
Without Borders
I
t is one thing to have read about how quantum physics suggests that everything is connected even if it seems to be far apart, or that we are all the same energy flowing in and out of different shapes, or what Einstein said about the mere illusion of our personal separateness from the rest of the universe. It’s one thing to have heard that what may appear to be individual mushrooms are actually all interconnected by a mycelium tapestry under the forest floor, that for example a honey mushroom network in Oregon spanning 2,300 acres is actually a single massive organism, and to ponder the philosophical implications. It’s one thing to listen to John Lennon dazedly sing, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”
It is another thing entirely to lay in the back of our crossover SUV with the seats folded down, somewhere off of a dirt road off of a lonely highway in the bright and endless desert, with all my clothes torn off and her fingers fluttering inside and about me and my hand clutching her hair and her mouth on mine and all my sweaty arms and legs wrapped around her and moving in such rhythm that I can’t tell if she’s thrusting or I’m heaving until with sudden shrieking laughter the boundaries between her being and mine dissolve and we are two currents of wind flying into the same space in the same direction and impossible to distinguish from each other as we flow through the beaming sky. Yeah—it’s another thing to feel it.
We release each other and I drop back, breathing and blinking—at first fast and wide like someone emerging from hypnosis, and then slow and rhythmic like a cat in love. Kat is sitting upright, looking out at the sands with a puzzled face. She asks, “What state are we in now?”
“Bliss,” I answer dreamily.
She smiles but rolls her eyes. “Yeah, but I mean like, if a state trooper were pulling up behind us, which state would it-” My head whips up just enough to peek over the bottom rim of the window while keeping the rest of my body out of sight, only to find a barren landscape with no one to see me anyway. Kat chuckles, patting my belly. “Just needed to snap you out of it,” she says and flops down next to me. “My turn.”
A little later, we’re cruising along US 160, which clips a little triangle of New Mexico on its way from Colorado to Arizona. We’ve been on the road for a few weeks, hopping between national parks and historical sites and goofy roadside attractions over enough territory that it isn’t surprising that one might forget just where she is. Abruptly as a plateau, Kat turns from the window and asks, “Does it bother you that I forget you’re transgender sometimes?”
“Still?” I ask. Some people I meet immediately recognize me as trans, others don’t. Kat didn’t at first, but we’ve been seeing each other for over a year now.
“Yeah, like I was figuring out that I’ll get my period next week and for just a split second before my brain caught up, I wondered if we were in sync. I know it’s a myth, but sometimes that seemed to happen with other women I dated. Anyway, I know you said you’re a ‘trans woman,’ but I just never think of you that way unless I try. So, does that bother you?”
“I don’t know,” I said, taking my time to consider. “Being trans is an important part of my life—of who I am. So it feels a little strange to ignore it. But … I guess if it’s going to be one way or the other, it’s better that you forget about it than go the opposite direction.”
“What would be the opposite direction?”
“Thinking about it too much. Thinking that I’m not a woman because of it.”
“That’s a dumb way of thinking.”
“Very dumb,” I agree, “but historically a lot of people have thought that way.”
Her face scrunches up. “Some conservative men, maybe.”
“No. A lot of women too, a lot of lesbians, a lot of them calling themselves feminists.”
“What was their problem?”
I chew on my lip a little. Kat and I have very different areas of expertise. While I was in a liberal arts college studying women’s literature and gender history and queer theory and social justice, she was in an accelerated vocational program laser focused on silly things like how to resuscitate someone in cardiac arrest or prevent a wound victim from bleeding out in the field. Her queer community extended only about as far as her rugby team, and she doesn’t spend much time on the internet. So as often happens when our conversations veer in this direction, I pause to consider the quickest route through.
“A lot of it comes down to space—like spaces for women, which haven’t always been easy to come by, and who belongs in them. Have you ever heard of the Michigan Women’s Music Festival?” She shakes her head. “It started back in the '70s by a group of women who wanted to have a place to exist without men, where they wouldn’t worry about being objectified and harassed, to not have to deal with male oppression, to just connect with other women.”
“That’s a pretty cool idea.”
“Very cool idea,” I agree. “Unfortunately, the people running it decided that trans women weren’t women—so they kicked out trans women attending, made rules that we weren’t allowed to attend, said only women born with vaginas counted and anyone else was a male intruder.”
She hums in thought. “Does that bother you?”
“Well, transphobia in general bothers me, sure, but the festival? Not really. My philosophy on parties I’m not invited to is—why would I want to hang out with the kind of people who wouldn’t invite me? I probably wouldn’t be very welcome at a Nazi rally either, but I’m not losing sleep over it. Besides, I guess if it weren’t for the ban, then Camp Trans wouldn’t exist. It started as a protest and then became kind of a festival of its own.”
“And that was just for trans women?”
“No, that was for everybody.”
She nods and concludes, “That’s how it should be. I don’t see any difference between us anyway.” But after turning back to look at the passing landscape, she amends, “I mean, except since you froze your sperm, you know … we could make a kid.” I smile. She’s not wrong.
When the car gets quiet again, I think more about her question. Unlike some trans women in generations past, I never concerned myself with “stealth”—with blending in to the point that I could pretend to be a cisgender woman because I was presumed to be one. My social circle was well mixed in terms of genders and sexualities. Most of my closest friends happened to be cisgender women, but it certainly wasn’t exclusive by design. Did such groups even really still exist—these groups of “girlfriends” mythologized by movies and television—the kind who get their nails painted together and buy each other’s MLM products and use the word “lunch” as a verb? If they did, I had no strong desire to join one—hell, I couldn’t afford it. The times I found myself invited by acquaintances to events that briefly replicated that kind of female-only world, I had the odd sense of being admitted as a kind of special case, though it may have been my imagination and it may have had more to do with my bank account than my biology.
In any case, I had never cared whether I was considered “no different” from a cisgender woman—as though all cisgender women shared some essential quality anyway. No less a woman, certainly, but “difference” meant little to me one way or the other. Until, I suppose, I met Kat—this sharp, unpretentious, beautiful, funny, up-for-anything, Kinsey-6 lesbian in my passenger seat. Whatever in the world might have contributed to her falling in love with me—how could I be bothered? In truth, I loved her so much back that there was something undeniably satisfying in her seeing me as “no different”—in there being no lines drawn between us.
I had never cared whether I was considered “no different” from a cisgender woman—as though all cisgender women shared some essential quality anyway. No less a woman, certainly, but “difference” meant little to me one way or the other.
Kat and I had very few boundaries from the beginning. In entirely stereotypical fashion, we raced into each other’s lives at full speed. We kept no secrets, and mere months passed before serious conversations on cohabitation, marriage, and children were well underway. And maybe owing to that her work as a nurse necessitated a comfort with bodies and their fluids, we quickly moved into that realm of familiarity in which not only was leaving the bathroom door open while on the toilet perfectly acceptable but to shut it even felt strange—once, when I absent-mindedly closed it, Kat just as casually opened it to chat, and before leaving she paused to check, “By the way, is everything good, because I’m picking up kind of a weird vibe?”
Bathrooms! It hits me. That might have been quicker to explain than the music festival and more relevant. Public bathrooms with those stark lines and thick walls dividing the stick figures from the stick figures in stick dresses—as ubiquitous a gendered space and as simple and clean a gender border as there is. Of course, real borders are a lot messier than that. Consider physical sex and the millimetre-specific medical definitions used to measure enlarged clitorises and micropenises in newborns with “ambiguous” genitalia. Consider the fact that plenty of butch cisgender women have been harassed and expelled from public ladies’ rooms under suspicion of being transgender. Consider that for a while, I was legally a woman at the state level because I only needed hormone therapy to change my driver’s license marker, yet I was legally a man at the federal level because proof of surgery was required to change my gender with the Social Security Administration. Real borders are messy.
In political geography, there are two ways to decide a border—either you follow the landscape, or you just draw a line and set a guard.
Take the state in which I was born—Illinois. On the west, we were bordered by the broad and squiggling flow of the Mississippi River that separated us from Iowa and Missouri. On the north, however, we were bordered by nothing but an imaginary straight line drawn between our grassy fields and those of Wisconsin. There are some houses in Illinois which are only accessible by driving north into Wisconsin, turning east or west on Wisconsin’s State Line Road, and then turning south to cross the border again.
In such cases, things are rarely as simple as they look from a distance. Take Colorado, which appears perfectly rectangular on a full state map. On the county level, the borders are riddled with minor adjustments, some to correct historical surveying errors, some to follow fluctuations in the landscape, some simply owing to the perennial challenge of mapping a curved planet on a flat piece of paper. Ultimately, this apparent quadrilateral in fact has nearly 700 sides.
Shortly after crossing one of them, we break from the highway to visit the Four Corners Monument. It famously stands at the intersection of the Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah borders and less famously also marks the line between the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe Reservation and the Navajo Nation. The Navajo maintain the site, which consists of an ornamental stone seal in the ground with state names engraved in their respective ordinal directions surrounded by concrete walkways lined with booths for selling handmade tribal crafts with certificates of authenticity. If nothing else, it’s a good spot to stretch our legs.
While we wait for the crowd angling for photographs at the seal to thin, we take a stroll around the dusty perimeter, looking off at the choppy expanse of rich and varied browns in every direction. I pull out my camera for quick shots into each of the four states, which I would never again be able to identify from each other. It makes me chuckle.
“What’s funny?” Kat asks.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The whole place feels like a sort of a joke about itself, doesn’t it? A whole monument about borders, smack in the middle of this big desert with the exact same sand and rocks and sky in every direction.”
“Kind of silly,” she shrugs. “But it’s cute. Come on, the line’s short now.”
So we take a picture together on the seal, and to get the fullness of the experience, we hold hands and swing in a circle, careening about with our arms reaching across the lines, and then I do a backbend to plant my hands and feet all in different states. We buy a hand-painted decorative arrow blessed with fertility magic, and we get on our way.
As we cross another state line, me with one hand on the wheel and the other holding hers, I find myself thinking more about borders. It’s hard to avoid thinking about them in this place and this time with this administration in the White House trying to build a 2,000-mile-long monument to racism and xenophobia on the south end of the country.
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say “on the southern border” any more than it would be perfectly accurate to call the ridiculous stripe of frequently breached steel slats a “wall.” It cannot be, after all, as only about 700 miles of the border are straight(ish) imaginary lines across the landscape, and the other 1,300 consist of the Rio Grande, meaning that the barrier must be constructed quite north of the actual border, cutting off parts of the United States, including private property, including some US citizens’ homes, on the south side the stupid fucking thing. The thing that for all its bluster and astronomical cost has done little but blow holes in flood barriers, devastate ecosystems, sever wildlife migration routes, and disconnect animal habitats, to say nothing of tearing apart families. Like many walls, of course, be they literal like this one or figurative—like laws against abortion or against transition-related healthcare—there is little evidence that it reduces the number of people attempting to cross, only that it reduces the number who survive the attempt.
I look over at Kat when I realize her grip on my hand has loosened—Kat, who gets her raven black hair from grandfather, Pepe, who migrated from his Indigenous tribal home, crossed the U.S. border by unspecified means, and settled near Chicago where he married a freshly immigrated French woman (alongside whom he learned to speak English) and fulfilled his dream of opening a Mexican restaurant, all because in his tribe, men were not allowed to be cooks. She’s napping with her head against the glass, but she hasn’t let go.
A smile grows on my face as borders fade out of my thoughts and I feel the way I come to these western deserts to feel. Boundless. Dynamic. Free. “See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run,” I tap out on the steering wheel, “Boy, you’ve been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down … ”
We spend the night in Grand Canyon Village, and in the morning, we set out to hike along the south rim. We walk along the unrailed edge and past the juniper trees twisting dryly in the morning light and follow the irregular stone steps descending along the sandstone wall. We step out onto the jutting rock ledges offering dizzying panoramas. The sheer impossible scope and scale of it, that incomprehensible size, all that empty space that somehow feels tangible with the silent solemn pressure of the void, the other side tinged with the colour of distance so far out of reach that it may as well be imaginary, are enough to make one feel as though she were dangling off the very edge of the world. I wonder if Kat feels the same way.
“What are you thinking?” I ask as we sit and rest and look out.
“I’m thinking … if I had come across this place and no one had told me what it was or what it was called … I don’t think I would have thought to call it a canyon.”
“Interesting. Why not?”
“Well … when I think of the word ‘canyon,’ I think of something like a crack, like just a wide line where the ground is split, a sort of gap between things. And yeah, it is that, of course—but it’s just so big, and with so much in it. You get what I mean?”
I do get what she means. Before us is not just a line or a gap but a vast and intricate stony labyrinth full of plant and animal life, networks of streams flowing amongst its innumerable dips and rises, and home to so many over the millennia.
“Like it isn’t just a line between places,” she says. “It’s a whole place itself.”
I suppose that’s the thing about natural borders—rivers, mountains, canyons—as opposed to our imaginary lines. They are often worlds in and of themselves. And people live there.
It’s our last night together before Kat flies home and I continue on. I recommend a particular hotel as we pull into Phoenix.
“You’ve stayed there before?” Kat asks.
“No,” I tell her, “but I once slept in the parking lot across the street from it. It looked nice!”
She gives me the look of someone who has never slept in a parking lot, shakes her head, and tells me to book it.
While we rearrange our luggage to prepare for Kat’s flight, we’re quiet with the sense of our looming separation. For the last few weeks, we’ve hardly been out of each other’s presence—now it will be a few weeks until we see each other again, and neither of us wants to spoil the evening with cliché talk about the sweet sorrow of it all. So instead, we make love slowly as though we both know that as long as we’re making love the morning won’t come, and in between turns, we crack jokes about canyon diving, and then we put our heads down on the pillows.
Neither of us can fall asleep cuddling, so we roll away before we drift off. Closeness aside, we just aren’t the type to sleep in a pile of each other like meerkats. But sometimes, we sleep like otters—holding hands and floating together so we don’t drift apart in the night.
The next day, after the airport, I stop at a café and pull out my laptop to get my bearings, plan my next moves, and readjust my mind for tripping solo. Though I’ll miss Kat, there is a certain relief in being on my own again, if only to lose the constraints of time. Hers is more shaped by the boundaries of “vacation days,” and we plan our route to make the best use of them. I, on the other hand, as much as I love teaching, chose the career in part because of how much time I wouldn’t be doing it, because it allows me to set up an automated e-mail reply at the end of the spring semester saying something to the effect of: “Out of office and on the road. If you need me in the next three months, don’t.”
Expanding the map on my screen, scribbling a list of destinations in my notebook, I can’t help but bask a little in this freedom that I’ve been working toward for most of my life. With a job that I can comfortably depart for an entire season, with a comfortable enough income for gas and food, with a lingering comfort sleeping in the back of my car like I needed to when road tripping in my younger and poorer years, and with a body I’m comfortable enough in to scale cliffs and trek deserts, there’s nothing left to stop me. I can do anything. Go anywhere.
But my very next stop is one I already decided weeks ago, a place I’ve been wanting to see for years and simply never got around to. A place, by whatever serendipity, that I realize two men in the booth neighbouring mine are discussing at this very moment.
“Excuse me?” I turn to look over the seat and ask, “Are you guys talking about Antelope Canyon?”
“Yeah!” the closer man confirms. “We were there last week.”
“That’s so funny—I’m going there later today. Is it as cool as it looks in pictures?”
I notice the other man look at his watch with a puzzled expression, and he interrupts his friend to ask, “You know it’s about four hours to drive up there, right? What time is your tour?”
“Oh, no, I don’t usually take tours. I mean, no offence, nothing wrong with tours, I just like to explore a place on my own, you know?” He shakes his head slowly. “What?”
“Not that place,” he says. I raise my eyebrows in question. “It’s on Navajo land. You can’t just show up and go in. You can only go with a guide.”
“Ohhh,” I croon and click my tongue. I’m a little embarrassed at the mistake but grateful that it was caught before I really made an ass of myself. I thank him for the tip and turn back to my laptop to schedule a tour. They’re booked for the rest of the day but have openings bright and early tomorrow. And there’s sure to be a parking lot to sleep in somewhere nearby.
Antelope Canyon is more the kind of crack that one might imagine when she hears the word “canyon,” but it is everything it’s cracked up to be.
Descending the industrial staircases into that narrow gorge reminds me of splitting a geode to find that secreted within a dusty drab shell lies a world of living swirling colour. Zigzagging along the bottom is like walking through a spice-orange river of liquid fire, parted and flash frozen around us. The walls bend and twist continuously, making it difficult to judge the distance to the next turn. The smooth stones take on strange shapes—a snarling bear, a laughing shark, a woman in profile, her hair blowing back in the wind. If not for the sliver of bright blue sky snaking along over our heads and occasionally dropping a piercing shaft of crystalline sunlight, we might as well be on Mars.
It is no surprise that (as the tour guide explains), the Navajo long believed that this canyon was a kind of gateway to another place, a thin line where the physical world and spirit world brushed up against each other. And it is no surprise that a place so delicate and beautiful should be so carefully protected. When the tour is over, I thank our guide (with all the earnestness and sincerity I can show without taking up too much of her time) for giving me the chance to experience it.
On the drive north, maybe nearing the Utah state line or maybe having already crossed it, I start thinking about borders again, and what it means to be without them. The phrase “without borders”—as used by organizations of doctors and journalists and such—typically denotes a willingness and ability to cross borders, maybe even an inclination to ignore them —with the best intentions of course. To have no boundaries. To enter anywhere. It is a curious evolution of language, though, in that the word “without” is archaically the opposite of “within,” thus to be without borders would really mean to be outside of them.
Maybe like most people who have lived on the margins in one way or another, I am quicker to notice, remember, and dwell on the ways in which I have been without. The ways in which my body, my gender, my wallet, have been used as justifications to place me without. It happened, as these things usually do, at the will of those safely within, drawing lines and indeed redrawing them in whatever ways would keep me without. In my youth, they called me girly, called me like a girl, called me a girl, until I finally called myself a girl, at which point they began to tell me I really wasn’t.
Maybe like most people who have lived on the margins in one way or another, I am quicker to notice, remember, and dwell on the ways in which I have been without.
For someone used to being shut on the outside of them, the idea of borderlessness is dangerously seductive.
The trouble is that either the establishment of borders or the elimination of borders could be an act of liberation or an act of oppression, depending on whose hand is drawing them or erasing them. Most all of us are in some ways within and in some ways without, and it can be easy to lose track of on which side of these many intersecting lines we stand. The founders of the Michigan Women’s Music Festival drew boundaries to stave off men’s gaze and their violent, predatory appetites, and they prided themselves on drawing additional lines around further protected spaces inside the festival grounds for women of colour to exist without the intrusion of white women. Yet, these cisgender women whose belonging within womanhood was never questioned, when they saw those of us born without, they shut their gates to keep us out.
And I too, when in the thrall of celebrating the freedoms I’ve worked for and the barriers I’ve overcome, can be seduced by the notion that now I can and should go anywhere I please. I’ll need to watch that. I still can’t help but love the idea of being without boundaries, of drifting and flowing through the world like wind. I’d like to tell myself that it’s one thing to want it and another thing to feel entitled to it. But maybe that difference is an illusion. Maybe they’re the same thing.