Nora Holzinger

 Through the Looking Glass I remember the day I found out I was unvaccinated.  I was struggling through the digital forms that would allow me to live on campus my freshman year of college, and I had to provide documentation that I was vaccinated appropriately.  I yelled downstairs to ask my mom if she had the documents.  “No” she shouted back.  “What? Where is it? What do you mean” I peppered her, finally leaving my room to come downstairs to the living room. “It doesn’t exist,” she said.  I was stunned.  She walked down the narrow basement stairs to rummage in the filing cabinet that held all my documents, and she returned from the depths of the storage room with a folded yellow card with my name and date of birth on it in her handwriting. Inside, the card was blank except for two lines – a polio vaccination and a tetanus shot at age two.  Living in a state with quite strict rules about vaccine exemptions, I had no choice – I had to get vaccinate...

“Ding dong - Doors opening. Step back and allow customers to exit…”  As I stand at the opening Metro train car doors, I sense another passenger behind me.  “They’re just letting men wear dresses these days, huh.”  It’s 10:30 at night and I’m coming home from work. I get a pit in my stomach and reassure myself there’s no way he’s talking to me. I’m a woman, and always have been.  However, we are the only ones in this train car, and I am wearing a dress.  --- I am over six feet tall, with a build better described as “statuesque” rather than “model-esque” – broad shoulders, flat chest, without the soft curves that would mark me as belonging to the ranks of the fairer sex.  This fact has been thrown in my face as long as I can remember – the fact that I am larger than most men and always will be.  Judith Butler, misunderstood feminist theorist, writes that gender is a performance. You are a woman because you perform the stereotypical social role of “woman”...