Hello from Paris!
I did it. I finished another draft of my ultra lezzie book called A Word of Our Own, which is a kind of memoir of my homo female life, also necessarily featuring my mother and grandmother. It’s entirely possible this new version is worse. I don’t care. I don’t even care if no one publishes it. It screws with my mind and I can’t work on it anymore.
I lay in bed all night feeling ashamed, and ashamed of being ashamed at the thought someone will read it. I don’t know how to explain it to you. I’m ashamed of a lot of things that shouldn’t logically provoke it—like aging. I find many older women gorgeous, and don’t think we should be ashamed of wrinkles or sagging skin, but when it happens to me I still shrink from the mirror.
Culture and conditioning don’t really pass through the brain. Shame slides down my neck and up from my diaphragm. My knees, at least, are immune.
Maybe my shame has something to do with conflict and how I was taught to avoid it. Or that I’m afraid I’ll be ostracized when the people I spent time with in the activist trenches learn I’m on the other side of some of the lines they’ve redrawn.
It doesn’t matter that I think the lines are morally crap, or practically “Here, have a swig of bleach” anti-scientifically wrong. It doesn’t matter either that I think I have a moral obligation to say what I think is true. The fact is—I’m very conformist. I may do the whole criticism of the left from the left thing—extending my role as the kid in the back of the class making jokey asides. But as soon as the teacher orders, “Ms. Cogswell, please share what you said with the class!” I shrink. I wilt.
Sometime around 3 a.m., I figured out that I’ve also been humiliated one too many times. Lying awake, some things came back to me that I didn’t even remember when I was working on my book. I put in my own mother harassing me about my weight, how the girls when I was living in a dorm one summer chanted lez, lez, lez outside my door. I wrote about the insults and death threats, menaces of sexual assault when Ana and I had The Gully online magazine. And men throwing bottles at me from cars, “Fucking dyke.”
But I forgot some of the briefer episodes. Like that one time the kids in my neighborhood threw small rocks at me growing up and I didn’t know why. Or how I got attacked when I published a really funny article in the Huffington Post joking about those men who responded to the International Women’s Day by demanding their own International Day.
They didn’t just leave nasty replies on my article. When my first book was coming out, and I searched my name wondering what reviewers or readers would find if they googled me, I discovered they’d also circulated my name and photo so widely, saying “Kelly Cogswell’s ugly, Kelly Cogswell’s stupid. No wonder she can’t get a man,” that they’d obliterated two decades of bylines as a journalist. Because their posts dominated the whole first page of results.
I almost puked. My book was coming out in weeks. Everybody would know Kelly was ugly, Kelly was stupid. My first public appearances afterwards were pure torture. I didn’t want to show my ugly stupid face.
Also, they ruined a picture I’d liked. It got taken at the Fantastic Fiction reading series at KGB bar in New York. I was sitting there waiting for it to begin, and staring thoughtfully at my glass of bourbon. I thought I looked contemplative. But no, I was just dour, unspeakably ugly because I couldn’t get a man. If I remember correctly, many photos were humorously labeled dog.
We’re often told that after getting harassed enough we develop a thicker skin. I find that the damage accumulates. It’s why female journalists are chased from social media. Why I have a newsletter instead of a column that I used to win prizes for from the New York Press Association. The last straw was when people from my own LGBTQ+ community denounced me as a transphobe, as a bigot on a secret queer listserve because I said it was wrong and misogynistic for anyone, including trans activists, to threaten women with sexual violence for any reason whatsoever. Apparently it’s also a sin to say sex exists.
This is the thing. I still believe those two things. In fact, I think everyone should. The first is a question of morality. If you think threatening a woman with rape, sexual mutilation, death is okay for any reason then you’re a fucking monster, or maybe a thirteen year old online. The second is a matter of science. Humans are not clownfish but mammals with one category producing sperm, another eggs.
Genetics makes everything seem complicated, and it is on a microscopic level, but zoom out and whatever you think about gender, for instance, doesn’t change the fact that humans only have two sexes. And those two sexes have social (and medical) consequences. Especially for females attracted to same.
I return to both things in the book because they’ve shaped my life. And it’s a terrible grief in this month of Pride that I’m ashamed to say so.
In Other News… Science Is Still Good
Another really good newsletter from Caroline Criado Perez, this time about the gall of how female surgeons continue to have female hands.
And in Making Light of Detransition, Dave Hewitt looks at what one study actually says as opposed to how the media is characterizing it. He offers a lot of quotes so you can assess what he’s saying.
That’s it for this week. I’m going to go for a run before it starts raining again.
Disgruntedly yours,
Ugly Dogswell