Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

Allison uses this short piece to explore the evolution of her gender identity. She chooses to tell the story of how she came to understand her own gender identity out of chronological order, an approach that continues her emphasis on gender as an unsettled thing that evolves over time. The episodes in this section cover her talk with Wanda when she was a young woman, Allison as an adolescent, and Allison as a teen.

During these periods in her life, Allison’s way of comprehending her gender identity was mostly reactive. She rejected heterosexual love and sex as an adolescent because she saw them as destructive forces. She understood love when she rejected the idea that she might lose her best friend. As a young woman exploring her identity, she first rejected emotional intimacy with other women and then rejected the idea that sex could fix what ailed her and the women she encountered. When she became more active in feminist circles, she rejected the notion that being lesbian was about politics. Allison’s memoir signals the end of this reactive phase by concluding the section with the story of how she still loves Pat (her best friend and teenage crush).

The opening paragraphs do the most work to convey what it meant to be a lesbian youth coming of age in a family and culture that stigmatized—or maintained silence around—a woman’s desire for girls and women. Negative word choices dominate this paragraph—“hard,” “never,” “cannot,” “nobody,” “evil,” and “not.” As a girl, Allison saw herself as a gender Other whose desires couldn’t be named in the language available to her. She hated her body and even today sees the same internalized misogyny poisoning the love and joy women could otherwise feel for themselves. She was profoundly lonely. Even once she began to engage emotionally and sexually with women, she experienced sex as destructive and isolating.

Allison’s account of finally talking with Wanda about her identification as a lesbian woman was a rejection of such silencing. The authentic way that Allison told her sister about the evolution of her identity allowed the two women to bond despite Wanda’s was presumably being engaged in heterosexual relationships. Additionally, Allison directly addresses the silence around sexuality by noting how damaging it is that “[w]omen talk about sex in such strange ways, carefully, obliquely, cautiously, almost shamefully” (54). As is often true, storytelling is the path forward through the destructive silence around gender, sex, and love.