Despite playing with these ideas for many years, it was not until I read Butler's Gender Trouble that I fully realized gender is on a spectrum and its roles are purely societal constructs. We are claimed, named as female or male at birth, and a thousand steps within harassing boundaries of norms stated, hinted, and everywhere most often force us into a position of unconscious acquiescence. The majority of us who are cisgendered, white, and heterosexual may never question why we act and dress and perform in a certain way. I always have.

I always have such questions and wrote each chapter as a vantage point of one body from the medieval era in communication with another from the modern era. Tomoe and Kikuko are equally in bondage under a Samurai patriarchy despite existing over eight hundred years apart. Melusine's hybridity is shared by Maud, and both perform dominant male roles. Yde becomes corporeal male in a thousand steps, and the performers in Paris is Burning create a real existence as female. Lucia and Susan Stryker exhibit such stark examples of fluidity they spark a light back to the sutures of each threshold. All exist in a dangerous and precarious placement. All naturally lighthouse to so many who are invisible