“From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.

From the Great Above the goddess opened her ear to the Great Below.

From the Great Above Inanna opened her ear to the Great Below…

Inanna abandoned heaven and earth to descend to the underworld.”

My future self sets the briefcase on the lunch table and clicks it open, revealing two syringes of silver liquid. It’s been eighteen, maybe twenty years since this dream. Future me has long auburn hair, a terrible dye job I won’t attempt until after college, in the bathroom sink of a ratty apartment. They pull a syringe from the briefcase, tap out the air, and say only: A vaccination against what’s to come.

Most of us don’t have the luxury of believing ourselves entitled to the future. Most of us—especially people of color living in a white supremacist society and world—are constrained to the past, if we are even allowed a past. The world is always ready to write of us in the past tense.

You might ask why I’m writing about trans immortality when, every day, every month, every year, more trans people are dying than ever. Let me put it to you this way. On July 9^th 1975, thirty-three year old Dutch performance artist Bas Jan Ader set off from Cape Cod to cross the Atlantic in a thirteen-foot sailboat named the Ocean Wave. Nine months later, the unmanned vessel was found floating bow-down off the Irish coast. Ader was never found. His absence itself became the second part of his unfinished triptych “In Search of the Miraculous.” I suppose that if he hadn’t risked death, even had he arrived to England, his arrival would not have been a miracle. Miracles are only considered miracles if terrible things would have happened in their absence. The cost is proportional to the miraculousness.

Terrible things happen all the time, I assure you, of which most of us know nothing. My question is what we do with unanswered prayers. Any history I tell of trans life, carrying that life into the future, will be incomplete because most of our histories are unknown, erased, or illegible to the cis arbiters of historical knowledge. No: I am not interested, here, in salvaging a recountable history. I want to know what happens to those of us whose names aren’t treasured up in books or social media or candlelight vigils or other people’s mouths, because most of us suffer without ever being immortalized. Like a mycelial network, we are connected by the thing that underlies us, but we may not realize it. One of us springs free of the earth in a field of potatoes; another parts the slipsoil of a mountainside, seeking siblings. We are ancient, though I’m not sure it matters. The oldest living organism is a lichen, a composite of an alga and a fungus, pulsing away undisturbed on a rock in Greenland for over 8000 years, growing only a centimeter in the course of a century.

A century! 

We have the internet now, and all its fascists, and there are as many futures and pathways to them as you can possibly imagine. The future isn’t linear; it’s branching, various, multiplicitous as the lichen. What I want to know is what we do with a past, dense and painful and complicated, that refuses pat eulogy. I want to know how to hold the unknowable weight of trans suffering without erasing its hope. How many of my transcestors spent entire lifetimes bobbing along sweeping hearths, spreading duvet covers, slicing onions to feed a man and a child—lonesome and absorbed and convinced we were the only ones?

Future Me must have known about the basement rental, about the house centipedes and the boyfriend who kept a long knife in the bedside drawer. Future Me must have known about the bright, lonely apartment after that one, the man who hung crosses above all the doors. Maybe you’ve heard of the lesser known Saint Agnes, the one from Rome, the patron saint of girls, chastity, virgins, gardeners, and victims of sexual abuse. When she refused the advances of her wealthy suitors, she was condemned to be dragged naked through the streets and raped in a brothel. Her hagiography claims she prayed as she was dragged, that her hair grew so long it covered her, that her would-be rapists were struck blind. Consider the cloak of her hair, the unburnt stake and pyre, the soldier unsheathing his sword. Consider the dozen or so men rubbing in terror at their eyes, the cries of darkness, their sudden night. And Saint Agnes standing there, thinking, now? Now you come?

The Sumerian goddess Inanna, who descended into hell to offer her condolences to her sister Ereshkigal after the death of her husband, the Bull of Heaven, was said to have the power to change the gender of those who worshiped her, and people who might today be called transfeminine—the galli—performed rituals in her temples. In the Sumerian poem that describes her descent into the underworld, Inanna enters the throne room of her sister Ereshkigal, naked and bowed low. Inanna is not welcomed, but struck. Her body becomes meat, emptied. Her corpse is hung from a hook on the wall. For Inanna, time stops.

When my beard started growing in, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had been returned to my sixteen-year-old body. Like many trans people, I joked I’d become a vampire. My skin grew soft and acne-spotted; I rode my bike at night for miles and miles. The problem was not that I was thirty-three according to my birth certificate, but that sixteen was not a good age for me. There were things that happened to me at sixteen that I had worked very hard to forget, and apparently they lived in that pubertal body, the one I’d come back for at last. I washed my face twice a day, relived the desperate, lonely knot of driving past a high school boyfriend’s house, the one everyone knew was gay before I did. This is the boyfriend who once wrote me into a story as a muscular, effeminate man flipping his dark hair in the wind. If I think too hard about the details of this story it seems to wink out of existence, as though it is too incredible to have happened. We had a bad breakup. I thought love was a boulder and clung to people to convince myself that I existed. I needed the version of myself that existed in this boy’s eyes. Without it, I feared I’d slide off the face of the earth. Which is very nearly what happened.

In a fable whose roots and versions span South and West Asia and parts of North Africa, a child is girled at birth, grows into an adolescent, and is betrothed to a man. The adolescent—still a child, really—prays to God to be changed into a boy.

Instead, a jinni answers. The jinni tells the child they may swap genders, so long as they swap back later. The child receives the jinni’s penis and testicles, presumably what is meant by the word sex, and grows into a man. The man falls in love. The man is happy. He dreads the moment when he will have to swap back. But one day, the jinniyah returns. I have broken the seal of the package with which I was entrusted, she says. She has become pregnant and cannot swap back. 

As a child I did not think to want a penis. I understood my body as a thing to be redeemed, like sinners. Something in me had been opened by force, and I blamed this violation for God’s great silence. God, I would pray outside my mother’s church with my eyes shut tight, God, come. There was no rest of the prayer.

Bodies may be designed to live, but they aren’t designed to last. Shortly after, at ten, I began to flood two and three overnight pads. I bled through the mattress. I missed school. I learned to swallow ibuprofen before it turned bitter. I learned the mercy of the body, that too much pain will make you pass out. I learned you can live in the land of pain, be hung from its rack and not die.

Scientists say endometriosis can be as painful as active labor, even a heart attack. I saw many, many doctors. A partial list of the doctors’ suggestions: motrin, tylenol, squid ink, heating pads, meditation, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, birth control, prayer, valerian, chamomile, ginger, oxycodone, pregnancy. One day, I thought, I will be dead. Then I will not be in pain.

Awareness of death is an awareness of the future. Maybe your particular sick will not kill you. Still, other people design futures and fail to invite you.

Genetics, I learned during my doctoral studies, tells us that immortality is to ensure that one’s offspring see the future—that is, unless you are a cancer cell, or a clump of endometrium on the run, clinging to bowel or bladder like a bank robber holed up in a roadside motel. I never had the right body to be a child. I didn’t want to become someone else; I wanted a different history, which would have ensured a different future. As a chronically ill trans child and, now, a chronically ill trans adult who doesn’t want to use my body to carry children, I will never be my parents’ treasured immortality. I only know what it means to be the ghost of their want.

What do I do with the version of myself that remains suspended in pain? What do I do with the past selves who live in this body that slips through time? The more famous Saint Agnes, Chiara’s sister, fled to her sister’s convent to avoid a marriage. When the family came to yank her from the altar, her body became heavy as iron, and she was saved. In the fable of the jinn, the man is happy. He keeps his penis. It is a miracle.

In fairy tales and epics, two things lie beyond the realm of the human: the demonic and the divine. Stories of miraculous gender transformations occur in both fables and historical documents going back thousands of years. In a 2015 doctoral thesis entitled “(Trans)Culturally Transgendered: Reading Transgender Narratives in (Late) Imperial China,” scholar Wenjuan Xie catalogs events of girled children transformed into boys or men because of their families’ piety or sacrifice as far back as 487 BCE. Here, too, though, bodies like mine are objects, rather than subjects: typically, the family wants a son in place of a daughter.

French trans artist and art historian Clovis Maillet writes in Les Genres Fluides about how medieval convents were havens for white transmasc and gender nonconforming people assigned female at birth, though the same didn’t work for transfems. To strive for the divine was to strive for maleness. In Europe in the Middle Ages, to be male was to be human, and therefore neutral; in a way, only women “had” gender as a modifying trait. In certain illustrations, women were labeled as a kind of animal. Because of the link between masculinity and virtue, the (white) body was sometimes deemed irrelevant. In what feels like a prelude to modern Western conceptions of the split between gender and the body, Saint Francis loses nothing of his manhood when Santa Chiara dreams of being breastfed by him. Italian art historian Chiara Frugoni recounts the story: “The saint drew out from his breast a teat and said to the virgin Chiara: ‘Come, receive and suck.’ And sucking it, that which flowed from it was so sweet and delectable, that she could in no way explain it… and taking in her hands that which remained in her mouth, it [the milk] seemed to her gold so clear and shining that all was seen in it, almost as in a mirror” [translation mine].

The list of trans saints is already long and well documented. And though other people’s eyes are not a prerequisite for existence, there is something profound about being looked into like Francis’s golden milk. Chaza Cherafeddine, in Divine Comedy (2010), photographed Beiruti trans women and cast them as the fantastical buraq, the winged, human-faced steed of the Prophet, peace be upon him, dazzling in emerald and ruby feathers. That said, on the ceiling of the dome of the cupola of the Cathedral of Florence, Vasari’s and Zuccari’s angels of the Last Judgment are white twinks with flat chests and smooth cheeks, while their demons are brown, purple, green, hairy as goats. Their bodies are adorned with breasts and penises, their fire-tipped spears plunged into the nether regions of tortured souls. In this version of the universe, my friends and I are having the world’s most epic orgy in hell.

I won’t romanticize the survival of my transcestors. Had I been born a century earlier, a centimeter in the history of lichen, I may not have survived. In this version of my life, I am declared possessed by male jinn, seized by malevolent spirits. In this version of my life, I write out passages from the Qur’an, submerge them in water, and drink the dissolved ink. In this version of my life, I pray.

The Catholic Church believes in the concept of a victim soul, those chosen by God to suffer for the redemption of humankind. This isn’t something the church declares; the person alone knows. Santa Gemma Galgani of Lucca was the daughter of a Tuscan pharmacist, orphaned at eighteen after her father, mother, and brother all died of tuberculosis. The disease would take her, too, at twenty-five. She is the patron saint of pharmacists, parachutists, orphans, those with back pain and migraines. She was said to levitate and received the stigmata at twenty-one, a precocious, teacher’s pet saint. 

A victim soul.

Everyone knows how to be happy but you, I scolded myself for much of my twenties, because I believed happiness to be an act of will. The only video that exists of me dancing was made at a residency on Ohlone land, to Oum Kulthum. Minutes before, an Argentinian artist had taken a pair of scissors and cut into my white tee shirt while I moved, turning my sleeves into curtains of knots, creating a keyhole across my sternum and a slash on each flank. I didn’t ask him to do this, so he can’t know I want to excuse myself from my life. In the video, you can’t tell. I’m not a good dancer, but in this video, I look like a girl who knows how to dance. I wanted to make a copy of myself that could live without me in it. I don’t appear in the eye of the camera. I am buried beneath it like a seed.

Little more than a year after the video, out as trans to my close friends and partner but still trying to convince myself I can live with my dysphoria, I’m walking through the city of Lucca after a couple of glasses of wine, having forgotten all about Santa Gemma. It is two days before Christmas. Though I won’t unravel my feelings about hormones for another two years, I keep telling myself I will find a way through my exhaustion and dissociation. I try to convince myself that I could even give birth, though it’s unclear whether my body is capable of pregnancy and I don’t want to find out. Doctors tell me testosterone will destroy my fertility, though this isn’t true, and I’ve just found out it’s illegal for same sex couples to adopt in my partner’s country, Italy. Maybe I could go away in my head, I reason, smile at strangers. I’d shut my testosterone canisters in a cabinet. I’d stay very still. I conjure a hypothetical life in which I have a partner so grateful for babies that they look at me every day and smile. They smile so hard they cry, smile so hard they have to go to special doctors because their face begins to hurt from smiling. I know you can survive your body being taken from you. People have been looking through me like a window all my life. Courage, hold your breath. Glaze over like a lake in winter. You won’t feel a thing.

The wine dulls the cold, but still we turn into a narrow street, out of the wind. A portrait hangs over the lintel of a door. I recognize Gemma’s upturned gaze, her black frock and folded hands. I sit down on the steps of the house opposite and command myself to cry. I cannot. I berate myself for being tipsy and unhealed. In this house, a saint’s hands and feet began to bleed. God passed through Gemma and transformed her. I’m still waiting to be touched.

After the meat of Inanna’s body is hung on the rack, Ninshubur, her handmaiden, dresses herself as a beggar. She tears at her eyes, her mouth, her thighs. She sets out for Nippur and petitions Enlil at his temple, who denies her. She goes to Ur, to the temple of Nanna, who turns her away.

Finally, in Eridu, Enki grieves for her plea. Father Enki picks bits of soil from under his fingernails and transforms them into a kurgarra and a galatur, beings “neither male nor female.” Giving them the food and water of life, he tells them: Go to the underworld. Enter the doors like flies.

The next time Future Me came, I dreamed of him in a nightclub. I wore a sparkly purple mini dress I’d recently given away to another trans friend and my three and a half inch black plastic heels with the cork platforms. He looked dangerous and sleek, and I cursed him. God, I thought, I am going to be beautiful, then bolted, terrified, through the crowd. If I stared too long he might leap down my throat, sprout black hair on my thighs, swell the muscle in my shoulders, unfurl the veins in the backs of my hands. An ecstatic fire would enter me, a joy I could not permit myself under any circumstances. The pain would kill me, I feared, were I able to feel anything else.

Santa Lucia is the patron saint of the blind, but also of a long list of others: martyrs, saddlers, stained glass workers, the town of Perugia, even (God help us) authors. In the northern Italian town where I now live with my partner, Santa Lucia’s feast day used to be a bigger celebration than Christmas. Something real still remains of her, or at least it used to, when the saint used to roam the streets of little Bergamasco towns in a long dress and veil of white lace. Everyone knew the one who came to the elementary school was fake, my partner tells me, like shopping mall Santa. But the one who floated through the town couldn’t be written off. The children would tell her the gifts they wanted as she passed, and Lucia, silent, would incline her head. Several women took turns wearing her white dress. The body was a door for the sacred. Lucia’s veil made a woman into something else.

According to legend, Lucia was a Sicilian woman from Syracuse who was martyred when Diocletian gouged out her eyes in the third century. Her feast day was originally celebrated on the winter solstice, her blindness symbolizing the darkness of the longest night of the year into which she—the name Lucia itself derived from the Latin lux—bore the light. Only in the fifteenth century does she begin to appear eyeless, bearing two lidless orbs on a plate. Francesco del Cossa depicts her lifting a delicate stem from which another set of eyes blossom, like lilies.

The light would have been different in the years my partner saw Santa Lucia. The streetlamps were all sodium vapor then, yellow-orange, not the penetrating blue-white of LEDs. When I left home for college, the only blue lights were the emergency call buttons scattered around campus. There was one trail where there was no blue light, a trail leading between certain campus buildings and certain dorms through a small wood. The boys called this the “rape trail.”

Most cities have LED streetlamps now, and the night doesn’t look the same. The light has changed, disappearing the shadows I remember. Yet I still fear the trees.

I meet Future Me again at a barbecue. In this dream, he has his arm around my partner and a cup in his hand. He is laughing. He has denser stubble, a more angular jaw. I am jealous of him because he is happier, more charming, more beautiful than me. I am jealous of him because he lives in a beautiful future into which I cannot follow.

He comes to me in my mid-thirties, as governments around the world are doing everything in their power to eliminate trans life and parenthood via sterilization requirements, abortion bans, smearing us as pedophiles, making it illegal for queer and trans people to adopt, listing us incorrectly on our children’s birth certificates (and our own documents), and criminalizing life-saving healthcare for both trans children and, increasingly, adults. He comes to me as rightwing politicians attempt to outlaw the imagining of trans futures.

Future Me is slowly replacing Present Me. I’m not saying I was ever another person. I’m saying some part of me, the pilot light version of myself, kept me alive when living was too painful to do. For years I assumed everything that happened during those dissociated decades was lost, mercifully. But once I began testosterone, memory surged up from deep freeze. I once tried to re-envision my childhood traumas with my present body, and for a few seconds I closed the distance on my past self with vicious clarity: there I was, the boy and his pain, and finally, terrifyingly, I understood myself to be human. But the feeling was slippery; it fell away at once, and I lost it again. To dissociate is to become a mirror, the surface of a windless lake. Who, exactly, had been raped? Was a younger me still trapped there, waiting for a miracle?

Time is a spiral with its layers pressed together. Ibn ‘Arabi describes time as an eternal circle. All points on the circle, though distinct, remain in touch with eternity. The past is not separate from the future, but part of it. If the past slips into my present, I see no reason why the future shouldn’t slip back to visit me. Only the future is slippery, too. A transition, like a novel, is a risk. The real dislodges the fantasy, destroys it, debases it by existing. But the real is tangible, at least. You can work with the real. A transition, unlike the fact of being trans, requires you to choose yourself. I would only learn later that it also requires you to relinquish your fantasies not only of who you will become, but who you’ve been.

My transition will never be finished. I am not following a line from one binary gender to another, but moving laterally, diagonally, inwardly, spiraling through time in my ever-changing, ever-returning body. Even melancholy, in this skin, is sweet. The boy I exiled comes alive in my face. I am eroding a fantasy of who I thought I was, crumbling it like wet sand, revealing the boy banished to the self behind the self. The boy who kept very still, frozen, so we might one day live.

If what Ibn ‘Arabi says is true, then I possess immortality—like eternity—in this very moment, in my very body. Listen: I am trying to arrive at the miracle by the door of my trans flesh. I will not believe them when they write that I am dead.

The kurgarra and the galatur find the queen of the underworld naked and in labor, moaning, her hair “swirled around her head like leeks.” When she groans Oh! Oh! My belly!, they groan, Oh! Oh! Your belly! She cries, My back! They cry, Your back! Your heart! Your liver!

Bewildered, she asks who they are to share in her pain, offering them the river and the fields as a reward. But they ask only the corpse hung on the wall, and it is granted.

The kurgarra sprinkles the food of life on the corpse.

The galatur sprinkles the water of life on the corpse.

Inanna rises.

If immortality is a possibility that exists from moment to moment, perhaps practicable immortality is a hope in the future as a reachable place. Once I writhed in bed, wondering if the pain—like the future—was all in my head. I clasped my belly and stared at my father’s paintings. I, too, wanted to be an artist. I didn’t have the word trans then, but I was convinced I would die young. I believed the only way not to disappear was to make art, as though by making something beautiful I could locate God. Bas Jan Ader set off from Cape Cod in a thirteen-foot sailboat and was never seen again. Maybe the beautiful future, like eternity, is an asymptote we approach only once we accept that we may never reach it.

My partner, Italian visual artist Matteo Rubbi, once made a work called “Il Muro,” the wall: a single person supports a wooden wall that would otherwise fall, holding it upright with the force of their outstretched arms. I can’t pluck my past selves from the rack of pain, just as I will never know most of the trans siblings who were afforded no miracles. I came back for myself, as we come for each other. The self who haunts me teaches me that our beautiful futures will not abandon us so long as we hold them aloft, like my partner’s impossible wall, with our hands.

This, at least, is what I tell myself, and plant my feet.

The post An Incomplete History of Trans Immortality appeared first on Electric Literature.

In my worst nightmares, my father transitions. 

In life, we are many years estranged, per his wishes. He has made his feelings on my ‘gender deviance’ clear. The fiery drama of the fallout of our nuclear family has long since cooled to ash, long held shouting matches stretched into years of silence.

And yet.

In these dreams, her beauty is effortless. She moves with supreme Black elegance, each gesture power incarnate. The perfect shade of foundation blends the sun-scarred skin of her forehead into her cheeks. A hairline I once watched recede is handily buried beneath luscious curls, voluminous as mine were before I hacked them off. Even her five o’clock shadow has been put to rest.

She kneels before me, her shimmering skirt unwrinkled by the movement. She holds my hands with nails lacquered violet. 

My father always loved violet. 

She apologizes for all the vitriol she ever flung at me, crying thick tears through false eyelashes. Gentle and contrite, she apologizes for calling me a cross-dresser, a dyke, a homosexual, a gender-bender, a transvestite. Through lips painted by artists, she begs for my forgiveness, admitting in the same breath that she could never earn it. 

Her humility is palpable, as is her beauty. Her regret is tangible, as is her grace. I stand, stone-faced, and grant her no reprieve.

In my worst nightmares, my father transitions. There, she is a better person than me.

And she’s better at being trans than me. 

II. Elder

My mother once told me, “You are your true self when you’re on a date with a boy. When you go too long without putting on makeup, it’s like you lose sight of who you really are.”

I sometimes wondered if my mother would’ve been happier with a mirror for a daughter. I know for a fact she would’ve been happier with a daughter, but we get what we get, and she got me. 

I only rarely saw my mother without a full face of makeup, and never in the full force of natural daylight. She had the art form down pat, just a few moments needed before sunrise to put her face on. Bright lips, thin brows, plump lashes, foundation in the lightest shade on the market. She wanted the same for me, claiming that it was part of a woman’s hygiene. I refused, hence her insistence that I had lost sight of my true self.

To this day, I’ve never seen her natural hair color. She started dying it in high school. If photos existed of her any younger, I can’t recall them. Maybe I was never shown them. Her hair is the exact same shade of box blonde in her wedding photos as it will be the day of my disowning over two decades later. 

She spends my childhood bemused by my mixed hair, constantly trying to tame it, straighten it, relax it, beat it into submission. Dye it to look like hers. She wrecks my curls, over and over, until I am big enough to hide, to force her to pick a different battle.

My father tells me I should be grateful. Girls are lucky, he says, that they get to wear makeup at all. He revels in the few opportunities he has to be on stage, eyeliner accentuating bright green eyes, blush high on his cheekbones. 

We might show up late to church, but we look good when we get there. I am the eldest child of the lot of us, an octopus wrangling clip-on ties to shirt necks that refused to starch. The memories, resistant to chronology, swell and shrink. There’s four of us, then seven, then six. A slew of mixed kids, our hair brown and black and ginger, tan and pale and freckled, bookended by a pale black man in violet and a far paler white woman with box blonde hair. 

After the sacrament, administered by teenage boys in ill-fitting black jackets, the congregation splits by gender, then by age. Gender lies at the center of Mormonism, so goes our scriptures. 

In the 90’s, church leaders said so explicitly in a document named The Family: A Proclamation to the World. “Gender is an essential characteristic of individual pre-mortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose”. Mormons the world over were to take that as eternally pertinent of a scripture as any line of the Bible. Eve supped on forbidden fruit, David kissed Jonathan, gender is who you are and why you exist.

Gender shone in every aspect of Mormon life. At church my brothers learned to rake, grill, hike, change tires, build fires, wield the mystical powers of the priesthood to heal the sick and raise a family. 

My sisters and I learned to sew, knit, crochet, cook. I cleaned the building, gathering up the Nerf darts left behind from the boys’ playtimes. I minded children smaller than the child I was, mended skinned knees and scraped elbows. I wore dresses, skirts, and kept my hair long enough to cover my shoulders and collarbone. 

A sincere devotee, I was prepared for the life ahead of me. Once a Mormon boy decided that I was a good enough match to raise a family with, I would bear his children. After death, his righteousness would earn him a planet, and I would fill it to the brim with offspring. Rumors swirled at summer camp that if a very kind husband found you, he might let you help pick out the planet’s name. 

I hoped that our planet would be named something nice, and that my husband would be even nicer. Whenever I imagined him, he shone as a silhouette of blinding light, intangible and scalding.

That document was likely named The Family as it tackled another subject heavy on the minds and hearts of Mormons at the turn of the millennium. It opened with the line, “We… The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God.”

III. Cover

I nightmare of three subjects. My father, Black and celestial. My mother, white and earthen. And the day following the day I got outed. My parents managed to corner and confront me during that brief visit home from college, a two-pronged attack. 

The shocking revelation of my dykehood was an open secret only a Mormon’s mouth can hold. I watched in grotesque fascination as it bumped against my parents’ lips, carrot-raisin-lime-gelatin sloshing in their cheeks. 

I wound up, during this lecture turned terror, holding my youngest sibling, feeding them bottled formula. They were an infant I met a couple days prior. I was a college sophomore. The many siblings between us were hidden somewhere. Perhaps they lurked in the depths of the house, invisible witnesses to the lurid affair. Perhaps they were at school, oblivious to the whole thing.

I hold this child, a stranger, for the entirety of this memory, this nightmare, this horrifically mundane armageddon. Their weight pins me to a rickety rocking chair as the hours stretch on. Their sleepy peace keeps my voice small, my body still as I cradle them. 

“Of all the childish choices,” says my father. He loves science fiction and fantasy. He probably would’ve loved the book I’m writing now, six years later. It has dragons, and wizards, and pigeons.

“You’re too young to know,” says my mother. She was married at 21. She had me at 22. She used to teach puppetry classes. She likes to sew costumes, astronauts and explorers and dragons. We all really like dragons.

“You’re rushing into this.” sighed my father. 

“Being gay?” I whispered.

“You’re being so dramatic.” scolded my mother.

From their first date to their engagement, my parents courted for six weeks. 

They were both enrolled in a theater program at a Mormon university, perfectly ensconced in a cocoon of faith and art. My father would proudly show off a photograph of the single night he spent in drag, some thirty years ago now. “I should’ve shaved my legs,” he’d always say. “I looked so wonderful. That hair, the lipstick, the fishnets. But I wish I’d shaved my legs!”

They met reading across each other for parts in a Shakespeare play, a moment so magical they could never remember the name of the play or the parts they read. Just their chemistry: they connected so resonantly that when they found themselves knee deep in a passionate argument on a stranger’s balcony months later, they knew their love was meant to be. 

“You’ve always hated men,” says my father. He cites my middle school bullying, shoving boys half my size aside, wrenching their long hair to their knees. 

“You’re taking the easy way out,” declared my mother. “Sure. Every girl wants to cut all her hair off and raise kids with her best friend. But growing up means making the responsible choice.” 

In my teenage years, my mother expressed concerns over my having so many sapphic friends. She told me that they would need to make their choice soon, lest the rest of their life be doomed. “No one gets to stay a child forever. Growing up means choosing to be responsible. Choosing to love men. It’s what I did, just like everyone else.” 

Slowly, over two and a half hours, the shape of it takes root. My parents are furious that I am refusing to make the difficult decision to eschew the temptations of homosexuality in favor of a righteous life of devotion to Mormon Jesus. They made their choice long ago in one another and have been donning masculinity and femininity and heteronormativity ever since. You, they point accusatory fingers at me, need to do the same. 

Over the next couple of tumultuous years we will fight and scream and cry and bicker as my hair gets lopped off and my dresses become hand me downs and my earrings are converted into cufflinks. My father will rage when he sees unisex dress socks on a Christmas list, screaming that I’m not a man and I’ll never be one. My mother will cry when I tell her I won’t wear the glittery plaids she got me as a replacement for the thrifted flannels that swallowed my wardrobe in early college. 

When I am inevitably, uproariously, explosively disowned, it is followed by the total silence of people who have said all they needed to say. 

IV. Other

A molecular biologist, I dutifully spend a chunk of the pandemic in laboratories, hunched over benches, scrubbing the body raw. Afterwards I bounce from gig to gig. Retail. Childcare. Freelance copywriting. Substitute teaching. 

My friends, my loved ones ask if I’m sure, if it’s worth the risk. I’m an obnoxiously effusive type, so social jobs suit me well. But the last time I worked retail, the public did me the dubious honor of teaching me the lesson that it’s dangerous to look like me, to have my voice, and most of all to use it.

They’re just kids, I remind my friends. There’s nothing a thirteen year old can do to hurt me worse than the grown man who dropped a fridge on me when he heard my butch body speak in soprano.

That dissonance visibly resonants in my reflection as I array myself carefully, the attention of a bomb defuser trained on an outfit assembled from Walmart clearance and Ross. 

Shoes too long in the toe and too stubby in the ball have been my companion for seven moves, going on eight next month. I tug on a thrifted polo, scratchy despite the softener I’ve thrown at it.

I’ve done my best to take in the khakis, but the stitches are visible in places that make the amateur alterations uncomfortably obvious. The hems are both uneven and far too high, showing off, depending on the day, several inches of novelty Pikachu socks or my unshaved calves. The good dress socks are in the wash, of course. I also somehow misaligned the sewing on the seat of this pair of pants, so it’s somehow both too baggy and yet too tight on the crack. Meant for a different set of equipment, not meant for my curves, not meant to hold me. 

Once upon a time, when my body stretched and swelled, my mother sewed clothes to flatter it. She made me dresses and blouses that fit. My brothers wore hand tailored vests, my father’s pants mended and hemmed.

She messaged me on LinkedIn for my birthday this past year, one of the few digital places I had overlooked in the four years since our estrangement. The message sat unopened, but I looked at the sewing machine, the too-short pants with uneven hems. Wondered about a family in perfectly tailored clothes, perfectly flattering their bodies. 

I wondered what my mother would look like in a suit.

That hair that was the subject of so many fights with my parents has been dyed to hell now, curls murdered by bleach and only now gasping back to life. The sunshine yellow of the summer is resistant to resurrection, but I’m trying to keep it up till the holidays. The kids love the yellow, especially the little ones, and it’s been a long season for them. 

Now low on time and rushing, I pin my custom name tag on. It only lists a little over the lycra of my exhausted sports bra.

Mx. Ball

They/Them

No, the kids were nothing to be afraid of. 

The adults, on the other hand:

When the local high school principal called me, he spoke carefully, each word measured. I tried to match his pace, unsure of my footing. A rookie substitute teacher in a large district could hardly feel that this call was a good omen.

A parent had contacted him and the school multiple times in the past day to complain about…the man hesitates. 

Each of the following syllables rolls off his tongue like boulders. “It’s my understanding that you use they and them pronouns?”

My stomach drops. Ah. This again.

That awkward, and ultimately pointless, phone call with the principal was the second incident in the last six months. A different superior, a different job, a different parent, complaining about my existence being  ‘age inappropriate’. “Gender,” says the last boss, “is just something we don’t talk about here.”

“I’m not bringing it up,” I desperately wanted to make eye contact with her. I can’t look up from my shoes. “The kids keep asking.” 

The ghost of my mother, reaming out a superintendent, hovers over my right shoulder, ranting about school bus safety. Someone’s getting fired tomorrow. 

A manager rolls their eyes at me when I correct them, sotto voce. He tells me that it’s not grammatically correct to be multiple people.

The ghost of my father stands thunderously before me. Dictionaries are splayed next to him, Webster wielded like a rapier. 

My parents were educators. Probably still are. That’s a quirk of estrangement, people wind up caught in amber the moment of relationship terminus. 

I’ve attended their classes, their lectures, their sermons. Watched them gather up a disparate audience and palm them, turn a room on the pad of their finger. Laugh, commands my father, and the room erupts. Weep, sniffles my mother, and the crowd is somber. 

They’d be better at this, nags the flash of myself warped in car windows, the glimmer of a person in the cheap plastic of a child’s sunglasses. 

They’d stand up for themselves, I sigh as another diversity and inclusion coordinator calls me an upstanding young woman. 

They’d have something to say, something quick and bright and real.

They’d sew perfect clothes, strike perfect poses, speak in perfect voices. 

They’d be better at this, as men or women or whatever oddity I am. 

They’d overtake me in an instant. 

V. Mother

Dreams of my mother find us walking on the rocky beach of her parents’ old home. They moved out of that wooden house years ago, but when I think of my grandparents I still remember their tiny chunk of bay on the west end of Puget Sound. 

Baby girl of six brothers, my mother is dressed in obvious hand-me-downs. A canvas jacket sits heavy on her collarbone, a thick flannel poking out past her hips. She moves with surety in thick galoshes across the uneven beach. Her hair is tucked under a handmade beanie, Seahawks green and blue. She smells like grit and sulfur, a slight tint of shrimpy wet coming in from the west. 

On our trek, I stuff my pockets with every chunk of beach that glimmers. Quickly I am bow legged from the weight of them, and look to my mother for her help in carrying my quickly expounding bounty of treasures. “Mom-”

“Shh.” Her attention is trained on the mouth of the bay. Her cheeks are pockmarked. She has crow’s feet. She wears no mascara, no lipstick. She’s wearing glasses.

I’m smug with her. “I thought you had 20/20.” I’ve needed mine since I was six. She lorded her perfect vision over me. 

She rolls her eyes, pointing with one hand, the other reaching for a holster on her belt. “I needed to watch the whale.”

It was a legend in our home. Once, when my mother was a teen, a juvenile whale got wedged in the tiny bay in my grandparents’ backyard. It fell to them and the neighbors to keep her calm, keep her wet, and holler at the idiot Coast Guard for trying to bring their massive honking ships into tiny inlets they wouldn’t be able to maneuver out of. 

Now I can see it too, the whale trapped in a deceptively inviting inlet at the north end of the bay. She thrashes, weeps, splashing and screaming and crying. 

My mother moves down the beach in a way I didn’t know her legs moved, the way Paul Bunyan ate up the country, the way a railroad moves a family from New York to Missouri, the way a road trip brings you home. She wades into the water, taller than an evergreen, as mighty as her lumberjack father, arms wide for the trapped beast. Gentle, she calms the whale, rubbing at the sore areas where craggy rock has torn at marine hide. 

My mother takes a few steps back, stance firm, galoshes steady. At her belt materializes a rope, spun from pine needles and spidersilk, the corners of my grandparents’ basement. With a heaving motion, the whale is wrangled, the rope thrown over my mother’s shoulder. 

Knees bent, head down, body set, my mother begins to heave. Step by herculean step, the whale is pulled through the shallow bay according to her will, by the power of her determination. Her cheeks flush red from the effort. Her temples bulge. She snorts and grunts and sweats. 

Halfway through her journey, a jostle of the rope whips her beanie off. For the first time in my life, I see my mother’s natural hair color.

It’s the same as mine.

VI. Further

My suit, a deep emerald, slips on perfectly. A discerning eye can tell that it was tailored by someone minding my curves, squaring my shoulders, tapering to my calves. Silky florals flare in the lining of the jacket, more color than most men would ever dare. 

It brings out the green in my eyes, an echo of my father’s own. The parchment button up sits on my hips just like the blouses my mother once sewed for me. When I take up the arm of my lover that night, my gold bangles will clang against their own jewelry, matching gold embroidery on their dress. We will dazzle, and network, and delight. We’ll fling coded words past oblivious ears, knowing that even now we and our people live on the fringes of visibility, able to speak to one another privately in a crowded room. 

If eyes narrow, if offered handshakes are rebuffed, if shoulders get bumped, I ignore them. It’s a talent of mine, well practiced and often called upon. I perfected it on walks late at night, at long shifts behind the register, in line at the bank, at countless tribunals of the public eye. Go on, my smile dares them. Give me, dyed hair and soft chest and high voice and all, a chance to be the bigger man.

The children are starting to recognize me, towering above their teachers, booming voice and bright colors undeniable. I made a new friend down in Denver, and he says he’ll coach me on hemming sometime in the new year. In the meantime I got new socks, boisterous and colorful. I affix my nametag, speak my name clearly. Half the time now the children have already alerted one another long before I get there- 

“Oh, oh, it’s mix ball today.”

Little ones quietly pass me scraps of paper, pronouns scrawled in mechanical pencil. A young man pulls me aside to ask about binders, and hormones, and how I got so tall. Secret names are whispered to me, treasures received with the greatest of reverence.

I still, on occasion, catch glimpses of a diaphanous femme father in the sweet turn of my lips. Hints of a butch mother can still be found between my set shoulders, shifting to bear heavy burdens. But a simple examination of the wearing of the tread of my work boots serves as refutation to years of maladaptive fantasy. Those people never existed, and I am here, putting one sore foot in front of the other. 

In my worst nightmares, my father transitions. 

In my wildest dreams, my father transitions.

When I awaken, my father is but a man.

In a kinder world, my mother and my father have different titles, or the same ones. They got to be mother-fathers and father-mothers. They got to wear dresses and suits and makeup and neckties. They got to experiment with their genders in college and realized that they were happy as they were. They got to experiment in college and realized that the roles that they had been taught could never contain the magnitude of human spirit spilling out of them. 

In a kinder world I am coached through a life beyond a binary by two people who never fit in one to begin with. 

In this world, those of us who chose to sow transformation reap trans joy. 

In this world, I am what they never had the strength, or love, or balls to be.

The post In My Worst Nightmares My Father Transitions appeared first on Electric Literature.

A week later the February sky returns to its characteristic gray,  dressing the world in the somber mood most appropriate for a funeral. The condolences I receive come with a mix of recognition and confusion. From the mourners who know me, I am offered firm hugs, and declarations of love and sadness. To everyone else, the question of who I am to Kiah is written on their faces.  Their eyes look for a similarly feminine version of the woman lying in the casket: a short, light skinned afro-latine woman in her mid-twenties, with dark eyes and long hair. 

I am not a full year into my medical transition. The changes in my body are subtle, even to me. Standing by my sister’s casket, I  face the stark reality of how different we had become. Kiah and I had been a complimentary set throughout our lives. She was delicate, feminine, and graceful; I, a culmination of all the  uncouth, rough edges of our dna. Our similarities were our laugh, our yell, our mannerisms, all hand me downs from our mother and grandmother. Our modes of self-expression, and the maladaptive coping mechanisms we both inherited, were our visible signs of kinship. Now, to the room overflowing with mourners, and to myself, I no longer feel recognizable as Kiah’s little sister. I do not recognize myself as who I am now—someone who has outlived their sister. 

My funeral outfit, much like the funeral itself, is a haphazard collection held together with love by family. I wear a small men’s black dress shirt that was hastily bought the night before at a grocery store, with assistance from mí tío. We had tried to find a full men’s look but there was not much befitting my diminutive frame.  The black dress pants I wear have been uncovered from my mothers closet, as graciously offered hand-me downs from my step father would not fit around my hips. The surgical mask I wear covers any semblance of the budding mustache on my upper lip. My blue durag covers my overgrown hair, and atop that sits a black and pink harley hat recovered from Kiah’s car after the accident. It feels like a memory, and I haven’t removed it from my head since it was found. 

No one expects you to look well dressed at a sudden funeral. I don’t expect to be seen—I am not the guest of honor after all—yet I feel more exposed and fragile than ever.  My grief is obvious in my chaotic dress, the shards of my life that have randomly imploded, collected together in one dysphoric, unflattering outfit. 

The visual juxtaposition of our genders is not new. In high school, Kiah and I looked like a young stud/femme couple to those unaware that we were siblings. For me, wearing feminine clothes ended when my mother stopped putting us in matching outfits in elementary school.  In our adolescence, we grew into our own individual selves and further from one another. This is natural and would have been fine, had it not been for the rift that widened in our misguided attempts to understand each other. 

In my exploration of transness and queerness, there are points in history where I’ve looked weird, quirky, downright ugly in some aspects. I rejected the traditional norms of femininity that I knew I couldn’t stuff myself into. I stopped shaving my body hair freshman year, while simultaneously shaving different parts of my head  whenever I could. I never wore a skirt, and I was unattractive, often downright volatile to the male gaze.  Kiah’s gender expression was hardfought as well. Our practical capricorn mother was not one to place emphasis on fashion trends, so all of Kiah’s beauty skills were self-taught. After a brief emo phase and some youthful blunders, she found her stride, spending hours on her makeup and hair, curating her clothes to emphasize the changes in her petite frame. Her efforts, however, did not bring up concerns of mental illness or questions of her emotional well being. At times I wanted to learn from her, asking how to apply eye liner or put extensions in, things I saw her doing. These misguided attempts had me looking ghoulish, and I can imagine her reluctance to waste  her coveted makeup collection on a clown’s appearance, as she often refused. 

But in her kinder moments, she never had me leaving the house looking like a fool. Although she couldn’t style me in the way that she utilized femininity for herself, she dressed me in outfits that accentuated my natural personality and features. She was the first in the family to buy me mens shoes, shirts, and pants, before the words nonbinary or transgender had been spoken between any of us. Through many Christmases and birthdays receiving clothing that was obviously intended for the person my family wanted me to be, Kiah gave me gifts reflecting who she saw that I was, who she wanted to help me become.   

I cannot recall the first time I came out to Kiah, but I remember one of the rifts that had occurred after being out to her and only her for a year. We were in our late teens, and had gone down to Texas to vacation with our tío and tía’s family. Mi tio and tía had been very close with my mother growing up, but the physical distance  limited the time for the extended family to know our personalities from more than the pictures my mother had been sending them. It was night one of the vacation, and we were arguing in hushed tones. “Can’t you just keep your hairy armpits hidden?” Kiah questioned. “Do you have to be so vocal about feminism?” “Can you please, just while we are here, tone it down?” 

I pushed back. “Why is it okay for me to behave like myself when we don’t put a name to it? Why is it not okay for them to see me as I am too?  It’s hard enough having to be misgendered while we are here, in all the spaces that I’m in, can’t you at least respect me when we are alone?”

“I just don’t get you,” Kiah responded in frustration, “I don’t understand what happened to my sister.”

We ended the conversation both in tears, both trying to see each other, both trying to express our frustrations without waking up the whole house. I don’t understand what happened to her sister either, for all I knew her sister was still there, still in this body, still trying to be a good sidekick, while also trying to survive.

Three weeks after the funeral, I go into Kiah’s bedroom and gather what will be my last hand-me-downs. I am surprised when a pair of green sweatpants fits me. She had always been flaca afterall. Among the items I collect are some pairs of shoes that I manage to squeeze my feet into, an overshirt with the tags still attached to it, a small plastic bejeweled ring that was recovered from the accident, a hello kitty baseball cap and a large stuffed snorlax that took the most space among her growing plush collection. I feel a semblance of familiar joy as I think of all the times we went through the other’s room borrowing items, and  never asking. As I feel her clothes on my body, I think, What will happen when my body changes in a year from now? Or Two years from now? Should I stop taking testosterone so that I can still hear her voice in my own? 

Even throughout the emotional distance of our adulthood, I always held a sliver of hope that the closeness of our childhood would return. We had been working to mend that bridge with a sibling weekend that would now never come. I had planned to bring her to Detroit in March, to show her the places where I went dancing, or enjoyed art and music. I wanted to introduce her to my new friends and show her the wonderful life I had created. Through my transition, I was growing into someone that I wanted Kiah to meet. Instead of all that hope, I begin to fear losing the person that she helped to raise. On my way out of Grand Rapids, I am head-to-toe in Kiah-regalia. 

In my opinion, Kiah doesn’t look her best at the funeral. In life, Kiah ranged from soft  to dramatic, with baby pinks or dark purples and blacks, spending hours on her makeup at times. This time, she lacks her lifely glimmer and shine. Her arms rest over the bottom half of her torso, and her palms are held together in a little heart, loosely collecting the letters people had written to her throughout the funeral. Her nails are bare, and nude. When my grandmother Lila walks into the room during family visitation hours, the first thing she cries out is, “Where are her nails??” Kiah’s coffin shaped nails were her signature look, rotating colors to match with the season, or the outfit. Kiah and I were different versions of ourselves, existing there together in our not-our-best-but-the-best-that-we-could-do looks. 

There are family members in attendance who I’ve not seen since I was a toddler. I assume the same was true for Kiah. Our reconnection with our estranged father’s family had caused tension between Kiah and I in recent years. January 2022, on a rare FaceTime between us, I finally heard her why. “I just want to know where we come from,” she said. She was straightening her hair, and wouldn’t look directly into the camera. “I found out about our great grandmother passing before we got a chance to meet her, and I just want to learn about them before time runs out”.  Now these family members—strangers—and I gaze at each other across years of disconnect, very likely asking the same question. “Who am I meeting because I’m grieving Kiah Holliman?”

What to say about someone who was just starting to live? 

I was tasked with writing the obituary. 25 years surmised into 161 words. Debating how to honor her just when we were reconnecting as adults, was difficult. I pause at the point in the obituary where I am to write the names of who survives her. I had just legally changed my name the summer before. Kiah and I were the only Hollimans in our household growing up because we were raised by our mother, Karina Alvarez, and had no relationship with our father—or his side of the family, the Hollimans. In choosing my own last name, I wanted to start my own lineage, claim myself as founder and creation. I wanted to honor the ever-lasting transition that I would always find myself in. I chose Jueves to honor my mother, and her mother’s native tongue (Spanish), and to honor myself, having been born on a Thursday. 

Pausing at how to address myself in her obituary, I longed to be a Holliman again. If there was only one other Holliman I would deeply know and love, it was my sister. At that moment I regretted the decision I’d made. I would go back to my maiden name in a heartbeat to be a Holliman again with her, to have that automatic sign of kinship. This was an unexpected consequence of this severance from who I once was, a “Holliman Sister.” I type my chosen name, Alizae Jueves into the obituary. I feel a chasm of separation and loss where months ago, I’d felt the bounty of euphoria. 

My paternal grandmother, Cynthia Patterson, walks in with my father’s family at the start of the funeral. They bring their own funeral programs, and a beautiful portrait of Kiah painted by my uncle Coy. Cynthia approaches me with kind, concerned eyes.

“Do you know who I am?” she asks.  

“No.” Normally I would feel shame or embarrassment. I know to assume that we are family, and obviously she knows who I am. But the grief interwoven with the shrooms I had consumed before the funeral numbs my social graces. 

“I’m your grandmother, Cynthia,” she says, matter of factly. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I know about you and your transition from Kiah’s Facebook. I know I can’t understand your grief, but know that I love you fiercely, I have always loved you, and I want to get to know you. It will take a while to build our relationship, and I am willing to wait as long as it takes for you to come to me.” She looks me in the eye with an intensity. I let my body be hugged, imagining what Kiah would feel if she had been able to receive this. I am blessed beyond measure, receiving affirmations of my transness, and love, from family I am meeting for the first time. I feel damned beyond measure not being able to experience this with her. 

I am, however, blessed on both sides. Not many people can say that both grandmothers receive their transness with grace. In December of 2021 I came out to my maternal grandmother, Lila, while walking her home. The short two and a half block walk contained a transgender lowdown, explaining to my 60 something year old Salvadoran grandmother what nonbinary meant, a brief overview of pronouns, how my gender is in constant flux, and why my little sisters call me by my buddhist name “brother Mushim” rather than my given birth name. We ended the night with a hug on her doorstep, and the affirmations, “I will always love you.”

This was a blessing that I was not able to relay to Kiah, the first person in my family to whom I had come out, years prior. Kiah and I last saw each other in January of 2022. I was in town for the last weekend of the month, visiting friends and family, handing out delayed Christmas presents. Kiah was my final visit before making my way back to Detroit. I had brought over iced coffee and baked goods for her and my grandmother. They were dubbed “the roommates” by my mother since Kiah had moved back into our childhood home. We walked around the block with my dog Ruby. We had tense, reactive conversations, both leaning on each other for support but not knowing how to express it explicitly. I remember telling her about the joys that I had in my life, and navigating exciting crushes that I had on other Black Trans folk. Detroit had been a refreshing bounty of Black Trans community with a thriving arts and creative scene that I wanted to share with her. She was telling me about the moves that she was making in her life, leaving her on again, off again relationship and wanting more for herself. I scoffed, giving a terse “I told you so.” I had been wanting more for her for years. I apologized and reframed, but the damage had been done. “I’m happy for you that you are seeing your worth,” I said. We were turning back around now, and the rest of the way we made lighthearted jokes, laughing, trying to connect through goofy banter. 

I said goodbye to Kiah for the last time at my grandmother’s back doorstep. I gave both my grandmother and my sister a hug. My grandmother boasted about how responsible Kiah had become, and Kiah gave a self-satisfied nod. “Be like your sister,” my grandmother said to me. I looked up the back steps at these women I’d spent my life with. 

“She’ll be good,” Kiah said. She grinned smugly at me. She was protecting me, not wanting to out me to our grandmother. In that moment I realized it had slipped my mind to tell her about the magic of having been received by our grandmother, and how much it meant to me to be out to all of the family now. All of this good news I planned  to tell her at another time. I gave Kiah a loving eyeroll and a smile, told them both I loved them, and that I would see them again soon. 

I only remember one line of my speech from Kiah’s funeral. “Kiah lived her life off the cuff, and that’s why I chose not to write anything.” 

Everything that comes after is a blur of memories, merely a semblance of how much she meant to me, and our family. I speak about how I loved growing up with her, how grateful I am that I spent so much time with her, more time than anyone else who got the chance to know her. The grief, shrooms, and overstimulation might be a barrier to these memories, or perhaps the virgo in me does not want to recall the unscripted. But I speak from the heart, and lead for my mother, friends and family so they can speak freely and share their love for Kiah.

I am never more than a few feet from the casket. My body remembers proximity to Kiah as a place of rest. I recall our childhood bedroom, our safe haven, a home within a home, where our twin mattresses lay no more than a yard apart from each other, and how in that space we discovered how to move through the world together. I left the funeral home that day knowing that I was to move and grow into the world on my own now.

Drawing had been one of the things that anchored Kiah and I in our childhood. Hours were spent in our grandmother’s living room, sitting cross legged on the couch sketching, drawing, and trading comics with each other. I had been avoiding drawing because I did not want to put the hard truth of Kiah’s death onto paper. Sitting at my mother’s dining room table, drawing with my little sisters in the hours after the funeral, a whimsical amalgamation breaks my hiatus. With a mix of crayon, pen, loose lines and scribbles, I depict the childhood table where we had tea. Different iterations of our faces cross the page. I write the first poem I’ve written in a while. 

No One Told me Hell had sunshine 

Warm Weather

And Deep,

Long 

Belly Laughs

If Hell is a place without my sister, it’s also a place where I hear my mother laugh louder than I’ve ever heard before. On a family hike a couple days after Kiah’s death, mí tío falls down a snowy path. My mother has no choice but to double over in laughter. Hell is a place where I meet love in different forms, find myself in different ways, discover how to move in the world carrying my old self and healing into someone new. Hell is a place where my sister’s travel sized urn is well worn from the adventures I take her on, adventures she would have adamantly said no to if she were still alive. Together, earthside and spiritside, we spend the summer of 2022 exploring the midwest; kayaking, hiking, biking, and laughing in places that would have felt out of reach for us only a handful of years ago. 

 Hell is a place where a year to the day of my sister’s passing, I wear the funeral dress shirt to go out dancing with friends. I walk into the club with braids done, tattoos out; alize consumed, good friends by my side. An homage to my sister, redeeming our not-our-best-but-the-best-that-we-could-do funeral looks with a sexy-while-healing look. The funeral shirt is unbuttoned, chest tattoos on display, binder safely tucked underneath to keep dysphoria at bay and be the firm container from which the plant of my spirit blooms. Found family, friends old, new and newer move throughout the club. Black trans performers take center stage, dazzling the crowd with a live band performance. I dance and experience a joy that I would have wanted to experience with Kiah earthside, but I know that her spirit accompanies me everywhere I go. Before my eyes I am confronted with the consequences of living a life of tenderness, vulnerability, authentic crumbling and regrowth. My voice is hoarse from laughing and shouting in joy. At the end of the night the shirt is sweaty and lightly stained. A promising redemption, in my opinion, to an outfit that was so dysphoric only a year before. A year to the day of transmuting grief and despair into joy and exuberance. If Hell is a place without my sister physically existing, this reality is a place where my sister’s joy is conjured and sustained through dancing, exploration, and deep, long belly laughs. 

The post I Can See My Future Through the Haze of My Grief appeared first on Electric Literature.

A low-income district in a Middle Eastern country in the mid-2000s. It’s summer and I, a primary school student, finally get to enjoy summer break and spend the days with my cousin playing games. We’re neighbors in the same apartment building—same floor even—and we hop from one place to another the entire day. We play many types of games, but one of them is our  favorite: we watch cartoons with superheroes and magical girls on the television. Then we role-play, immediately after the show is over. Our role-playing games are as formulaic as the shows we watch. Always, she is the damsel in distress; always I am the mad scientist trying to kill her. My methods are almost always absurdly grotesque, and  sponsored by ACME Corporation or Doofenshmirtz Evil Inc.—at least, they are in our expanded cinematic role-playing universe.

“Oh my God, here’s the evil scientist again! I’m trapped by your newest trap and weapon! The Unbelievably-Heavy-Pillow-Fort-Trap 3000!”

“Hah! Think you could escape my ultimate scientific inventions? Well, think again!”

“Oh no, it’s getting worse! Not the Incredibly-Precise-Laser 6000! Are you going to kill me with that or what?!”

My cousin strikes a dramatic pose under the couch’s pillows. I smirk devilishly. I have the high ground. The laser in question is a very-2000s pencil with a small sparkly Hello Kitty toy attached to its top. The pencil is never sharpened since it’s a recurring prop for our games—far more important a purpose than summer break homework.

“I’ll do much worse than simply killing you—I’ll cut your vocal cord with my Incredibly-Precise-Laser 6000! You’ll be the next Ariel the mermaid!”

“Not my voice!”

She emerges from the pillow fort with newfound energy. We fight as if we are about to wrestle. When I pin her down, I get on top of her while also holding both hands up by her head, proudly exclaiming my next villainous goal.

 “Hah! You fell for my trap; you are done for! Now I shall do something even worse for you but fun for me! I will cut your tits off clean instead! Bwa-ha-ha!”  

There is a reason my cries get highly specific, and highly graphic. The cartoons we watched weren’t my only source of inspiration. Whenever I performed these lines, I  mimicked the villain that I came across in a low-budget horror film that I’d watched, in secret, under cover of night. 

I have always had sleeping problems ever since I was a child, so when I couldn’t sleep, I instead got up and went to our living room. I wanted to see what was airing that night, but my parents always hated me staying up late. I pretended to be  a secret agent. I quietly and slowly rose from my bed, walked on tip-toes to reach the living room, and turned on the television. 

In Turkey, they used to exclusively air low to no-budget horror B films after midnight. The funniest part is, this went for almost every single channel available on the satellite, so basically you were zapped through them and greeted with masterpieces—Plan 9 from Outer Space or Killer Klowns from Outer Space—all on a single night. It felt as though I  was walking through an open buffet of $20 budget films in one hand, and a dream in the other. 

While I loved binge-watching all kinds of B films during those restless nights, I gradually realized that I most enjoyed those containing intense gore or body horror. It was extremely satisfying to see the blood splash and the organs fly out. I couldn’t put my finger on it back then, but those scenes felt familiar in their visceral visuals. My eyes went wide with excitement, my lips curled into a smile. I wanted to see the blood and more. This wasn’t like seeing something you liked on the screen, it was much more than that. So, as a result, to quench my blood thirst, I grabbed the newspaper every Sunday and religiously combed the television schedules for every channel listed. The criteria: The film must air after midnight, and it must have a weird or intense title suggesting gore or body horror. To my delight, I realized I could watch these  films multiple times nearly every week, often each night since the programmers kept going for such titles—something we had in common. 

Looking back on all those film nights, I can’t remember the names of those films I so eagerly awaited. However, I still remember how I felt whenever I saw some character’s guts spilling out or another’s skin peeling off, blood and everything everywhere. Even after I watched, say, The Thing, my primary memory of it was not the character arcs or story progression; it was the grotesque death scenes. Yes, those scenes felt relatable for some reason unbeknownst to me. As a result, I often found myself dreaming—or maybe nightmaring—myself into those scenes anytime I had a bad day, which was usually triggered by glancing in the mirror and seeing my body or face’s reflection. Those dreams/nightmares were all similar in their narrative. It began immediately with the death scene of the week. 

I kept searching for another film with a gory body horror scene just to make sure I will be able to be reborn in my dreams and feel happy and natural once again. I kept finding myself looking for that transient and dreamy feeling of realness constantly after that. Though, even though it all looks crystal clear now, I still do not understand the connection between those gore scenes and my own gender identity. There is a very simple reason for that – I simply did not have any idea about the existence of a queer side of the world yet as I was trapped in the typical binaries of life here visible to my eyes.

Being a child in a low-income and conservative family in the Middle East comes with a very common starter pack. You are pushed toward the pursuit of education and a career in either law or medicine by one’s parents. This was the case for me as well. I was the first one in the family that showed signs of “getting numbers and stuff” so my path was clear – I simply had to study medicine. I internalized that idea so fully that the evil scientist became my recurring character in my role-playing sessions with my cousin.

Soon after, I learned more about medicine, science, and everything in between as I kept breezing through primary and middle school. Seeing the diagrams of organs or skeletons always brought me joy. I often tried to draw anatomical drawings and then cut the drawing into pieces while imagining rivers of blood gushing out from the incisions. I’d found my career goal; I decided to become a surgeon. Cutting the skin and organs? Count me in! That goal quickly died  and was kicked to the curb when I realized my math and science skills were no match for high school calculus and biology. I had the blues for a while, but  I did have something else to fall back on, to keep me motivated. Yes, it was those cheesy yet iconic, gory B films themselves. Those unrealistic body horror moments made me feel at home every single time.

I frequented the art platform DeviantArt. I have always been into story-based cinematic video games as well as horror films, and games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill still rank among my all-time favorites. As you can guess, they predominantly have body horror and gore elements within their character designs. I would browse the fan art sites with great admiration as I would type in the names of the characters with the most grotesque designs onto that search bar and see the results pop up. Whenever I would see any new masterfully crafted artwork of a scene from the games with full gore, they got registered into my mind’s storyboarding territory, and eventually, showed up in the sequences within my dreams. My internet surfing adventure eventually spread to another crucial site – Tumblr. There, I found not only artworks but also writings of all sorts. This curious rabbit hole eventually led me into the world of queer perspectives and ideas. Among the many memes and other viral content, I noticed a common type of text entry on Tumblr. It followed along the lines of “I create gory body horror artwork and writing because duh! I am trans!” and it was at that point that my subconscious started to consider the possibility that I might be too. It still was not clear to my waking consciousness, though. 

I was in high school during my Tumblr exploration stage. It was not the only thing I explored, I also realized that I was not straight. I did not have any access to anyone or anything in real life that would help me navigate what was going on within my mind and soul, so of course, I went back to my comfortable corner online. I started to actively learn about the queer community, queer identities, and more. I was finally starting to find the puzzle pieces, one by one gathering everything in a big huge bag. I felt myself reaching close, but I also could tell I was still missing that finishing touch. 

Surely, that obsession with my wanting to become a surgeon must be related, right? Also, pulling all-nighters constantly just to watch brutal horror films from my childhood days to now too, right? It must be, it simply must be that way. 

I finally came across that one quote that gave me my eureka moment. It was from the book Something That May Shock and Discredit You written by Daniel Mallory Ortberg: “As my friend Julian puts it, only half winkingly: “God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine so that humanity might share in the act of creation.” I still vividly remember the very first time I read that quote. I was speechless. I could almost hear the puzzle pieces in my brain connecting and then finally forming the big final picture. 

Watching those films and reading those quotes made me realize why I kept feeling so inclined toward watching grotesque horror films even when no one around me did so, and doing that was even condemned silently by everyone else around me. It made me realize why I hated my body so much that I kept killing it off in my dreams—every single night—and why I was so obsessed with the goal of becoming a surgeon in the first place. It also made me understand why I found gory scenes in cinema comforting – it was as if looking into a mirror. I, as a queer creative in both orientation and identity, wanted to create a body of my own from scratch, a body in which I felt natural and real. Watching all these body horror and gore horror films was a passive yet highly effective way for me to concretely visualize those ideas, ideas which were further developed in my dreams. When this narrative cycle reached an ending for the night, I felt a sense of completion, and of finding my home with those films., After reading so much about the theory and watching the films, I finally realized that I could partake in that completion by simply creating my works. So now, I am a graduate student in film and television, learning both theory and practice. As I open Celtx, the screenwriting application on my computer, I realize that writing scripts with body horror helps me feel as if I am creating something relatable for people like me, while also expressing myself. In a way, I feel as if I am helping others explore their own identities. As I’m typing this now in mid-2023, I’m preparing to write my master’s thesis as well. This topic, body horror in cinema as a way of expressing transness or non-binary identities, will be my thesis theme. It feels like something of a small-scale miracle to have had this topic approved by the institute, now that the Islamist regime here won the majority in the May 2023 elections once again, trapping me in this open-air jail of an oppressive ideology for five more years. 

I cannot help but wonder what else I will discover about my identity as I keep walking on the path. There is a place for people like me, there is a piece of freedom to exist and experience somewhere. While I feel like losing hope for the future, I try to motivate myself with the progress I have made so far. I know I must go on, not only for myself but any potential others who might come across my writings online someday, the same way I came across Ortberg’s writings. Just like others, I have the power to exist and experience freely, and hope there also will be an opportunity to fully go through it openly, on a different side of the world. Until that hopeful, longed-for escape, I will keep turning on the television at night and letting the seas of blood shine into my eyes.

The post Long Live the New Flesh appeared first on Electric Literature.

Regrettably, my class schedule conflicted with another important event I was attending: my death.

I contacted my ride to school and told her that I couldn’t do it that day. I apologized for my absence, but left out the part where I planned to asphyxiate myself by noon. This wasn’t a suicide attempt with an subconscious desire to reach out for help and awareness. I had no intention of failing.

As I dragged my miserable self out of bed, a voice implored me to find help one last time. I wasn’t happy, but I struck a bargain: I would seek help one last time as a courtesy to that voice. I picked up the phone and called a suicide hotline, ready to ruin some underpaid counsellor’s morning. It rang for over a minute without a response – not even an answering machine. I put it down, thinking I had misdialed. I tried again and the same thing happened. 

I had phoned a suicide hotline and nobody picked up. 

When the realization hit home, I laughed – truly laughed – for the first time in weeks. The funniest point in one of the darkest periods of my life. The whole disaster put me in such good spirits that I postponed my death and skipped school for the day. I napped, and played video games, the same as any other teenaged boy would do with cherished spare time. I now had a mirthful secret: I was such a human catastrophe that I had failed my own death.

I postponed my death a few times during my teens, but this is the only story I tell to strangers. It’s the only one with any entertainment value. The other incidents aren’t funny.

There was the logical conclusion to my disjointed upbringing: failing at so many appointed tasks and then, failing at death. 

With the privilege of hindsight and a Master’s in Psychology, I now know that fractured mental health and a critical shortage of support structures is ruinous. Tragically, I spent my formative adolescence in that whirlpool of ruinous emotions. I didn’t evade death through force-of-will or artful self-care. I avoided death because of small fortunes and a tiny spark of resistance.

May we never have to confront our killer in the mirror.

I was an auspicious creature, a thing of humble destiny that would bear my branch of the family tree forward. Chinese families often prefer boys for their value as income providers and bearers of the family name. A good education. A ‘respectable’ job (don’t tell them I did online sex work). Wife and kids. The responsibilities of Chinese masculinity mingle with the privileges. Boys are shaped into morally-upright and productive creatures who maintain their family’s face. Face. An untranslatable concept of social respectability, dignity, and public relations that governs many aspects of Chinese life. 

What I’m saying is that I had a lot riding on my shoulders, and I don’t remember signing up for any of it. 

Growing up, I was intimidated with stories of Chinese children failing to uphold their families’ standards. Young men who became video game-playing deadbeats; ‘good girls’ who partied their grades away at university. Chattering ladies and grandmothers endlessly compared their children to see who had the best one. Picture the javelin throw event, but the stakes are a family’s reputation and the children are the projectile. Who had the best grades? The best extracurricular record? The best musical performance? The children who left this crucible bore lasting imprints of the messages they heard. Depression, maladjusted personalities, and alcoholism. The coping mechanisms for success. 

All of this was a preferable alternative to failure – becoming a failure was certainly the worst thing that could happen to a Chinese child. The ‘failures’ of my youth became cautionary tales passed to other children. Like the Titanic: doomed to serve as a warning to others. I sometimes think about a family friend whose son slipped so far that he failed a grade. I think he just needed social support. I hope he’s okay. I hope they all are. 

I grew up under relentless pressure to be better than the person next to me, rather than befriend them. I bore the weight of being a Chinese boy remarkably well, considering that I was actually a girl. 

May we reach our future without being twisted in someone else’s straitjacket.

By first grade, I was enrolled in visual art, dance and piano classes. My first piano teacher believed that a five-year old was too young to start. Unfortunately for her, my elders are Chinese. They knew enough stories of prodigal musicians to know that if you didn’t get your child against a grindstone early, they’d never be successful. I joined the millions of Chinese kids who were nudged (coerced) into extracurricular activities at their parents’ behest. My parents took pride in how liberal their parenting techniques were. They proudly told me that they consulted me, asking if I preferred piano or violin. They were under the impression that ‘asking’ me made it an informed decision. The fact that my five-year old brain wasn’t able to process the responsibility and expectations wasn’t considered. In adulthood, they asked why I hated it so much if I ‘chose it’. I had to explain the inability of children to give informed consent to them while sharing a pizza.

Piano is just one of the many things I failed at during my childhood. The dance class melted away. My art class teacher politely ejected me from the class because I was too energetic for it. I wanted to draw fighting robots and she was interested in teaching still life and basic color theory. A thoughtful parent would have reconsidered their decision to enroll a child in extracurriculars that were beyond their child. These are Chinese parents, so I bore the mounting weight of familial disappointment. My upbringing was defined by my inadequacy. My failure to attain high grades. My extracurricular failures. My lack of piano achievements. My room was devoid of trophies like other children. Better children. 

My body wasn’t good enough, either. The matriarchs got it into their heads that a seven-year old shouldn’t be so skinny. I was required to drink a loose fluid dotted with atolls of dusty powder—protein shakes— of a sickly vanilla flavor. Instead of turning me into the big, strong boy they wanted, I became more troublesome. I was a picky and slow eater, the way children who are forced to drink half-mixed protein shakes get picky. The way children who eat under risk of punishment eat slowly to appease their elders despite how little they’re enjoying the food.

Under threat of punishment, I learned to eat faster than anyone else at the table. When my family visits nowadays, they remark that I eat like ‘someone who has never seen food before,’ and implore me to slow down and enjoy it. I don’t even have the energy to explain the irony of this to them.

Every time I failed at an endeavor, I received a dressing-down about my shortcomings. If I was lucky, there was just an exasperated sigh. Still, the message was clear: I wasn’t good enough. 

May we never be pulled away from the small things that bring us delight.

I tried to be a guy. I really did. By my teens, I was insisting to other guys that lesbian porn was the best, because it had twice the volume of women. In 10th grade, someone behind me was talking about a friend who was acting strangely. I shouted across that, “Well at least he’s not gay! It’s the gays that are the real problem!” That made me feel good, like a regular, gross teenager. They didn’t have to know that I grimaced in the mirror at home. Or that I hated compliments aimed at my broad shoulders and deepening voice. They needn’t know that I clung to my last plush toy until age seventeen – slightly ashamed of, but fiercely protective of my last ‘soft’ possession.

When I wasn’t a foreigner in my skin, I was reminded of it by the people around me. A stable feature of my childhood was being made aware of my differences. Casual remarks from classmates and passersby about my ethnicity. People asking if I ‘knew kung fu’ or was related to Jackie Chan. Casual, prejudicial ribbing from those around reminded me of my difference. I was being seen. 

I once received a royal chewing-out from my grandmother for inviting two ‘ungrateful’ girls over to our house. They asked for a snack, which she considered a wildly inappropriate gesture. She encouraged me to stop befriending them. Not long after, I dared to ask a host for permission to watch TV while she tutored my cousin. Word reached my grandmother and I received an extraordinary dressing-down of my inadequacies as a human being. I never found out what I did wrong.

I was caught between Chinese and South African modes of being without an instruction manual. Each turn of the Earth made me more accustomed to the idea that I was a poor fit for my body and a poor fit for my life. Being alienated from society is familiar to most of us sometime or the other. Bodily alienation is a bit harder to grasp, even when you’re living in it. We all get ambushed by negative thoughts about our bodies, but the disconnection brought by dysphoria is truly alien. Even after a vibrant and successful gender transition, it hasn’t fully left me. 

May we all graduate from our rental bodies to something that truly feels like home.

Every gender transition is different.

Mine started off exactly unsurprisingly: my mouth outran my brain. And before my brain had a chance to put a lid on it – to rationalize it away – I told my girlfriend Lucy that I might be trans. We blinked at each other in a feeble effort to process the gravity of what was just said. My mouth never paused to ask my brain for forgiveness. It still doesn’t, and I respect its enthusiasm. It was swift and resolute. 

The year was 2020. There wasn’t much to do during lockdown other than make earth-shattering personal journeys and complain about life’s proceedings. My girlfriend ended her lifelong nail-biting habit. I realized that I’m transgender during lockdown. I’d say these were equally substantial events.

I must have been insufferable during those early weeks, because the dam had broken, and all I could think or talk about was transition. I cooked up a schedule for transitioning: I would research for the next few months so that I could be extra sure about it. I would consider starting hormone replacement therapy in 2021 and let it work for three or four years. Then, I’d gradually make femininity a full-time thing. This was an orderly and steadily-paced transition that gave Lucy and I plenty of space to adjust.

Turns out, there’s no planning for reality. I was out of the closet to everyone in my social circle in two months (oops!). I started hormones in 2020, a year ahead of my plan. I was a full-time girl by the end of 2021. So, several years faster than expected. I was incorrigible. I studied every change to my physicality in joyful fascination. I wondered what the next change would be. How would I look once the body fat settled? How would my breasts turn out? Would people still like me? My internal monologue sounded like an adolescent girl – which in fairness, I sort of was.

I didn’t go into my transition blind to the trials that women face. In 2016, I was a crossdressing man in exploration, a tourist in femininity. I did so with the love and support of my friends. I was quickly exposed to the street harassment and nightclub groping that come with feminine presentation. When I started my transition, these experiences were a core part of the ruthless arithmetic of whether this was ‘worth it’. I was one of the few ‘men’ who had first-hand experience of some of the misogynies that women face. Was I willing to take up those experiences and shed the safety of manhood?

May we all be gifted with the determination to craft our best selves.

I noticed it quickly: the second glances and lingering looks. My anxiety said that people were ogling the broad-shouldered ogre man-lady who will never be a girl. My anxiety is kind of a dick. 

With time, those negative thoughts were dispelled for the acrid illusion they were. Eventually, ‘positive’ confirmations of my femininity appeared. Drivers were much more polite to me at pedestrian crossings. I received offers for assistance with my groceries. Men were much more amenable to making chit-chat with me. People saw a woman and acted accordingly. 

Success.

Happiness bloomed in me. Society now saw the person I wanted them to see. Still, I mourned the men who society largely treats as unworthy of assistance or attention. I don’t see how things would be worse if we offered to help men with their groceries a bit. 

My confidence escalated, but so did the attention. My girlfriend steadfastly told me that I wasn’t just any woman, but a beautiful woman. I entered the pandemic as a lanky young man with a penchant for baggy clothes, and escaped as a stately young woman. The physical traits that I found ill-fitting for manhood were now prized: thinness, long limbs, soft facial features. Men asked for my number. There was an occasional whistle or comment as I walked past (ugh). 

I was being read as a woman. As many trans people would say, I ‘passed’. This wasn’t a test like my childhood weight or piano recitals. It was self-imposed. I signed up for it, and I succeeded.

From now on, this is how it would be.

This new gaze of society – one reserved for beautiful Asian women – unsettled me. I didn’t consider myself beautiful. My anxiety and wounded self-esteem always assured me otherwise. However, others thought so. Strangers are inexplicably more polite to me despite no change in my behavior. Every time I’ve been asked on a date was post-transition. The unwanted compliments are a torrent. Being so vividly seen took me back to my childhood, but the jeering had been replaced with hungry second glances. 

There’s a word for that. Trans people talk about gender euphoria – the unbridled joy of having our gender affirmed. But, this was gender ewphoria: the disconcerting half-happiness of one’s gender being affirmed in a harmful way. A trans woman encounters street harassment for the first time, but feels her femininity affirmed despite it being sexual harassment. A trans man is invited to participate in casually misogynistic conversation because he’s now one of the boys. Gender ewphoria. 

‘Passing’ has its consequences. Even success has shortcomings, but it’s always worth it. That’s what makes it success.

May we please be affirmed for our beautiful selves in ways that aren’t gross.

Starting antidepressants didn’t cure my paired anxiety and depression. They took on the burden so that I could better uphold my daily life. Gender transition was the same. It freed up mental capacity previously occupied by the need to endure my incompatible body. With that alignment, I could focus my resilience on other endeavors. 

Masculinity taught me much, not all of it good. It taught me hardness and suppression. I politely abided and suppressed my tears, my interest in men, and my femininity, to name a few. By the time people stopped telling me to bury myself, the lessons were entrenched and I perpetuated them myself. There was a lot of digging to do. With my newfound energy, I confronted parts of myself that I’d driven into the ground. One by one, I decided their fate.

My masculine upbringing taught me independence, assertiveness, and emotional resilience. A keeper, but I sanded down the hardest edges. My insular, nerdy-boy childhood formed a love for military history, scale model making and video games. Keep! But, let’s augment them with the feminine interests that I was always too afraid to try: cultivating my wardrobe and collecting plush toys. 

But the eating disorder? That had to go.

It was anchored in my childhood diets. My family disciplined me for being a ‘fussy’ and slow eater. As a child, I was fed protein shakes because my body was too weedy. By my teens, this overbearing watch was replaced by apathy – I could eat whatever I want, whenever I wanted and nobody cared anymore. Great idea, right? 

My understanding of what constituted healthy eating has always been lacking. My childhood primed me for an unhealthy relationship with food. However, that didn’t spawn an eating disorder. I needed motivation. One final push. It came in 2015, during my crossdressing cis-man era. My tourism in femininity showed me the joy of seeing my feminine form (euphoria), but I noticed a few squishy parts. Areas that could be a little ‘leaner’, or where my clothes could fit a little ‘better’.

One final push.

I didn’t have the language to make sense of dysphoria, euphoria, or men’s eating disorders in 2015. I just let my mind dictate this new path – just vibin’, if you will. I lost an alarming amount of weight by starving myself, and kept it off for over a year by force of will. I accepted a constant state of exhaustion and daily headaches as the price for my goal body—a feminine body. It never occurred to me to ask why a ‘cisgender man’ would crave a feminine body. I wasn’t eating enough to form such big thoughts. 

This downward spiral only stopped when I was confronted with the reality of my situation: I was at a dangerously low weight and I wasn’t looking more feminine. I was just gaunt. Pallid in the face, and struggling to focus in my lectures. The pendulum swung in the opposite direction and I binge-ate to regain the weight. I declared this episode over when my weight returned. I was under the mistaken impression that eating disorders were just about weight.

My transition was marked by near misses and short relapses. I nearly relapsed when I dug up my old feminine wardrobe to see how the clothes fit. They didn’t. I did the smart thing and thrifted them away before I let Size S become a ‘body goal’. I relapsed when I visited Lucy’s family home and was surrounded by women who had complex (read: terrible) relationships with weight, and also unable to maintain my eating schedule. At work, someone remarked on my thinness and I later watched her scrape the chocolate icing from her cupcake before starting on it. I ate briskly and left, before those thoughts came back.

When my mother saw the new me for the first time, she said that I was too skinny and I had to eat more. There it is; ewphoria. No tradition in a Chinese family is more hallowed than making inappropriate remarks about a daughter’s weight. I knew at that moment that she saw a daughter in me. Still, Lucy had to talk me out of cutting down on my next meals.

Wicking away the pain of my past in careful, measured movements. Small, incremental successes chipped by the occasional failure. This is the trajectory of my eating disorder recovery. 

May we all liberate ourselves from the pain that marks our body.

Most people who want to kill themselves don’t actually want to die. Dying is anathema to our body’s every interest. What we actually want is a quiet end to the suffering. Unfortunately, we know that such a thing can never pass, so dying becomes an adequate facsimile. 

I was a frightened, lonely boy. I had finally been burdened with too much trauma – bodily, psychologically, socially. The scripts of inadequacy and manhood gave me none of the agency to cope with it. I didn’t want to die. I just wanted to go away. I’ll never know what pressed me to each new day during those years, but I’m glad it happened. 

In 2015, I escaped my childhood to a university hundreds of miles away. That university experience shaped me into the woman I am today. Even better than shaping me into this woman, it gave me the courage to pick the threads of my past apart in search of that lonely child. In the recesses of inadequacy and trauma-memory, I found the definitive reward for the life I built. I gave the suicidally depressed boy-I-was what he wanted most: a conclusion. 

By transitioning, I relegated him to the past tense. I released his life into the realm of memory. I ended his pain.

I didn’t have to take his life to accomplish it.

This is joyful beyond words. I am one of the few people who was able to put their suicidal self to rest without the horror of taking a life. That is prettier than living in a body I can call home and striding the world as my truest self.

I am proud of that shaken and bewildered boy for enduring his world while still trying his best. 

I am proud of him for giving up his life piece-by-piece to shield a woman he didn’t know. 

May he rest peacefully in the knowledge that it was worth it.

I empathize with trans people who want to relegate their past selves to oblivion. But this is my story and I’m obliged to make room for the sacrifices my past self made. I remember him for the courageous child that he was, even if he never believed it. He bore guilt for every test he supposedly failed, and he was nearly overcome. Only with the freedom of adulthood and recovery did I learn that sometimes, the bar for success is set at survival. It’s the only bar that really mattered to my younger self, and he upheld it.

No undertaking can affirm my agency as much as undergoing an adolescence of my choosing. Nothing can match the bliss of awarding my past self the accolades and rest he earned. 

This delight – the embodiment of my euphoria deserved a name.

Her name is Summer.

I named her for the warmth roiling in her heart, the prosperity in her smile, and the unbound hope in every step she takes.

May we all be privileged enough to have a name that fits perfectly.

The post I Chose Life and a Second Adolescence appeared first on Electric Literature.

A white family was floating on tubes in the water already. I was apprehensive in the way that you are when you occupy a new place and scan the room, checking out the danger meter. I was nervous traveling through rural parts of the South as a queer- and trans mixed-race couple with two kids in tow. I always took note of our surroundings and whether or not we saw anyone else who looked like our kinds of people. 

I often avoided going swimming or to the beach unless I was going to a Trans and Nonbinary Beach Day where I felt safety in numbers. As a parent, though, this swimming hole had been a carrot we’d held out for the car ride. I didn’t want to keep the kids from a swim at the end of a long day of driving.

I tried not to look at the white family staring at us, thinking that I would mind my own business and keep to our own section of the lake – and hoping they would do the same. But my partner whispered to me: “That man has a swastika tattoo over his heart on his chest,” and I felt my neck muscles, holding all my stress in my body, pulling for the exit. 

I didn’t want to stare, but tried to see out of the corner of my eyes. A large white man and, presumably, his wife stared at us as if we had intruded on their lake. Their kids, carefree, splashed around them. I made slow and steady moves to get us out of the water because I didn’t want to scare our kids. We started moving them towards the lake bank, despite their protests that they had just gotten into the water. I felt the man’s eyes on us as we rinsed off lake grit at the showering station, his gaze following us all the way out of the beach area. I wondered how many other people we would encounter who would wish harm on our family.

I am a nonbinary Chinese American in a relationship with a white trans woman and have been co-parenting my partner’s children since they were 3 and 6 years old. Both children, now 13 and 16 years old, have come out as nonbinary and trans in the last few years. As a new co-parent navigating raising children moving between two households with very different cultural understandings, I first searched for community and cultural resources for trans parents and found little which was helpful or applied to our experience.

I was never sure I wanted to create a child from my body, continue my bloodline, bear a child. I was raised to bear children, but only in proper ways. I have a clear memory of my mother calmly telling me that she would disown me if I ever came home pregnant. As a child, I remember the gossiping of my aunts when my cousin fell in love with a Vietnamese woman (face like a horse!) and my other cousin a model (loose woman!). I rejected the clear trajectory (virgin to wife to mother) when I brought home someone of the wrong race (white, black or Latinx), wrong educational background (community college) or wrong gender (trans). 

I’ve always thought that if I made the decision to parent that I would adopt or foster someone who needed me. In high school, I was horrified to read about Chinese girls abandoned at orphanages by parents who only wanted a son, exacerbated by China’s one-child law – and imagined that if I were to become a parent, I could support someone who had been thrown away by family or society, like an outlaw. 

I wasn’t quite prepared when C (3 years old) and M (6 years old) came into my life. I had never thought I’d be parenting into adulthood what I thought were two white boys, wanting them to be racially sensitive and queer and trans positive.

When I met Cassie, I didn’t expect much either.

In my early 20s, I had a white boyfriend who was obsessed with Japan. I wasn’t Japanese, but I was the closest thing he had in proximity. When we ate using chopsticks, he would tell me what he thought were proper ways to use chopsticks even though I had grown up using them. I never told him that I had grown up listening to the elders in my family express contempt and resentment for the Japanese because of Japan’s invasion of China during World War II. When we split, I vowed to never date a white person ever again and I didn’t for the next twenty years.

I first became aware of Cassie at a local meeting for a support group where we discussed relationships. The meeting took place in an overly crowded room – she heard my voice and my thoughts about gender and relationships and wanted to meet me. I heard others gossiping about her as a trans woman – and knew that I had yet to meet her because I had never before met a trans woman in that very white, heterosexual space.

We met when I arrived at the tail end of the group’s four-year anniversary party at the local bowling alley/arcade bar. My friend wanted an invite to the underground local hot tub collective, a local word-of-mouth fixture in Milwaukee, where I survived the winter by going for soaks on cold nights. I asked who else wanted to come and Cassie came along. 

You never knew who you were going to encounter in the tubs, but I hadn’t seen anybody at the tubs who was out as trans. It was in the basement of a multi-use building which housed a local yoga studio and across the street from a bookstore. There was a key to open the outer door into a small yard area and a code to enter. There was a hot tub, cold tub, sauna and room off to the side where people stored their belongings. There was a slot in an inner wall for visitors to pay the $5 guest fee. 

Since I didn’t know Cassie well, I just watched and observed both how she was moving in the space and how others in the space reacted to her. She told me about leaving her marriage and I learned that she was newly coming out as trans. She kept her underwear on and kept following me in and out of the hot water. I wasn’t dating white people or interested in getting into serious relationships with them, but I became heated and brash.

‘You like me,” I said flatly. She was a bit flustered, but didn’t deny it. I was toying with the idea of being bossy and in control. It felt important to be the one to set parameters and tone for how we were going to interact.

I told her to write me a letter that detailed out all her significant relationships with other people of color. I was surprised when a thoughtful and detailed personal letter arrived in my inbox. 

I asked her if she knew who Bayard Rustin was. She didn’t. I proposed seeing Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin because I wanted to see how open she’d be at learning about something outside of what she knew. I also wanted to know how she would react to activities centering queer people of color as a white person. She agreed so I kept hanging out with her.

Much of our early relationship was built around first sharing food and then making food. A week after we met, I invited Cassie to an annual dumpling-making party I hosted for my birthday. She was one of the first to show up to help chop vegetables. In the middle of the party, we ran out of dumpling wrappers and she ran out to acquire them. At one moment in the midst of chaos, I looked over and saw Cassie happily chatting away with someone she had just met, engrossed in conversation like the rest of the room. She looked like she belonged in the stream of my multiple networks of acquaintances, friends and housemates.
When my housemate decided to celebrate her birthday (and entryway into cronehood) by shaving her head down to the nub, she threw a party where she asked a few of us to shave our heads in solidarity, including me. I didn’t invite Cassie to that gathering because it felt intimate and I wasn’t sure how she would react to such a ritual. In the middle of that party though, Cassie dropped by because she had brought me goat milk in courtship. I stored the goat milk in our fridge and took small sips throughout the week, savoring the fresh milk. 

When I was sick, as an act of care, she brought me three different kinds of cough drops because she didn’t know what I liked. We started cooking together and sampled grocery stores in lieu of dates as we got to know each other. Going to the grocery store became a ritual we shared together. 

Cassie and I slowly progressed to sharing more and more of our dinner table, which included C and M when they were in Cassie’s care. 

The first night I met Cassie’s two kids, C and M, she had them for the night so she invited me over to her place. I hadn’t had too many kids in my life except cousins and my little brother so I was nervous about what to expect. It was late and the kids were in bed. We had just gone back to Cassie’s place to make out on the couch and snuggle because it was convenient. We were still on the couch when M woke up upset about something. I wondered if I was supposed to be there. Cassie held M with her full body as M tantrumed, struggling to hit something. I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

One of the first things I noticed was the food. C and M both wanted Mac and Cheese, pizza, hot dogs or hamburgers and not much else. They were picky about food and I was too.

When Cassie and I introduced the kids to stirfry or other food that they were not used to, they often rejected what was on the menu. They would beg and moan for something else even after the thank you helping that was customary and inherited from Cassie’s ex’s family that became a practice adopted for the kids – to respect the person who made the meal.

I grew up in a Chinese American immigrant family where much of the care in our family was expressed with food. My favorite meals were dumplings and hotpot — meals that everyone made together. We ate family style – sharing several different kinds of dishes in the center of the table.

Growing up, my mother made the majority of our family meals. I was used to eating what was placed in front of us. Though I had preferences, I cannot imagine wholesale rejecting what was placed in front of me and demanding something else from her.

M had a distaste for family-style meals, always preferring individualized meals. In the early days of living together, we often accommodated C and M’s demands. It created a situation where two separate meals were prepared and eaten and highlighted the differences in the kinds of food that the kids were used to and the kinds of food that Cassie and I made together as part of our relationship. When we went out to eat as a family, Cassie and I often ordered family-style over M’s objections.

I viewed C and M’s reactions as a white, privileged way to approach food and meal-making, often making meal times feel like a tense showdown. I worried that I wouldn’t be on the same page as Cassie because I hadn’t been there in the very beginning years. I also didn’t want to complicate her relationship with the kids.

Cassie eventually agreed with me that she catered to the children out of a sense of guilt. She also told me that there might be other reasons for M’s orientation around food. I slowly learned that M’s autism made her extremely sensitive to textures in food and grass and that she would hyperfocus on that to the exclusion of everything else. 

We were navigating our relationship as a newly out trans woman and a nonbinary person. Cassie’s kids would scream “Daddy” in crowded public spaces and we would worry about what would happen if strangers objected to our presence in the space. We tried to warn them that there might be people who would judge and try to hurt us because they didn’t understand us (and Cassie being especially vulnerable as a trans woman).

Neither of us had any models of what a family like ours could look like and didn’t know of any other families, even in the queer and trans support groups we belonged to. Many of those who came didn’t have children and the ones who did had often come out much older. There didn’t seem to be any others who had young children shared across multiple households. 

I looked up kids’ books that included trans protagonists and/or families. There wasn’t a lot out there, but I tried to get my hold on everything published and we started reading together. We wanted to show them that there were other models out there other than families with a heteronormative father and mother. We didn’t find too much that we loved (some were okay representationally speaking but lacked in terms of storytelling, and others had the opposite problem), but at least there was a place we could start together. 

We chose to read as much as we could so that there could be a variety of representation – from books spotlighting gender creative kids to even rarer books which featured a trans parent. We also read books featuring kids of other kinds of queer families such as families with two moms or two dads or even queer penguins. I worried that the kids would rebel against what we were trying to teach them – to be gender-inclusive and to understand that there were many different ways of making and being family – and ours was just one of the variations.

When I got a new job in Texas, I asked Cassie to move with me – and she made the challenging decision to leave her kids behind. By that time, we had switched to seeing them every other weekend and sometimes longer on breaks. Once we moved to Texas, we saw them for part of their winter break and part of their summer break – with long stretches of time when we were not able to see them. We became the traveling, queer and trans, mixed-race family – often driving across the country to pick them up and drop them back – and their other family was the white and straight suburban family who had them during most of the school year. 

We had to navigate transphobic and sexist expectations of Cassie as a “father” because Cassie was the one who had always worked outside the home to support her family. Even when her job proved to be too stressful, causing debilitating bouts of anxiety, and she chose to move with me to Texas, she was stuck in the childcare agreement that she had made based on the snapshot of her life from the time when she had separated from her ex. This arrangement was then reinforced by the state regarding when we were allowed to have time with the kids and the level of support that Cassie was expected to give to her ex.
We learned about the transition period between households and how that would impact the kids – when we were in the same city and switching five days on and five days off, it would get hard in transition days leading up to switching households with more tantrums and mood swings. The same happened on a different scale in the week which led to the switch.

It was also an intense transition for us – from no kids to full-on parenting with no ramp-up. Because months passed since the time we had seen them in person, it also felt like we were getting acquainted again.

Until recently, we were an always migrating household – moving for jobs and circumstance — and the children were constantly migrating back and forth between different households. This made it challenging for them to make friends with others their own age. We became our own little insular household when the kids were with us.

When we first moved to Houston, the Hero Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) campaign to pass HERO, an ordnance which would ban discrimination on sexual orientation, gender identity, sex, race, color, ethnicity, national origin, age, religion, disability, pregnancy, genetic information, family, marital or military status, was underway. As has happened before, the anti-HERO campaign used trans women as the focal point around whom to organize, increasing fear. 

Traveling between Houston and Huntsville, where I worked and Cassie attended school, felt like shuttling between two different universes. Houston was a large city which felt very international, where we weren’t the only mixed-race couple and often weren’t the only queer and trans people around. In contrast, Huntsville was a small city which ran on the prison system which dominated the city. However, HERO’s defeat confirmed that there were many in the area who saw trans people as not deserving of protection – and it increased my sense of foreboding that harm was coming to us.  

When I agreed to teach a Honors-level Black Lives Matter class with two other queer colleagues, a false news article was published in the conservative news about how the Honors College was pressuring students to take a politicized class on the Black Lives Matter movement. I got a voicemail on my office phone offering de-transition support from my sinful lifestyle. We all got hostile emails telling us that the sender hoped we would lose all our funding, as we deserved. 

I was navigating being an out trans-identified faculty member on a campus where the LGBT group was semi-closeted and where I seemed to be the first trans/non-binary faculty member (and person) many of my students had ever met. I was often thankful that the kids were with us in summertime or winter break when we had more breathing room. Even though I loved the culture and big sun of Houston, I started making plans to escape to a place where I didn’t feel an impending sense of disaster and doom, which ultimately ended up with moving to the Pacific Northwest.

As we entered the tween years, our household was rocked by big emotional mood swings when the kids were with us. Each day, I would ask C and M to walk with me to get exercise and food in the neighborhood. Early in the summer, we caught C sneaking sugar in the form of a bag of Dum-Dums, which continued throughout the whole summer. Cassie had bought and put up a yoga body sling in the doorway and C started hiding out in it. We noticed that C often couldn’t answer our questions about what was going on and couldn’t tell us what they needed and often withdrew from family conversation or interaction. 

The next summer, Cassie got a new job and I became the one who spent time during the daytime with C and M at home. That summer, M spent much of the time in her room sleeping or with the door closed. When I asked M about how she was doing, she admitted to me that she was depressed. C spent much of the summer in their room and wouldn’t eat. I started asking C and M to help out with household chores – to get them circulating in the house and to encourage them to get vertical and off their screens. All they wanted to do was hide out in their rooms and play Minecraft.

At the end of the summer, right after she said goodbye to us, M released a video of her playing Minecraft, with the main character ripping up floorboards at the end of the quest to reveal a trans flag. I wondered how her larger extended family would receive the information since Cassie had not been supported in her gender transition. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that M received a lot of support and care. A few days later, we heard that M had chosen a new name for herself – Myra. 

Myra’s coming out as a trans girl (and later Clover coming out as nonbinary a year later) forced me to re-calibrate my sense of the family that I was in since all of us now identified as trans and non-binary.

Looking back, we had often referred to both kids as a collective: “the boys.” We asked them to use the boys or men’s restroom and assumed that they were male. Even though we were both trans, we didn’t give space for them to choose how they wanted to identify and present to the world. I was so concerned to make sure they knew how to address Cassie properly as a trans woman and understand what it was like to be the kid of a trans woman – and secondarily, that they knew that I was genderqueer and nonbinary – that I didn’t consider the possibility that they were trans and nonbinary themselves.

The kids reminded me of how binary my worldview still was regarding gender. Myra, for instance, grumbled about how we would say “Good girl” to our dog Pepper and “Good boy” to our dog Benny. “Why can’t you just say Good dogs?,” she grumbled. And we had persistently gendered her as male without giving space for her to choose, until she told us otherwise, despite both of us identifying as trans.

Another hot summer day. We’re nearing the end of C and M’s time in the Pacific Northwest. I’m in the car on parent duty, Myra in the front seat and Clover in the back seat. It’s the first summer that Myra has lived with us since coming out and she’s beginning to shine. Cassie recently took her thrift shopping for her birthday. She modeled the clothes in the living room, twirling around and smiling. Now she’s wearing one of her thrifted skirts paired with black combat boots, ready for the LGBTQIA* youth social. 

I wonder what my life would have been like if I had attended an event like this as a young person. Cassie and I talk about what we want this next generation to experience that we didn’t.

In the parking lot of the zoo, we see a line of young people queued up to enter the zoo. Many of them look like they’re already friends or have come together and I worry about how she will do on her own without knowing anybody first. It hasn’t always been easy to make lasting connections with other kids their age because they move between two households and we are  often moving. 

“Make sure your phone is fully charged and call me if you need to be picked up,” I say. Or rescued, I think. “Actually, make sure that you write down our phone numbers somewhere in case you phone dies.” 

Myra rolls her eyes and grumbles – a hint of that old contrarian gritting her teeth at the dinner table – but does what I say and copies down my number.

I ask Clover what they want for dinner and we decide on burgers. When we first drive off, I’m alert for any notification that Myra needs to be picked up and is not having a good time. I remember my own awkward pre-teen and teen years where I felt excluded and ostracized socially and hid in the band locker during lunch so I wouldn’t have to publicly eat my lunch alone. But she doesn’t call. Clover and I eat our burgers in the car while watching the locals order shakes, burgers and fries in summer heat at Dick’s Drive-In. We’re not staring at them the way we were stared at in Arkansas six years earlier and they don’t pay us any mind. Instead, we’re enjoying the summer air through the open windows and just spending time together.

We finally get a call that Myra is ready to be picked up.

“So, how was it? Did you have fun and meet anyone cool?” I prompt.

“Yes, I made a friend!,” Myra says. I see a hint of jealousy from Clover that they aren’t yet old enough to attend the social.

I feel relief and excitement for Myra about the possibility of growing a new friendship and Clover who can attend the social the following year. 

It is hard not to worry about how the kids will navigate this world which increasingly targets them. It is hard not to worry about what impact it would have if Myra is denied access to trans-competent health care or the ability to use the bathroom she chooses in school. It is hard not to worry about the high rate of teen trans suicides or the battle for trans youth and their families to be treated with dignity and respect. 

A few weeks ago, Clover decided to move across the country to live with us full-time. I felt proud of them for deciding that they wanted something different in their life, naming what they needed and working to make that vision materialize. I remember that this is how trans people have always survived. We take care of each other. We build our own networks of support. We choose our own family and kin.

Notes: C/Clover and M/Myra are pseudonyms. I first met C/Clover when they were 3 years old. They changed their name in the last year to reflect their gender identity. I refer to Clover as they/them to reflect their pronouns at the time of this publication.

I first met M/Myra when she was 6 years old. She changed her name in the last year to reflect her gender identity. I refer to Myra as she/her to reflect her pronouns at the time of this publication.

The post I’m a Nonbinary Chinese American Who Co-Parents With My Trans Partner appeared first on Electric Literature.

“And it just goes in — all at once?” I ask, even though we’ve already gone over this once before.

“If you can,” he confirms. “It’ll hurt less, that way.” 

In this moment, poking myself with a needle for the first time feels impossible. I am terrified of needles. Through the haze of my anxiety, I briefly consider that this is an apt metaphor for my decision to take testosterone. That I was the one who chose to do this, that it is not the act itself but the unknowability of the result that I am most fearful of, but also that it is impossible to waver any longer. I am on the precipice; the syringe is already in my hand, poised in its perpendicular position, ready to pierce through my thigh and all of my jittery nerves.

My hand stills. At last, I’m ready. It’s time to take the plunge. 

At some point last year, my Instagram algorithm finally figured out that I am a queer guy. Not a difficult task, as I had been clicking on every suggested Reel of a hot Asian man, half out of a desire to study and steal what made them so effortlessly masculine, and half out of desire. It spat out video after video for me of men in slo-mo or match-cut transitions, flaunting their perfectly styled hair and expensive outfits, and like a particularly naive mark, I watched them all. But there were a couple of Reels mixed in with the rest that took me aback. Catching sight of a blonde-haired Japanese man dressed up in gallant period attire, poised and tall under a spotlight and singing his heart out on stage, I knew from previous experience that he was not a man at all, but Rei Yuzuka, one of the current top stars of Japan’s Takarazuka Revue, an all-female theater troupe. Yuzuka is an otokoyaku — a (presumably) cis female performer who only plays men’s roles, and she is the best of them, among a notoriously competitive company of actresses. It did not escape my notice, either, that Yuzuka had managed to fool my Instagram algorithm — that, with the sheer power of her gender performance, she had transed my panoptic gaze just a little bit. 

“Part of the especially unique allure of the Takarazuka Revue,” the official YouTube channel boasts, “is how the women playing otokoyaku seem to be more impressive on stage than real men.” Which is a statement that, as a transmasculine person, I find incredibly funny. Because isn’t that, in effect, what I am doing? Constructing an alluring masculine fantasy for myself, out of the bits and pieces I observed and borrowed from other men. Like the otokoyaku, I wasn’t always a man. I had to learn to become one.

I hadn’t always wanted to be transmasculine. At the beginning of 2018, with the help of my therapist and several close friends, I had just left my ex-boyfriend several months prior. It had been a physically and emotionally abusive relationship, punctuated by several instances of sexual assault, and I had settled into my new apartment, away from him, somewhat shattered as a person.

It had unequivocally been a relationship filled with gendered violence, despite his protestations that he was a feminist, just because of the way cisheteronormativity shutters us into gendered roles if we don’t actively resist it. Knowing this, and filled with a redolent rage at what he had done to me, I couldn’t help but feel vengeful. This was, perhaps, at the height of the “men are trash” rhetoric spreading around social media, with everyone happily tweeting and sharing easy zingers. Including myself. It felt righteous and justified, and moreover, in my injured psyche, it made sense. Masculinity had hurt me, which meant that I had to take shelter from it. I imagined that femininity was a divine goodness. Masculinity was something toxic to be rooted out in everyone and destroyed. I held onto this belief for several years, especially since it was a sentiment echoed in many queer spaces that I had called my community. 

And yet, in 2021, I suddenly felt like I wanted to go on testosterone.

The way I have described it to my friends is that my body knew before my mind did. By 2021, I had already come out as non-binary, changed my name to “Jonah” on all fronts but legal, and even started presenting as more masculine, but I had never thought that I would want to undergo medical transition, or to be seen as, first and foremost, a man. I still can’t fully explain how I knew it was testosterone that my body needed, and not anything else. All I can really say is that it was a visceral urge that seemed to spring from some deeper part of me that came before language and reason. 

These urges came on the heels of my abruptly quitting a long-time job, and I don’t think the timing was pure coincidence. Freed from the last stranglehold that required me to put on a pretense for polite society, I was suddenly thrust into discovering who I was outside of professionalism and capitalism for the first time in three years. But the thought of wanting to go on T was terrifying. I couldn’t understand it at the time — why did I want to be a man, when men had hurt me so much? 

There is a lot of fear-mongering about testosterone and how it affects one’s emotions, mostly designed to convince trans men from transitioning and to give cis men a biological excuse for their harmful behavior. It’s so pervasive on every level of society that it’s hardly questioned, and I certainly believed a lot of it when I first began researching what it would be like to go on T. 

Like many others, the first things I learned about HRT were largely from hearsay and haphazard Google searches. There seemed to be agreement that the effects of T were “destructive,” “irreversible.” You wouldn’t be able to undo the rapid proliferation of facial and body hair, nor the deepened vocal chords, nor the bottom growth. Worst of all was the oft-discussed “roid rage,” which made T sound like a poison that was destined to incur anger and aggression in any body it entered. That made me most afraid of testosterone — afraid that I would change too much as a person, afraid that I wouldn’t recognize who I was in the mirror. What if T transformed me into the thing I feared most — a man who causes harm to other people? 

It was this language that made me put off going on T for almost a whole year, all while I was in severe dysphoric pain. Fortunately, I was surrounded by good people — trans/non-binary friends who graciously listened as I voiced my wants and worries, and specifically, a few transmasculine friends who were going through a similar process of discovery with their own genders. Through them, I learned that masculinity wasn’t anything to feel ashamed of, and so was emboldened to try looking into HRT once again. I scoured Twitter for personal experiences from transmasc folks, I read crowdsourced Google Docs on the effects of T, and I watched YouTube videos and TikToks of trans guys talking about their transitions. This new variety of first-person reportage was invaluable to me; it showed me that there were many ways to be a man and to exist in a man’s body with joy. Moreover, it taught me that the fear-mongering was a result of TERF rhetoric, which sought to “preserve” and “protect” the femininity of transmasc folks and prevent them from transitioning. 

I had femininity within me, certainly, but I didn’t want it to define me anymore. If anything was poisoning me, it was the mantle of womanhood that was forced on me but that I had never wanted. And if I didn’t remove it from myself, it might end up killing me. Slowly, my need drowned out my fear, and I gathered the courage to call my local gender clinic for an intake appointment. After years of enduring violence, I owed it to my body at least a chance at freedom and autonomy.

We do a lot of harm, to ourselves and to others, when we assume the bioessentialist stance that men, particularly cis men, are not capable of emotional intimacy. I remember receiving a verbal dressing down from an old friend when I called them complaining about the lack of investment I was getting from a guy in my burgeoning friendship with him. “You need more female friends,” they told me, “guys just aren’t good at having deep heart-to-hearts.” But, I replied hesitantly, I feel like I just get along better with men? There are exceptions, of course, but I have often felt a sense of disconnect when befriending women — a gap of difference I never felt like I could bridge. “You’re probably hanging onto some internalized misogyny,” was their diagnosis. “I think you have to ask yourself why female friends aren’t good enough for you.” Funnily enough, my friend would probably be horrified to know they once said such a thing to me. At the time we both identified as cis women, and now neither of us do.

I had no good explanation for why I yearned for the emotional intimacy of men. Sometimes there is no logic devised for feelings; they are simply that: feelings. Gestures towards an emotional truth that has no container. In Sophia Giovannitti’s essay “In Defense of Men,” a critique of the common liberal feminist impulse for man-hating, she writes, “I love men’s casual homoerotic acknowledgements of each other as men; I want all men to kiss their homies goodnight and I want it so badly that I, too, want to be a man who is a homie who gets kissed goodnight.” Giovannitti wrote this line as a cishet woman, but I can find no better line that encapsulates my entire spectrum of desire as a queer trans guy. We all talk about how toxic cispatriarchal standards render many men isolated and unequipped to express intimacy, and while that’s certainly true, I have met many men (cis, trans, and non-binary alike) who happily resist those values and are openly affectionate with their male friends, and when it happens, it is just as beautiful, sacred, and deserving of protection as any other expression of friendship. 

I have no better proof of this than my own experience. Recently, a cis female friend who’d also experienced intimate partner violence asked me, “How did you stop yourself from blaming men as a whole for your trauma, and from going down the man-hating path?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I guess I was just lucky to have some really good guy friends at the time.”

In retrospect, I think it’s funny that some of my most toxic, emotionally taxing friendships have been with queer femmes, and some of my most loving, intimate friendships have been with cishet men. Of course, I could say the exact opposite is true as well. The devastation of my twenties was caused by a man with whom I was in a cishet-fronting relationship, and the people most responsible for rescuing me from it were women. I have been held and loved by people of all genders, and I have been hurt by them too. Knowing we are all capable of harm regardless of our identity markers — that was ultimately the truth that freed me. 

Where does that leave me, then? I want to acknowledge that a toxic masculinity does exist — one upheld by a cispatriarchal system that seeks to control and poison all of us, including cis men. I want to confirm that there is a power pageantry at play here that, if we’re not careful, even transmasculine folks can be lured to participate in. And I want to emphasize that this model of masculinity is inextricable from the project of white supremacy, which stations its imagery of “ideal maleness” and “ideal femaleness” in white bodies and traditions. For Asians in particular, we are always feminized by the white gaze, regardless of gender. Even if I were attempting to “transition into male privilege,” as some TERFs claim, it would never be possible for me. I am forever in America, by nature of my race and assigned sex at birth, designated to be some bastardized form of “gender,” not the “desirable feminine,” but certainly not masculine, either. So I don’t belong in the traditional dichotomy of masculinity and femininity, and I don’t care to, either. 

Aligning masculinity with “hardness” and femininity with “softness” simply reifies gender binaries, the same way that primarily referring to non-binary people as AFAB or AMAB does. Our social conditioning trains us to think in binaries, and it’s a hard system to escape, even as our own genders manage to. On a practical level, I don’t think these dichotomies make a whole lot of sense, either. Growing up, I was a rebellious and rambunctious tomboy, and my mother had (without much success) attempted to eradicate my inherent boyishness and impose femininity on me. Not because she wanted femininity to make me soft — but because she thought my unacceptable gender deviance, which was out of alignment with the society I lived in, was my weakness. Possibly my worst offense to her was that I was a sensitive child, prone to crying and large emotions. She wanted me to hide that as well, under the clean and equanimous guise of a “good girl.” “Never show the world your true face,” was the lesson she stressed the most. “The smartest way to survive is to wear the face that everyone else wants to see.” 

Unthinkingly, I had swallowed her teachings, even when they had hurt me. All throughout my teens and early twenties, I taught myself how to perfect femininity. I spent years curating my wardrobe and took pride in being complimented for my style. This only intensified after I left my ex. In the typical post-breakup fashion, I wanted to prove that he hadn’t hurt me at all, that I was stronger and better without him. I dyed my hair, bought more revealing clothes, and hunted for the gazes and praise that would affirm that I was worth their love. I’d even hazard to say that these attempts at high femme appearance were extremely successful. But one afternoon, returning from a party for which I had dressed to the nines for, I walked back to my apartment feeling like I wanted to cry. Nothing bad had happened there; everyone had been perfectly nice to me. But I felt like the underside of my flesh was crawling, like I wanted to rip all of my skin off. And I knew precisely the source of my deep discomfort, even as I clung onto it, thinking it would save me. 

To me, femininity was the knife I wielded, as well as my armor. Masculinity was the soft and vulnerable thing inside me that I had to protect from the cruelty of the world, that opened me up to the possibility of violence. For too long, I thought that this was the way it had to be. But as any person, cis or trans, might be able to tell you, this is a painful way of living. And neither is it even effective at saving you from harm. Lately, I have been discovering that a weaponless existence is the only way I know how to continue to live. Being free, weightless, and true to myself returns to me an innate strength that was all but hindered by the pressure to conform, and it also allows me to surround myself with people who are interested in loving me as whoever I am, no matter how many changes I may go through over time. I had been taught my whole life that being soft and vulnerable would only make me a sucker, a fool — but these days, I am finding that it is quite the opposite, that if I open up and meet people halfway, more often than not, they will come to meet me where I am. 

I am lucky, in some ways, that the first trans man I encountered in any piece of fictional media was Oshima, in Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore. Fifteen years after I’d first read it, I now have some issues with how Oshima is depicted as well as the contents of the book itself, but Oshima is still very meaningful to me. His gender identity is never questioned by the other two main characters, and he occupies a position of wisdom and culture in the narrative that feels enviable. Anytime the titular teenager Kafka needs advice from a sensible mentor figure, Oshima is there to provide him with it, and anytime Murakami needs to deliver an excessively long monologue about his opinions of art, it comes out of Oshima’s witty and discerning mouth. In a story with deliberately murky plotlines and morals, Oshima is the lighthouse, a beacon of warmth and stability that others can turn to when lost.

Moreover, Oshima ran completely counter to everything my mother wanted me to be — he invited strangers in need into his home without question, he was kind, he spoke his mind, and he didn’t care what others thought. He could survive the world as himself; he didn’t need any armor to begin with. For years, Oshima was my favorite and most memorable part of Kafka on the Shore, and I didn’t realize until recently that he represents a beacon for me, too, one that I can look back to and orient myself towards whenever I doubt that my masculinity is “enough.” When I try conceiving of a gentle but strong transmasculinity, often I am remembering meeting Oshima for the first time on the page, in equal parts awe and envy.  

I am thinking of him the first time I plunge the needle into my thigh — not just Oshima, but the person that I want to become, the person I have always suspected that I might actually be. My RN was wrong — the injection still hurts, but it actually doesn’t hurt as much as I’d thought it would. Which is also an apt metaphor for my experience with testosterone. Now that it’s been more than half a year on T for me, I’m finding that a lot of the commonly-repeated things about T are, perhaps, not as common after all. Because of the chancey game of genetics, there truly is no universal transition experience. My face and body have visibly changed, but not as quickly or drastically as everybody, even the most well-meaning of folks, would have led me to believe. And that, for the moment, is okay with me. I am gradually molting into the shape of my soul, which I can now see whenever I look in the mirror. I am not waking up to suddenly discover that I am a completely different person; I’m growing with myself, one day at a time. 

More importantly, of course, is the way that I’ve been feeling on T. Counter to the prevalent myths, I don’t feel out-of-control nor particularly short-tempered, but rather more open and in touch with my emotions. For many years, I had put up so many walls, with others and with myself. I refused to let myself feel the totality of my feelings, convinced that the depth of them would destroy me. I’m realizing now that what felt so unmanageable was the fog of dysphoria that laid heavily over everything, making it difficult to face my most difficult issues or even to ascertain what their root causes were. With the dysphoria largely cleared away, it’s like I’m re-experiencing myself in full color. Still capable of deep sorrow, yes, but not terrified that I’ll be ruined in its wake. What’s more, I possess a broader range of joy that makes me feel fully human, fully present and participating in the world around me. And that, to me, is what it means to be(come) a man. 

The wonderful thing about being trans is that sometimes you discover the person you needed to become was always simply who you are. After years of wandering, I have finally come home to myself. There in my bones still lives the child who cries easily and bruises quickly, who gravitates towards warmth too readily but moves towards the fire without fear. I recognized him at once. Excavating them from buried earth, I take their hand in mine. I find that I no longer require the armor to live, to feel safe. After all, I am not walking forward alone, but with every part of myself. 

The post Masculinity Is the Soft and Vulnerable Thing Inside Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

The fly’s head is rendered in microscopic detail: its bulging compound eyes set above a fleshy proboscis, cradled between its mouthparts. There is, however, something more unusual about this intimate portrait. A pair of finely bristled, jointed appendages protrude from the front of its head. Even to the untrained eye, it is unmistakable: legs are growing from where its antennae should be. It is grotesque. It is uncanny. It is so obviously made wrong.

I learned that this fly was created through the mutation of a single gene. This type of mutation is called a homeotic transformation, when one discrete part of the body is transformed into a completely different one. The animating spark that first drew me to biology was encapsulated by this little mutant. I was captivated by the pliability of the living body, and with it, the promise and possibility of transformation.

I have researched and studied developmental biology for almost a decade now, first as an undergraduate assistant, and now as a graduate researcher. My work often elicits comparisons to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s not completely unfounded—I study organisms in their becoming: how cells become tissue and how tissues become flesh. Many of the early classical experiments in the field evoke a similar sense of grotesque alchemy as Shelley’s descriptions of monster-making, with disparate flesh grafted together and tissues rendered into biochemical essences. The results of this experimentation resembled the eponymous monster as well—the mutant, leg-headed fly just one of a menagerie of lab-made monstrosities: two-headed, Janus-faced tadpoles fused along their shared spine, chimeric embryos formed with the cells of two different animals.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that my thoughts returned to these experiments when I first began transitioning. While a second head wasn’t among the changes I was expecting, I recognized myself in these laboratory creations. I wanted to believe that science would have no trouble accommodating me, that in its strangeness and infinite possibility I could build a space for my existence no matter how repellant it might seem to anyone else. Like every patchwork hybrid and mutant creature of science, I was visibly constructed and obviously made—and to a young scientist, that felt dizzyingly powerful.

Frankenstein proved more relevant to my experience than I’d anticipated. In some ways, this was unsurprising—I am hardly the first trans person to relate to monstrosity. In her 1994 monologue My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix, the historian Susan Stryker explicitly articulates this struggle, positioning herself, a transgender woman, as the monster that society seeks to materially exclude and marginalize:

“Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”

Stryker’s monologue is an unambiguous reclamation of monstrosity, a celebration and assertion of monstrous sentience and autonomy. Her rage and defiance shone through with total clarity. But it wasn’t the clarity that I felt. I felt as if I occupied the position of both doctor and monster— I didn’t just want to have autonomy. I wanted to be recognized as a scientific agent in my own transition. If I could express the changes that I saw in myself in the language of physiology, of anatomy and of endocrinology, why shouldn’t I be able to? I wanted to think of myself as capable of generating new knowledge, and capable of conveying it in a manner acceptable to the scientific community I’d been part of for almost a decade. I’d first approached transness specifically through the lens of scientific possibility—an expression more in the vein of Victor Frankenstein declaring that he would “unfold the world to the deepest mysteries of creation”, rather than the monster’s desire to simply exist. Yes, it was hubris, but wasn’t that a kind of rallying defiance too? Somehow, the desire for acceptance on these two fronts felt conflicted, but I didn’t understand why. Was it really so impossible to be both doctor and monster at once?

But trying to see myself as both proved more fraught than I’d anticipated. In my excitement, I overlooked the nature of experimentation itself. Experiments are carried out by a scientist, on a subject of experimentation. This is not a relationship free of hierarchies. A scientist is not a medium through which the facts of nature simply flow through unimpeded. Experiments are designed and outcomes are interpreted. Ambiguity and uncertainty are resolved, or at least their parameters articulated. Specifically, the scientist (or the scientific establishment more broadly) is responsible for these processes and how they occur. In a scientific culture that is inextricable from, and often an active participant in, maintaining existing societal power dynamics, scientists often act in the service of maintaining hierarchies rather than dismantling them. The laboratory is not a site of liberatory transformation. It is a site of control.

Frankenstein is about science. Not only in its subject matter, but the process of doing modern science— its motivations, its ideals and the specifics of how it should be done. Victor isn’t just a scientist—he is a gentleman of science living in 18th century England. He performs experimental science, a mode of understanding and doing science that was only established about a century before his time. It is in this context specifically that the novel explores the power dynamics of experimentation. Frankenstein is commonly said to be about “transgressive” or “unrestrained” science, but the social context in which it takes place is important in defining what it is transgressing against—the qualities that define “transgression” were not created in a vacuum. Funnily enough, however, it might be said that they were created by one.

In the mid-17th century, the chemist Robert Boyle invented the air pump. Boyle was a prominent member of England’s Royal Society, and would go on to be highly influential in defining the way modern experimental science is conducted. The air pump was a large glass dome, perched on top of a brass base. It had an attachment for a pump, allowing the air inside the dome to be systematically siphoned away, forming a vacuum. The air pump would allow him to make the fundamental discovery that he is remembered for today— Boyle’s Law, the thermodynamically-determined relationship between a gas’s pressure and volume. Boyle saw the air pump as a means to control natural phenomena, to standardize observations and measurements by enabling experimental conditions to be replicated consistently. If the protocols for operating the air pump were judiciously followed, one could expect that its results would be the same during every scientific demonstration. The experimenter then became a messenger for the machine, a purveyor of instrumental readings rather than self-interested opinion. By factoring out human influence and agency, or as Boyle put it, “the morals and politicks of corporeal nature”, experimenters could produce results distilled purely from the laws of nature. 

Unfortunately, as we see in Frankenstein, “corporeal nature” is not so easily extricable. To me, this is the anxiety that makes Frankenstein a scientist’s horror story—the inadvertent contamination of our observations, the creeping realization that we’ve allowed our objectivity to be compromised. Just as the air pump removes all traces of air from the dome, we are expected to remove all traces of ourselves from our research. There is a special horror, then, in not only recognizing yourself in your experiment, but having your experiment attest to your presence: just as Victor Frankenstein calls the Monster “my own vampire, my own spirit set loose from the grave”, the Monster reaffirms its form as “a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance”. It follows that if the most ideal scientific process is one that can completely separate experiment from experimenter, the most transgressive is one that enmeshes them completely.

I found myself charged with this grievous transgression about two years ago, when I’d only been publicly out for around six months. A professor at my graduate school was posting his views online about the reality of binary biological sex in humans— a discussion that was not the good-faith engagement with biological taxonomy one might have hoped it was. One opinion was particularly derisive:

“Question for scientists who do not believe that humans have two distinct binary sexes: How many legs does a dog have?”

My first impulse was to form a scientific rebuttal. There are many potential approaches to discuss the complexity of sex and gender in biology—the complexity of the human endocrinological system, the inaccuracy (and insensitivity) of calling intersex phenotypes “mistakes”—I might even choose to debate the taxonomical and anatomical definition of “leg”. But I saw the likely futility of engaging. The implied equivalence had already been made: determining sex in humans is as simple as determining the number of legs on a dog. It is an easily-made, individual determination that can be made by sight alone. Any scientist who cannot do so possesses woefully compromised judgment. And, of course, anyone with such compromised judgment cannot possibly be a good scientist.

And therein lies the rub: my desire to be seen as a scientific agent—in my own transition, as a transgender scientist—is at best, according to Boyle’s experimental philosophy, poor experimental design. By this logic, like Frankenstein and his monster, every observation I make, by design, attests to my inextricable presence.

Put simply, I am a bad scientist.

That is the crux of this type of bigotry—it isn’t about empirical truth or falsehood at all. Underlying this complacent declaration of equivalence is an invisible arbiter, the unseen, “good” scientist who is able and entitled to design the terms of discussion due to their neutrality and impartiality. Ultimately, it functions not as an assertion of truth, but an assertion of epistemological control: I decide who is a reliable arbiter of their own experiences.

With the invention of the air pump, Boyle also advocated for a very specific code of conduct for scientists. To confer upon their results a sense of reliability and validity, Boyle proposed that experimenters should always employ restraint and modesty in the presentation of their results. Experimental descriptions were to be minutely detailed, judgments should err on the side of reasonable doubt, and confident assertions should only be used to convey academic consensus. It was humble to the point of self-effacing, refusing to unduly speculate on the theoretical causes of its observations. The resulting academic voice became characteristic of 17th and 18th century scientific correspondences of the Royal Society, codified into institutional and professional etiquette. Through this deliberately constructed image of propriety, Boyle created the ideal of the “modest witness”—a persona that the philosopher Donna Haraway defines as “the inhabitant of a potent unmarked category”. The modest witness was a civic man of reason, able to transcend biasing cultural polemic or political squabbles. In return for this performance, he was given the power to distill objective truth from subjective reality. The voice of a modest witness was the voice of objectivity itself, speaking what appeared to be perfect reproductions of the natural world into existence. 

If my first mistake was failing to live in such an unmarked body, my second was actively calling attention to it. After the flurry of biological-sex based opinions had passed, a number of my peers and myself decided to quietly bring the professor’s comments to the attention of another senior professor with some oversight in the department, presenting it as an issue of potential discrimination. The senior professor attentively listened to our concerns. He paused, and looked genuinely thoughtful. Then he spoke.

“I understand, but it’s a divisive subject. It’s like…say, open carry-“

He sounded so earnest. He sounded so painfully earnest. 

I cut him off before I could stop myself. I couldn’t bear to let him finish that comparison.
“Professor, I am not a gun.”

The meeting went silent. The senior professor looked a little taken aback, awkward and apologetic. It was obvious that he hadn’t known I was trans, or that a trans person would be present at all in this discussion. I quickly launched into a formal spiel about institutional policy and workplace protections. This was my first experience making myself deliberately visible in my role as a graduate student, and all I wanted to do was take it back and disappear again. In the end we were met with expressions of sympathy, but little in the way of action. I did not speak again, nor did I follow up with the complaint. If my desire to exist freely was comparable to an instrument built for violence, what kind of justification could I ever provide for myself? What explanation could possibly suffice? I had received a tiny insight into how others—especially well-established scientists—might perceive transness. At the time, I thought I was the only trans person in my department. Newly out and still grappling with how it might impact my future prospects, even that awareness was enough to decide that being seen was a mistake. I didn’t want to see how I would be reflected back at myself, and I flinched. I am not a gun. I am not a gun.

When the Monster reads Victor’s journals, it internalizes Victor’s bitterness and resentment towards it as a deep sense of self-loathing. “Increase of knowledge only discovered to me what a wretched outcast I was,” it says, resenting that its deeply human desire to seek knowledge only leads to greater pain and misery. The tragedy is that the Monster first sees itself in relation to the world through its creator’s guilty eyes—a guilt that Victor projects onto the Monster due to his transgression of scientific and social norms. When I turned the scientific gaze on myself, I assumed that it was mine. I saw it as an exercise of autonomy: I was using my scientific knowledge to understand myself. But the surveilling gaze of science has historically been used as a project of control, seeking to make monstrosity legible through the language of taxonomy, and all too often, pathology. I was trying to see myself through a kaleidoscopic lens, each facet interconnected with innumerable others, the multitudinous inherited eyes of witnesses past. So many of those eyes are responsible for making monsters from the bodies of those too visible for the carefully guarded boundaries of polite society. Subjecting yourself to that gaze, if you are monstrous in any way, is risky—all you might see is the indelible, wretched stain of your ascribed subjectivity.

After the complaint led to little resolution, I removed all mention of transness from most of my public platforms. I deleted the pronouns from my email signature. I put off plans to medically transition. I gave up on coming out publicly while I was still in academia. This incident occurred during what collectively was my lowest and most precarious point in graduate school, and everything seemed to reinforce how thinly my presence was tolerated. An insidious mix of paranoia and shame bled into every interaction, and I began to withdraw entirely, working at strange hours and behind closed doors as much as possible. I envied peers who could so easily disappear into their arguments, who could move through academic spaces without friction. To achieve the same effect I excised whatever I could from my self, deftly performing the bloody surgery of dissecting accumulated feelings of rejection, anger and futility. I was going to be free of the baggage of an embodied existence, free of the corrupted viscera that only caused me distress. I spoke with a voice that I barely recognized. I imagined it as a ghastly hand puppet, a disembodied set of vocal cords that I manipulated by pulling on each tendinous strand. Here is a citation. Here is a scientific graph. Here is all of my heart processed into data, into statistics, into the only way you can bear to see me.

In all my cringing anxiety, I’d made the mistake of operating within the same logical bind laid out in the first professor’s derisive question. An institution that seeks to make monsters is never going to unconditionally welcome one into its midst. Stryker’s monologue is performed with this understanding in mind—it was inspired by a protest held at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Stryker recognized that institutional science saw transness as a project of control, an attempt to stabilize ambiguity and subjectivity, and exert total mastery over the products of its creation. Tellingly, another of the first professor’s posts claimed that this exact project was the agenda of trans and gender-nonconforming people:

“[On the use of gender-neutral pronouns] Those claims are about wielding power over others…He/him and she/her are all that are necessary.”

It seemed so ridiculous at the time. What threatening power did I, a single graduate student, have within my institution, or even my department? I’d forgotten, after so long of being afraid, that monsters are typically the ones who are feared. In experimental science, the purpose of an experiment is to demonstrate empirical truth. The Latin root of “demonstration” is monstrare, which means “to show” or “to make visible”. It shares an etymological root with monster— both derive from the verb monere, or “to warn”. My claim to agency, or even my very presence alone, is perceived as a threat by those who are used to their own claims to autonomy and authority being uncontested. The power and promise of unquestioned neutrality is haunted by the specter of monstrosity, as it threatens to upend the clearly defined and neatly categorizable.  And in this spirit Stryker closes her monologue with a monstrous warning:

 “I call upon you to investigate your nature as I have been compelled to confront mine. I challenge you to risk abjection and flourish as well as have I. Heed my words, and you may well discover the seams and sutures in yourself.”

As I had long recognized for myself, Frankenstein captures the scientist’s horror in seeing themselves in their work, and with it, their own constructed nature. But I underestimated how terrifying Stryker’s charge is to those only made aware of their “seams and sutures” through the inconvenient presence of sentient (and opinionated) monsters. This anxiety seems to follow even the most vaunted men of science—on one of the buildings on the Caltech campus (where I am pursuing my graduate degree), there is a relief based on Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Instead of Jesus and his disciples, the great men of modern science—Newton, Darwin, Copernicus, Franklin and the like— gather around a singular figure. That figure is Richard Feynman, the charismatic physicist who rose to prominence during his tenure at Caltech in the 1950s to the 1980s, winning the Nobel prize in physics for his contributions to quantum field theory in 1965. If any one person could be considered an institutional hero at Caltech, it would almost certainly be him. In a quantum physics textbook that he authored, he describes an intriguingly-framed observation about electrons:

“Instead of going directly from one point to another, the electron goes along for a while and suddenly emits a photon; then (horrors!) it absorbs its own photon. Perhaps there’s something ‘immoral’ about that, but the electron does it!” 

Again—that moment of monstrous recognition as the electron interacts with itself. That instinctive cognitive and moral recoil from it. The intended meaning of the observation was likely to be a flippant joke about masturbation, but jokes aside, the anxieties are similar: to touch yourself intimately/to be so intimately aware of your own presence is a deeply forbidden thing. For the visibly-constructed, with our obvious cultural ties, our specific relationships with history, the non-normativity of our existence—this isn’t a new consideration. So much of queer and trans memoir is devoted to the idea of the multiplicity and fluidity of selfhood, of the careful attention to how moving through times and spaces changes us as people. But for those whose entire understanding of self is staked on the immovable pillar of presupposed neutrality, the idea that you too are a creature of context—that your perspective, your experiences, the way you understand yourself and others are a product of interactions with the world—can be overwhelming, to say the least. 

But selfhood isn’t the only construction threatened by monstrosity. Much institutional power derives in part from its invisibility: the unquestioned ability to judge, stratify, categorize, to enact your will without being seen. Haraway describes how, in Boyle’s time, the modest witness was a composite of social mores prized by contemporary English institutional power— the politesse of gentlemanly conversation, the asceticism and self-renunciation of the Protestant clergy, and the high-status ideals of ethical restraint and discipline. Monstrosity threatens to make these systemic constructions visible, revealing that Doctors are as constructed as Monsters are—but in ways that reinforce the social relations and hierarchies of power of the day, rather than threaten them. It is no wonder, then, that confronting monstrosity provokes such discomfort. Standing above the village of Chamounix, finally face to face with the creation he has restlessly pursued, Victor attempts to rebuke the Monster’s request to listen to its story in an oddly distant manner: “Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you”. As with Feynman’s fleeting brush with monstrosity, Victor’s moment of recognition is also pointedly contained in an aside. Finally confronted with the Monster, he can barely look it in the eye. 

When I first pitched this piece, I half-heartedly returned to the first professor’s posts, to see if he’d at least deleted them. He hadn’t, but there was a curious addition to his bio: the letters X and Y. They were the very first thing there, ahead of his institution or faculty title. It took me a while to register that they were meant to be a declaration of sex chromosomes in the place of pronouns. On a professional level, this was disappointing. But on a personal level, this gesture fascinated me. If my pronouns were, as he’d put earlier, some sort of epistemological power grab, then this must be a rebuttal, inevitably revealing something of his own beliefs. The scientific legibility of chromosomes seemed to be symbolically elevated to a statement about truth— an insistence that chromosomal sex revealed something essential, or perhaps even metaphysical about people. That no matter what, chromosomes would remain the consistent guiding light, allowing you to navigate the treacherous unknown waters of gender to the safe ontological harbor of chromosomal sex determination. Their presence was almost totemic, as if brandishing them publicly would ward off the nasty unscientific ambiguity of gender identity. As the sole bearer of they/them pronouns in the biology department to my knowledge, I remain very amused that apparently, I specifically, am the hellish vampiric specter that this genomic talisman is meant to ward off. I am sure that this professor would say that this gesture was satirical, that it was simply meant to parody and ridicule irrational flights of gender fancy like mine. And maybe it was, but my accursed sentience leaves me free to find it funny from my own monstrous little perspective as well. Mostly, I was left with one thought: I can’t believe I was afraid of this chromosome-wielder for so long. 

I do not think I can explain my transness in a “purely scientific” way, not in the way I imagined that being trained as a scientist would allow me to. I no longer think of this as a failure on my part, because science itself cannot be explained in a purely scientific way. There will be those who feel that same instinctive recoil to this sentiment, who are discomforted by our shared humanity, who would dismiss or ridicule what they do not understand at first sight. But monsters are never truly banished, only deferred. Like the specter of the reanimated dead, our autonomy, our collective wisdom and experience, our personhood already looms in the corner of your eye. Our gaze will meet yours, and the inescapable realization will finally dawn on you—“It’s Alive!”

The post I’m a Transgender Scientist and I See Myself in “Frankenstein” appeared first on Electric Literature.

My neck, its circumference, was the last thing to out me.

“Your neck is on the small side,” Dr. C. said after he glanced down my throat. I was at my first appointment with a sleep medicine specialist who, serendipitously for me, was a pulmonologist. In response to the “any changes” question during my annual physical, I’d told my primary care nurse practitioner I was waking up at night gasping for breath. At the time I had no understanding of the correlation between the circumference of one’s neck and obstructive sleep apnea. The one thing I thought I knew about the disorder was that heavy snorers are often diagnosed with sleep apnea and treated with a dreaded continuous positive airway machine. When I told my cousin I might have sleep apnea, she asked if I wanted her unused CPAP. She went on to explain she was tested, retested, and ended up with a machine she didn’t need because of (expletive) false positive results. Dr. C.’s eyes lingered a bit, refocusing on my head and neck.

“What size shirt do you wear?”

I re-looped a KN95 around my ears, wiggled the black cone to adjust its nose piece underneath my glasses before I responded. According to a tailor’s tape, my neck is slightly below fifteen inches with space to sneak in two fingertips. One reason I round up whenever I purchase dress shirts (slim fit) is to make more room. Fudging my neck size allows more space to tuck tails down and around my hips. Slim fit eliminates any bagginess around my chest and lats. I wasn’t sure Dr. C. cared about my arm length.

“Fifteen and a half,” I answered. 

Apparently, a thick neck—considered 17 inches or more for a man and 16 inches for a woman—may indicate a narrow respiratory airway making it more difficult for air to flow to your lungs. Excess fat around your neck can also narrow your airway when you lie down. According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s explanation of obstructive sleep apnea, if air needs to squeeze down your throat to your lungs you can end up snoring or wheezing, and if your airways become fully blocked you might stop breathing all together. The truth is at my age, I have the beginnings of a slender turkey neck. My body is aging like a luscious leather couch planted in a bay window alcove — cracks are starting to show.  I’ll yield to the possibility my brain container appears small(ish) for the sixty-three-year old transman that I am today. 

Dr. C. looked at his computer. I could tell he doubted the veracity of my stated shirt size. 

“Did someone take your weight?” 

“No.” 

“That’s alright. How much do you weigh? I can type it in.” 

“Back down to 165,” I said. I was proud and feeling good again after four months of a low-carb slog, ditching my pandemic backslide of double IPAs and sourdough pretzels, flourless chocolate cake and champagne.

“And your height?” 

“Five eight. Well. More like five seven and three quarters since I’ve gotten older.” 

“I’ll give it to you. But your BMI.”

My father was six four with what I imagine was an average body mass index most of my life. My brother is six two, played Pop Warner from Pee Wee through high school, was probably hitting two thirty the last time I’d seen him before our estrangement. Men on my mother’s side on average are shorter than me with a few exceptions. Black, Filipino and Austronesian lineage. My mother’s mother stood about four seven; at five six my mother towered over her sisters and some of her brothers. Maintaining her weight at or below a hundred and fifty pounds was an unfortunate obsession she ported over to me when I weighed in at one fifty around my 12th birthday. She drove me to her diet clinic that pumped me with HCG extracted from urine of pregnant women to make her feel better. The shots had the opposite impact of their intent: all I wanted to do was binge on ice cream and See’s Candies. 

BMI talk from a sleep doctor was borderline triggering. Without putting a finer point on his reference to my body mass index, Dr. C. said, “Your lung volumes are on the lower end.” 

I thought about my lungs growing up in Los Angeles during the sixties and seventies when hazy smog concealed the magnificence of the San Gabriel Mountains. My father chain-smoked Winston cigarettes unfiltered before switching to Marlboros. I told Dr. C. I was exposed to my father’s second hand smoke.

Back then, I was enamored with my father’s smoking and wanted desperately to emulate it. Fake smoking with fingered air cigarettes was a regular part of playing alone in my room. I interpreted my father’s smoking as a feature of masculine strength, not a component of any toxic meditation practice. My mother’s mother smoked too. Granny struck her matches on the bottom of her pink slippers. One day my parents gave into my incessant requests to smoke. I was six or seven. I remember my mother led us into the bathroom upstairs and allowed my father to give me a puff of a cigarette he ceremoniously lit to prove their point. I gagged. They chuckled. I cried. “See!” my father said. “Told you so,” my mother said. I don’t remember which one of them threw my cigarette into the toilet bowl. It didn’t matter. Supervised smoking and quitting in the second grade happened quickly. Dr. C. didn’t seem interested let alone have the time to hear about my recollections of secondhand smoke or my parents’ experiment.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I’m retired.” 

“And before you retired?” 

“Corporate finance.” 

“So, you understand ratios.” 

I started to worry as Dr. C. launched into a cursory explanation that my lung volumes and other pulmonary function results were outside of the normal range compared to reference values. “Does it matter…,” I began. I heard the pitch of my voice change and cadence slow as I wondered if his medical opinion regarding normal was being filtered through the biological lens of male and female expectations. His expertise brought him to size — head, neck, lungs, one’s respiratory system, the interpretation of capacity curves informed by computed biological sex norms. “The way you’re describing this, does your birth sex matter? I’m transgender. I was born female.”

Based on years of experience I’ve learned to be rudimentarily clear with healthcare professionals regarding gender identity. For example, I imagine it was an assumption about my first name coupled with an attempt at culturally competent thoroughness that caused a nurse practitioner new to me to ask the date of my last prostate exam on a telemedicine videocall. When I chuckled that I didn’t need it, she countered in a tone of admonishment the importance of health screening, as if I were just another obstinate (i.e., Black) patient. As far as I was concerned, all I was doing was going through the motions to get a testosterone refill electronically transferred to CVS. Check the box, let’s move on. Mandatory biannual bloodwork, including a comprehensive metabolic panel, isn’t necessary anymore since I’ve been on T over twenty-five years. The substitute NP saw me, heard me, and yet assumed estrogen refill (which was ridiculous.) “This is a first,” I said to her with an edge of incredulity after I realized I had to articulate I wasn’t born with a prostate.

“Of course, it matters! Gender is not sex,” Dr. C. said in a slightly raised erudite tone.

Here we go, I thought to myself. I had gone from chatty and open about my symptoms to a vulnerable trans person in an unfamiliar healthcare setting — exposed. Decades earlier, an urgent care nurse at Alta Bates Hospital in Oakland practically cursed me out as she took it upon herself to shame me because I misrepresented my sex, despite the fact I was legally male by then with an amended California birth certificate to prove it. I remember her face turning sunburn-at-the-beach pink, her voice raised like Dr. C.’s as she walked out of the room.

I was in for a tetanus shot. To be fair, she was trying to make sense of a potential duplicate medical record. There was someone named Anastasia Cecilia Jackson, same date of birth and social security number in their system. Years later I was instructed to make a 45-minute drive to California Pacific Medical Center’s emergency room in San Francisco because of a two-day 104 fever after my phalloplasty procedure. The attending nurse insisted they perform a rapid HIV test after I “revealed” I had received bottom surgery weeks earlier in their gender clinic. She initially responded with a WTF stare, and began asking questions about my status, which after further probing I realized was shorthand for my history of sexual activity and IV drug use. Fever is a symptom, but I tried to explain that I doubted HIV was the culprit lighting my body up and rolling me into her emergency room. She pushed back and said we needed to rule out HIV. Hours later I was admitted into the hospital to combat a UTI.

Dr. C. scrambled up and out of his chair. “I’ll be back. I’m going to rerun the test to see where you fall within the other ranges. I’ll do it myself,” he said this time in a hushed tone, as if he were a priest in a confession box administering five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers, sworn by an oath to keep my sin of gender omission between the two of us. The way I saw things, a one-sided discussion about assigned sex with Dr. C. was due to an outdated binary intake system. My new dermatologist’s webform asks for birth sex, gender identity, and pronoun preferences. But she is a Black physician and dermatological surgeon running an award-winning medical and aesthetic practice. Based on Dr. C.’s quip about gender versus sex, it could have gone either way in that moment — he could (re)make some attempt at cultural competence or be the bearer of righteous indignation under the guise of the Hippocratic oath in reverse, as if I had broken a covenant of my divine duty to disclose in a medical setting that I was born with XX not XY chromosomes.

My fear and simmering rage aside, in 2002, Bellemare, Jeanneret, and Couture published results from their study Sex Differences in Thoracic Dimensions and Configuration. They concluded the volume of adult female lungs is 10 to 12% smaller than males of the same height and age. Unaware of this data at the time, I waited for Dr. C.’s clandestine analysis using an updated set of female reference values, back to so-called normal.

Intellectually I understand disclosure. How else will providers know the appropriate care to administer if you can’t speak for yourself? Despite the misdiagnosis risks, I’ve treated my birth sex as HIPPA PHI on a need-to-know basis. The one exception to my current rule is primary care. Even then, I tend to omit surgical plus minus additions and subtractions, revisions, ‘ectomies and ‘plasties on generic intake questionnaires. I choose to forego the zoo animal observation in the name of scientific curiosity (i.e., medical education) until I can build a mutual relationship of trust. I once had a urologist at a teaching hospital ask if his students could look at my ding-a-ling. Never again. I will not be pathologized. Disclosure needs to have a pertinent purpose. So no, my dental hygienist does not need to know my testicular implants were taken out because the silicone alternative was too hard and interfered with my road bike performance. Chafing is bad enough on long rides for anybody, even with high quality butt butter!

Dr. C. was taking a long time. Five minutes by myself was nerve wracking. I was in a sparse unfamiliar room within a department treating patients with asthma, COPD, cystic fibrosis, and lung cancer among other respiratory system issues. The breathing test administered right before felt like my nose had been clamped shut with a binder clip. I was instructed to wrap my lips around a tube with a mouthpiece that looked and felt like a snorkel. I hadn’t expected tubes and wiring for a sleep study referral. Before the diagnostic probing, I knew my lungs had scar tissue based on an X-Ray performed for an unrelated medical procedure in college. “Let me try it again. I can do better,” I cajoled the respiratory technician with a resonant tone I hoped she understood (sis, gimme another chance.) “Mm-hmm. I don’t want to use this because I need three good measurements. I can throw one of them one out.” I had no idea how to interpret the graphical lines being mapped real time when I turned my arthritic neck to the right. I felt discouraged I couldn’t blow with the force she encouraged, “keep going, going, exhale; take a deep breath; is your tongue in the way? There needs to be a good seal.” “Yep,” I grunted which sounded like a weak muffle down the end of a blocked megaphone. 

We kept at it. In the moment, attempts to achieve the best results seemed more about her skill as a respiratory technician than my limitations. She was distracted throughout the test. I overheard her on her mobile with a care giver of a relative, excusing herself multiple times between measurements, in and out of the spirometry equipment room. Perhaps that explained why there was no height or weight for Dr. C. But my struggles inhaling and exhaling? There is no other way to put it. My lungs suck! This is a feature of my lived experience that didn’t need spirometry validation.

I had pneumonia twice before the eighth grade, with multiple bouts of bronchitis during flu and allergy seasons my entire life. Because of bronchitis, I missed a Girl Scout camping trip and was kicked off my high school swim team after three practices. Both absences broke my heart. More recently I got wet playing golf in coastal North Carolina during the summer of 2021. My brother-in-law and I cut the back nine short after funnels of charcoal clouds and thunder warned of fury rolling our way. The water was warm, my head and chest lightly pelted for five minutes before we drove the cart to the parking lot. It didn’t take much. Being outside in southern rain morphed into a month-long bout of spitting up thick yellow and occasionally brown mucous. A PCR test ruled out COVID-19 which I feared could blow up my fall writing residency. Bronchitis —  my nemesis loving on me again.  A course of antibiotics was required to fend off pneumonia. Trying to sleep with a rattling painful wheeze and a spit-bag reminded me of my childhood. Clueless and precocious, I used to fake-take tetracycline which I hated swallowing. I’d take the pellet in my hand, squeeze it between my left thumb and index finger, gulp my orange juice, and make a face with accompanying sound effects. Fake-take. When my mother left my room, I would drop the drug down the gap of my headboard. I was sick of taking pills. 

During my gasping episodes my breathing is labored, like the time a kid who lived across the street beat the crap out of me. He called me bitch nigger after I threw a rock into his boy pack in the suburbs of LA County where name-calling happened on the regular. I picked up a blue grey Mexican pebble from my mother’s bonsai garden and connected with his forehead. He responded landing upper cuts on my solar plexus and floating ribs — my back pinned against siding near our front door which served as punching leverage. I remember my mother took me to the pediatrician in addition to calling the cops to submit a police report. “Did he call you names?” Bruised, too embarrassed to repeat the words to the officer sitting with me and my mother on our living room couch, I lied for my attacker, I lied to end the interrogation. I have no idea then or now what type of lasting damage the lung contusion from the old beat-down caused.

Dr. C. was finally back with a printout full of numbers. My rerun: female from male. His reinterpretation: “You’re still on the lower end. I’m going to order a sleep study and a CT scan to rule out bronchiectasis.” After a brief discussion on the benefits of a sleep study at home versus the occasional false negative results, we agreed to start in the comfort of my own bed versus an overnight stay in the hospital sleep lab. I wasn’t referred to Dr. C. for an assessment of my scarred lungs, however if there was something to know I was open to knowing it. I kept the newly prescribed exploratory tests on the down low. I wondered aloud to my therapist what was beneath the surface of my trepidations of sharing my latest referral with my wife. It wasn’t the first time I omitted certain details regarding tests or treatment. 

Distrust of doctors and nonprimary care providers by Black people has been well documented and researched given racial disparities in health and the traditional healthcare system. The NIH’s National Library of Medicine’s website is populated with abstracts such as: 

• African Americans and their distrust of the health care system: healthcare for diverse populations
• Disparities and distrust: the implications of psychological processes for understanding racial disparities in health and health care
• Knowledge of the Tuskegee study and its impact on the willingness to participate in medical research studies

Neither my mother nor my father as senior citizens in their seventies appeared to trust doctors, resisting recommendations to take medications or perceived invasive interventions. My mother railed against treatment for my father to me, proclaiming dialysis would kill him because she knew he would keep drinking vodka and OJ. On the other hand, my father appeared unwilling to exercise his agency over his own healthcare. Apathy is a form of foul play. Years after my mother died, my siblings found partially taken prescriptions in her bathroom during their preparations to sell our family home. Previously my mother confided she had blood in her stool, however my sister-in-law supported my mother’s subsequent proclamation that all she really needed was a good night’s sleep. My mother’s vital signs were literally fine on her death bed. Who knew vitals don’t reveal the complete picture of a body’s deterioration?

Repeat: You are not your mother. You are not your father.

The first time Dr. C. and I had exposed our unmasked faces to each other was on a telemedicine video call to explain the results of my CT scan. We exchanged pleasantries as if we had never met. The virtual face-to-face felt more intimate than meeting in person masked up the prior month. Moving on to the point of the chat after smiles of acknowledgement, Dr. C. said despite the cyst and nodules, he wasn’t too worried about my lungs if I scheduled annual CT scans from now on. “Now we have a baseline,” he said. 

The fact that I don’t have significant obstructive sleep apnea requiring an intervention is a partial victory for me, my gasping awake while asleep still unexplained. The cardiologist I chose to see practically escorted me out of his office with a COVID arm bump and a smile. There was no reason he needed to see me again; he confirmed my heart is healthy. Left to my tendency for hypochondria-fueled research on the Internet (yeah, sure; I admit it), I have concluded the source of my gasps is likely nocturnal panic attacks. The symptoms of a nocturnal panic attack according to the Cleveland Clinic are chest pains, chills, intense feelings of terror, nausea, profuse sweating, a racing heart, numb fingers, toes, trembling or shaking. The research shows nighttime panic attacks present more severe breathing symptoms like gasping for air versus an attack during the day.

As a trans family specifically, my wife and I have both been sleeping on the edge of gasp. Mortal stress has been lurking. Swallowed. Pushed down. I know there is a collective fog of panic in the circles I belong. Culture has been weaponized; red and blue and purple states marked. Book banning. Trans kids, trans athletes targeted. Marriage equality shielded at the federal level. Some claim COVID is a sham. They say critical race theory is to blame. Blue lives matter. More guns — concealed weapons even better. States’ rights to elevate sperm and criminalize choice is terrifying. What’s next? Will the Thomas un-Supreme Court hint at its desire to accept private insurance cases addressing the legality of denying trans health, including puberty blockers, gender affirming mental health, as well as hormones and surgery? Will my F to M gender reassignment be criminalized, monitored by gender vigilantes if states legislate their “right” to protect gender-conforming citizens from moral corruption that could spread to their families? 

While sleeping I gasp myself awake sometimes, and occasionally shriek, settled by the soothing sounds of my beloved telling me it’s (just) a dream. Perhaps a consistent deep breathing practice without another medical referral is all I need. We shall see. 

This essay, by Stacy Nathaniel Jackson, is the seventh in Electric Literature’s new series, Both/And, centering the voices of transgender and gender nonconforming writers of color. These essays publish every Thursday all the way through June for Pride Month. To learn more about the series and to read previous installments, click here.

—Denne Michele Norris

The post As a Black Trans Man, I Refuse to Be Pathologized appeared first on Electric Literature.

But the durian—no condiments, no utensils, no plate even—trumped all these. I could smell it before I saw it, like a death or a thunderstorm on the horizon, a smell that leaves superstitions and pinched noses in its wake. Visually, the durian is spiky, large, hard, and green on the outside; creamy, sweet, buttery on the inside: back home they call it the king of fruit, partly because of its high price and addictive nature. During durian season, you can buy the fruit in white polystyrene boxes with the hard shell removed. You must eat it with your hands, tearing into the doughy yellow mounds that cover a hard seed. The flesh is a dense, heavenly concentration of pungent, fibrous honey. This is a very heaty fruit (energizing or stimulating, in traditional Chinese medicine), so you must never have it with alcohol. The flavor is sweet, solid, and electric, and lingers long after eating, like something warm on your breath—according to old lore, no soap brand can wash the smell off your hands, only water poured from the husk of the fruit itself.

The durian is difficult to describe to those who have never encountered it, because the experience of durian—from its myths and quirks, to its many varieties and swinging prices—goes beyond the vocabulary of orthodox Western palates and newspapers. Traditional English-language food writing—a genre that rewards taxonomy, elevation, and reinvention—thrives on finding the perfect combination of words to capture the experience of a new flavor. 

But sometimes, no word can depict an experience that is so totally foreign to the readers’ mind. Sometimes the word falls short of the thing entirely. My parents, for example, named me after a type of classic French plum. But the fruit I crave, the one I most deeply want to emulate, is the durian. 

Before going home last December for the first time in years, I had spent my last few winters dreaming of durians. I moved from the US to France in the summer of 2020. It was the middle of the beginning of the pandemic, the second movement of worldwide protests against anti-blackness and police brutality, and the end of my five-year student visa. In short, I couldn’t return home, and my legal residence was now in France, a country I had visited but never lived in.

Bureaucracy hits like that sometimes, with no respect for narrative.

My first year in France, I didn’t go out much, due to a combination of remote work, Covid-19 restrictions, and a plain, lonely lack of places to go and people to see. I spent a lot of time filling out forms and calling various administrative departments, trying to lay the foundation for the rest of my life in a new nation-state—healthcare, taxes, housing.

To comfort myself as I lumbered through bureaucratic sludge, toward another winter away from home, I turned my thoughts to the food I missed. I stuck a postcard of tropical fruits to the wall. I wrote a durian manifesto. I found shriveled versions of herbs and leaves from back home and tried to approximate dishes whose flavors I only vaguely remembered. I saw my face in the mirror, and used an old trick to change its appearance, softening my gaze so that my reflection seemed blurry. In that fuzzy indistinction, I could imagine whatever I wanted. I could imagine that the weather was different, with sunshine outside my window instead of cold grey wind. I could imagine that I was home, and that I was myself.

When I did leave the apartment, I walked anonymously, trying to locate the pace in my step that would allow me as invisible an existence as possible. I wandered into stores and mangled conversations in French, despite the fact that nobody who hears me speak thinks I grew up anywhere other than this France. But French wasn’t—isn’t—a language that fit me. My syntax is wobbly and simple. My vocabulary dates back to the francophone middle school I attended in Singapore in the 2000s, or to the Parisian seventies that my mother grew up in. Most of the time I manage fine. After four syllables—try intersectionnalité—my tongue stumbles. And beyond struggling with the words themselves, I struggle to identify the codes to go with them. Five years in a French middle school hadn’t taught me where to place my hands when ordering something from behind a counter, or whether I should sign off all my text messages with a first and last name, or whether it was too much to smile at a cashier from behind my mask. Now, somehow, every movement made me uncomfortable. It wasn’t just the language, it was everything about the world it operated, the way it made me shrink everything, from my words to my body. At some point, I knew I would have to make an adjustment.

I don’t remember when in my life I decided that, for practical reasons, it would not make sense to start questioning my own gender identity, because in the French language there is—according to most of its speakers and institutions—only “il” and “elle.” France is the country on my passport, and in some paperwork that I fill in. French is a language that I speak, sometimes with one half of my family and, for a time, in school. I don’t remember when I intuited that France would be the country I would have to live in once I had run through all the visas I’ve collected. Once I did, though, a question sometimes sifted front of mind when giving my pronouns in well-meaning settings on my US college campus: is this right, though? The response I gave myself each time: It doesn’t matter; it can’t matter. 

Sharing pronouns became the norm while I was in college, but those parts of speech alone never seemed like the whole problem to me.  

After all, in college, like everywhere else, I was always having to find shorthands to explain who I was and where I was from, some more or less satisfactory, and none of them entirely true on their own. 

In introductory linguistics classes, I learned about symbols and referents. The symbol is the word, the phrase or language we use, and the referent is the thing itself in the real world. When we say “I am ___,” we are associating ourselves—the referent—to a name, so that others may know how to call out to us. 

I enjoyed those classes, the assignments to pick apart sentences and categorize each word by its function and type. I enjoyed rearranging words to see what meaning could come out. In English, I could be as complicated and long-winded as I wanted. But I lost that precision when I moved to France and found myself submerged in a flurry of administrative Madames that left me shockingly aware of something wrong in the way that I kept having to present myself through paperwork and in official phone calls. The bureaucratic demands were tiresome and endless. I had to draw on every last form and ID number attached to my existence and send it over and over to different email addresses. I was sick of form-filling, of follow-up calls, of being asked to send my visa, which I didn’t have since I was a French passport-holder: my technical existence seemed inscribed at a weird intersection of citizen and foreigner, unable to be processed by most humans in charge of untangling public administrative requests. 

Administration is one of those tools, neutral in name and deadly in practice, that the capitalist state has historically wielded against minorities to exclude them from political and economic life. Immigrants, gay people, and—especially today—trans people are often trapped by the paperwork limbo operated by a state with vested interests in keeping certain people in extreme precariousness. Pointing to recent anti-trans legislation in the US, trans scholar Jules Gill-Peterson has argued that the state is trying to become cisgender: “The state has, at all levels from federal to local, attempted in different ways to exclude trans people not so much from citizenship as public life,” she writes. “If trans youth and adults lose access to public education, healthcare, restrooms, and legal recognition of their gender, there is essentially no way for them to participate in public life. They are not so much legally disenfranchised as in losing the right to vote or hold citizenship as they are expelled from the public sphere, exempt from care and support, as well as vulnerable to policing and violence.” 

Technically, when I moved to France, I wasn’t even an immigrant, I wasn’t even transitioning, and still the administrative work necessary to keep existing took a toll. There was a certain irony, I thought, in how I had been using logistics and practicality as an excuse to push back any thoughts about transition. I had worried that transitioning would make it more difficult for people to talk to me in this country, when the reality was that my very existence already seemed to be a glitch in the system, and that nobody was talking to me anyways. I would have to make myself known to the state, whether I wanted to or not.

In parallel, I could no longer deny or minimize the gap between my name and my self, the symbol and the referent. It was in my body, my words, everywhere. In this new country where so few people knew my name, I knew I would eventually have to respond to something, even if, back then, I would have rather refused any name at all.

Edouard Glissant of Martinique—philosopher and literary critic—once articulated that we should challenge the Western demand of “understanding” people, often framed in academic or journalistic contexts, and posed as a prerequisite for solidarity and compassion. While transparency and the search for knowledge are often presented as democratic, humanitarian projects, some of our differences are simply not knowable or definable to others. This shouldn’t mean we need to claim visibility as a political platform—our humanity shouldn’t need to be seen and understood in order to be respected. In Poetics of Relation, he named this “the right to opacity” and imagined a sharp ripost to his detractors: “As for my identity, I’ll take care of that myseIf.” 

The first time I read this, I imagined saying it myself to all the people, from bureaucrats and curious passers-by, who for whatever reason requested a play-by-play of my entire life trajectory in order to process me. It made me calm. I thought about my father, who loves durians. He’ll scoff disbelievingly at anyone who doesn’t, a bit of provocation. “What? What do you mean you don’t like durian?” It’s that performative sort of response to someone who doesn’t love something indisputably amazing. In his tone, I read a challenge: How can you claim to understand, when you’ve never known the first thing?

The durian’s reputation comes mostly from its smell. Everyone has a different way of describing it; to some, it’s like gasoline, to others like a rotting carcass. To me, the smell is of home. It’s a warm day with cups of room temperature tap water and hands curled slightly, resting over a plate, fingers golden from oil and good food. 

Durian has long been a delicacy and prized fruit in the region, because it is significantly more expensive than other fruit. In his essay collection Durians Are Not The Only Fruit, Wong Yoon Wah, who grew up in rural Malaysia, explains that families often prized durian trees for this reason, as they could be an important source of income. Today, an entire transnational industry has evolved around the fruit. Demand has grown particularly in China, which imported US$4 billion worth of fruit from Southeast Asian countries last year (four times the volume in 2017), leading to competition and intranational squabbles over “durian diplomacy.” Certain variants are more expensive and sought after than others. No longer limited to polystyrene boxes sold by the road, durian can now be found in products from soap to chocolates. Thus, the durian has evolved into a veritable touristic weapon of choice in the region. At the same time, its undeniable pungency and tenacious grip in different local folklores is part of what makes it so unpalatable to a Western audience.

What does it mean today to be the king of fruit? The durian’s smell is too powerful for it to be co-opted like the jackfruit; too beloved to be eradicated or sanitized away like so much of nature has been in Singapore; every few years it causes the foreign correspondent industrial complex to show its ass when a Hong Kong-based Daniel attempts to describe it, compares the smell to death itself, and ends up getting roundly shamed on the internet. The durian has an extensive bibliography: oral, written, spiritual, extending far beyond the archives of the New York Times’ travel section. Its power comes from its polarity: either mesmerizing or repugnant to its beholders, the durian is incompatible with moderation and half-measures. It remains illegible outside its context.

When I finally managed to get myself into the national medical coverage system, I began the process of finding a doctor who would be able to prescribe hormones. This activated a whole other process of box-ticking, which required me to go from white-coat to white-coat explaining why I wanted to do this. At first, when they asked me what I wanted to get out of the treatment, I found myself spouting phrases that felt true but came out as nonsensically earnest as middle-school poetry: “I want to grow a shell,” I said. “I want to feel more solid.” 

Eventually I learned to recite the words and phrases that would unlock access to the treatment I wanted: “more masculine,” “less pronounced hips,” “facial hair.” Some of this was true, but I didn’t know how to explain—especially in French—that I wasn’t particularly able, or keen, to envision a certain version of my body that I was trying to achieve, but that there was definitely something I wanted to move toward. I wasn’t used to thinking about my own body so much, certainly as a mechanism of self-defense. I also don’t think my earnestness in this department would have helped me get the prized prescription. 

At the same time, I kept thinking back to the durian—to how, no matter how much press and recipe development and glory and hate it receives, there is something about the fruit that people outside the region just don’t seem to understand. Durians became a defensive symbol for me then, an internal compass that I conjured to help keep my voice steady in medical appointments when I asked for what I wanted.

Durian takes us beyond the apples and oranges—the cisgenderism, the whiteness—toward the horizon of weirdness and extremity, to an unconditional solidarity with those whose existence is distant or different from our own. People from my home know: You don’t have to enjoy the taste of durian, or even understand why anyone else does. But it exists, and you certainly have to respect it.

In defending opacity, Glissant criticizes the Western demand for total transparency. He rejects that we should be explainable, and that this explainability should be linked to an essential, authentic, truth. I have been on hormone replacement therapy for over a year and when people ask me why, the answer I give often leaves them dissatisfied or confused, just like when they ask me where I am from.

So often, the quest for authenticity turns into a hunt for purity, a hunt for immobility, for some truth about a culture that has somehow remained fixed in the chaos of history. Based on this metric, I feel like my identity is instantly fraudulent in almost any context, given how many of them I have moved through in my life. I am French, but I am not. I am home, but I am not. I am a man, but I am not. Sometimes this minutiae feels unfair: everything in this world is complicated if you ask questions. So many symbols we take as regional fixtures have complex origins. Why should their legitimacy need to be free from the movements of history and its humans?

Take rubber, for example, one of the primary exports from British-era Malaya in the early 20^th century. Today, rubber plantations remain a local symbol in social and economic history. They are an iconic part of the landscape in Malaysia, lining highways and encasing past stories of migrants, coming mostly as low-paid laborers from colonial India to tap the smooth, grey-brown barks.

But those trees aren’t native to the area: In 1876, a British plant collector smuggled rubber seeds out of Brazil (which had, until then, enjoyed a prosperous monopoly on rubber production) and sent them to Britain’s Kew Gardens. 1,900 germinated seeds were sent to the Peradeniya Gardens on Ceylon, which then sent twenty-two specimens to Singapore, where the first rubber plantation was developed in the Botanic Gardens. By 1920, Malaya (which then included Singapore) was producing half the world’s rubber. Wong Yoon Wah, the author of Durians Are Not The Only Fruit, grew up on a rubber plantation in Perak, Malaysia, which is also where he first encountered durians. In Wong’s essays, the sprawling diversity of plants, their legends and their origins all commingle, making for a collection that departs from clean, traditional botany and offers, instead, a portrait of life in rural mid-century Malaysia that brims with contradictions and unsolved mysteries.

I want to be truthful, which sometimes involves being complicated. But sometimes, I don’t want to explain. I don’t want my footnote to be longer than my main text. Sometimes, the explanations I could give only seem to hinder the truth more than anything.

Eventually, I started taking hormones. As I made the appointments and filled out the forms, I began to find the right cadence in my speech to ask questions, confirm dates, correct mistakes. The “honorific” box on the paper, the Madame I ticked, grew smaller as my world grew larger; I left my apartment more often. I met people, spoke to them, exchanged numbers. Ironically, once I was comfortably entered into the state’s system, I no longer felt so trapped by it.

Many trans people I know don’t trust the state. But depending on it, in many instances, is not really a matter of choice in our current capitalist system: you can’t choose to divorce yourself from the institutions that directly or indirectly provide you with the funds and care necessary to live.

Gill-Peterson, who argues that the state is trying to become cisgender, posits that this is a recent narrative choice made to legitimize the states’ domination of social life. She compares this to the transformations that, in the 1940s–60s, made the US straight: “Rather than the state merely encountering gay and lesbians and then folding them into its political life (the liberal, progress narrative forwarded in mainstream LGBT activism), the state proclaimed itself straight in order to found its practices of administration and political domination on the exclusion and dispossession of homosexuality as uncivil.”

It’s not just the US. It’s not just France. I know I can’t be too sloppy with my metaphor and my angst against the West: Durians are banned in most public transit in Singapore. As I wrote this, politicians in Singapore were arguing about the constitutional definition of marriage. They, leaders of a state dependent on an extreme neoliberal free market, have been speaking for years now about the import of “cancel culture” and “Western values,” because apparently queerness is intrinsically related to those things. 

In response to these attacks, one reaction is to cling on to historical truth, to show that state-sanctioned homophobia is in fact a colonial export: 377A, the code outlawing gay sex in Singapore and many other countries formerly under British rule, was instated under colonial rule. Gender remains a colonial construct, and many pre-colonial cultures, including the Indigenous Bugis people in Southeast Asia, have a recorded history of a wide diversity of genders. 

But while these histories are precious, they remain understudied, and their contexts quite culturally specific in a region that is replete with differences and exchanges over time. More importantly, they should not mean that our present, breathing lives mean anything more or less. If we didn’t have an explanation, we would still be here. If we didn’t have a past, we would still be here. Shouldn’t that count for something?

I know I may have to go back to some institutions and ask, again, for new corrections to be issued. For now, I’m able and content to live my life outside of forms. My body is changing like a new season. Maybe it is this, or maybe it is this burgeoning idea of the durian, like a charm or newfound spirituality, that has made it easier to know how to walk. You’re not a freak, I tell myself now in public spaces, listening to Prince and moving my hips and shoulders both. You’re just holding a durian. Logically, it is incumbent on the durian to be disliked, if what Westerners dislike is good food. That’s just what it is. A durian doesn’t come timidly through the door. A durian doesn’t feel shame. A durian is just a durian. Why get so mad about a fruit?

“The apple does not fall far from the tree,” is a saying in countries where many trees are limited by the feeble power of their temperate context to produce anything more interesting than apples. I prefer to think instead of rubber seeds, which can lie dormant for years after they have fallen, until one day in the future, they explode, with a sharp, riotous noise.

This essay, by M Jesuthasan, is the sixth in Electric Literature’s new series, Both/And, centering the voices of transgender and gender nonconforming writers of color. These essays publish every Thursday all the way through June for Pride Month. To learn more about the series and to read previous installments, click here.

—Denne Michele Norris

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