#DontTrumpWomen Sticker, Emeryville, CA. ©2019 The Femme Project.
““Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?””
Nineteen words.
These were the words asked by the Democratic Senator of California, Kamala Harris, of the Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, on the third day of his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing on September 6, 2018. These nineteen words effectively drew a hard and fast line between what it means to be male versus female in the United States. Words that reverberated in the collective consciousness of all who watched and have felt the acute pain of powerlessness. For a moment, that awareness appeared to register on the face of the sweaty man who would go on to play an instrumental role in dismantling the rights and lives of so many women.
This article began with fits and starts.
Nineteen has been a recurring number in my herstory. I was 19 when I went away to college for the first time. Two immediate family members have birthdays on the 19th day of their respective months. I was married on the 19th on a sandy beach in a small ceremony far from the judgement of my disgruntled family. The date is tattooed in a delicate script on my left rib. In 2019, I returned back East from California in a cross-country move that festered with emotions wavering between wonderment and failure. It was in 2019, after buckling down with renewed purpose, that I published the first version of my book, Madame X Book 1.1. Then, COVID came calling, and 2019 was a footnote in the history books, living only in the colossal shadow of the pandemic.
I sit here with nineteen burning brightly in my brain. Each of the nineteen words spoken by Kamala holds a value as equitable and significant as the ones preceding and following it. A number in its prime only divisible by one and itself. The number of years for the lunar phases of the moon to realign on the same day of the year. The number of the Constitutional amendment giving women the long overdue right to vote. The number of convicted “witches”, most of them women, who were hung by the neck during the Salem witch trials. A profound number in numerology that combines 1, the number of new beginnings, with 9, the number of completion.
Beginning at nineteen.
At age 19, I was determined to chart my own path as I left home for college—a new beginning full of promise and opportunity and an ending that rendered me powerless in a web of shame.
When I was 19, I was raped twice, at two separate, off campus fraternity parties by two very different individuals. The fragile ideas of self identity, independence and internal strength that I had just begun to cultivate during my time away from home and parents were eviscerated instantly. What replaced that new-found autonomy was shame—a small blotch at first that blossomed into a complex network of white lies and revisionist history. I blamed myself and I tucked away that awful secret into deep places to conceal my own Scarlet Letter “A.” And it waited there, until 2018, the year that I let my acute pain resurface into the light.
Many of us watched through tears at the proceedings during the Senate confirmation hearing in 2018. And many of us heard our own tragic stories in the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. Her very public agony spawned a revived movement to recognize survivors and we collectively rallied around each other when #MeToo presented real hope for the future of women. I made my first attempt to let go of the shame and, perhaps, begin again.
The space between.
I wanted to write this article last year and post it 19 days before the election as a call to rally again—Never again. We won’t go back! The woman who posed the question of nineteen succinct and disarming words to Kavanaugh; who championed the dreams of little girls and wise women alike; who represented real change in our national conversation about equality—she was running for President of the United States of America. And her capability, momentum, and promise were contagious. But the election came and went. We know how it went. And many, myself included, are bewildered, searching for logic and answers.
Nineteen days after the election was another milestone that came and went for my article to post. Nineteen days before the end of 2024, the last year before Trump as President—another missed numerical opportunity. January 19th, the day before Donald Trump ascended to the highest public office for the second time, that day too, passed me by without the words to capture the complexity of what I was feeling. And another numerically significant 19 is on the horizon: February 19th, the date identified in one of the many executive orders issued by Trump to end birthright citizenship. The order may never come to pass, but its existence is indicative of the time in which I find myself navigating the unknown once again.
Nineteen. There is a vastness between the beginning and the end. Perhaps what matters is what we do in the time that intervenes.
