Facing Our Collective Denial About Gender

I can't really travel anymore. It would be futile to ask me to speak at the Cather Spring Conference. But it might have made sense to try. The theme this year is literary prizes. How they are given. Who judges them. Whether they have intrinsic meaning or value.
I have been one who was awarded a literary prize. Two years ago. And I have since served on the panel of judges for a more important prize than the one I was given.
So why wouldn't I be invited to speak at the conference? I could even have done so digitally, zooming from Florida to the Red Cloud Opera House. What a thrill. But to do so would require acknowledging the existence of the book given BookFest's 2020 International Book Award for Biography: Long Road From Red Cloud, which tells about Willa Cather's gender-expansive identity.
This is new language for me, and it would be for Red Cloud, too, if we could talk about this matter that has so much of America wound up in knots. Hey, folks. We no longer have to call her names like hermaphrodite or mor-phee-dite or gender dysphoric or intersex. Our beloved author can now be gender-expansive.
Hot damn. She knew right away, as did her mother, that she didn't fit the mold. Willie broke loose when they tried to change her into a Wilhelmina. Her mother decided on Willa when the child was 14 months old and clearly not a girl, although the doctor said that was what she had to be.
Some name near to Willie would surely work. Same number of syllables. It works for dogs, right? Some say yes. Some say no. It doesn't matter. Although the grown-up, famous-author Cather said, in 1928, when a man she had met at a dinner party asked about her moniker: "I can make no reasonable explanation of my name . . . If I had to be William, I would have preferred to be William without modification."
Would that we could have tried, dear ones, before I die, to make a "reasonable explanation" of Cather's gender-expansiveness.Perhaps another year, perhaps with students of the new program of study being initiated at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, a campus always on the cutting edge in such matters. I recall being brought in to speak at a Gender Studies Conference they held way back in the 20th century.
It gives me hope to read that Lewis & Clark will begin offering a course, nine months long, (how appropriate), in preparing individuals to "better support trans-spectrum children, youth, and adults, and educate those within the PK-12 education system and other youth-serving organizations."
I think I like the new term, gender-expansive, better than trans-spectrum. Willa Cather doesn't belong on a spectrum, any more than any other non-binary individual, but she really should, someday, be celebrated for the wonder of her gender-expansiveness. Okay, okay. Not in my lifetime. But someday. And perhaps some other day, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (who is also having a conference in her honor, just up the road this weekend) can be studied as "bi-curious," once my Florida Journeys has been published. Some day both of these woman will be be free of the boxes we've been been keeping them in.
Someday, as Gertude Stein would say. Someday it will be Sunday. And we will live in a world where gender can be seen as the magically shifting thing it is, and sexuality, not people, can be studied on a spectrum.