operates in Jamaica is the paradox of its sheer rigidity and blurriness. For all intents and purposes, at the time of writing, for my own safety and against my own wishes, I dress in a manner that is unmistakeably masculine:
Short locs, stubble, short-sleeved button-ups, crocs, jeans. The same 3 pairs of fucking jeans.
Sure, I accessorize with some less-than-typically-masculine pieces: a bracelet, pearls, a touch of nail polish, my ever-present collection of small silver hoops, a waft of floral perfume, but it is a wonder to me that so often I get “mistaken” for a woman. Are these small things, which I have admittedly taken most of my life to discover my affinity for, really enough to make me cross to the other side of the gender binary in the eyes of my fellow countrypeople?
I don’t begrudge all of the windshield-wipers, gas station attendants, random people at cafes their confusion. They see someone who could conceivably be a woman except for one tell-tale sign and they panic, fearing… what exactly? Offending me? Jamaicans, for all our fire, are generally kind people (once you’re not assessed to be a transgressor of course), so maybe they feared labelling me as one of them. Maybe they feared what they thought I might do or say as a “man” being “disrespected” in that way. Maybe. I don’t think I’ll ever really know.
It’s a scary world where the defined roles for the two genders we’ve given primacy in our society can be so easily blurred together, at least for those who believe that primacy is both natural and immutable. I represent something destabilizing for these people, even in my closetedness, I represent the end or the invalidation of everything they know about gender, about people, about nature.
Given that, what’s stopping me from doing more?