How Trees Complicate Our Understanding of Gender

Origin Story

People came from trees. According to the Norse tale of Ask and Embla, when the gods first created us they fashioned us from wood. In this story, the first man was made from an ash tree and the first woman was made from an elm. In the Irish version of the story, the first man was alder and the first woman rowan. To this day the memory of sap must still run in our veins, inspiring the uncanny longing we feel in the woods, the recognition of kinship we see in a tree standing tall in a field.

Rowan and Elm

The rowan tree goes by a multitude of names. You could call it rowan or Quickbeam or mountain ash or service tree and all those names would still be the right ones. In much folklore and in books, like Jacquline Memory Paterson’s Tree Wisdom, one finds the suggestion that there is something particularly feminine about the tree, that it is perhaps the female equivalent of the ash. John White and David More’s The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Trees describes the rowan as “an attractive slender tree,” a description implicitly coded female in our society. Here is a delicate beauty with white flowers and red berries. One can almost imagine the rowan as Snow White in tree form. But in reality, the tree isn’t female at all—or it’s not solely female. The flowers of the rowan are alternately termed bisexual, or hermaphroditic, or “perfect,” meaning they have both male and female parts on a single flower. The American elm is the same—both male and female or neither male nor female, depending on how you look at it. Each spring the female parts of the elm’s flowers mature before the male parts but, eventually, both are present. We humans don’t often perceive the masculinities of the rowan and elm as clearly as we see their femininities. But whether we acknowledge all aspects of these trees in our stories or not, the trees themselves remain the same.

Crabapple

Have you ever done this writing exercise? Describe your gender identity without using images that are stereotypically associated with masculine or feminine things. Try it. See what you find. When I do this exercise, I always think of the crabapple tree in the yard of the house I grew up in. It was split down the middle, all the way to the ground. Its two halves grew away from each other, almost as if they were two separate trees. We never knew how it had split. The crack down the middle of its trunk was old, possibly as old as the tree itself. Perhaps it was made by the weight of its branches pulling in opposite directions. Perhaps it originated from some outside source: an axe, or lightning. I would look at that tree and I would imagine its roots, those parts I couldn’t see, grown all together, tangled up and merging in a way its above-ground parts couldn’t. Underneath, I thought, the tree would be wholly undivided.

Alder

The alder has unisexual flowers, meaning that its flowers have either male or female reproductive parts. The male flowers, called catkins, are longer, the female catkins are shorter. But the flowers can all grow on the same tree, making the tree monoecious. Some trees are entirely binary, or dioecious, meaning unisexual male and female flowers grow on separate trees. Gingkos, for instance, one of our oldest trees, having changed very little since the Triassic period, are dioecious. This binary can certainly be found in trees, but it’s not all we can find. Worldwide, only 5% of trees are dioecious. Globally, the most common gender configuration in trees follows the multi-gendered flowers of the rowan/elm model.

Human

There’s always been a boy self inside me. I don’t know how to say it any better than that. We have more words now, of course, to describe it than I had growing up. We have beautiful words like genderqueer, gender fluid, nonbinary, and so many more. For most of my life I sensed this other self, divided, a hidden part I shouldn’t show. I spent my growing up trying to find a space in womanhood to fit me. And I did, for the most part, though I’ve long understood that I do womanness slantwise. My womanhood is queer and fluid and shifting. Much of me fits into this space very comfortably and I’ve grown very loyal to it. It’s the loyalty that comes with working so hard to find something, with spending so much of one’s life defining and defending it.

But not all of me can fully exist there. Whatever form of womanness I try to take (and there are so many forms, so many rich iterations of female), there’s always this other me, this misfitted man me, enduring just under my skin. This part of me longs for an outward expression that, in a binaried world—even in our increasingly questioning binaried world—I struggle to articulate. In my experience, in-betweenness can be particularly hard to define. If I say my gender is queer. If I say I’m a rowan. If I say I’m nonbinary. If I say I’m like an ash. If I say I’m a genderqueer woman. If I say I would like to be a very old Yew tree. What does that mean to you?

Ash and Yew

In the world of tree genders, the ash is notorious for being confusing. While some species of ash are dioecious, others can be singly gendered or multiply gendered and can even change genders from season to season. An individual ash might have male flowers one year, female flowers the next, and then both for years after. The ash isn’t the only tree that does this. A few years ago, the UK’s oldest tree, a Yew that had spent thousands of years in the appearance of maleness, began to grow female berries. I like to imagine this tree laughing to itself as researchers crowd around its branches trying to understand what has happened. I imagine it woke up one morning, after millennia spent as a predictable, upstanding arboreal citizen, said “fuck it,” and let itself bloom.

Arboreal Gender

Gender is a human concept. So when we observe tree reproduction, and assign sex based on observations, we have to remember that these are all human concepts and human distinctions. They say more about us than about our arboreal neighbors. In our myths, we attempt to describe our fascination, our sense of connection with trees using origin stories and sagas of kinship. Through our symbolic engagement with trees, we reveal much about how we perceive these creatures, and in them, ourselves. But however hard we imagine, we can’t perceive the tree’s point of view.

Origin Story, Revised

What if, after the first man and first woman were made, their tree parents told them a secret? The ash changed as they watched, whispering “My very nature is fluid.” The rowan shook their perfect flowers and said, “I am multiple.” But, as the humans began to discover the complexity and potential of genders, to explore the natures of ourselves, Thor became angry. The gods guard their secrets jealously. He threw down his lightning, creating our seemingly unbridgeable gaps between men and women, creating, for many of us, the gaps we hold deep within ourselves: the bisection of binary.

And so, here we are, split down the middle but growing. We don’t always know into what. Underground, I am multiple, many parts hidden under my surface. My trunk may be divided, but its singular halves are finding their ways back to each other in branches. Entwining toward an outward expression of roots, they dream they can grow themselves whole again.