Old, Unfeminine, Unreliable

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

Dear Hatshepsut

People got out my way today.

I saw them, deliberately making room for me. Some stepped as far away from me as possible. And I fucking loved it. They seemed to be scared of me, and I fucking loved it.

So often, walking outside is an exercise of navigating a river of people, mostly men, who seem to be coming right at me. I am determined and refuse to get out of their way because I know they don’t take seriously women and our right to public space, especially Black and women of colour’s rights.

What changed? Why were people, including men, getting out of my way today?

Because of my hair. I’ve just buzzed my hair. And what’s left of it is mostly white. I am old and unfeminine.

Is that why you started wearing a beard and male regalia in your public imagery? Did you recognise that a more masculine appearance would keep people out of your way?

I never wanted to be a man, Hatshepsut. Granted, I never fully signed up for the womanhood contract but a woman I am. And then menopause made me unreliable.

Old, unfeminine, unreliable.

A stone statue of Pharoah Hatshepsut at the Met Museum. Photo by me.

Did you worry about being called “buff?” I see your pecs in the gallery dedicated to you at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and wow. I’ve been lifting for almost three years now and while I can deadlift and squat more than my body weight, that fact is not showing in my pecs. .

I never wanted to be a man. And yet there was that man who told his friend in a voice loud enough for me to hear when I was 13 and had stubbornly short hair “That girl used to be a boy and they gave her a sex change.”

And there was the teacher at my high school who after a friend and I dressed as men, complete with drawn on beards, and disrupted the school assembly that I made a better looking man than the teenage girl I was.

And there were the boys and girls when I was seven asking “Are you a boy or a girl?” What were they looking for that they didn't see?

What did you want people to see in you, Hatesepsut, that wasn’t obvious?

And now that 7-year old looks back at me in the mirror. “I’m still here,” she insists to my reflection, with her once again stubbornly short hair.

I’m reading menopause novels and they’re all centered around almost exclusively affluent, white women who are married with children. I feel outside of that world in a way I chose and which reminds me why.

What about those of us without daughters? Those of us who will not live on through those daughters, who will not be both singed with an envy that we are socialized into for youth and at the same time taste immortality on that burnt tongue of our subconscious as we watch our daughters grow?

What does menopause do to us when we are not those things? When we are not envying our daughters’ growing fecundity as ours is drying up?

You’d think only white, married mothers went through menopause.

I’ve been to your magnificent temple in Luxor, Hatshepsut; so different from the others, so far and so high. Did you build it so far from anything to be away from everyone? That’s what I wanted when menopause really fucked me up.

Photo: Robert E. Rutledge

To hibernate, basically.