Gender Games

By Alfonso C. Hernandez

Gender Games is a novel written in an innovative, experimental
form in short chapters related by a narrator who lives in a world
where Gender definition is irrelevant since the characters he meets
appear male and turn out to be female. And vice-versa. This world
exists as a metaphor for the narrator who gives us solutions on
how to change societal structures by using several techniques:
transformations, ubiquity, metamorphosis, and even violence.
Possibly, a life changing experience.

The question of Gender is explored in a metaphorical way to
clarify that all human beings are complex and cannot be defined as just male and female. Mr. Hernandez is the author of a book of poetry: Lullabies of Revelation, a collection of three plays: The False Advent of Marys Child, and has other publications of plays, essays and poetry

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781449076382

Book preview

Contents

The Shadow

The Outing

White Light

Hospital

Home

Tongue Of Angel

School

Narcissus

Manwoman

Le Jardin Du Luxembourg

Double Nature

Autodidact

First Crime

Second Crime

Brute Clay

The Shout

Nausea

Third Crime

Self Portrait

G E N D E R G A M E S

Breeders

Joy

THE SHADOW

The shadow prenetrates me, in my sleep, when my mouth is open and I have abandoned myself to the dangers of the night. As I dream, I feel the sensation of a sexual penetration through my whole body followed by a tense sense of suffocation induced by a warm, soft, erect object being introduced into my mouth. The metaphpysical object feels made of soft cloth, full of pulsating membranes, pliable, elastic, but hard enough to cut my breath. My breath stops and I enter a numbing state of paralysis. Then, I open my eyes.

I gain my consciousness. I dare look and observe a shadow coming out of my mouth: a gigantic black shadow, formeless, which extends toward the wall. It’s not human nor animal. I shout but no sound comes out. The shadow flies away and leaves the room through one of the small opened windows high in the wall. I tremble desperately. I wipe the perspiration out of my forehead with my hand and I loose consciousness. Fear immoblizes me. I wake up with an intense fever. My personality shows its fractures after these nocturnal, unexplained and unvoluntary visits.

Similar shadows are running wild in the night world crying with silent cries waiting for some human soul in a vulnerable condition, like mine. Even in the hottest valley days, a frozen shiver of fear shakes me when I remember such invasions. I only fall sleep when I am totally vanquished by fatigue and I always leave at least one light on at night nearby. I live with an extreme case of phobia of being alone at night. I live in a constant state of anxiety.

THE OUTING

When I was born, I am told, I was a robust boy with all my genitals intact. I was registered and baptized with a boy’s name and grew just like any ordinary, precocius boy speaking when I was one year old. Now, I am a woman who had no sex change operation and who is not a transvestite. In fact, I abhor the idea of wearing women’s clothing or any soft garments. I wear one or two sizes larger because I dislike the tight look and most of my shirts and pants are made of masculine materials, colors and styles. No pinks or light blues for me. And of course, never purple, nor violet. Only gray, dark blue, black and brown. White shirts with ties of one single color with some lines and definitely no flowers. I wear a ring on my left wedding finger because I want to give the impression of being married, of being normal.

I am a woman in a man’s body whose appearance changes at different times during the year following a very peculiar process of masculinization and feminization. I am very aware of my emotional interior changes because my inner self guides me to respond physically to the presences of male or female beings, if they are attractive and if they send a beam of sensuality in my direction. However, sometimes, I am unaware of my physical changes until an outsider makes me aware of being someone else as what happened one evening at dusk when I was standing watching the Opera House in Paris, at the corner of the Boulevard des Italiens when an adolescent pointed at me practically screaming: C’est une femme. He is a woman. I was wearing my jeans and my farm worker’s jacket and still I was discovered, seen, outed by an unknown person I had not even noticed. I walked away from that corner as fast as I could.

I am still unable to understand and control the physical changes, the emotional transformations. There have been occasions when I have consciously willed such metamorphosis because such changes serve one purpose or another. When my work demands that I act and talk like a man, then I have to force one nature to go into hiding, at least during my workhours. When I must appear and behave like a man, I suppress and send back to my deepest self my feminine nature. But, when I do this, then my feminine self comes out stronger once I am not on guard. I can not deny that when my feminine self overpowers my masculine self I have wished to have some kind of surgery. But then, my common sense comes back just thinking of the extreme embarrassment I would have to endure if I actually considered to change my gender.

I know that there are individuals who are more sensitive to my changes because when I meet them, immediately they tell me that they are married or that the are looking for a girl friend completely different from me in age, race, color. The shame I feel at these moments when I am caught as if I had been in some way showing sexual interest disturbs me for various days after causing me to fall into a compulsive depressive state when I cry easily or I am prone to make mistakes in the kitchen, while driving, or at work. Then my anger overpowers me and forces me to control looking at men as if they were potential sex partners. When a woman thinks that I am interested in her romantically, all I have to do is to avoid her or simply I do not pursue the issue. Some women react like men by telling me that they have a husband or that they are happily married. The affair ends before it begins.

Belonging to the two genders, in spite of appearing as only one type is not the problem most think it is even though I have contemplated suicide multiple times. I have tried it at least two times, always unsuccessfully. I still love life more than I love death. Who knows? Perhaps one of these days, when I have no idea who I am and when I find my depression unbearable, then, I’ll buy a bottle of valium, or prozac, a bottle of the best whisky and drink both entirely while listening to Callas sing J’ai perdu mon Eurydice. You might think that I am a coward or that I have not integrated the male and the female within me, which is probably true. But it is not a question of integration because then I would never be able to partner with a male or a female as occurs when I am in transition between the two and become a highly spiritual being without any physical desires.

This is not a confession. I write about my triple nature because I believe that most human beings actually have at least a double nature. This is not a confession because I have not the slightest feeling of guilt in my bones, in my heart, in my brain. I do believe that the pure heterosexual, male or female exists, rarely, but does exist and since the majority of the human race is either bisexual or trisexual, or more, the sooner we accept this reality, the fewer individuals will depend on alcohol, drugs, the fewer will commit crimes, as those I have done, all unpunished. Confession stinks to catholicism and such a state is so repellent to me that I prefer to call this narration and effort to tell you the truth to see if you can absolve me without judgement. But if you judge me, it does not matter. I am not searching your forgiveness nor your understanding. Facts are facts and they must remain unpunished. At least until now.

WHITE LIGHT

One afternoon, after the wheat harvest has ended, the farm hands fill the oxen driven cart with wheat bushels which must be transported to the mill. My mother and the driver of the cart seat on an improvised, impoverished bench at the front edge of the cart and I climb on top of the straw pyramide. We leave the ranch and start our trip on the dusty, narrow road. I sing happy songs of childhood I learned from my grandmother, the French one, the blond one, the one with turquoise eyes, accompanied by the song of the running water of the creek on the side of the road. The birds sing also their farewell songs to the light of day