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But later is better than never. Or at least I keep telling myself that.

I went to see Kate Bornstein at Villanova and I listened to Lynn Morgan's talk on "Reproductive Rights and Wrongs in Contemporary Latin America".

Kate Bornstein was refreshing. Interesting. Vivacious. And her boots were fabulous. I wasn't exactly sure what I should expect. I mean, I read her work so I kind of pinned her down into the category of writer and gave her no wiggle room to be/do anything else. So when I sat in the audience, staring at this chic older female writer sitting on a stool drinking a soda (it was diet), the term 'performance' had me baffled. I was wondering if she was going to read poetry or some of her works, or start dancing and singing. It really didn't cross my mind (though it should have, I love spoken word) that it was neither. It was informal, it was engaging and it was eclectic. I watched photos pass on a screen, I listened to her describe her life as a phone sex operator and I listened to her bash Scientology. She was so convincing that I found myself take a piece of her with me as I left. Not just the get out of jail free card, but a piece of Kate. It feels really wonderful when something moves you so much that in your change in position, there is also a change in your weight because you're actually carrying a piece of that which moved you.

One of the things that really stuck out to me was her discussing how she learned to 'talk like a woman'. I think I almost forgot that while she looked like a woman, she wouldn't really sound like one. Except she did. Until she dropped her voice down to it's natural tone. And I found myself thinking about her gender switch again. I finally let it sink in that she didn't feel like she could be herself with a penis and that she loves fashion (she must, her clothes were so enviable) but did she really have to change how she spoke? As we say in Brooklyn, "is it really that serious"? I know plenty of women with voices as deep as a man's and men with voices softer than talcum.  So I wondered, where was the line between Kate being "Kate" and Kate as performer of society's well-established female stereotypes?

Before seeing Kate's performance, I went to a talk by Lynn Morgan. My mother's family (the side of the family I grew up with) is from Panama so I thought it was incredibly enriching to learn about reproductive rights (and wrongs) in Latin America. She began by asking us what we thought of when we heard the term "reproductive rights" and the consensus was abortion. It was crazy how we all forgot that reproductive rights weren't always abortion rights; it was also the right to reproduce. But what was on my mind, and I am sure others, was that fertility issues were the rich woman's problem; there weren't many poor Latinas trying to get pregnant. What I found most interesting was that there were countries in Latin America that had high quality of life ratings yet women weren't allowed to take birth control or have abortions. One of the things that I took with me, (yes, always carrying something) was the topic of men reproductive rights. Do they have any? Should they have any?