“It’s fine for you to try that on as long as you don’t buy it.” A saleswoman had crept up behind me. She was Black, with graying hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she wore stockings, and the sensible, kitten-heeled shoes of a woman who never missed her Sunday church service. I didn’t know her, and yet I knew her very well.

“I’m sorry?”

“You wouldn’t actually buy that. You’re not a girl; it’s not for you.”

She had clocked me.

“No, ma’am, I guess not.”

I placed the arm band into her outstretched hand and rushed from the store, my eyes lowered to the ground as I frantically texted my friends to meet me elsewhere. I was angry and embarrassed, but mostly I felt exposed. I’d been standing by myself in a store meant for teenage girls in a suburban mall in middle America. I typically felt invisible, but with one glance, one comment, this woman let me know that she could see me for what I was—and what I wasn’t. 

A year later, a friend and I visited a different mall, a fancier mall, one that didn’t even have a Claire’s. We walked around, he and I, deep in conversation about sexual identity and stereotypes, when he asked me quite calmly, if I had ever considered the idea that I might actually be a girl—one who’d simply been born into the wrong body.

I considered his question. His tone was gentle, but his query was sharp, pointed, and it lodged itself inside of me. I was aware of their existence—because of the T in the acronym LGBT, and because I’d seen episodes of The Nanny and Will and Grace—but trans people had always been, to me, more theoretical than real. 

Being “trans” seemed an unthinkable way to move through the world. I was already Black, and gay, and the son of a well-known Baptist minister. I was a high-school senior who had somehow managed to survive at a deeply conservative all boys prep school. Soon I would be a freshman at a progressive liberal arts college outside Philadelphia. I had worked hard in school, convinced that leaving Cleveland and never looking back was the only answer if I wanted to live my best Black queer life. This college—a campus where The Princeton Review said it was easier to come out as queer than as a Republican—was my reward. I wanted to step into the freedom of the real world, and distance myself from the context in which I was raised. I was not looking for further marginalization.

I told my friend that I was not transgender, but his question punctured me like a bullet that wouldn’t, or couldn’t, be removed.

I first had the idea for an essay series centering trans and gender non-conforming writers of color in the fall of 2021. I had recently been named the Editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, a groundbreaking digital literary magazine with an annual readership of more than 3 million. A few months earlier, I’d publicly disclosed my identity as a trans woman, something I’d been preparing to do for two years in response to a question I’d been asking myself for sixteen. When I was named to this new role, I was widely celebrated as the first Black, openly transgender woman to helm a major literary publication. 

Around this time, the comedian Dave Chappelle released a new Netflix special, The Closer, in which he pitted the Black community and the LGBTQ community against each other, arguing that queer white people are better off in contemporary American society than Black people and often participate in the racist marginalization of Black people. The role played by different marginalized groups in each other’s oppression deserves a richly considered and nuanced conversation, but instead, Chappelle completely erased the existence of those who live at the intersection of Black and queer identities.

Around this same time, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie published an essay which doubled down on an evasive response she gave when asked whether or not a trans woman is a woman: “…My feeling is that trans women are trans women.” This puzzled me. As a woman who claims to be in alliance with the LGBTQ+ community, her choice to write the essay felt like an intentional anti-trans dog whistle to her global army of supporters, many of whom are self-identified terfs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). 

But Chappelle infuriated me. The popularity of his special, and the conversation it ignited, remained a major talking point in news media for weeks. Netflix defended the special, resulting in a walkout by their trans employees. Over weeks of social media and news media discourse, what I noticed was this: for all the dialogue surrounding trans identity, the loudest voices in this conversation were never trans people, and in particular, never trans people of color. We were the existential center of a cultural boiling point—and our voices were almost nowhere to be found.   

From my fury was born Both/And, a series of fifteen essays published online by Electric Literature, with the goal of elevating emerging trans and gender nonconforming writers of color to a national literary platform. But there was one key distinction—these writers would have the unique opportunity to be edited by a trans writer of color. Electric Literature quickly fundraised to support the series, meeting and then exceeding our goal in just one week, proving that writers and readers alike were hungry for these essays. The popularity of the series, which was published on electricliterature.com in 2023, as well as the ever-growing far-right political targeting of the LGBTQ+ community, further proves how necessary these essays are. 

A few nights ago, Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, during which Republicans spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans ads. As I watched the results, my heart fell from my chest. I knew what was coming, and predictably, less than twelve hours later, I tuned into morning shows where I saw political pundits—from both parties—blaming the trans community for the election results. Early analysis saw folks saying that the Democratic party was out of touch with the majority of American voters, that it was too woke, that American families didn’t want grown men playing sports against little girls. The absurdity of that statement aside, I kept thinking to myself, But I’m an American voter, too. 

What followed was a profound sense of displacement, politically speaking. While my values are progressive, I have always been a voter motivated by pragmatism and harm reduction. I was raised in a Black, middle class family of churchgoers by parents born between the silent and the baby boomer generations. I was raised to vote in every election. And I was raised to vote without attaching a grave sense of preciousness to that vote. It wasn’t necessary to agree with everything my chosen political candidate said, in part because voting wasn’t supposed to be the sum of my political engagement. It was a chess move, a means to an end, and it was the bare minimum. More simply put, I have always been a registered voter, and I have always voted for the Democratic ticket. Given my values, this means I have also, always, held a deep sense of frustration at the party’s continued pursuit of moderate white voters. 

Being Black, and being queer, I have always worried that when it comes to policy, measures that affirmed and protected my existence would end up on the chopping block. And very often, that’s exactly what happened. But in recent years, public opinion has shifted. Marriage equality, for instance, has been legal for nearly a decade, and folks have largely realized that their heterosexual marriages were never in danger. Perhaps it was the optimism of youth, or the stability of democracy, but I never looked into the future fearing what it held for me, or my community. When faced with the possibility of a rebooted Trump administration, I felt strongly that Kamala Harris needed to win if I was to maintain any sense of safety.

Whenever progress is made, there’s corresponding backlash. Right now we live in a time of unprecedented targeting against the LGBTQ+ community, and yet we stand on the precipice of an even darker era. Being a writer, I turn to literature in times of darkness—the writing of it, and more importantly, the reading of it. In the face of a political class that, at best, hesitates to stand beside us, and at worst works to bring about our ruin, I introduce you to the brilliant writers in this anthology, all of whom live at the fraught intersection of race and gender identity.

Each of these essays is a wonder, something taken from the heart of its writer and flung, with delicious abandon, into this world. Each essay leaves an imprint, promising to reverberate inside the reader. There is Akwaeke Emezi, who meditates on what it means to be beautiful across gender, and Tanaïs, who writes about the fantasy of making feverish love to another femme, to  mark the occasion of a landmark birthday. Meredith Talusan remembers a casual hookup that awakened the woman within, and Gabrielle Bellot travels to Hawaii with her wife, where the eruption of a volcano inspires her inner goddess. These are just a handful of the essays that turn their gaze inward, and backward, straddling—and sometimes weaving—what it means to be man or woman, masc or femme. 

There are also essays that turn their gaze fearlessly forward, conjuring the sort of tender, loving future we so rarely get to live. Zeyn Joukhadar considers what it means to be part of a future their ancestors never lived to see. Kaia Ball dreams about their estranged father coming out as trans, and finding a way to accept them. Jonah Wu brings the reader along as he jumps from the proverbial cliff into the world of hormone replacement therapy, embracing a more masculine future. And A.L. Major considers the cost of creating the life, and family, of their choosing. 

Historically, trans people have been forced to imagine, or conjure, representation of ourselves into existing narratives that never sought to include us, often using the stories and fictional lives of canonically cishet characters as foundations for possible trans stories. Both/And is unabashed in its portrayal of the fullness of our lives. These essays consider imagination and fantasy as real-world liberation, the heightened visibility and invisibility of trans bodies, trans joy, laughter and love, and trans rage, revenge, and loss. 

At Electric Literature, we believe that literature has the power to shape public consciousness. Storytelling breaks down barriers in numerous ways; perhaps the most powerful being the building of empathy. My community is under vicious attack on every level, but we refuse to disappear, and I refuse to allow our stories, and our lives, to be erased. The time is now for trans and gender nonconforming writers of color to amplify our own voices on our own terms. While the culture is obsessed with us, that obsession has been weaponized in an effort to legislate us out of existence. But it simply won’t work because we’re already here. We’ve been here, telling our stories in our own words, our voices rising to the rafters, ringing so loud that we’re impossible to ignore. 

The post The Cultural and Political Obsession With Trans People Is Harming My Community 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.

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

The post I Am a Man, but I Am Not appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Ori is coming from Heaven to Earth

If my head is behind me,

I will be successful in this world.”

-Ogunda Meji

1

Before you were born, your spirit lived at home with us. We were close—a bond that could never break. Played patty cakes and breathed in stardust. Traveled on comets and surrendered to freedom. Unfortunately, you had to go to that big house to receive your placement on Earth. We never knew why an individual was chosen, where they were going, or when they would return, but we trusted that it was your time. Every piece built up to your big moment. After you did the necessary readings and rituals, we had a big party to celebrate your new flesh. On the day of your departure, the Lord of Heaven assigned you the Orisa, who would walk with and support you. You would not remember their name, but you would remember the sensation of their love. Ifá blessed your destiny as you were cut open from your mother’s womb and thrust into the light.

Life is really about those isolated moments that explode. Big as microelements that created the universe. Small, like when you’re dreaming, lost in your subconscious, and you have a life-changing epiphany. One night three years ago, I woke up from a dream, my heart racing. Before I opened my eyes, my subconscious shouted, I want to be on estrogen! 

I was sleeping in my nephews’ room at my sister’s condo. To my left, her boys together were sleeping in the adjacent bed, wrapped around their plushies and blankets—quiet enough that I heard their gentle snoring and the ceiling fan, but it couldn’t stop the heat trapped in my body.

Before that estrogen dream, I had no urge to transition physically and was comfortable not using gender-affirming treatment. My male-presenting performance was familiar; embodying femininity was dangerous. I’ll look stupid in a dress, my legs are too hairy for that, my skin’s terrible; I’ll never look like a woman. My internalized transphobia was steadfast like a fortress, and I masked it, claiming I didn’t care how I presented. It turns out my fortress was made of sand; before I realized it, rushing water surrounded me and pulled me into the current. Naked, I saw my body for who she wanted to be.

It’s true that I didn’t know I wanted to be a trans woman until that dream, but it’s also true that she was always inside of me. 

The reality for my Black trans sisters is fucked up and will continue to be so. The consistent violence leaves too many wounds. Not all of us can remain resilient and brush off the critics. Sometimes the critiques puncture our strengths. I feared the potential bruises from visibly transitioning: family members looking at me with confusion or disgust, the shame they would express, and the loneliness of standing in my truth. It takes so much to live freely. On a good day, I know how I need to take care of myself, but on the days when my depression, anxiety, and anger smother me? Shit. 

The ancestors created a tradition that helped them feel connected to God; their descendants adapted it and brought in new elements, especially to live through the atrocities of enslavement. We can access those same tools to thrive. One is Isese (Ee-shay-shay), the Yoruba tradition, philosophy, religion, and way of being that God sent various Orisa to help us. I’ve experienced immense healing as a devotee during my gender transition. My spiritual work has transformed my emotional well-being, allowing me to take a leap of faith. 

It’s true that I recently became an Orisa devotee, but it’s also true to say that the Orisa was always inside me. 

In the spring of 2020, I developed a long-distance relationship with my partner, Johnny, who lived over 700 miles away in Atlanta. We met on Instagram when he saw me on a mutual friend’s story. We joked that if it wasn’t for the quarantine, we wouldn’t have given each other the time. The spark that ignited our love was my comment on the colorful beads he wore in one of their photos. Johnny later revealed himself to be an Orisa practitioner. I had questions.

I came into the tradition because I love hearing stories about Black deities. My family didn’t tell me the fables of our Dominican heritage. More concerned with making and saving money, my elders wanted me to be the best student possible and very macho—the markers of masculine success. Our folklore began with our uprooting, moving to the US, hoping to escape Island poverty. They sacrificed their home so that, God willing, I would build a prosperous one here. I relied on my Catholic upbringing to teach me about good and evil. I knew I was queer when the priest denounced queerness as a sin, and I felt doomed. I flogged myself with shame to discipline my desires. But my flesh couldn’t contain what bubbled underneath; punishing myself did not bring me closer to God. I left the church when I went to college and wandered into New Age spirituality, studying astrology, Tarot cards, and chakras. 

Those New Age practices grounded me, but listening to Johnny waxing poetics about Orisa brought me deep-rooted joy. Above all, he emphasized that Isese stood on Iwa Pele, the ethics of developing a gentle character, and connecting to your bespoke destiny. I felt aligned—like drinking water after being thirsty for so long—and my spirit felt compelled to learn more. Talking about our spiritual beliefs opened our hearts to feel safe with each other. Our daily acts of care brought us closer together: facetiming late at night, sending affirmations, and processing our past relationships—the good, the bad, and the ugly. We made it work because we chose to love. I am grateful Johnny supported me during a rocky post-grad transition. I fought for my life to live out my authentic self.

I share my journey to encourage my sisters to include African-based traditions in their healing practices. The three years since practicing Isese, I’ve moved to the South, landed my first job, and started transitioning, including gender-affirming hormone therapy! Let me be clear: I am not advocating we stop visiting our mental and physical professionals. But why can’t we get consultations from a (credible and trustworthy) Orisa priest? It can help us mend our weary souls and balance our health, mind, and soul.

2 

The summer of 2020. I had just graduated from Williams College but was surviving off unemployment. I lived between my sister’s in Newburgh and my mother’s apartment in West Harlem. While applying for jobs, I wrote, read, babysat my nephews, and practiced my divination skills with my Tarot cards. I preferred my sister’s because I loved the quiet of Newburgh, where I heard my intuition. I regularly walked to the waterfront and talked with the Hudson River. She listened as I cried about feeling lost, wanting to fly outside my flesh. Seeing the river traveling between the Hudson Valley, I wondered when I would flow to a new destination.

That estrogen dream proved I still had some growing to do, but I didn’t feel safe doing it in New York. The city held too much of my past. My mother’s eyes struck me, and her words wounded me. She prayed for my salvation, believing I hung out with “demons.” In a way, she saw the darkness around me.

When the pandemic began, I asked myself a few question: How much more time do I have left? Am I wasting the little time I have? On top of that, my critical self-talk convinced me I was not enough and paralyzed me from taking action. Estrogen will make me crazier and more emotional—why do I want to take it when I’m already a mess? 

The obvious choice, for my peace, was to stay with my sister. But she didn’t have much space for me. Sharing a room with the boys had adorable moments, but I sacrificed my privacy. I remember doing yoga in the room; the boys took it as an invitation to jump on me. They were joyful, but I was irritable. Another time, I tried to put an ancestor shrine in the kids’ room—just a white sheet, a glass of water, and a white candle—but my sister wanted me to take it down. She was worried for the boys’ safety. She asserted that they could break the glass and hurt themselves, but under her statement, I knew she was uncomfortable. We compromised that I would put it inside a dusty cabinet in the living room. Only when everyone was asleep could I pray in front of the shrine. 

That fall, I visited Johnny in Atlanta. By then, we had been dating for five months, and I’d taken two trips to Atlanta. They took me to a local Ile to get my first Orisa reading. My future godmother said: be ready for a change, be kind to women, and be careful with whom I share my light and, to observe these messages, pray to my Ori, my spiritual essence from Heaven. 

I talked with Johnny about my frustrations at home, and they offered refuge at their place until I figured my shit out. Leave New York, my homeland? With no job and living off the money from my unemployment benefits? To live with a person who had known for less than a year? The decision weighed on me until I imagined what I might gain. A place to wear whatever I want, go wherever I want, eat whatever I want. I would miss my family, but a new life in a new city was exciting. I decided to take that leap of faith.

Johnny and I drove to New York (it was their idea) to pick up my things, planning to spend Christmas with my family. The plan was working great—my sister supported my decision and felt comfortable with Johnny, the boys loved him (I was jealous when they gave him more attention than me), we cooked dinner for them, and when we needed a break, we took drives to the waterfront and prayed to the river—until it was almost Christmas time. My mom had never come to Newburgh, and she didn’t want to meet Johnny; her choice reeked of prejudice. I never told her my moving-out plans, knowing she would disapprove, so instead, I said that my “friend” and I were staying for Christmas and then going to Atlanta for New Year’s. Still, she disapproved of me not celebrating the new year with the family.

We were supposed to celebrate Christmas at my mom’s, but when my sister told me at the last minute that Johnny wasn’t welcome, it was a blow to the chest. When will Mami accept us? Accept me? But I felt obligated to greet her. Johnny somberly understood and offered to stay in the car. Assuming it would be a quick hi-and-bye, I left them in their car and promised to bring a plate of food.

I entered a chaotic scene: my sister cleaning the whole apartment, removing the plates from cupboards to wipe the shelves, clearing out cabinets filled with old memories and broken electronics we no longer used (but never threw away), mopping the floors, the kids were screeching over their new gifts. I assumed my sister’s cleaning was a distraction because our mom was stressing her out—maybe about Johnny and me. She urged me to stay and help clean. I was pissed. It wasn’t right to leave Johnny alone, but I obliged, thinking the faster I did this, the quicker I could go.

My mom lay on the couch talking with my tía Gladys. She gave me the phone to say Merry Christmas to her. My tía had been sick for the last year, in and out of the hospital for a kidney infection. She asked me, “You remember my promise?” 

“Yes, tía,” I said, remembering when I told her I wanted to be a writer, she made me vow that I would write her memoir, an honor I didn’t appreciate at the moment. She was the first person in my family who supported my writing. I told her I loved her and returned the phone to my mom; that would be the last time I talked with my tía.  

Two hours later, I returned to the car with a cold plate of food. Johnny looked broken, upset to spend Christmas in cold isolation. They started the car and drove away. I wished I could’ve cried, but instead, I shut down.

3

Johnny and their Morehouse brethren lived in an apartment complex in Marietta, a 35-minute drive from Atlanta. I was not used to living around forests and disgustedly-excessive mansions. The state hung onto its chattel slavery legacy: a residentíal community named Plantations Place, another apartment complex called Power Ferry Plantation, and more. The buildings near us housed many South Asian families; the kids would frolic in the parking lot every day after school, to the drivers’ frustration, and their parents flocked up and down in small groups. Black families lived in tiny clusters, like the middle-aged gay couple who put up colorful holiday decorations. 

Freed from engaging with my family, I focused on self-care: journaling, meditating, divining, doing yoga, working out with Johnny at a nearby gym, and praying in front of their Orisa shrine. I went to thrift stores and brought dresses for the first time; I started using she/they pronouns. Johnny and I built an ancestral shrine proudly displayed in our room. I hoped that committing to small daily acts would lead to peace.

The chaos inside you is louder in a place of stillness. My critical voice believed I was an imposter: I made a mistake leaving New York. I ain’t doing shit here. I don’t belong here. I’m using Johnny to run away from my problems. Can I be feminine? Can estrogen change my body? I don’t have the income or insurance to cover the costs; put myself in debt for what?  I saw myself naked in the mirror and saw my beard, broad shoulders, and tall body and was disappointed. 

Johnny and I had bad fights based on small misunderstandings, but we projected old anger and insecurities into the argument. I voiced the doubt I was feeling inside, and that triggered Johnny. “Do you want to go back to New York?” Johnny asked me one night; in his tender eyes, I saw panic. 

I assured them I did not: “This is my home.” 

I prayed to my Ori, as my godmother instructed me.  I expressed gratitude for waking up another day. Invisible hands caressed me, letting me know I was not alone. I changed how I spoke to myself, shifting my perspective from “I” to “We/You.” I dug deep into the shadows of my soul to find affirmation. In my journal, I wrote: You’re writing this as a reparation for your inner child. She deserves a space to feel and be, and that’s beautiful. We are proud and love you so much.  

The biggest charm of Marietta was its nature trails. The Chattahoochee River (coyly called ChattaCoochie) snakes through the land, and my enclave was near many of her streams. One day, walking through the forest, I needed to clear my head. After doing my self-care routines, I felt so small and in the dark. I ain’t worth shit; people younger than me are living my dream and making hella money and I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere. That’s when I came upon the Chattahoochee’s main tributary, Sope Creek. Hearing the water rushing over stones spurred me to sob. I kneeled on the sandy bank and prayed for the water to hold the emotions I couldn’t anymore. I cried like never before, and I surrendered. 

You will be ok—we’re here, the water confirmed.

When the weather warmed, I regularly hiked to find peace. I sat on top of rocks that resembled prehistoric eggs and journaled to God. During times of uncertainty—like when I received rejections from jobs, literary magazines, and creative fellowships—I sat by the creek to remind myself that I am a storyteller. I witnessed my soul’s sensations as I listened to the water, teaching me how to mother myself. To show gratitude, I gave her offerings of fruits, honey, and songs of praise. 

Johnny suggested I communicate with my mom, reminding me that a tenet in Isese was honoring your mother. My sister and I talked on and off but rarely mentioned our mom. “You know how she is,” she persisted, not wanting to get in the middle of our feud. I don’t wanna hear her talk shit. But she’s your mother–don’t let her anger stop us from giving her love. 

Begrudgingly, I called her. She picked me up while working in her taxi; I said, “Hi, Ma,” and she replied, “I am? I didn’t know I had a son.” She never asked about Johnny; when she did, she ranted about how I took advantage of their generosity. She asked when I would return to the City; I gave vague responses. I stopped the conversation before we both got heated and tried the next week again.

What brought us together was God. “God is with me,” I reasoned after she said that I was going against God’s wishes. She and I had different definitions of God—my God is queer, and hers is conservative—but our God was compassionate. One Sunday morning, she talked about her favorite Bible passage, “Before you leave to go anywhere, say Pslams 91.” She credits that verse for protecting her in her 20-plus years of taxi driving. I read the first lines: “…I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’” 

“Aha—that’s it, son,” she laughed. From there, reaching out to her on Sundays morphed into our ritual. She would ask me if I went to church, and, knowing that I attended an Orisa service, I said yes. Is it worth improving my relationship with my mom if she always sees me as her son? Have faith that the work you’re putting in will heal.  

Later that April, I serendipitously got a remote job at an NYC-based non-profit. The Executive Director, who remembered when I was a student of the program, offered me a remote position to assist in writing communications and grants. I had a salary and health insurance; I could afford gender-affirming hormone therapy and take the essential steps to be myself!

But the blessing of the new opportunity tormented me. At night, it was difficult to go to sleep. I couldn’t stop thinking about the rookie mistakes I made during the day. I misspelled a student’s name in a press release and, devastated, earnestly wanted to kill myself. Remember, you’re still new and have a lot to learn. It’s ok to make mistakes. But damn, why am I fucking up so much! 

In the morning, I woke up irritable. I gotta work, so I can have a place to live, shit to eat, and not be an absolute failure. I can’t do the shit I want. Praying to my Ori momentarily centered me until I fell into despair again. On the weekends, I recharged as much as possible, rarely communicating with my friends; two days were never enough. More cracks appeared, and I was overwhelmed with simply caring for myself. Improve my health, maintain a job, plan for my future, grieve the violence we endure, and more. Had done my self-care routine, done the readings and rituals. Ended the feud with my mom. Got a damn job and health insurance. What else can I do? 

Later that week, I returned to the Ile to get another reading to clarify what I needed to do. I was prepared for the reading to reveal a hidden enemy preventing me from succeeding. I was surprised when Orisa said they wanted me to take it easy. My godmother advised me to focus on rest and joy because I lacked them most. They were right; I wasn’t sleeping well and shunned myself from the world to manage my imposter syndrome and perfectionism. Immediately, I thought, Am I taking my life too seriously?

4 

The autumn leaves changing color reminded me to be mindful of how my life changed. Johnny and I moved from Marietta; our new apartment building bordered Bankhead and Buckhead, with gentrification demolishing the landscape. No more strolls to the creek. In its stead, Marietta Boulevard sprawled for miles, new constructions on either side. Black and Brown men in hard hats hammered away while their white bosses lollygagged to the side. There was a small creek nearby, but it smelled like sewage. Detached from nature, my roots needed more nourishment to survive.

Johnny recommended that I see a therapist. We had just had another fight, and Johnny pointed out the repetition of my patterns that had fueled the fire: not communicating my emotions, shutting down, and becoming passive-aggressive. I finally understood I might be a part of the problem. I started the arduous process of finding a new therapist and reviewed dozens of websites and reviews.

I found an available therapist who did virtual sessions. In our session, I cried, “The pressure to succeed is killing me.” On the screen, the room’s darkness engulfed me; a small light shined through the shades. She was adamant that I take a medical leave from work to start antidepressants: “Your serotonin levels are imbalanced, and the best way to address it is to begin an SSRI treatment.” Take pills? I don’t need to be medicated. That’ll fuck with my head. Then: What else have you got to lose? Do you want to continue feeling shitty? I took her advice, took off from work, and scheduled an appointment with a psychiatric nurse practitioner. The nurse diagnosed me with PTSD and put me on Prozac and Quetiapine. I was worried about the stigma of taking them, but my therapist advised me not to attach too much to the label and instead focus on healing. No more shame, no more shame, no more shame, I said as I ingested the pills. 

The medication helped immensely. My mood swings lessened, and the critical thoughts didn’t feel so powerful. I could see myself clearer now that the dark clouds were gone. You see, don’t you feel better? Things were looking up; my concentration during work improved, the foundation between Johnny and me strengthened, and I planned to visit my mom and tía Gladys during the Holidays (I would go alone to avoid what happened last Christmas). 

Johnny and I were heading to a gathering with their friends when my sister called me. I heard my mom wailing in the background. My sister managed to say that tía Gladys had passed away. The night she transitioned, she told the family around her to ensure I kept my promise. We later learned that a bullet from a past shooting—a jealous lover—caused her illness. 

Before leaving, I told my therapist that I feared going to New York while transitioning. She said, “You are going to say goodbye to your aunt. Prioritize caring for yourself and avoid anyone shaming you for who you are.” To say goodbye, I decided to write my tía a letter to express what I wished I said.

I arrived at my mom’s apartment, but she wasn’t there. Knowing she couldn’t handle seeing the sibling she saw as another daughter in a casket, she stayed with the kids upstate. My sister was drunk and watching television on the couch at my mom’s. We talked briefly about nothing; the elephants in the room couldn’t be named. She wants to be alone, and you need rest for tomorrow. I headed to bed early and spent the rest of the night writing the letter and praying for peace.

For the wake, I wore an outfit I bought from the women’s section and put on my heeled boots. My sister also put a lot of time into her look, even dying her hair this gorgeous brown color. We both agreed to look our best for our tía, who always complimented us on how good we looked at family functions.

A quiet trip except for the sound of our heels, my sister and I entered the funeral home and greeted people separately. Ok, we’re on our own, but we’ll be fine. I didn’t recognize most of the people there. Male cousins I hadn’t seen in years tried to dap me up, but I went in for a hug instead. Some relatives complimented my looks and were glad to see me. But I dissociated to withstand heaviness; I couldn’t share my emotions, so I hid them. Wanting to give her the letter, I asked my sister to go with me and support me, but she wouldn’t go. She had fear in her eyes. A very sweet cousin offered to be by my side. I kneeled on the rail and took in what I saw: puffy, yellow skin, eyes closed, deep red lipstick, and arms crossed. It was my tía for sure, but her spiritual essence was gone. I placed the letter by her hands. Head down, I forgot where I was for a moment until my cousin helped me to stand. The rest of the service moved on, but I wasn’t there. My sister and I took the train back to Harlem with nothing to say to each other. The next day, we went to the burial and watched the casket be lowered. I held my sister’s shoulder as we walked to the gaping hole and threw our roses.

Afterward, she drove us to Newburgh, where my mom lay on the couch in her pajamas,  watching television; she hadn’t showered in days. I kissed her on the cheek. She looked at me: “Hi, son.”  For the first time in a long time, I saw myself in her. I got on the couch with her and watched television while she and my sister gossiped about who was and wasn’t at the burial. 

The rest of the time in New York, I processed all that had happened. I returned to the Hudson waterfront and meditated on the misery and traumas my family had endured: extreme poverty, racism, domestic violence, unjustified arrests, alcoholism, exploitative and oppressive governments, etc. We had managed to survive, but to thrive? We carried too many wounds.  

I tried to envision how tía Gladys survived the worst moment of her life. If the bullet had been an inch closer, she could have died. After the shooting, she became paraplegic and had to change everything she had known. I imagined she wanted to give up, but she continued to conjure joy. She was always there for me, even when I wasn’t aware of it. When my mom talked bullshit about me moving to Atlanta, my tía defended my need for space, I would later learn. The love she showed me grew into the love I later gave myself. I wish I could’ve told her about my transition; she would have supported me.

My tía transitioned into Heaven, where she was embraced and welcomed home, while I got back on a plane to Atlanta. Looking out of the window at the pearly-white clouds, I felt stable. You’re transitioning into the person you’re meant to be. 

A year later, I was naked on the table as the wax specialist ripped off my old hair and dead cells. I realized it was time to start hormones, to have a new beginning. My faith showed me that I could stand in my truth. I researched and talked around to find the best way to start. Thanks to the people at FOLX Health, I spoke with a knowledgeable clinician and received my estrogen and testosterone blockers within two weeks. 

It is wild to think of how my body will change, but I know I am not alone. I have my ancestors, the cleansing water,  the community of my chosen family who has my back, my John, my Ori, and more. We are here with you, don’t forget us.

We will lead you home

Before you arrive, we will sing your name

When you come home, we embrace you

Before you left Earth

We knew where you would go

This essay, by Leo D. Martinez, is the fifth 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 I Found Black Trans Liberation in the Faith of My Ancestors appeared first on Electric Literature.

—Denne Michele Norris, Editor-in-Chief

If you dive across the rocky shores of the Korean Peninsula, you may find a shy, hump-headed fish staring back at you. The Kobudai, also known as the Asian Sheepshead Wrasse, is a thick, large-jawed fish that can shift gender based upon its needs and, hopefully, how it feels on a given day. The average Kobudai will live as an estrogen-based fish during its early years but transition to a testosterone-based body once it is older and larger. Not all of these fish transition, but they all have access to free hormones if they want to, without any concern for health insurance, because they are fish. As I plan for my own second puberty, videos of divers with Kobudai comfort me.

Perhaps the most well-known Kobudai video was published in June of 2017 by Great Big Story and documents the relationship between Hiroyuki Arakawa, a scuba diver, and Yoriko, an Asian Sheepshead Wrasse. It’s early morning and the waters of Tateyama, Japan are calm, a cool, deep blue. Each wave carries the taste of sea vegetation, of iron and salt. Arakawa and his team take a small motorboat out several miles from the shoreline, and when they stop, Arakawa, clad in his black diving suit, tastes the air on his tongue and jumps in.

I was born in 1996, which makes me of the Pokemon Emerald generation, and grew up abroad as a Chinese American adoptee in Tokyo and Singapore. These formative years were texturized by an unutterable but nonetheless embodied feeling of loss–of boyhood, of homeland, of language, of the texture and smell of my biological parents. Though I never had words for how I felt, was bereft of any notion that life outside of girlhood was possible, I felt truly as if I wanted to live a life outside gender. Whenever I was set free to roam outside, to sift through sand or comb through the tall grass for rare beetles, I felt embodied most fully in myself. Each of my actions brought joy and carried resonance beyond categorical life. It was only when the construct of gender was superimposed onto my being that I felt dysphoric. Like when I was eight, for example, and coming home in my cargo shorts full of BBs from the park near my house, I ran into a disheveled, professorly British man in a Barbour jacket outside of my apartment complex.   

“Say, kid. Do you know the password?” he asked. He adjusted his briefcase on his shoulder and cocked his head towards the electronic doorman where we punched in our lobby access codes. 

I told him I wasn’t supposed to give the code out.

“Good lad.” He punched in his door code and ruffled my squid-like bowl cut into a silly mess. I felt a rush of pleasure at the man’s assumption of my boyness, but also a wrongness, as if I’d gotten away with something not quite true. Still, for years, I remember coming back to this memory and holding it to my ear like a seashell, as if a portal within myself to a place of deeper resonance, one I could feel but never name.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year of high school that I obtained access to the language of transness, albeit in a time when the word was whispered dangerously around nooks and corridors, an unwelcome intrusion into the liberal, cishet mechanics of the all-girls boarding school I attended. For months, a white day student in my year had been embroiled in negotiations with school administration regarding his use of he/him pronouns and outspoken acceptance of his transness, a notion the school seemed to worry would destabilize the cishet tenets of gender they’d structured their business around. If this day student would simply use she/her pronouns and revoke his “claims of being trans” until graduation, the school would sweep the whole situation under the rug. How easy it was for them to ask him to delegitimize himself, to attempt to steal his language like some sort of deranged pronoun Ursula, as if that would change anything within us trans-students-in-hiding. As if there hadn’t been some refrain, even before I had language for it gaping through me all that time, some searing knowledge of difference, here, here.

It’s interesting to think about how directly the microcosm of my boarding school mirrors modern anti-trans discourse in the United States. Through abundant anti-trans legislature, especially regarding trans-affirming praxes in schools, sports, and, in the case of Greg Abbott, even within the home, the United States government believes that trans people will cease to exist if pushed out of public spaces, if they are refused live-giving medical care via gender-affirming surgeries and hormones. Simultaneously, through the creation of new anti-trans campaigns and media, these claims circulate a reductive, ideological chokehold on what transness is. Through the lens of empire, transness is only able to be seen as in opposition to cis identity–a deviation both dialectically tethered to, and defined by, its negative. It is therefore ideally constrained by dominant structures, absorbed into systems of domination rather than allowing an alternate way of being.

Arakawa and Yoriko are very good friends. You can tell because Yoriko swims right up to him and sometimes even requests a kiss on her lumpy head. Cute!!! She lives at a depth of 56 feet next to a red, underwater Tori gate built by human friends. Coral is abundant in her domain–purple Bubble Coral and orange Elkhorn–where she has lived and spent time with Arakawa for 30 years. Arakawa mentions that one day, a few years ago, he noticed Yoriko was moving slowly, lethargically, unable to catch her own food, and so he fed her five crabs every day for about 10 days. That’s 50 loving crab meals!!! He notes that now, after this act of tenderness and care, she’s feeling a lot better.

70 percent of our planet is covered by the ocean, which contains 97 percent of all the world’s water. One might think this could mean that the Kobudai has endless spots to scope out and enjoy, but as trash, chemicals, and global warming increasingly threaten our global marine environment, the Kobudai are left with fewer and fewer places to go. Rising ocean temperatures and rising acidification levels have caused mass coral bleaching and lower oxygen levels within the water for the ocean’s billions of creatures. Within the past few months, the Bering Sea’s shift from an arctic state to a sub-arctic state has caused a mass migration of billions of snow crabs towards colder waters. Additionally, shifts in PH levels can cause mass death for sea life, as well as toxic algae blooms that cut off large swaths of sea from the sun. Fish like the Kobudai rely on coral and crustaceans for food and shelter–once one of these elements is threatened, all of them are. While it is unknown if Kobudai populations are low enough to technically render them endangered, they are certainly at risk due to the impacts of climate change brought on by global capitalism, and I worry because there is still so much I think we can learn from these fish and their ocean friends: about gender, about symbiosis, about what it means to be a living thing.

Like other aspects of identity, transness is clearly influenced by its intersections. Even when talk of transness was omnipresent at my boarding school, transness was implicitly framed as a white identity group by community members. Examples of trans people were tall, lanky white trans guys who dominated Youtube and search engines. Though I’d always felt uncomfortable with my gender as a formerly unathletic femme Chinese American, I was genuinely convinced I couldn’t be trans. It reminds me of the time I didn’t think I could be both Asian and a lesbian until I watched Pretty Little Liars, which was revolutionary in the way it portrayed a romantic relationship between Emily Fields and Maya St. Germain, two femmes of color in different phases of outness. I still watch those Youtube compilations all the time! While silly when I think about it now, I also was unable to conceptualize myself as trans until I enrolled in undergraduate school and met other trans people of color for the first time. Oh, I thought. Well, duh. A few years later, though, after joking with my peers, I heard a few of them say, quietly, me neither. I didn’t know I could be both trans and a person of color too.

I am resistant to categorizing the experience of transness as “natural” or “unnatural” and using the Kobudai’s experience as evidence for either simply because I don’t think it’s a useful organizing principle, nor do I particularly care. Systemic notions of what is “natural” are constantly in flux and codified to the benefit of oppressors, police, and lawmakers–by this, I mean that “unnatural” is a weaponized blanket label given to those who the state is intent on controlling and/or erasing from public life. If my being is unnatural, so be it . I am too busy living each day as a person who is soooooo stylish and cute.

What I do find interesting about the Kobudai’s experience of transness is that the species’ experience as a testosterone-based fish is informed by its experience of girlhood. Kobudai will only transition once they’ve reached a certain size and use their larger bodies to protect younger Kobudai. Girlhood, care, and transition are inherent parts of their identity, and learning this tickled me in a butch way. Knowing this has texturized my own memories of my girlhood with feelings of bravery, and purpose–mended the gaping hole of longing within me for a stolen boyhood. This has been a big theme in my life: finding wholeness through reimaging loss. Now, I imagine my two selves—older and younger—meeting knee-deep in a muddy creek, my older self a refracted mirror. I give thanks. Our memory smells like springtime. We orbit each other like a frog and tadpole, like changing seasons, like ghosts.

The other day, I was scrolling through my friends’ Instagram stories–because I self-ID as wizened and don’t use Tiktok–to find that Iowa had enacted a transgender bathroom ban and a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Though I feel like this is the product of long-time lobbying, I still feel gutted about the anti-trans laws sweeping our country, the unprecedented escalation to codify “unnatural others” through legislative attacks on bodily autonomy. I think of friends who I’ve lost due to systemic violence, friends who should have been allowed to thrive. “We take care of us” has been a trans resistance slogan for a long time, and this was the message my Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Writing class passed around to each other that day. I dwell on these two words often, what it means to feed a sick friend of a different species five crabs a day, to serve as cover for younger and more vulnerable members of trans community, to take care.

Right now, I’m looking for an outfit to wear to a “rave” at Dave’s Foxhead Tavern. I’ll probably Facetime my friends to see if any of my fits make sense. On my birthday last year, my very best friends here in Iowa threw me an Under the Sea-themed birthday party and I felt very, very loved. Sometimes, being a trans fish means having a great time with queer and trans friends and trying a “designer drug that is somewhat like ketamine” together, and dancing, and tonight I will think of Hiroyuki and Yoriko and all the versions of myself who I had to swim through to feel alive like this, at this exact moment, with so much love, and I will think of all of my courageous, brilliant friends, all of us diving under the fog lights, all of us now and here, here, here.

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