Was I Not A Woman?
On no longer belonging to the group.
Let’s do this, darling. Welcome.
I want to tell you about something that just happened. Not to talk unnecessary, petty shit, but to work out some thoughts, and do some feminist work.
I’ve been wondering—
How do we reimagine literary communities, the category of woman, who belongs to this group—and who does not?
In just a few weeks (!) on February 22, 2022, my book In Sensorium: Notes for My People will be published. Inner peace is all I crave right now. After working myself to the bone to finish writing the book and relaunch TANAÏS all of last year, this January, I’ve been nesting in a cocoon, not wearing a drop of makeup, cooking every meal, practicing yoga and dance, taking care of my partner, Mojo, after neglecting the pleasures of our home and each others’ presence and bodies, all while avoiding the latest mutation of the virus.
I burst my own bubble—bliss can only last but so long—with a stupid move: I peeked at a list of Most Anticipated Books by Women of Color in 2022. Everyone warns us: Don’t care about these things, they’re stupid, they don’t mean anything. Fuck it, I checked.
I won’t name the author or publisher of the list, just like they didn’t name me.
This omission definitely put me in a mood. I felt bad, sad, and mad, at myself mostly, for even giving a shit. For expecting anything from the literary world, ever. I don’t expect to be on lists. I don’t expect grants, awards, press, but when they come, of course, I take whatever I can get.
What did it mean that I wasn’t on this list, of all the lists, this is one where I believed I belonged, where my community could find me, among other writers—women and femmes—the writers I consider my actual literary community. Writers whom I’ve grown alongside in the literary world, women writers of color, ever since Brooklyn College MFA and the publication of Bright Lines, my first novel. I’d always belonged to this tribe of women of color, a term I hate for its imprecision, but shorthand that’s worked fine enough for so long.
“They left you out because of your pronouns,” my sister Promiti texted me. “They assume you identify as nonbinary.”
“As if women of color wouldn’t want to be on a list with nonbinary writers, as if we don’t all want to read each other’s books?”
A few years ago, I published an essay on them, “Changing My Name is a Celebration of My Identity, My Past and My Future” (not my title!) but the point of this essay was to announce I was no longer to be called Tanwi Nandini Islam, I wanted to be called Tanaïs, and that I wanted to return to gender-neutral pronouns, reflective of my mother tongue Bangla. I had never asked to be “she” or to be a woman. Woman bears the weight of man on its end. I’m sensitive to language, how it looks, how it sounds, how it feels on the tongue, and for me, woman no longer holds. But do I name myself nonbinary in the piece? No. Nonbinary is an identity for very dear people in my life, for them, it works. But it is not the term for me. I don’t call myself non anything. So I do not call myself nonbinary. This is a personal choice.
I reject the gender binary. My being, the way I move, the way I look, the way I evolve, the way I speak, the way I love and desire and inhabit this world, and want people to love and inhabit this world, rejects the gender binary.
I am femme. I am queer. I use they/them pronouns.
My sister, of course, was right.
"Women and queer, trans, and nonbinary people have been denied the freedom to share our thoughts and discoveries for millennia. Writing is a sacred place to validate our present existence and eons we’ve never known..." (from my essay in them.)
The writer reached out to me, and congratulated me, after I left a comment on her page, simply with the title and pub date of my book, sparkle emoji. She congratulated me, hearts.
We exchanged a few direct messages. She reiterated that there’d been feedback, a discourse, among nonbinary writers in the community—a consensus that women & nonbinary writers or women & femme writers not be clumped together. She let me know that the list did include trans women. Of course, as it should. I did notice that, but still, why was my work—entirely devoted to the liberation of women & femmes and the Bangladeshi diaspora, not included? It was hard not to see this as an erasure, one that I’m painfully aware of in myriad spaces. In South Asian spaces, the dominant voices are Indian, often upper caste Hindu; in Asian-American spaces, they are East Asian; in Muslim spaces, Arab, Persian, North African or Southwest Asian. Light-skinned people so often centered. When you’re of Bangladeshi descent, you belong to all these groups, in a way, but so often you feel like you don’t fully belong. Because our work and our history is not recognized, seen, uplifted or included as part of broader South Asian, Asian-American or Muslim spaces.
I totally would’ve included your book, she told me, but she felt hesitant to misgender me, after reading my essay in them. I wrote this four years ago. Since my discomfort with being named a “Muslim woman writer” is central to that piece—she decided to respect what I’d written.
We are so woke we are not even awake. Not even alive to actual people who are right there, ready to dialogue and share their truth.
Respecting me would’ve been risking the awkward exchange, not assuming information from four years ago, and sending me a direct message. A simple: I thought to include your work on this list of women of color, but I don’t want to misgender you, would you please let me know what works for you?
Then I could’ve added my two femme cents to the discourse. Then a brown-skinned, Muslim femme person would not be erased.
I absolutely understand why many nonbinary writers may not wish to be grouped in with the monolith of “women.” We need spaces that are theirs. (Do I belong there, take up space there, either? I’m still figuring this out. But it says a lot that a brown-skinned femme person feels they cannot take up space, no?)
The word woman, the idea of a woman, is so loaded, so triggering, so wrong if it’s not you. My femme identity is rooted in how “woman” no longer feels true. I understand why we should want to carve out our own spaces.
“How radical would it be to see a ‘Most Anticipated list’ and it doesn’t mention it’s for women, trans or nonbinary people of color and just IS only made up of trans and women and nonbinary writers?” Promiti says to me on video chat.
Yes. This feels right to me.
Women’s spaces are important to women, I know this firsthand, and while I deeply believe women deserve to be cherished, loved and respected, we have to acknowledge how a part of undoing dominance—which does include the category of woman in relation to trans and nonbinary people—is how cis women reify patriarchal dominance, too. I am still learning, and unlearning, too. One of the best pieces I’ve read in the past week is written by the “transmasculine and chronically ill queer Muslim media maker, curator and communications specialist from Bangladesh,” Mikail Khan, about growing up in search of transmasculine community in Bangladesh. Read this piece.
Whereas my center and experience is femme, they write in a way that deepens my knowing of transmasculine experience, which deepens my own experience on earth.
I disagree that naming women & trans & queer & femmes together inherently erases our differences. I see the & between these peoples as a union. By broadening the definition of marginalized stories to uplift and protect and support in a single space—we can be held together in communion and solidarity.
For example, I write the phrase women & femmes throughout In Sensorium, to discuss feminine and female-assigned people throughout the book. I bring this up to show how the word and represents a unity, a community. Not a clumping, but wholes and worlds that exist side-by-side, equals in their innate truth, each marginalized by heterosexist patriarchal dominance and violence. When I employ the phrase women & femmes in my book, I include women, cis and trans women, AND femmes, among whom are queers, trans and nonbinary people and deities.
I do respect how the writer reached out to me. She held space for my honest and unfiltered opinion. This moment marked a profound personal evolution these last seven years since I published my first book. Back then, I felt I had to play a part, of a smart, respectable literary woman writer. My queerness, best experienced through my characters, not me. And with my long hair and feminine appearance, no one read me as queer. Only when I cut my hair short again, in 2020, after the essay announcing my new name, did I start to be called a queer writer! a queer business owner! a queer founder! I love it, but I wish my ultra femme appearance could make others believe what I am.
After our messages, it slowly dawned on me: I no longer felt wholly at home in all-women’s spaces. This woke me up to how uncomfortable it felt to be excluded, it broke my heart in a way, because it felt scary. But why did I want to be included if I had to explain myself to be there? Despite a whole lifetime gendered as a girl and woman, a cisgender femme embodiment, and a very excruciating year of writing and research, mostly about women and femmes—I still do not feel comfortable being labeled a woman writer.
And yet, the question still haunted me—
Did women really have nothing left to learn from my work, because somehow, me as femme and they/them, banished me to no woman’s land?
“But I make a great woman!” I cried to Mojo, “Everything I’ve done is for women.” That night, I couldn’t help it, I wept, but it also reiterated how toxic the idea of woman felt, when you no longer belonged—this experience reiterated painful limitations. What was I mourning anyway? The privilege, the protection, the naming, the inclusion — what dominance affords. Why did being omitted feel less like an affirmation of my pronouns, and more like I couldn’t sit at the women of color writer’s table anymore?
“You do make a great woman,” Mojo said. “No one can take that from you.”
As a femme person, in this body, each and every day of my life, I am read as a woman, I am treated as a woman, I am perceived as a woman, and my life partner is a cisgender man—heteronormative privilege that begs the question, How are you not a woman? How are you queer? What can I say to this? I have had sexual and emotional experiences and desires before this relationship, I am drawn to masculine people, cis, trans and non-binary, I am searching for my truth, just like everyone else. Mind-body-heart connection is a process that Mojo and I, in our masculine-feminine dance, committed to for life. We are each other’s lovers, but also in a strange way, each other’s children, each other’s parents. We chose not to have children to love each other more, to heal together, to nurture each other’s growth in every way, shape and form. For me, queering romantic love looks like what we are building together.
As I get closer to who I’m meant to be, who I want to be, femme is truest. Femme pulses with the queer, the feminine, the powerful, raging, soft, fluid—the Divine.
This feminine divine guided me as I wrote my book, and there is little in the American literary imagination that feeds this part of my writing process. Is my assertion of myself as they/them, my desire to return to my pre-English, Bangla mother-tongued, ancestral or divine self, enough to strip me of all the experiences I’ve lived as a woman?
Is me being the truest version of myself, then, walking away from myself as a woman?
No one can take my experiences as a woman from me, just as no one can take my name Tanwi Nandini Islam from me, and yet, I hold the transitions and transformations and contradictions at once. Audre Lorde said once, in an interview, only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat. And her writing on difference in Sister Outsider, shaped me as a young feminist, on how to hold the complexity of our differences, to see them as powerful sites of confluence between us, but to never forget they’re there. In a neoliberal dominant culture fearful of misnaming or misgendering—let’s be honest, more for fear of being canceled than actually doing the work of dialogue—the outcome is that everyone feels safest in their own lane, where they can nurture their own community.
Women will never be safe and free—whether we’re talking access to abortion or periods or reproductive health, ending rape culture or writing literature—if nonbinary and trans and queer and femme people are not also safe and free in regard to these exact things. What happens to them and theirs, happens to us and ours, too. Women are not the only ones writing women’s stories and lives. We don’t all just want to write and read our own stories and lives. We need to write to each other, read each other, and free each other, as we do this for ourselves.
When you read In Sensorium: Notes For My People, you will see that how I sought to touch something ancient, for a future where we may witness liberation for all beings.
Love,
Tanaïs
P.S. Thank you for reading my first letter! I will be releasing a letter each Friday leading up to my book launch at The Strand Bookstore in New York City. Friday, 2/25. More on that soon, and the afterparty at The Sultan Room, if it’s even possible to see each other in real life. Below, an excerpt of IN SENSORIUM: NOTES FOR MY PEOPLE (HARPER BOOKS 2/2/22)
“…I hold the transitions and transformations and contradictions at once.” ❤️❤️❤️