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Jessy,

In your generic experiment, you write: "I had been saying for months that I didn’t think of myself as a woman. I hadn’t pursued that line of thinking any further. Susan Stryker showed up – readings in two of my classes, and she herself there as well. Suddenly, there was a mirror, and I raised my eyes to it, and that’s how I came out." Then, in "See Minotaur Or, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Minotaur," you write:

And now I'm plowing through readings on trans/intersex issues in recent American history and googling all kinds of things, and I'm very quietly freaking out again. And I don't know why. My hypothesis is because I lack a vocabulary to describe my own gender identity, and this sort of thing gets it all stirred up. I suppose the best term is genderqueer, but … I guess I don’t know what I mean by that. I’m not transsexual. I don’t feel like my body is wrong, or that … I mean, I don’t think of myself as a woman, and I don’t like the word woman, but I certainly don’t think of myself as a man, either.

Thus, I would be interested in knowing how Stryker's essay was therapeutic for you. What exactly in the text resonated with you? helped you? comforted you?