A Letter to My Male Friends Who May Not Know That They Are Women
Dear Friends,
I don’t usually write about politics, but there are times when the present makes a fold in time and connects electrically with a moment in the past. I’ve been feeling it now.
Think back to November of 2016. A openly misogynist sexual predator was running for office against a female candidate. For a long moment, it seemed that he would not succeed, and then he did. People took that moment in many ways, but for me, and I know I am not alone, the realization that millions of people, almost half the voters, had endorsed, ignored, or forgiven his assaults plunged me into despair.
Like most people gendered female, like most people assigned female at birth (and also like more boys than is commonly acknowledged), I have experienced sexual predation and sexual abuse. Watching an open abuser being given high honor, being raised to the office of the presidency, unmade and reconfigured me.
In the days that followed I wrote this letter, a letter to my male friends who did not know that they were women. I sent it to those friends, friends who had seemed baffled by the depth of my reaction, but I also sent it to The Rumpus, who published it as part of series of immediate responses to the election.
Fair warning: this letter is melodramatic, and in moments explicit. It comes from the shock of those days, when millions were filling the streets in protest. And yet, many things that have followed are the things I feared, that we feared: the attacks on trans rights, the purging of school libraries’ LGBTQ+ book collections, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the criminalization of abortion and women’s healthcare, Project 2025’s horrifically misogynist visions for the future of our country.
What are our own visions for the future? It is time to articulate them. What happens next is once again in all our hands.
— Sal
Dearest loves,
As you are, I am stricken. I am devastated. I am unmade.
We have all felt a terrible blow. And yet, of course, we all feel it differently, and have different understandings of what has befallen us, and what is to come. What I fear now is that the extent of my sorrow and devastation will seem unaccountable to many who are close to me. That this terrible thing that has happened to all of us will divide me from those I hold most dear. I feel I must write to you, my closest and most important friends, so that when we are together you can understand why I am so changed.
I woke up on the morning of November 9 with a new body. The first thing I discovered, and it’s been a surprise, is that I am female. I stood in the bathroom and looked at my breasts in the mirror. How strange that these familiar shapes now mean something new.
Deep in the night of the election, I felt a storm of hate, one that had obviously been building for months, years, decades, but was now rising to unimaginable heights, striking like terrible lightning through my physical body. I felt this hate was directed very, very precisely, at me. It said that my claims to be fully human were rejected utterly, and that the destruction of everything I loved would be reveled in. I am taking this very personally.
More than 60 million people have chosen to support and condone a leader who does not believe I am fully human. Because I am female. Because, when I take my shirt off I see breasts. Because I have a clit. And because I am queer—queerness ignites a gender panic, a hatred, which is at its roots misogynistic. And again because I live in a city, because I read books, and I write, and I make art. Because I practice meditation. Because I wear my hair a certain way. Because of what I value and because of everything I love. As I examine my life and myself, wherever I look, there is nothing about me that is not hated by that hate.
And yet as I feel that hatred coursing through me, I discover that my body is not only what I can see in the mirror. I feel the hatred reach and run through every female body. Every little girl, watching and puzzled, trying to discover who she is and can be. Every old lady and every embryo. My female body is huge; it contains millions. I feel the hate running through my queer body, male and female and trans and in drag and undefinable. My body grows, mysterious and enormous. I feel it running through all the people on the subway with me, every single resident of New York City. I feel the hatred attack every Muslim-American and every immigrant and every person of color. By where the hatred goes, I know who I am. I feel it coursing through every book on my shelf, through libraries and campuses, through professors and students and scientists, through therapists and social workers and aid workers, through peace activists and do-gooders, through writers and artists. I feel the hatred striking everywhere that inner life is valued and treasured, everywhere there is a subjectivity that declares itself to be fully human, uncontrolled and uncontrollable by authority.
I understand that not every part of my new body loves me, or wishes to be defined as part of me. Many or most may be offended by the idea. This is a body I do not have, or claim, agency over, a body I cannot and do not appropriate, colonize, or control. It is a body of subjectivities, all nerve endings: a body of feeling.
I am aware that many parts of my new body also hate me, and may feel that they themselves are not fully human, and that many parts of my new body voted for a world that condones and ratifies this hatred. This body is riddled with self-hatred and fear.
I am walking through the streets alternately crying and raging. If I see you, there may be tears running down my face. I am afraid for the world. I am afraid for my friendships. Some people I love may have wished for this devastation. Some people I love may not be feeling this blow in their own body. Some people I love may not be able to recognize it in mine. Some of my male friends may not know that they are women. I am afraid that when my friends look at me, they won’t recognize their own lightning-struck body looking back.
November 12, 2016
I am curious to know how all of this feels to you!
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
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No melodrama here. The election of Trump and then the appointment of Kavanaugh felt visceral and personal in a way I couldn't explain (and I'm a UK citizen!) so thank you for putting this sensation into words.
Anger has a place, in life and in literature, but it's often 'disappeared', especially in poetry. There's something freeing about the energy and clarity anger can bring.
Beautiful, truthful, poetic, clear. Not melodramatic. This is what public-private grief feels like. The teen girls know they come to womanhood in this climate. It needs to be said. Thank you, dear poet.