Leaving the Sisterhood of Women Writers

The more I wrote about women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.

Almost two years ago, I said goodbye to one of the most important people in my life: my first therapist. I’d started seeing S while in the throes of what I now suspect was a meltdown, the kind of aimless yet suffocating malaise in which hours would pass without me realizing. I’d come to in my dark, carpeted bedroom, lying face-down on the ground and wishing I could cast through the floor and melt into the earth. Sometimes I’d mix it up by having a panic attack: My entire body would go numb, and my partner would have to carry me.

During my time with S, I learned how to mitigate and manage these reactions; my general anxieties; the crush of 2016 and the determination to see life through anyway. In our last session, S had me write a letter to myself‚ the kind of cheesy exercise I adore. As I scribbled away happily, I found myself writing, without any precursor: “Also, and I don’t really know what to do with this, but I don’t really know how I feel about my gender anymore, haha?”

When S asked if I wanted to share my letter, I instantly said, “No,” thrown off by that sentence that came out of “nowhere” and the wall that went up at the idea of sharing it with anyone—even someone I trusted as much as her.

*

For as long as I’ve been a writer, I’ve been a woman writer. Through pluck and chance, I landed my first regular writing and editing gig for a website run by my college’s journalism school. They were only in their second year of operation and happened to need someone who cared enough about music to run that entire vertical, and I was willing and able to run around Los Angeles covering shows.

I was a physically small Asian American woman in a scene dominated by large, white men, and I began to consciously imbue that perspective in my work. The “diversity in entertainment” conversation was beginning to kick into earnest, and by the time I graduated, I felt a strong sense of responsibility to identify myself as a woman of color working primarily in spaces that were not, historically speaking, friendly to me.

This responsibility ballooned when I landed an internship, and then a staff position, at a website that epitomized a certain kind of “women’s media.” Girl power was on the menu every day. I’d taken a class literally called “Sex, Politics, and Power” in college, and my nascent vocabulary of #feminism buzzwords grew, as did my general awareness of just how bad everything was for girls! Like! Us!

I felt a strong sense of responsibility to identify myself as a woman of color working in spaces that were not, historically speaking, friendly to me.

I learned how to write in what could generously be called a “cool big sister” dialect, and I leveraged my particular experience writing about music to interview female musicians about, well, just how hard it was to be a woman in a predominantly man’s world. This was all part of the general move in media, women’s and otherwise, toward writing centered on unique identity experiences and challenges, so I also started to write about being an Asian American woman.

After I quit that job, many of my freelance clips came from that same locus of experience: I am an Asian American woman, this is my story. Even when I wasn’t directly writing about women, or feminism, or being nonwhite in America, I would still find ways to weave this perspective into my work. I got another job in women’s media, and again found myself parroting the same tone of, “Ladies, let’s get it! We can care about our hair and reality TV and gun violence and the slow rot of democracy.” I began to take on more ambitious reporting work that, though uncentered on my identity, gained notice from followings that had grown around, well, my identity.

This culminated with the biggest story I’ve written to date: a music magazine cover feature on an Asian American artist. She’s a rock musician; I’d written about rock musicians. But it seemed obvious that I was assigned to the story because of who I am, just as much as the fact that I’d worked with an editor at that magazine on a few other pieces. And when the feature went live, I received emails and tweets expressing sentiments to the effect of, Thank you for writing this piece so thoughtfully, as an Asian American woman. Many of these missives came from young Asian American women, but always young women—including someone who later reached out to me for her book project centered on what it’s like to be a woman writer.

*

Here’s the catch: Over the course of the past few years, I have begun to feel like a stranger in my body. The femme styles I’d always claimed as my aesthetic began to look more and more wrong on me. I found myself experiencing the same numbness I used to get from panic attacks over exclamations as innocuous as, “Hey lady!” The more I wrote about girls and women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror.

I started wearing pants again, after years of expressing that I wished I could only wear skirts and dresses forever. I remembered that the reason I went through such an intense depression, which precipitated my visits to S, was likely because I’d started on a low-dose hormonal birth control pill. I couldn’t stop thinking about the sentence I’d written in that letter to myself in therapy, the queasiness and embarrassment I’d felt for expressing it, and the fact that the feeling was now growing stronger and stronger, like a parasite that fed specifically on my insistence that I was—I am—I have never wanted anything more than to be a woman.

But I don’t. Throwaway comments and memories suddenly seemed like prescient and bewildering prophecies: my partner calling me the “bro-iest person I know.” Every instance my parents scolded me and told me to act more “ladylike.” My intense self-identification with the male protagonists of action anime series, which started at the same time as puberty. The fact that one of the protagonists in my novel in progress is a trans boy, and I’d spend my downtime at work looking up information about transitioning “for the book.”

The more I wrote about girls and women, the more distanced I felt from the figure I saw in the mirror. 

I started dressing to consciously summon the “soft boy” aesthetic I saw in Tokyo street style posts; anime fan art; the kind of knowing wink that people who dress to turn heads possess, but in a way that would make a snap judgment about my gender harder. I cut my hair shorter and shorter. I bought one binder, and then another. The night before Valentine’s Day, I told my partner, through tears, that I didn’t want to live as a woman anymore.

*

My entire life, my parents’ nickname for me has been “Leo.” It’s my sun sign and a passable pivot from my actual name. (My dad unknowingly sends me zodiac memes, under the charming assumption that they’re actually meant for people named “Leo.”) The old nickname I’d gone by, assigned to me by other people throughout my life, felt more and more like wearing a pair of shoes that squeezed my toes too tightly. I asked my partner to call me “Lio,” a portmanteau that has the added benefits of being precious and different.

I reached out to a friend of a friend who’s transitioned, and he told me about the place I’m now going to for therapy. Every week, I get closer and closer to telling my new therapist, E, that I want to begin hormone replacement therapy. By the time this piece is live, I will most likely be taking testosterone in an attempt to understand something about myself: the way I’ve changed, and want to change more.

This isn’t to say that I am suddenly not a woman writer. That part of me is impossible to erase from my history. I am grateful for the fact that being a woman writer has allowed me to touch so many people’s lives and put me in contact with folks I treasure as friends and confidants within the writing world. Without women’s media, I wouldn’t have a career—and I might never have found such a concrete way to articulate how poorly I identified with womanhood at large.

Now I’ve found myself in a space where I can advise young writers, those who identify as women and otherwise. Including the young woman who reached out to me about the book project, who during our interview told me that I was the first person she’d spoken to who’d stressed the importance of learning about and specific resources for freelance labor laws, as well as the fact that freelancers have to protect themselves—because most publications won’t. But my “laughing alone with salad” days are over. I can’t, and won’t, parry with the voice in my head that insists that I can just be a woman; that to try to live and be otherwise is a joke or a razor’s edge that will cut me when I fail.

Without women’s media, I wouldn’t have a career—and I might never have found a way to articulate how poorly I identified with womanhood at large. 

To all the people who’ve sent work my way because, in part, of my identity: thank you. I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but I’m not the only Asian American “woman” who can write about these things. To my friends and my sister: I would indeed prefer if you started calling me Lio, but I understand that old habits die hard; I have patience, if you have persistence. To my parents and my partner: I keep having dreams in which you leave me, and I don’t know what to do with that. With my parents, this may have to be just another thing we sweep under the rug; you’ll tell me my hair is too short, and I’ll remind you that you used to tell me that my hair was too long. With my partner, I cannot express how thankful I am for your love and courage.

To the young women who’ve stumbled upon my work, both the pieces that are built on the idea of me, a woman writer, and the ones that aren’t: I still have things I can tell you, teach you, but what you’ll learn in your own time is that anything can change. The industry, your interests, your skills. Your feelings about the world, about the people close to you, about yourself. What I urge you to practice is honesty and empathy toward every version of “you” you shed and grow out of. And when the next generation turns to you, implore them to do the same.