“I’ve been wounded by and obsessed with my own complicity in caging myself inside gender and societal expectations, but as I thought about the horrible things that have happened historically to women who didn’t conform, as well as the insidious ways people of all genders are indoctrinated, I began to have a gentler understanding of why I might have at times confused societal norms for my own desires. I wondered, then, if I could ever be free, and when I closed my eyes, I saw a vision of all the conforming and nonconforming parts of myself as many birds in one cage. In the vision, the cage was weak and flimsy—so far less consequential than what was inside it—that I realized even if I could not yet fully free myself, I could give the cage itself wings and still fly.”
—Melissa Studdard