It's really a small, small world after all . . .

With gratitude and sincere apologies to the noted 20th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer - and his now famous "Porcupine Analogy"


I found myself early in my life among a number of porcupines huddled together for warmth on a cold day in winter. It being in the nature of porcupines, they began to painfully prick me with their quills such that I and they were obliged to disperse, me out of fear and they out of suspicion. You see I had no quills of my own as yet unless of course you count my penis and that I guess would count for only one. In the world of men I would be informed later and with much fanfare that my penis would be the only quill I’d ever need. I knew by now "she" should have “felt” like a boy. But this feeling “like a boy” business was all new to me, being unaware that the nearly bottomless ambivalence that went with it would, for a great many years, reflect only my experience. In that ambivalence came the conviction that I was the only person on this good earth that concerned myself with such thoughts – of course excepting Christine Jorgensen, whom I had met and become acquainted with quite a few years before. It would be many more years before I would meet another of my kind and discover that I was not alone.

The thought that consumed me now was: If it was fully known how far apart I stood from them, would the loathing we routinely lavish upon each other for such differences be so far behind? Finally the bitter cold drove us together again, when predictably the same thing again happened. After many turns of huddling and dispersing, I discovered that it might be best to begin to craft a life that would allow me to remain at a rather significant distance from them. As I look back across four decades on it now, I know I had not crafted a life but had conceded to first accepting and then carefully crafting a lie. But the young “she” was cold and frightened and wondered in the way that children do, if they knew who and what I was, would I ever be warm again? Would I remember what it felt like if, in the future, I ever were?

I grew into a “male-bodied” woman of some forty years of age. To the surprise of no one, since my “shadow” was the only companion that for many years I'd allow to get close enough to notice, I felt a flicker of warmth that a lifetime of fear, self-loathing and denial had not managed to extinguish. Still I preferred to remain outside, where I will neither prick others nor be pricked myself . . .

. . . but I was very cold and it was at last time to come in.

© 2009 Renée Thomas all rights reserved