Thought of this last week but only wrote it down after reading Pete VanderBeek’s post on Voices about the two transexual, transgender friends across the street from where he’s living. His reflection was that they have very complicated lives indeed.

Last week I went to a Civil War Reenactment. One of the issues brought up was all of the women they are finding in civil war graveyards. These are not women who are publicly women, these are women who were living lives as men. There are stories of such women in the old west as well, women who lived their lives as men, dressed as men, passed for men, were known as men.

We are tempted to fit these stories into our labels, a temptation I think we need to resist. What this teaches me is that our categories are our own. People fit into the categories available to them but they are not the categories.