It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.

The point of the journey is not just healing. It's also recovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves.

But somewhere within each of us, buried at varying depths depending on the age and degree of neglect or abuse, shame or coercion we endured, there is a resistant, daydreaming, rebellious, creative, unique child -- a true self who is waiting.

Each individual woman's body demands to be accepted on its own terms.

We move away from only the binary boxes of "masculine" or "feminine" and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.

When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.