Genderbending at the Madhattered

By Kameron Hurley

My friends are cyclical, like the eight seasons—always changing, always the same. I never believed this. About them. About myself. I didn't like politics.

I photograph the perpetually gendered in little rural towns outside the city, towns with names like Ash and Beech and Coriander. After half a year of churning along muddy rails, knocking on knotty doors tied with twine; after half a hundred debates with operators about misdirected calls, charges, disconnected or nonexistent lines; after all that, all I wanted was to be back in the city, drinking at the Madhattered, thinking about anything but politics.

My friends kept tabs on when I'd be in; we'd meet at the Madhattered thirteen hours till dawn. Nib and Page were always there first, always arguing: debates about heterosexist dogma, or who could drink the most tarls without compromising gender propriety. Margin would drink mandalas and tell me it was barbaric that there was actually a country where drinking processed food was taboo.

Rule showed up the same every night, of course. He'd walk in, tall and straight-hipped, denouncing social authorities and gender prescription. He'd come in with his beard plucked because the government wouldn't let him get it surgically eradicated. His wish for smooth cheeks fell outside his gender prescriptions, especially since he was queer. "Nothing personal," Rule told me the first time we met, when I asked him to be female for the night, and he admitted to his inability to alter sex. "Just born that way."

Rule always ordered the drinks: mandalas straight up, sprins over ice, four tonic and tarls . . . and then he'd order drinks for the rest of us.

By the end of the night, we were always drunk, and Margin would be slumped over in the seat next to mine, wearing a blue tunic or pink tutu and enough makeup to paint a landscape. Margin would blubber about the latest love he or she had lost that night, Page and Nib would be yelling about whose turn it was to be male in their ongoing adolescent opera, and Rule would be wearing a dress, illegally. Around two hours till dawn, when the perpetually sexed couples were going home to baths and babies and picket-fenced houses, we'd start to talk photographs. History. We would start talking about who we were, who we wanted to be.

Those were the worst nights.

But I need to tell you what I did outside the Madhattered, before Liquid Sunshine and the end of adolescence. Before perpetualism, complacency, adulthood.

Photographs form our historical memory, our past. The image of our forebears, sexed in the ideal of their vision upon our discovered landscape of sand and stone, is our starting point: they upon the black shores, wrapped in lingering sea-fog, posed among amber forests, recording our landscape as significantly as the record of their own existence; back when the landscape was still significant. Each of us is remembered in the same way. Photographers, through photos, prove our existence. Mine. Yours. Ours.

I'm one of those photographers. I help document every mature citizen who's formulated a sense of gendered identity. In little towns like Tansy and Burdock in the north, most people are photographed male; that's the perpetual gender they chose, the one the government ordains they're recorded in. You're stuck with perpetualism until you've dried up your breeding potential. Some change back afterwards—many do before I come to town—but really, it doesn't much matter after the photograph; whatever you've chosen as your twenty-year perpetual sex is the one you'll be remembered by, the one that forms your perpetual identity for posterity. In a little town south of Tansy called Grass, I once waited four weeks—a whole season—for half the elder population to shift itself back to female so I could capture the images of themselves they were bound by law to portray for posterity. All those perpetuals, adults, so certain of who they were, where they belonged. I envied them: their unchanging core of identity, their sense of themselves as a part of our historical present, permanently recorded for our future.