Sir Lady Gray
Becoming a whole person in a world trapped in a divisive psychology
When was the first time someone asked WHAT ARE YOU?
I was born a person with girl parts, given a “boy’s name” and raised the youngest of two brothers. My mother wanted a tomboy, or at least a girl who could hold her own. What better way to have a girl who can take a hit than to name them contrary to social norms, cut off all their hair, and move them to a hick town in Florida? As young as single digits I began to experience people asking me not who I was, but what I was.
If you were a Jennifer, Sarah, Julie, Kathy, Caitlin, you were a girl. If you were a Joe, David, John, Nathan, James you were a boy. If you were a Lennie, and the only other Lenny was a black boy from “the wrong side of the tracks” whose name was shortened from Leonard, you realize quickly you‘re breaking the mold. I was a Lennie, I never knew anything else. It wasn’t short for anything, I was named after the matriarch and most respected woman on my father’s side of the family. I didn’t have a middle name, just Lennie Gray. To add insult to injury when I was this young, I was still suffering from an accident as a baby where I fell down a series of stairs and deadened my four front baby teeth. So as far as I knew Lennie was a short-haired, front toothless child, raised without religion to believe god was unity with all of life, called sister and daughter to my family, but had no place in the world around her; harassed by the boys and shunned by the girls. I was always grateful for the open pastures around my home and my imagination to disappear on grand adventures alone in nature.
Eventually, my adult teeth came in, sometime around the 5th grade. I was allowed to grow my hair out, and I found my way through my brother’s hand-me-down clothes, and the girl’s section of cheap fast fashion. Middle school arrived, the boys still didn’t like me, but the girls finally accepted me and I’d found some friends. Then we moved.
Welcome to Lithonia, where your 98% hick white school became a 98% suburban black school. I am grateful I was raised to believe god was unity with everything, because this was culture shock. I’d never seen so many brown humans in my entire life. In 7th grade science class I was paired with Marah for lab, my first close black friend.
Marah understood how I’d felt as an outsider. I could talk to her about things no one else before had comprehended. She taught me the history of racism, and we’d spend hours discussing spiritual philosophy, activism against hate, peaceful protest and the dichotomy found in the civil rights spaces of passive peace and assertive aggression. She became my best friend, and thus my journey through intersectional feminism began through lived experience. To this day Marah will tell you I’m the white person who taught her not all white humans were poison, and she is the person who showed me my pain as a whatever I was matched hers as a young black woman, learning the true meaning of empathy.
My father had been traveling for years and was largely absent. He moved to China, and my first trip there when I was 13, I traveled with the eyes Marah had helped open. After I returned we moved again, to a school that was 50/50 and riddled with diversity tension. Back to not fitting. I had found I was more comfortable with people of color, but there was a dividing line between the poor black kids bussed in from outside the perimeter to rich white schools inside the perimeter. As a white person I wasn’t accepted with the brown kids, as a poor kid the bougie white kids shunned me, and I fell in with the misfit punks who taught me, if you don’t like who I am as I exist, I’ll simply exist to make you uncomfortable.
My dad divorced my mom, married his interpreter, and at 15 I took my second trip to China. In China, as a tall teenage American girl, I was exotic and beautiful, always being asked for a photograph in the street. Also, my name isn’t gendered there, I was just what I was… a Lennie. Walking the streets of Southern China I found the next major development for my identity, not being able to hide. I was a foot taller, melanin deficient, and dressed in my teen American angst of all black and Doc Martens. But here I was a beautiful human, just as I was. My difference was what made me alluring, and I never forgot that feeling even though it took me years to experience it again.
Upon return to American life I found a new dynamic. The boys would be friends with me, talk to me all about their lives and girlfriends, they were open and honest with me, especially when they’d say, you would be so pretty if…you dressed like a girl, wore make-up, showed off your body more. I was told I was the most wonderful person, but only beautiful enough to date if I validated their sense of masculinity, and did more to be more feminine. I was becoming so outraged by this I became defiant and refused any romantic interest who would pursue me solely for my external appearance. At 17, I met a queer manperson through the Atlanta underground rave scene who loved my everything, and is the first man to ever make me feel safe. Six months later I moved in, four years later we were married. Here I could be me, a fully expressive human me. He taught me what it means to make people feel safe enough to thrive in themselves as fully themselves, by challenging my growth zones and giving me opportunity to explore my utility, something often kept from women. He also taught me radical unconditional self-love as a means of loving others.
At the age of 18, my partner convinced me through logic of our poverty that shaving my head was the most sensible way to wear my hair. I’m a sucker for a rational argument so I let him cut it all off… and the world instantly treated me differently. I was back to WHAT ARE YOU, not WHO ARE YOU statements. Only this time I felt prepared for this experience and I decided to wield my newfound power. I used my hair as a social experiment to uncover the bias of others. Over time I could weed out in seconds the people who couldn’t see me, the ones who saw me as a human, and those who saw me as a beautiful loving human. Every reaction, insult, unfiltered statement, and tick of body language was used to read your subconscious mind. In turn I would use the experience to integrate the emotions surrounding all the received bias and judgement until I built up immunity to the violence, but also a sincere empathy for all people subjected to this socialized subconscious abuse.
A glaring pattern began to develop, it was almost always white people, and more specifically white men. White women were always validating towards my bravery to keep my hair so short but very dismissive of themselves to take such risks because they were too flawed for whatever reason. We had socialized women for weakness and self-loathing, and this narrative made my heart heavy. White men were almost always abusive towards my sexuality and relationships they knew nothing of, telling me a man would never love me looking as I did, so I’d tell them to say that to my husband. Wishing me well on my cancer recovery, but cancer patients don’t have eyebrows or stubble, also I don’t look or carry myself as a sick person. Telling me they’ll donate their sperm so my lesbian lover and I can conceive. Thinking goading me or aggressive competition was how to motivate a tough girl, instead of just asking me if I wanted to or explaining to me how I could conquer a fear. Or simply telling me how beautiful I could have been had I been more feminine.
WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? Be more feminine.
How can I be more feminine than tits, hormones, ovaries, periods, and a vagina? To my women friends I am a woman’s woman. A lady of ladies. A queen. A lover. A fighter. A cryer. Beautiful, brilliant, and FEMME AS FUCK. I am comfortable in my body, wear fitted lacy sheer clothes, dresses, and can rock a six-inch heel without any trouble. At times my sense of self and resilience against male bias even helps them embrace their ladypower in new ways. I’m not just feminine to them, I’m a goddess… as they are to me.
From here I began to hone the identity of Sir Lady Gray. How assertively androgynous could I be? How far could I push this social boundary? How much poison could I pull out of men by being completely fluid? How deeply could I trigger bias so I could show it to you and help you overcome it? How many of you could see and hear me? How hard is it to emasculate you? How do you respond when the person you are looking at in me expresses rage, grief, or love? Are you loving, kind and commpassionate or violent, dismissive and abusive? In what ways do you inform me I’m not woman enough? I’m still answering these questions, and every day I’m leaning harder into this space pissing cis-white-men off because they have no power over me, and bringing peace to the hearts of essentially everyone else.
A misogynist once told me to ‘just receive like a woman should.’ Fortunately, I know I give as good as I get, because non-binary as an expression of identity is a being without inherent gender bias, an acceptance of being all things human seeking the heartfelt humanity within others.
What’s in a name? Turns out, a lot. Your honor, integrity, dignity are what your name represent. Every good brand has a good brand story behind the name, and a reputation to back it up. Sir Lady Gray of Lenspeace is mine. Lennie as a name in the feminine means torch bearer or bringer of light, the masculine tense means lionhearted. Mowris, stems from Moorish and actually carries the meaning having a dark skin. Gray stands tall in the middle. I didn’t ask for this identity, it was given to me. My name translates to a complete spectrum of grayscale, light to dark. My work in the world has become to trigger, balance, and facilitate empathy, to help wake everyone the whole fuck up to end abusive -isms and heal social pain. My immunity to subjective bias allows me the freedom to see it, call it out, hold it accountable, and help humans find integrity with their hearts to delete a divisive program we’re collectively trying to dismantle for true peace to emerge. LENSPEACE communicates empathy on behalf of our shared humanity to shine a light on the world as it is and as we wish it were. My life’s work has emerged from my soul work.
I know who and what I am, do you know thyself?
Call me any names you like, sir, ma’am, he, she, they, masculine, feminine, bitch, cunt, whore, asshole, artist, designer, feminist…every name translates to Sir Lady Gray — magically disgruntled manifestor.
