At that time, the cage of my circumstance, in my mind, was my gender. Not its actuality—I liked my body well enough. What I didn’t like was what I thought it signified: that I was tied to my “nature,” to my animal body—to the whole simian realm of instinct—and far more elementally so than, say, my brothers. I had “cycles.” They did not. I was to pay attention to “clocks.” They needn’t. There were special words for me, lurking on the horizon, prepackaged to mark the possible future stages of my existence.
