Anyway, to get to the point, I've been thinking back on something that hit me about Wraeththu the first time I read it, something that struck me very hard at the time and why, I have no doubt, I've been so hooked ever since. Basically, while I was reading along, following the stories of Pell, Cal, Swift and the rest, I found myself getting absolutely giddy with one particular notion: "These creatures have gender just like mine, just how it's supposed to be!"

I'm not saying I'm a hermaphrodite or think everybody else should be, or that everybody should be bisexual. What I am saying is that reading Wraeththu seemed like the first time I had found characters that embodied gender characteristics and sexual orientation/s I could truly and comfortably relate to. I'd been presented all my life, in actual life and in books, with men, women, heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality... and even though I could comprehend it, relate to characters in books, I never really felt I was truly standing in their shoes -- they were too tight, too loose, or on the wrong feet. It just didn't feel right to me.

I'm 29 now and even though I didn't figure it out until 10 years ago, I am profoundly ambivalent about any particular sexual orientation or gender.

I say I am bisexual but that is only for convenience; I don't like this notion of two poles and I'm between them, because gender is much more multidimensional than that, much more mobile. I also can't fathom the notion of not moving around, of somehow being in the middle and never swaying this way or that.

Gender is another issue. For a long time, I loathed being a woman. I loathed women too -- just really couldn't stand them. One reason I never had any homophobia in me is that to me it made sense for men to avoid women -- men were far superior. For a couple of years, I seriously longed for a sex change. Glad to say that thanks to meeting people like Kate Bornstein and getting to know some wonderful women, I grew out of that and accepted that I was a woman and could express myself as one. I could also still "be a man" and not have to give up on the full expression of myself.

Sure, I have been dressing pretty feminine the last few years, but that doesn't stick me into some place, that's just a costume or, if you want, a completely neutral action which only has meaning if you give it. Although it's not culturally accepted, a man could dress in women's clothes and it's not going to affect their gender, it's a costume. Anyway, at the end of the day, I realize there was not a question of this OR that, I could be both. For this reason, I have never quit calling myself transgender.

Anyway, all this rambling aside, when I read Wraeththu I really got to thinking that I "related" to the characters differently than than those in other books, even ones I'd loved. In other books, I would often view characters as being "other" than me -- they were men, they were women. Even though those polarities supposedly don't mean anything to me, I read the characters with the assumptions that the categories meant something to them, and so a woman would be a woman. The same would go for sexuality. I would rarely find any characters who thought the way I do, who didn't have a preference for only one thing. I could imagine such a preference and accept it in the character, but for my mind to truly relate to them, it was like acting.

With Wraeththu, I felt like I didn't have to put any effort into comfortably accepting the characters and their feelings -- it all seemed perfectly natural. It was such a shock -- like going to some country and discovering I know the language even though I'd never visited or studied. It was a homecoming really: You are with us, you can be us. And it's this welcome and joy that has kept me.