Itland

The Polish language has three genders: male, female, and it. It being a neutral "genderless gender." The assignment of these genders is seemingly arbitrary: tree is male, soup is female, baby "niemowle" is an it.

"Baby is an it?" I asked. "How can that be?"
"I don't know. That's just the way it is."
"But don't all babies have a sex? Aren't male and female babies anatomically distinct? How can they all be collective its?"
"Well, sure, there are baby girls and baby boys. But as babies, they are neutral. Only when they're older do we call them girl or boy, man or woman."
"Okay," I said, "If babies are its, at what point do they 'earn' their gender? Is a four-year-old more 'male' than a six-month-old?"

I had hijacked a Polish lesson with my own tangential musings; I was hung up on the neutral genderless it.

"There's no cut-off mark. It's not like that. It's just... well ... babies are its! And then when they're older, they change."

* * *

I tried imagining a world of baby its -- a storkless, bonnetless, blanketless utopia where pinks and blues are known exclusively as colors of the sunset, celestial emanations of an androgynous Divine Source. I imagined this Itland as the prequel to Charlotte Gillman's Herland; life before socialization, before patriarchy, predating constructions of womanhood and machismo. What would it be like, I wonder, if as babies, we were reared not in fairy frills or little prince bowties, but in something other, something it? What if this Itland were not de-gendered but rather de-dualistic? If expressions of gender were categorically vapid, ecologically unprovoked, but intrinsically Holy-Souled? Would it liberate us? Or would it plunge us into isolation? Would we move through social space with ease or would we tumble wildly through boundaryless abstract love, searching for companionship but lacking a "rubric" for how and where to start? And what if, as in Jewish law, companionship were known only in the meeting of a gaze, in the penetrating quietude of feeling another's soul?

I have never felt trapped inside a body that is detached from the truths of my heart or the convictions of my mind. Indeed, I was born female and female is how I feel. But the nominal expression of my gender has certainly been questioned for me as a result of having an "untraditional" name. In nursery school, my name tag was adorned with miniature fuzzy footballs and lustery baseball bats -- "boy" symbols. In grade school, when I received a list of my teammates from the Ridgewood Soccer Association, it was never a shock to be listed with Jonathan, Eric, and Christopher instead of with Karen, Caitlin, and Julia (despite the fact that my mother wrote FEMALE in pink capital letters on my registration form). Fifteen years later, I suppose little has changed. In Poland, where every woman's name ends in 'a' (Ania, Eva, Karina, Sofia), my own nominal introduction usually elicits the following response: "Your name is Jordan? Like Michael Jordan? But Jordan is a man's name. How can you be Jordan?" Just yesterday, in what was perhaps the most glaring supposition of my identity since birth, I received an email from a stranger who not-so-subtly assumed that Jordan Namerow was an Orthodox gay man. It was quite comical, and to avoid further confusion, I promptly set the record straight. But what suddenly struck me is how twistedly empowered we are to undo this virtual "identity embossment" to reconstruct our own realities. If Jordan Namerow can be so easily imagined as an Orthodox gay man, can we not just as easily exfoliate all of the social residues, the "act like a lady," "walk like a man," "don't cry in public" deposits, to cleanly imagine our whole true selves? And what if this imagining became an instinctive meditation, or a means of timeless labor kneaded into penetrable, physical change?

* * *

At daybreak, I travel through wakefulness as the sun travels through skylines, through treetops and melts into my pillow. It is the 15th of September -- one month before Yom Kippur, the holiest marking of new beginnings. Contrary to popular belief, the essence of Yom Kippur is not guilt. It is not "I'm tainted." It is not "I'm sorry." The true essence of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, is "it is possible to change." But for whom? Most often, change is outwardly responsive; we recreate ourselves as adjustments to the world, as courtesies to our parents, as favors for our friends. This kind of change demands the orbiting of the self on someone else's axis. But what if the axis on which we orbit remained our own? What if "it is possible to change" were not a reaction, not a compromise, not a bargain or a correction or a mask of self-affliction, but a peeling away of excessive anti-truths? What if change were not the wearing of a wet-suit, but the diving into our own lucid skin?

This year I will return to the essence of Yom Kippur. "It is possible to change" will be piercingly self-centered; a sacred shedding to suck myself back into it. "Jordan" in Hebrew means "to flow down; to descend." And so, in the essence of my name, I will flow back to beginnings, slowly descending only to climb again in wonder.