University of Michigan, Unknown Stairwell
I was born at the University of Michigan Hospital in February, 2003. At the time, my father was studying for his PhD there, for material engineering, which meant that as a toddler, he occasionally took me to his office. Strangely enough, it’s not my father’s arms, which held me as we climbed the stairs, or the office itself, where I played with toys while he worked on Excel sheets filled with numbers that I remember, but the cold, concrete stairwell, lined with metal railings, stretching up to unknown floors, that we passed through. The exact memory is fuzzy, having been 15 years since I moved from Michigan to Washington, but nostalgic nevertheless.
Yet what does it mean to be nostalgic for loneliness, to want, to crave it? The isolation of the stairs, a peaceful alienation from the rest of the world? Am I a liminal person - someone who does not belong to spaces defined - for loving liminal space?
On Stairs
Stairs have been around since antiquity. The first stairs were made of stones and wood, and built into paths on the sides of hills and mountains to enable easy access through difficult terrain. It reached its most developed basic form in colonial cities in Ancient Greece, where stairs became more than just easy paths based on natural contours. The city of Priene was planned before it was built, and it is here that stairs, along with the streets and placements of buildings, became subject to the "deliberate decisions of the designer and the exigencies of the created structure." (Templer, 1995) Stairs and stairways became as much rhetoric as they are constructs.
The modern straight-flight stair with landings is an invention reliant on advances in building material and technology. With upward expansion came the need to access upward expansion, which continued to enable further expansion, bringing existence to structures like the Empire State Building and the Burj Khalifa. The exigence of the stairwell is to provide access to higher stories in a structure, and while there have been numerous stairs designed with architectural art in mind, such as Michelangelo's stair for the Laurentian Library, (Templer, 1995), and which are pieces of art in and of themselves, the stairs I refer to in this essay, personally, simply connect floors and rooms together.
On Liminal Space
Liminal space, in the physical sense, is a concept more easily defined by example. Imagine a school during passing period, bustling and filled with children in the daytime, when classes are happening and everywhere sounds the steps and squeaks of shoes on linoleum. Then think of the same school after hours, when the windows become a harsh division between fluorescent lights and inky darkness. Do you remember going to a school concert, and wandered a bit too far away from the rest of the group to walk the halls? How it felt eerie and disconnected?
That's a liminal space - when a certain location is experienced outside of its familiar context. (Liminal Spaces, 2021) More literally, it is a threshold - a space defined by the space not occupied by other spaces. In the built environment, like a building, individual rooms often have their own purpose, such as a lab room, storage room, computer room, et cetera. But to have a functional building, one must connect those rooms with hallways, doors, and stairs. A stairwell is a liminal space that exists between floors.
Think of liminal space as connective tissue. If a room is an organ, then hallways and stairs are the connective tissue holding the operation together. Unnoticed but necessary. As an example of just how overlooked connective tissue is, the mesentery, an organ in the human body that connects the intestines to the abdominal wall, was just coined in 2017, after hundreds of years of medicine.
When you linger in a space defined by its relationship to other spaces for too long, it feels a bit funny; you were not meant to exist in such a space for extended periods of time. Or were you?
---- ----- Elementary School, North Stairs
The South stairs of ---- ----- Elementary School smelled new when I stepped on to them. The school was renovated the previous summer, and these stairs were free from the wear of time. Concrete, with metal, barred railings, with a more open concept idea that let in views of both floors. I remember looking at architectural concept diagrams of the new school building.
In the last months of 5th grade, we began to change. The late spring warmth became the space between childhood and adolescence. We visited our future middle schools for the first time, and made plans for the classes we would take next year.
And we began to change physically, too. This change was for me, much harder than the academic change. In the space between elementary school and middle school, I would watch in helpless confusion and disgust as my body inherited the form I did not want, within sight of both the old and the new, but belonging to neither.
On Gender
According to the World Health Organization, gender "refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed." Gender is usually assigned at birth based on the biological configurations of female and male. Those whose gender identities, or internal sense of gender, do not correspond with the their assigned gender, are considered transgender. I am one of them.
Transgender is a term that encompasses many identities and even then, not everyone has the same experience. Though I identify as a man now (and very loosely at that), my journey was not a straight run from "girl" to "boy" - instead, for a long time, I existed in a limbo in between those two particular points. I even existed in a limbo between cisgender and transgender as I struggled to accept myself in a way that was meaningful to me.
So that's my spiel on gender. That's all.
On Transitions
A transition is a liminal space. Both exist between defined spaces and are the threshold of one state to another. Teenagers are in a transition between child and adult; life is a transition between birth and death. Seasons may have been defined by people to have rigid beginnings and ends, but in reality, they are always changing. Those full branches that sway in the summer breeze change color, one by one, then two by two, and by the time one has bothered to observe, the leaves are rotted on the ground. Opposite to constant transition is the sudden - struck by lightning, you drop in an instant. Yet there was still a fraction of a second where you were transitioning from alive to dead, when your heart was captured by the electric shock.
Contrast change with persistence. Metathesiophobia is the fear of change, and though it is rare, it is not unheard of (otherwise, there wouldn't be a word for it!). The phobia usually stems from a life pattern of uncontrollable situations, where change becomes associated with uncomfortable phases in one's life. (Olesen) Of course, we all have a little piece of metathesiophobia - that’s natural. When life was good, how I wished that nothing would change, and it would last forever! It is also natural, yet increasingly outdated, when persistence is imposed upon certain people by others. When parents incorrectly believe that their children would never grow up and have their own beliefs and opinions. When generations incorrectly believe that their experiences will be universal to the next. When people fail to realize the fluidity of identity and expression.
Persistence is a construct of human ego; another synonym for persistence, and antonym for change, is stagnation. The only thing that is known to be constant is change.
University of Washington, Paul G. Allen Center, Stairs 3
Stair 3 in the CSE1 building at University of Washington is similar to the stairwell in University of Michigan that triggered my fascination with liminal spaces years ago. It has smooth concrete steps, with two rough anti-slip lines. The banister is metal, painted green. The walls of the stairwell are concrete as well, and as I step down into the basement to work, my footsteps echo around the shaft, which stretches from well below the ground, where research labs reside, up to heights I have never wandered before.
I pass through for a brief 20 seconds in the space between rest, in my dorm room, and work, in the computing labs in the basement. In this way, I use the stairwell the same way my father did for his office. On occasion, I let it unfold into its own experience, by pausing on a landing and looking down, then up, marveling at the utilitarian, functional construction of the stairwell. For me, liminal space is its own experience. I only walk away for fear that someone will walk in and break the spell.
On Gender Transition
I guess I'm not done talking about gender.
Gender transition is the step that transgender people take to live closer to their gender identity. It is different for everybody, and everybody takes different steps. Everyone has different goals and different starting points - the only common factor is that it is a period of significant introspection and change, a sort of rite of passage.
Indeed, various ritual experiences are key in the journey of many transgender individuals and help to affirm their gender identity. In a 2015 study comprised of 21 different transgender and gender non-conforming individuals, some of those experiences included changing their name, cutting or growing out hair, and hormone therapy. (Dentice & Dietert) Between the initiation of rituals and "completion," however, there was a state where the rituals were in progress, leaving those individuals in a liminal space.
I started my transition in the last year of high school - I changed my name and pronouns, cut my hair, and more recently started taking hormones to masculinize my body, deliberately deciding which parts of the gender transition would fit my design. But between the state where I appeared "female" and the state where I will appear "male," I looked somewhere in between. I once asked someone for the bathroom, and they replied with the locations of both the bathrooms for the girls and the boys - on opposite sides of the building. I guess that the limbo between male and female was preferable to strictly being interpreted as female, but it was that - a space between two predetermined points on a very broad spectrum where society preferred those who clustered near those two points.
Several Beautiful Stairs Across Campus
And now, a few examples of beautiful and curious stairs across campus,
- Odegaard Undergraduate Library's central staircase, which provides a generous view of the different levels of the library, and the people there,
- The Paul G. Allen Center's Stair 1, which truly embodies the sense of claustrophobia of liminal space, with its fluorescent lights and narrow, blank walls,
- Red Square's southeast stairs, which, on clear, sunny days, reveals Mt. Rainier on the way to class,
- Savery's stairwells, which expose the pipes, the inner workings, the blood vessels, of the building, and
- The Bill and Melinda Gates' Innovation Stairway, which floats in the center of the atrium and leads to the graduate computing labs, lifting us to a higher plane of knowledge.
On Liminality
In cultural anthropology, liminality is the state of ambiguity between culturally defined stages in one's life; such a state is occupied during a ritual or a rite of passage. (“liminality”, 2021) We, as people, pass through set stages all the time - just think of adolescence, which changes from child to adult, marked in many cultures with coming-of-age celebrations and rituals, such as the Spanish quinceañera and the Jewish bar/bat mitzvah. Liminality also applies to entire groups of people who do not belong to set categories in society - for example, illegal immigrants, monks, and transgender people.
For transgender people in particular, liminality is twofold - they do not belong to society's standards because they defy the notion that gender is equal to sex, and because for many, whether by choice or the constraints of biology, they do not belong to strictly male or female binary categories in public perception. Existing in between states is a hard place to be, and society does not always accept liminal people with open arms. Those who do not conform to society's standards are ostracized, shamed, and even physically harmed; as such, rather than remaining in the liminal space between the male/female gender binary, many transgender people eventually align with those two points, be it their own choice or not. Even within their own communities, transgender people may face criticism for not "adequately presenting or passing as male or female." (Dentice & Dietert, 2015) My first experiences in the transgender community were ones of such hatred on the giving side, fueled by my own confusion and discomfort, which I truly regret now.
It is a shame. Transgenderism, and fluid transgenderism at that, gives one an open perspective on different levels in society, like the stairs in Odegaard; yet it can also be suffocating to be in, like the Allen Center's Stair 1. It is a beautiful experience, like descending Red Square's southeast stairs, but like Savery's stairwells, it also exposes the sometimes ugly inner workings of society. Finally it is transcendent, like the Innovation Stairway - ascending beyond boundaries of flesh, genetics, and blood to create our own selves.
It took me a long time to acknowledge that transgender is beautiful. It will take me longer to continually accept it. But I know this now. To consistently protect that experience - to protect all transgender and gender non-conforming people means to embrace liminality, rejecting the traditional gender binary to ascend upwards to a world of free, safe, and shameless exploration and expression.
Elm Residence Hall, East Stair
Elm's East Stairs are carpeted, with full, white walls, the dark metal handrails attached directly to the wall. The landings have large windows that open to the street, where I can see next-door-neighbor Poplar, across the street Lander, and the streets lit up by traffic lights in between.
It's 4 am, and tonight, the mysteries of the world are gathered around me. I stayed up with friends who have since left for their dorms, leaving me alone, cross-legged in the stairwell. For the first time in my life, I belong to a group of people who accept me as their own. In a few months, I will have experienced the most significant changes to my body, and whether I like it or not, in the public eye, I will belong to one point of the spectrum. And yet I cannot let go of belonging to the stairwell, because that's where I was born, struggled, and lived.
In three hours, the sun will rise and break the spell, and we will rise to resume our daily roles. I drink the cool night air, and it quenches my thirst. I wrap its darkness around me like a blanket. Tonight is clear and still; I can see the stars above, and I wonder who else is awake in the space between dusk and dawn. I wonder who else loves the liminal space and is too, unbounded and undefined.
Then I get up and pass through the door, leaving my thoughts to swirl and dance with the dust motes in the stairwell.