The Fixed Stars

by Molly Wizenberg

“There are some people that one loves,” admits the wife in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, “and others that one perhaps would rather be with.”

There’s this really great passage from a book I love, The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson. “How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?”

I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self.

Androgyny is not gender’s absence; it’s the negotiation made visible.