on cartography and dissection

When you're Other, there's this funny thing, especially if you're seen as a mix of something and something else. (Races, sexes, parts of reality. The atoms and their combinations are legion, of course.) They had a way of dealing with this in old texts, after all. There's a place on the Center's nice precise map for the country you live in.

It's got that little face blowing wind on it, maybe, or sea serpents grinning and looping. It's labeled "Here Be Monsters." The coastlines fade off into dotted lines, blurs, guesses. Nobody comes back from there, they'll tell you. It's the edge of the world. It's a savage land. Mostly you know this: nobody knows anything, but there are guesses. There are stories. There are Herodotus' dog-headed men and gold-digging ants, Californian island flower queens, there are Sima Qian's tattooed dragon-men of the steaming South. The Isle of Glass, the Western Blackness, the Kingdom of Prester John.

The Antipodes, where men walk upside down.

Here Be Monsters. Things like Us, like people, but different. They're cannibals, they're mermaids and sea-bishops, they're pale and bearded and travel in boats with great seagulls pulling them forward with the wind. They have three bodies and one head; they smoke the leaves of a tree that makes them behave as Greek men do when drunk on wine.

Monsters are off the map, and the bigger our maps get, the less room for them there are; they either fade in, assimilate, become familiar, or they're driven further into the wilds and from there to extinction. Monsters and facts don't mix. Monsters are made of stories and conjecture. They're part this--a thing we know--and part that, a thing we don't, or a thing we do, but mashed together all wrong.

Maybe it sounds familiar, by now. Maybe, like me, you recognize yourself. You look at the coastlines of your skin, fading into gulfs and seas of the Center's borders, washing up on your beaches, and you hear, across the water, those words: Here Be Monsters. You hear them inking it onto you, steering well clear or making a beeline for savage lands to tame and profit from. You know your insides are not navigable. You know that no matter how you say, look, I can tell you where you are, you're right here, all you will hear back is a new name given to you, the Undiscovered Country.

Wave your arms and shout, if you like. I'm doing it, too. You'll still hear the question: What are you?
I'm not a what.
Yeah, but what are you?

Not an Us, see? You're an Other. You're a fantastical thing of a foreign land, no matter how much you can learn to recognize Them as part of your Us, as like you, they'll be...curious, or afraid, or both. And busy, meanwhile, planting flags, colonizing your reality, calling this Squaw Hill and that New Hampshire, and they will probably not even recognize that you had names for your parts, you had words, you could have told them your own story.
It'll be pieced together, instead, from explorer's accounts and schoolyard rumor and careful, scientific study of specimens, while you're waving your arms.

It's an interesting thing, to be the bushman in the zoo, to be Herculine Barbin, to be the subject of an ethnography instead of an autobiography, to be rendered in someone else's symbols. Those of us who survive learn to become bilingual, learn to be Sacagaweas or Zizous. (Some learn to be Hannibals and Owain Glyndwrs and Mangal Pandays, instead; one way or another, it ends messily, then.) Sometimes you're lucky enough to be named by your neighbors for the colonist, instead: 'these are the Eaters of Raw Meat, o guest, who live to the north.' 'This is my gay friend Tim, who's gay. He's an artist, aren't you, y'big homo? Anyway, I hope that doesn't bother you.'

And there it is: you're illuminated in a manuscript, a centaur, a Celestial, an Eskimo, a manticore, an autogynephiliac. You're made of stories, and your own voice is generally drowned out by them. You're a Monster, and it ain't your Here to Be in any more. You're the one brown kid in someone else's town. You're the transsexual etherized upon the table. Monsters aren't in their own stories; they're in someone else's, some Center's, some subject's object. They guard treasure Real People can take, or they can be killed for a trophy, to be a proof of belonging and earned renown in the world outside the unmapped place they lurk. They're there to advance the plot, but nobody ever asks what the look on Medusa's face was when she saw her own reflection for the first time. Nobody ever asks why the Chimaera needs killing; it's a lone thing, a wrongness, a distortion wandering in from elsewhere, burning the straight-plowed fields of Us. Huddle in your cave with me, monster. Can you hear someone else's heroes coming?

Maybe you can claim some thirdspace, you can pick among places given you, you can believe the hype about your Magic Insight Into Other People's Gender or be someone's Gosh, That's Really A Lesson For Us All. You can play the shaman, live on the edge of the village; you can play Cheiron and train Real People's heroes. Me, I refuse to be here For Them, as much as possible, no matter how much I care for them as part of my human race. I will not be a cipher. I'd rather be a monster than that, some days, even though there's really only one way a monster's story ends, even a tame monster's, and it has to do with poison arrows.

So, you wanna plant your flag? Well, Here Be a Monster. Make me one, and I will go bump in your night, I will do it with teeth. You get what you continually, noisily, unlisteningly expect, eventually. It's that or partnership, letting me fill in my country's map in yours, letting us exchange and converse, admitting that to each, the other can be navigable, if only you let the territory speak for itself.

You're not discovering me. I was already here.