Tag Archives: Simone Kolysh

Queer Bowls: On Mothering as Failure, Healing and Survival.

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Simone Kolysh is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. They are also an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College and Lehman College, teaching in Women’s Studies and Sociology. Their work addresses intersections of gender, sexuality and race.  In this post, the second in our Queer Kinship Series, Simone reflects on experiences as a Queer parent. 

 

My mother, having caught me walking slowly by her couch, says ‘Can I ask you something?’ and I know that no good will come of it.

I hear ‘Why do you put a dress on him when he doesn’t know he shouldn’t wear it?’

I’m tired.

Rubbing my eyelids, I say, ‘Because he asks for it…because he’s happy in it.’

I leave.

Why does she even bother, I think, knowing full well that we won’t change each other’s minds? It is my three children, two marriages, and several gender and sexual developments in the ‘wrong direction’ too late for her to still attempt these conversations.

This time, the ‘he’ in question is my 2-year-old. He, and I use that pronoun tentatively, does not know gender for now or that most of the world will not understand that he should wear dresses just because. This child about whom my mother worries is not the one I want to talk about lately. I wish she’d talk to me about his sibling, the kid that’s 7 years old, the one using ‘she’ and ‘they’ pronouns as of last month. She wears dresses a lot more and says she’ll be a girl if my next child is not or that, you know, she is a girl but it’s complicated. I know that feeling. Gender is complicated for me too, as an agender lesbian person. Or, rather, it is very simple but the rest of the world makes it difficult.

She’s the daughter I was always scared to raise and a somewhat unexpected one at that, because while no one really thought this child would follow a straight path, pun intended, I did not know it would be now that she would say she’s trans. I whisper ‘I’m not ready’ and ‘But if anyone can raise her, it’ll be you’ back and forth in my head. My mother should ask me about what is going on but she won’t because she thinks of her as an already lost cause, the way she thinks of me. To her, there is still hope for my 2-year-old and maybe, if she starts her attacks on my parenting early enough, the way she did with my oldest, now 10, perhaps my youngest will grow up to be a boy.

So when I think of queer kinship, I think of my mother as its antithesis. My life will be forever marked by the enormous failure that is her lack of mothering. The space between her as a woman and me as a person is vast and monstrous-looking because of many traumas and I will always mourn the kind of acceptance and support that a mother should give her child. As part of the mourning process, I, like many others, have ripped out my roots and shred them swiftly and without regret. Yet, her actual physical being remains in my house and in my life and I just know that even when she dies, the many things she’s done and said will always haunt me until I die and perhaps bleed into my own parenting in ways unknown.

Sometimes, I wonder if my own fervent commitment to mothering my children and other people in my life is an act of rebellion against such haunting. I did not enter motherhood to rebel, quite the opposite, but I recommit to it time and again because, to me, it is now a clear political act. After all, mothers are treated like replaceable trinkets that are not worth much while others pay lip service to their important social location. In reality, many of us are sentenced to parenthood and find ourselves utterly full of despair and without support. Amazingly, we persevere and rarely abandon our young or each other. We thrive and make it work, despite many hardships and experiences of oppression. Further, the kind of mothering queer and trans folks are intimately involved in is a genuinely healing process without which there would be a lot more broken people.

Which is why my second thought regarding queer kinship goes to the Japanese art called Kintsugi, in which broken bowls are repaired with gold and other precious metals, so as to mark the history of the broken object instead of hiding that it’s been broken. Many of us that are queer and trans carry around deep mother wounds, even as if we see our own mothers broken before us. Many of us are now parents ourselves, trying to preserve our children and minimize their own shattering. All of us are queer bowls that have been repaired, sometimes carefully and sometimes without anyone noticing, by the numerous experiences, friendships and relationships we’ve had with others that are ‘deviants like us.’

What are the ways in which we are connected? In some ways, the making and sustaining of a queer kinship network defies a clear articulation. Sometimes, they are my friends from way back when; sometimes they are my students. Other times, they are strangers in the traditional sense but they are writing and living and surviving and providing all of us with models of being, of building families and of queer survival. In turn, they look to me for inspiration, for the kind of adult and parent they’d like to be, for ways to talk about sex, gender, and sexuality with kids or anyone else. Each of us thinks the other is brave and strong but each of us feels uncertain and precarious. We are the next generation or activists, scholars and elders. Our children, just like us, are growing up in an alternate dimension, a dimension that imagines a different future, while the general sense of reality is still a mainstay of a white hetero-patriarchy.

I find the constant fight to make a different future happen in my house and inside myself to be exhausting in profound ways but my final thought about queer kinship is that it is worth fighting for, because we cannot live a different life, a life without authenticity, and we must try to stick around so that others can do the same. Nevertheless, we must also speak to the wounds we bear on a daily basis because they build on our childhood wounds. As much as we mother each other, we cannot escape the fact that we have been failed by those who were supposed to do that work instead. When I think of my mother, I do not understand her bowl. She has not healed through me. Instead, she took the jagged pieces of her broken self and cut me constantly without hesitation, as if my tears and my pain are good enough results. When I think of my bowl, its earliest cracks have been the biggest and the gold with which they are now filled is very queer, the kind of queer people say is radical, as if that word has any definition. As for my trans daughter’s bowl, her childhood cracks will never be as bad as mine because the gold that is my queer kinship network is the kind of gold that alchemists chased through the ages, rare and powerful. That is the gold that will now coarse through her veins untamed and for that I will be eternally grateful to the many people that, by their existence alone, have made it easier for me to be this strong a mother, to be this strong a queer warrior.

Voices of Queer Kinship Series: An Introduction and Call for Contributions

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How do we arrange our social, romantic, political, and sexual lives? What types of relationships and spaces facilitate the sharing and affirmation of Queer existence and experiences? Where do we find and how do we create our own families or networks of choice as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, polyamorous, non-binary, same-gender-loving, asexual, pansexual, kink, gender fluid, agender, or otherwise Queer people and groups? What are the multiple forms and appearances of Queer kinship in our world today? How do such arrangements reveal and potentially ease life within cisnormative, mononormative, and heteronormative contexts? How do variations in race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, body size and type, nationality, and other social factors influence such relationships and the forms they take in our lives? What does the term Queer Kinship mean to you, and how might it speak to the broader social world and ongoing pursuits for social justice?

These are some of the questions we hope to consider, discuss, and debate in a new series of essays amplifying “Voices of Queer Kinship.” In this series, we seek narratives exploring and illustrating various forms of Queer love, family, relationships, and the meanings of these experiences for the individual writers and more broadly. To this end, our own little Write Where It Hurts family will be posting essays on our experiences building, cultivating, and experiencing Queer Kinship. While we envision this series playing out over the next few months, there is no deadline for submission as we believe such stories have a place on the blog at all times. As such, we invite all interested parties to submit posts – essays, narratives, poetry, stories, or other forms are all welcome – exploring the meaning and experience of Queer Kinship in their lives.

In our case, the idea for this series emerged as our own founder and editor Xan and previous contributor Simone Kolysh discussed the importance of safe spaces, families of choice, and sources of affirmation in their own lives. In a month where Pride events are taking place across the country even as our communities continue to face violent and political attacks from multiple sources, they talked about the importance of our stories, our voices, and the varied ways Queer people organize intimate, social, and political lives. In a year where many have benefitted greatly from the legalization of same-sex marriage last June while others who do not wish to marry have seen their options for relational and familial recognition begin to disappear, they talked about the importance of illustrating and discussing the diversity and variation within and between Queer relationships, families, and networks. Ultimately, they decided – with the affirmation of the rest of the Write Where It Hurts family – that we should use this platform to amplify such complexities and create room for these voices.

In this spirit, we seek stories and voices of Queer Kinship in all its forms and types for inclusion in the series. Specifically, we welcome posts discussing topics including but not limited to, for example:

Lesbian and gay marital and other relationship experiences prior to and post same sex marriage legalization

            Bisexual and otherwise sexually fluid relationships prior to and post same sex marriage legalization

            Lesbian, Bisexual, and Gay experiences of committed relationships beyond or instead of marital and family based forms prior to and post same sex marriage legalization

            Transgender and Non-binary relationship experiences with people of various sexualities

            Intersex relationship and family experiences with people of various sexualities

            LGBTI experiences with families of origin, chosen families, reproduction, raising children, navigating child-related legal codes and policies, and navigating interactions with other parents

            Polyamrous relationships of varied types and forms in relation to romantic experience, sexual experience, familial experience, or other day to day activities

            BDSM and other Kink based relationships of varied types and forms as well as relational and familial experiences navigating casual or other forms of BDSM or other Kink play

            Heteroqueer people in long term relationships with and openly supportive of LGBTI people, navigating polyamory, or engaged in other non-traditional sexual, gender, and / or romantic experiences

            Mixed orientation relationships prior to and post same-sex legalization

            Asexual relational and familial experiences with others of varied sexual and romantic identities

            Experiences of affirmation and / or marginalization in explicitly LGBT, BDSM, Poly, and other Queer spaces and groups

            Transgender experiences with long term partners in relation to transition, healthcare and bathroom access, and family formation

            Non-binary experiences with long term partners in relation to family, friends, workplaces, dress norms, and other aspects of daily life

            Experiences navigating the assumptions and reactions of others while engaged in Queer Kinship and / or as sexual, gender, romantic, relationship, or otherwise Queer

            Experiences of childfree people navigating assumptions of parenthood and reproduction in Queer and other spaces and groups

Although the list above provides a starting point of some of the topics of interest in this series, we also welcome essays or other types of posts on Queer Kinship itself and relations with broader society as Queer people, couples, trios, unions, families, and groups. We further welcome examples of the ways Queer Kinship – personally experienced or observed – has touched your research, teaching, activism, or creative endeavors. Further, as usual, we will accept both named and anonymous submissions for this series.  The next two weeks will feature regular posts on the site, and then, beginning on July 20th, we will begin posting pieces in the series – starting with submissions we already have from our earlier Facebook announcement – and continue doing so in between posts on other topics for the foreseeable future. As usual, please feel free to reach out to us with any questions you may have or ideas for this or other series on the blog. To contribute, simply gather your thoughts and contact or send submissions to wewritewhereithurts@gmail.com.

Xan, J, & Lain

Of Children Born: The Journey of an Agender Lesbian Mother

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Simone Kolysh is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. They are also an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College and Lehman College, teaching in Women’s Studies and Sociology. Their work addresses intersections of gender, sexuality and race.  In this post, Simone reflects on being an agender, lesbian mother of three children that parents against dominant narratives of gender and sexuality in their queer household. 

My body is a mother’s body. It is not a young body with smooth lines from the thighs to the small of the back. Mine is a body of valleys, soft and reminiscent of uterine battles and pain. It is a jagged, unshaven landscape full of stretch marks and cowardly veins that collapsed under pregnancy weight. Mine is a body that managed a labor without contractions and the darkness of postpartum depression, as the light of my first child was brought into the world on a hot July day. I rocked this body around the bed unable to loosen it free of panic but kept it close to my child so that no matter what was breaking inside me, I’d keep him whole.

My body is a mother’s body. It is not a dancer’s body with perfect posture and well-shaped legs. Mine is a body that knows what an obsession dance can be but that movement no longer comes first. Though it responds to an inviting embrace of the Argentine Tango, it does so with a reluctant and bothered ankle, broken weeks before the light of my second child was brought into the world on the day I, too, was born just twenty-five years prior. I crumbled under my own pressure, onto a mailbox at the corner of Kings Highway and West 8th street. Cursing, I hopped home thinking that to labor with a broken limb is just what I needed.

My body is a mother’s body. It is not my mother’s body with frail shoulders and cheeks full of Botox. Mine is a body of risks, piercings and tattoo ink. When the light is right and the mirror is bribed, I can see what my lover finds gorgeous. And though I claw at my body because it does not always make sense to me, I remember how bravely it got me through my only labor without pain meds, as the light of my third child was rushed into the world at the Brooklyn Birthing Center. When I now feel my three children collapse onto my breasts that have struggled to breastfeed, I know that my body is a mother’s body and it is well worth the worship.

______ ~ ______

There is nothing like a slurred ‘You’re so sexy, baby’ from some guy on the street to remind me that I am seen as a woman despite holding an agender identity. Even men that aren’t strangers have said that I am ‘so obviously a woman’ because I turn them on. Such experiences of sexism, laced with homophobia and racism when I am with my Black female partner, make it obvious that my struggle around gender takes a backseat to our collective struggle as people of marginalized gender and sexual identities, trying to navigate a world where white, cisgender, and heterosexual men hold a significant amount of power.

Yet white, cisgender and heterosexual men may be the future demographic of my three children, ages eight, six and one. Therein lies the paradox of an agender lesbian mother trying to raise feminist kids in a society that teaches boys to put down women and people that don’t conform to mainstream ideas of gender and sexuality. As a scholar of gender and sexuality, a sociologist and a Women’s Studies professor, I have given my kids a critical eye towards gender, sexual and racial hierarchies. It also happens that my middle child has taken a gender non-conforming path, linking once more our gender journey as mother and child.

Shortly before he was born, I began to struggle with the category of ‘woman’ into which I was born and raised. Once I admitted to myself that I could not finish the sentence, ‘I’m a woman because,’ and explored identities beyond the gender binary, I was able to more fiercely carve out a safe space for my children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the first battles took place between me and my biological family that not only rejects and erases my gender and sexual identities but also believes I am causing my children great psychological harm. So before I can think through my gender identity and how it has evolved through my motherhood, I must face how my own mother shaped my ideas of womanhood.

My mother’s main lesson was that one’s power as a woman comes from seducing men and appealing to the heterosexual male gaze, in addition to becoming a mother and a wife. Whether it was because our family is Russian-Armenian or that the prevailing attitude across most cultures is one of patriarchy does not matter now. When I showed interest in taking charge of my pleasure or being with women, she took me to see a psychiatrist. When, at twelve, I came out as bisexual, the closest word I knew at the time to describe being attracted to more than just men, she cried. When I married at twenty, she was glad, hoping it was all a phase.

Rather immediately, I became obsessed with getting pregnant since that meant ‘having it all.’ Three years later, I was a mother of an eight-month-old child, banished from my house for breaking up with my husband. I was in love with another man, someone who was my equal. He helped me come into my motherhood by taking over my child’s care from my mother who tried her hardest to teach my son traditional gender norms. To this day, my first child is more aligned with ‘boy things’ because at the time I did not feel strong enough to stand up to my family.

My new partner supported my being queer, the label I took up during college, and my exploration of gender. When we married, I was pregnant and determined to raise this child differently. As I became more involved in LGBTQ scholarship and activism, I struggled with my gender identity and it took about three years to publicly come out as gender non-conforming, during a panel on transgender identities. It was a fleeting moment of being true to myself in a public setting since, without constant coming out, no one can ‘tell’ I am not a woman.

I have to come out again and again because it never quite sinks in and some people simply forget that I am agender or that my pronouns are ‘they/them.’ Generally, I never correct people if they use ‘she/hers’ because I am glad to align myself with women and do, to a large extent, experience the world as women do. Though I would like to not be perceived as any gender, changing my physical appearance was never essential – I do not want to change my body, just the way others link it to womanhood. Not making a physical transition makes it difficult for people to see me as agender.

Even though mothering, to me, does not mean I’m a woman, it adds to my invisibility as an agender person because of the assumption that if one has been pregnant and birthed three children, that they are even more of a woman. It certainly made my biological family like me more, because I gave them ‘three healthy boys,’ a marker of status within a sexist community. It is as if the assumed gender of my children helped solidify my womanhood. And, as a mother, I was now responsible for raising them properly, to become grown men able to provide for their families through upward mobility.

Which is why I am glad that my oldest child’s first Barbie was the Halloween Barbie, scary not only for its lack of realistic measurements. Growing up in Russia, having a Barbie meant you were better off than other families. When naked ‘pupsiki,’ which happened to be gender-neutral dolls, were all we could afford, Barbie symbolized a ‘better life,’ a life sought in the United States. Now I am raising my own children in Brooklyn, New York, but there is little place for the Russian-Armenian values of my past. After all, it was not in my parent’s dreams to have their grandsons play with dolls.

Instead of being groomed to be ‘real men,’ my kids are raised free of gender norms, which allows them to develop their identities safely as they learn more and more about the world. And, prior to learning about gender, each of them gives me a gift. As an agender person, moments when I am not gendered are essential to my wellbeing and how I see myself but they are rare. When my children are young, they are able to see me as Simone or Mommy without gendering me or seeing me as different from them. Even when they have noticed physical differences between their bodies and mine, I have explained everything from menstruation to genital shape without attaching biology to gender.

So when my kids look at me during those early years, their eyes are a place of freedom. In a way, motherhood has given me a way to find moments of validation for my agender identity, even if they are short-lived. I cannot say enough of these transformative experiences because I know what it feels like when a person with no pre-conceived notions of gender is able to see me. The intrusion that takes place when the outside world teaches them their mother is a woman is always disturbing and requires significant re-education. Long ago, I made a blog called Gender/Detki – Rearing Logical Children. In it, I had hoped to provide concrete examples of how I addressed gender and sexuality with my children.

Looking over the blog now, it is clear that my children knew little of gender until they interacted with their maternal grandparents, who live downstairs, or their Russian preschool environment. Their father and I never called them boys and they were allowed to play with any toy and wear any article of clothing, including dresses, tutus and fairy wings. Their hair was never cut and they never heard a single thing about their behavior not ‘being appropriate for boys.’ Naturally, what they learned from us, their chosen family made up of multiple parents and family friends, clashed with what they learned from others.

It was quite a surprise for my children to learn that boys and girls are often separated in preschool throughout the day, that boys and girls have to go to different bathrooms and that specific recital roles, of gnomes or princesses, are reserved by gender. The length of their hair became an issue, because other kids would say they look like girls and their ‘girly shirts’ got laughs. When I dealt with the administrators, I did not disclose my agender identity or any additional details about my family. I argued that if girls were getting their hair styled on a daily basis, the same can be done with my children’s hair and reminded them of the fact that we paid generously for tuition.

Once my kids got attached to their teachers, they wondered whether gender was good or bad. I taught them that people have different opinions and that nobody has the right to police how their gender is expressed. Sadly, because of their encounters with other adults and children, they have learned to expect harassment based on their choice of clothing, toys or behavior. Some of the time, they would give in to the pressure and, for example, ask me to cut their hair. Because it is their body and their choice, I have done so but with tears in my eyes. The pain and the anger I feel on behalf of my children exacerbates my own trauma.

Now older and in public school, my kids manage a lot more backlash, which is hard for me to watch. As an adult, I have not yet figured how to freely express my agender identity without having to constantly educate uninformed cisgender people. Why should children as young as five have to face a similar struggle? Because knowledge is power, I have taught my kids about the construction of the sex and gender binaries, the link to sexuality and how gender and sexuality are affected by one’s race, class and any number of other social factors. These topics are hard enough for my college students to grasp but the way people react to my kids’ gender ‘deviance’ makes such discussions necessary.

I am proud to say that the more I learn about gender and sexuality and about myself, the more my children are able to benefit and feel supported in their own exploration. They have shown resilience and courage by resisting harassment and trying to live truthfully. Here, I would like to return to my middle child’s gender non-conforming path. Most recently, he has become quite interested in wearing a ‘girl’s bathing suit,’ which is not going to go over well at his swim classes, summer day camp or with my biological family. Part of my motherhood journey is to be an advocate for my child and so I am gearing up to have several conversations so that he may be able to wear his turquoise bathing suit full of ruffles. When I caution him, I am sad to say that he may not be allowed to wear it and that his grandmother and others will continue to make comments. He nods and answers, ‘I will ignore them, Mama, I will just ignore them.’

When I speak to others on his behalf, part of me wants to say that I am also like him, weird and proud of my ‘deviance,’ and that I would love for my kids to be part of the LGBTQ community. But their mother’s deviance makes it hard for others to accept my children. Now that I am firmly at peace with my lesbian identity, there are new definitions to go over since their peers are throwing around casually homophobic remarks. To me it is not difficult to reconcile being agender and a lesbian but trying to explain to my kids why the label ‘lesbian’ still applies even if I am not a woman is a bit of a challenge. What I say is that others perceive me as a woman which means having to face sexism and homophobia.

If I did not have to explain to my kids why much of the world thinks our family is ‘wrong,’ they wouldn’t need an explanation because they have been raised to embrace difference. Regardless of divorce, changes in family structure, new gender and sexual identities, like their mother’s lesbianism or future children, they are surrounded by loving adults who will help them usher in a new world. Along the way, they will offer acceptance in return. Want to see an example? I recently asked my middle child about his feelings on my not wanting a gender, on being agender. Not looking up from his video game, he replied, “I feel fine because it’s your choice and gender doesn’t matter at all.”