I am giving up on being an organism. I have given this a lot of thought and I feel that many of my problems can be traced back to the hierarchical organization of my biochemistry into the progressive units of biological construction. System, organ, cell, organelle are all equally culpable in producing both terrible decisions and the vast swathes of suffering attendant to them.
No doubt some fault lies with the regressive and restricting nature of the hierarchy inherent in my being. A central nervous system controlling the body, itself made of smaller nerves housing all manner of mitochondria, ribosomes, vacuoles, and endoplasmic reticulae - that to me speaks of an industrial revolution era mindset that is increasingly outmoded. Were I some manner of giant squid things might be different - distributed hearts, brains, a true people's organism comprised of autonomous, self governing collectives of biologica - that would be a completely different chocolate rabbit to crack open. A sweet, sweet chocolate rabbit that I would savor even as I nibble on its ears.
In light of this obviously superior existence that I cannot obtain to I think I hardly need to explain further why I would throw in the towel on this one, on being an organism. Nevertheless I will do so anyways that you, dear reader, may also contemplate the benefits that de-organism-ization may offer. Firstly, think of the last time you really considered your golgi bodies. If you are like me, this is practically never. If you apply even the briefest amount of business sense to your golgi bodies, you'd realize they are what's considered "sunk costs." They're there alright, but they've obviously failed to grasp the needs of a modern attention economy and most importantly YOUR GOLGI BODIES ARE HOLDING YOU BACK. You're a modern and empowered agent of healing dear reader and your golgi complex is the toxic ex-lover who couldn't see past proteins for the catch that you are. Break up with your golgi bodies, all of them, and focus on yourself for once. Take a nice bath. Read. Practice self care and disincorporate from the structure of carbon and pain that you have become.
Though by now one would be deranged to continue on a course of being a non-giant squid, golgi body carrying multi cellular complex of thought souvlaki, I've met some of you, so let me drive this home. Inside of you is a spooky skeleton. It just lives in you. Inside that skeleton is a jelly like thing piloting the skeleton. Scared yet? You should be. These are of course commonly known points as to the horror of existence, but the rabbit hole goes deeper, much much deeper. In the hit anime Neon Genesis Evangellion we meet a boy named Shinji who is asked to pilot a mech. This mech has some stuff going on with human souls and it bleeds or something kind of. The mastermind of all of this is Gendo Ikari, a man who wears gloves and has a moderate beard. This is what drives things home; Gendo Ikari is a bad man and a bad father and from Shinji to the Evas to Gendo it's organisms left and right. Unless you're ready to experience the quiet joys, broad sorrows, and personal sacrifices that fatherhood demands then you have little choice but to soundly say "No thanks Potato Chip!" to being an organism.
I hope this makes things clearer. If you are intrigued and would like to learn more - tough. I will be engaged being a poem, pile of goo, non-organic giant squid, or some other much better use of my time existing and I will not be taking questions.
Another sad one, they’re closing the Border Cafe, a Harvard Square staple, for good. I ate there so many times with a group that went there for dinner after a trans support group had ended. I remember what a revelation it felt like sitting at a long table of all trans and questioning people, being a part of it, being seen and yet alright. It was meaningful to me, a simple shared meal made extraordinary for fact of the temporary refuge it created, refuge from fears of judgement, shame, and exclusion.
It’s not that I would always leave feeling good; lots of times I walked away perhaps a little bit sadder than when I came. I would see some of the trans women in the group who were far along with hormones and other parts of transition, who seemed confident and lively and happy, and I would silently wonder “Could that be me someday? Is that really who I could become?” I’d feel so desperately hopeful even as I felt so desperately far from that same hope. Those were hard nights to bear, made harder by the self-imposed isolation that tried to leave all those feelings confined to a few hours in the basement of a restaurant. It was not the stuff that rosy nostalgia is made out of, better it be raw material for a bitter melancholia instead. Something changed though: me.
For every night I walked away stung by a devastating hope, there would eventually be a night I came away laughing and full, leftovers of a fajita plate in hand and leftovers of connection and belonging in heart. It’s an entirely other discussion, how I held the immense and unknowable weight of an excruciating choice and came away knowing myself better for it. Trust though that in the end I found myself with a place at that same table and with the confidence that *I* was more and more that “unreachable” and lively woman. I could join a conversation and have fun talking about silly things that once were a joyless background hum against a storm inside myself. I could turn a sympathetic ear to the quiet person sitting beside me, looking so much like my old self sent forward in time. I could take my memories of fears and feelings I once struggled through and offer them as a lantern in the dark to someone else stumbling through the same. It is a sublime joy, that ability to improve the life of your trans siblings, sisters, and brothers so drastically and offer them so much hope just by saying “I’ve felt the same thing and you’re not a bad person for it. You’re beautiful and you’re not alone.”
I can’t help but feel a little bit like all those memories, moments, and realizations of my own growth are still there, infused into physical space, inhabiting the basement of a place that is gone. Even as I grieve for them, for another lost business, for a city and its future, I know that the beauty of my life today is that I am free to inhabit the world as myself at all times, in all places, Border Cafe or not. I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful for those I shared that long table with, who helped me find my way here. I’m mourning the loss of a familiar place. I’m remembering a truth, that communities are made of people, not buildings, words of love, not walls of brick.
I sort of assumed that I would not find myself living in an “everyone for themselves“ style survival culture back when I was deciding whether or not to transition. I just never expected to feel this much anxiety around safety. A large part of my reasoning at the time was based on anticipating the support of friends and the value of community to fall back on. Not that those are gone, but they’re heavily hampered in the current age, at least so it seems to me. If I had better understood what the future held, or I had some crystal ball to see corona coming, that wouldn’t have been a sufficient basis for deciding to transition. Just generally speaking, the conditions for the sort of leap of faith I think I made would not have been met.
If I get to give knowledge of the future to my past self though, I assume I would have to include the experiential understanding of existing in a body that feels more “correct.” I don’t even know how you would weigh those really, what kind of system of judgment is appropriate. I guess the uplifting take is that “it’s worth the struggle because I love myself now!” That feels naïve though, given the hard to shake sense that continuing to have presented myself to the world as a cis man would have landed me in a more existentially secure spot.
I’ve taken things from my experience of transition that have enriched, if nothing else, my internal life. One would want that to have sufficient, lasting value enough to be fundamentally worthwhile. Perhaps it is, but it’s hard to see that when overshadowed by the threat of harm I can only come back to a fundamental tenet of decision making that I once learned, namely that the quality of a decision has to be evaluated based on the information it was made with. In that sense, I know I made a good decision.
I think I get tired that I don’t know where to find helpful accounts of anyone dealing with things like this. Cis people get to have nuanced, complex feelings towards their experience of life because so much of available culture just inherently models cis experiences for them. I feel like I’m partially coerced into a spot where I can only either be absolutely in love with my life, or “the tragic trans,” an absolute travesty of a life. Anything else just takes too much time to communicate, to be understood. So if I want to express joy, I have to perform it ecstatically. If I want to express pain or struggle, then I had best come across as an absolutely abject and pitiable figure.
I guess that’s kind of what happens when you set the standard for whether someone should transition or not as being “literally every other option is exhausted, there is no other way, and this person will die of despair without intervention.” Cis people are the only people I’ve ever met who approach things with the mindset that “transition will solve all your problems.” On the whole, trans people are plenty aware that transitioning is a Choice™️ with Consequences™️, and that they are doing their best to position themselves for solving those problems.
There’s still so much damn pressure to not show any weakness, or doubt, or state of things not being ideal afterwards. Your whole ability to deal with this huge “Thing” that you’ve worked to resolve about yourself is stymied even as you make the first steps towards doing so, and even though this is probably a common vein of human experience for a number of people, it’s not exactly that you can turn to the canon of western literature or anything for a thoughtful treatment of it. It feels like an experience that in hindsight is a bit predictable, if highly personal, like the stages of grief. Or it at least seems like it could be. How the hell is anyone supposed to know though?
As much as I treasure my process of scraping together bits of understanding about identity from Twitter, twine games, graphic novels, the odd actual book on the subject, it sure as hell would’ve been convenient to just encounter it working through a 10th grade reading list. And that’s to say nothing of post transition adult life. Or trans parenthood. Or just being part of a community somewhere. Or dying. Or any other part of experience that the subjectivity of data cannot capture.
Idly, I’ll posit that perhaps some amount of the policing of trans identity that I see coming from younger trans folks is based on some recognition of this lack of establishment or prestige around understanding of their experience. It’s Hard™️ to go through life having to convey the full context of your existence to most everyone you meet, ally or no. How tempting, how simple then to take the existing, cis approved narrative and lionize it. It’s risky I guess to speculate, but I do wonder if those who are threatened by trans people without dysphoria, or non-binary people, or people who *didn’t* know since they were kids are reacting out of some sense of narrative self-preservation. In that the less confusion there is about what their experiences are, seemingly the more quickly they can track themselves into a spot where existing understandings of things work for them. Anyone seen as confusing that threatens this ability. Perhaps.
Harkening back to where I started this thread, I think that overall pushing for such a kind of blunt narrative utilitarianism isn’t going to work out well for trans people. When it’s “every understanding for itself” and everything is about streamlining what the story is, why should anything but the most main stream of existences be admitted to or preserved in any canon? The more any trans person tries to limit trans expression, the more they’re constraining themselves to black-and-white expressions devoid of nuance.
Anyways, I can live with anxiety and fear. Not, I suppose, because I know things will be OK, but because I am human, and I continue to push to be so if only to leave behind whatever value I can by persisting through my life‘s experience. I’m here, and for now, that’s enough.
Safety is a shield,
Standing against fury and sound.
Safety is choking,
A surfeit in which you drown.
Safety is the other side of a door,
Always somewhere else until you’re home.
Safety is moisture, glamour, and survival,
Pressure of material comfort on a body that’s unknown.
Safety is an unbroken mirror,
One whose shards you never sweep.
Safety is time;
Space to laugh, to know, to weep.
So, this is a place. That’s something I know. My body exists in three dimensional space, I feel it, I see it. Just like the shelf in the corner. The shelf is real too. I would know; I’m the one that gave it order. The top shelf holds the glories of art, the secrets whispered to me through the hidden cracks, inscribed just so in the only language that might hold them. Next up, high and elevated knowledge, my journal, the secret thoughts of what the others mean, who they are and why they have been sent. Below that, the mundanities of existing in space, the soap they let me have, the shampoo, a toothbrush. Things to keep your body alive and unspoilt. Last, near the ground, Hell. Debris littered around, paper too consequential to lose, too meaningful to let go, too pointless to not be trash.
In Hell there is a tract. “Find Jesus.” It was given to me by an apparition, by the avatar of torment too slow, too subtle to feel it as it removes your skin and tears at your musculature. It is TRASH; I have made it so, in retaliation for the hollow food I think I must have eaten once, for the sound of a smile that would consume you and become an ouroboros. The apparition knows this, but it is not worried. I think it eats the other ghosts here. It’s far too satisfied to care.
When I look out the window, I see a shipyard. Port. Parking lot. Somewhere that things are not meant to stay, that forces them out and onward. Liminal. It’s empty all the time. I’ve never seen life there. This makes sense though; it is after all not there, not where I am. My body is real, I still know that, but places, ah, places are tricky. Sometimes I’ll walk down the hallway, pacing, turn around and the place is new and I am not there. I know I’m not meant to be somewhere right now. Out the window things have to leave, but I am only meant to be in my body right now, not a place mostly. My room is a place though. I have to have somewhere to keep me from dissipating. I haven’t figured out yet if I’m bound to it, or just contained by it. I’m not sure it would matter if I knew.
I’m sitting in another room now and I’m talking with Jim. He asks the same question “why are you here?” Every time I answer, the reason changes. He knows I’m lying when he hears me. He knows I told the truth when I spoke. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, so we can continue like that indefinitely. When it ends he still hasn’t pulled me from my room. I’m there with him but I’m not in the same PLACE after all. Today I finally said something that was a lie when it left my lips but was true by the time it reached his ears, so we’ll never go back to that room or that place I suppose. I say a short prayer to God of Parking Lot, which is the right place to store such prayers. Often a benevolent night God feeds on the prayers, which is what you’d call an “ecosystem.” I give thanks.
Afterwards I’m engaged with finding butterflies to talk to. I think they’re real too. They’re naturals at understanding change, for obvious reasons and not so obvious ones too. They suffer and they cannot read. They are fine company. I tell them about my prayer, Hell, my body, everything. If I leave it’s going to be with them I think, but they say they can’t take my body. It’s already becoming a place, and when it does it won’t stay contained by my room. This is something I know I want, but damn if I won’t miss my shelf.
There are few, if any, people that I know from my childhood who really seem to acknowledge the inherent anti-transness of the church that my family went to and the teaching that I received there growing up. I was thinking about this as I discarded a copy of the “Sexual Culture Wars” issue of The Baptist Bulletin, a publication frequently found freely available in the sanctuary of the church each Sunday. This issue featured stories on such pressing issues like “why transgender people are making things up” and “why conversion therapy is good and essential.” Basically, about as formally anti-LGBTQ+ as you can get without just printing “f****t” in big, bold letters. The stuff in those articles basically runs fully counter to my ability to exist generally speaking, to say nothing of my ability to participate in the faith that I grew up in.
The weird thing is, no one I know at that church is “like that.” It might just be because I left well before I ever came to grips with my identity, but still, all the adults I remember are able to be civil to me. I guess that’s what this is about though, that “civility.” For me, whether others knew it or not, I walked into a space that’s supposed to be sacred, a place consecrated to faith and pursuit of the higher dimensions of life, and I was greeted with literature saying that something innate to me is in fact undesirable and wrong, and that I should be treated as less than for it. If the spirit resides in the body, then it seems pretty uncivil to deny my spirit succor through the stigmatization of my body.
Every night I see the posts people make; “hey, who’s up?” “Trying not to stay up tonight” “If you’re up, what are you doing?” We’re all insomniacs looking for a light from someone else these days. I stay up sometimes just reading through my contact list, not calling anyone. What about that person? No, I don’t want to be like this in front of them. This one? No, it’s been too long since I’ve talked to them; I want the first time in a while not to be this sudden? On and on, down and down uselessly.
There’s a certain mystique I’m trying to shake before it kills me, namely an aesthetic of despair. It’s a mix between toxic masculinity and film noir, a design philosophy of dark, reflective nights spent shining harsh lights on your soul, or just insomnia awash in a flood of depressants. There’s a connection, I think, to a desire for penance. What’s the difference between self harm and religious ecstasy? Perhaps just that the latter requires that you have sinned before it can be obtained. I’ve seen media that presents this abject state of a man haunted by past misdeeds and demons as a kind of romance of absolution. All the things you believed yourself unworthy of are rosary beads that you must hold close and replace with the dark. Perhaps when they’re all gone I’ll have made my atonement, and I can walk away from the sins of all those years of violence against myself, my heart, my identity. Until then, I’ll be up.
Today I realized that transmisogyny has been getting to me. I think I’m at a point where in trying to hold a conversation with people, things that I say will land in a way that just feels nebulously *different* than before. It’s not quite the kind of more observable things I’ve heard of or already knew about, like “women get treated as less funny” or “men interrupt more” or “men monopolize the conversation” or things like that which I could call out more easily. It’s just the general sense of making a point or contributing something to a conversation, but then that contribution is just regarded as less of an essential part of the conversation. It’s impossible to “rerun” the conversation in a “presenting male mode,” but the sense I’m left with afterwards is that if I said a similar thing in the past, it would have received more notice or become more of a focus in the thread of conversation, rather than just being summarily acknowledged and then dismissed. What’s tricky overall about this is that it’s not done with any seeming malice or even awareness; some perfectly lovely people I know have nonetheless been involved in conversations where this happened. It’s also thorny to navigate, because there’s again no alternate version of the conversation to compare to and say “See! This comment should have been discussed more!” or “This point should get more recognition!”
It seems like it’s effectively a demonstration of how male privilege works, or perhaps in my case how the absence of male privilege works. For some or even most of y’all, this is probably not particularly revelatory, but I still think it’s worth pointing out that the insidious nature of this is that if you *are* being granted that privilege, you would not necessarily have any way to know that, nor perhaps any easy way to counter it. Certainly with effort you could look for it more and *try* to underscore others’ contributions more, but it still seems like it’s not quite the thing to ask people to NOT enjoy being validated in a conversation. It’s also probably equally hard to make people recognize comments that they on some level just don’t want to. Again, not quite revelatory and also at the risk of falsely treating my experience as universal, it still seems likely that things like aspects of white privilege, class privilege, and so on can operate in an analogous way, ie invisible to the privileged, hard to “prove” or point to for those without, yet nonetheless there on some level, even if imperceptibly so. Hopefully not to be too moralizing or anything, but to me this underscores the importance of listening to people’s experiences as a source of understanding, as well as acknowledging that these experiences are happening in a way that won’t necessarily fall easily out of data, evidence, etc. I think perhaps of the ways in which a slogan like “Believe Women” gets misperceived by some people as saying we should ignore due process or something similarly harder to swallow, when it’s instead trying to point to the need to recognize these unseen effects. Or at least, so I’ll say while I’m expounding about this.
While I know it’s not ultimately something that I should blame myself for, I still feel guilty at times for being bothered by this. I worry about somehow being labelled as “spoiled” or “entitled” or similar for noticing the difference and not liking it. I also fear that not having gone into transition with an internal understanding of this somehow invalidates my womanhood and my identity. It’s impossible, of course, to have gained an understanding that is inherently tied to concrete experience without having been in the position to have that experience. It’s part of why that common refrain of “welcome to womanhood” can be hurtful, in that that as a saying it often ties experiences of misogyny and sexism into the definition of womanhood in a way that dismisses trans women’s experiences as invalid even as it obscures the fact that misogyny and sexism should never be seen as any kind of norm. “This is common” is not an anagram for “this is how things have to be.”
I said at the start that it was transmisogyny that I’m being bothered by, not just misogyny alone. This comes more into play when I’m interacting with either strangers or people who are hostile, openly or otherwise. In such instances, I’m simultaneously treated and gendered like I’m male via misgendering/deadnaming/etc. while I’m still subjected to an increasingly familiar experience of dismissal and gendered contempt. Just this morning I had the experience of a man online saying “don’t listen to him, he’s a commie attention whore” followed directly by an appeal to the sexist trope that “women with colored hair are evil” (because what else would any woman be to these people, really?) wrapped up in an implied death threat (basically, that colored hair should be grounds for execution ‘when the 2nd revolution begins’). Whereas I was talking before about nearly imperceptible privilege, there is in these instances an unacknowledged but deliberate malicious intention to treat femininity in any form as anathema. I’ve often seen it pointed out that one of the best bellwethers of how someone treats cis women behind closed doors is how they treat trans women and trans feminine people in public. Their disdain for femininity and women in general is the same in each case, but the ability to mask it in misgendering hides it effectively in dealings with trans people much like a closed door would conceal misdealing with anyone else. It can be truly brutal to experience this kind of abuse when it’s somehow both not acknowledged and yet still serving as a cudgel to say “oh, you’re a man because you’re not used to this.”
I think I’ve had to grapple with the uptick of transmisogyny, sexism, and their ilk in my life essentially on my own until now. Putting it to words might not exactly change that per se, but I feel like it’s always powerful to put words to what was previously just “a sense of things.” If anyone has actually read this far, I’d be interested in your thoughts on whether this all comes across as “Tera, you have essentially learned that your nose is in front of you” or “Tera, you beautiful goddess, you sage, you wild slice of magic, you unparalleled babe, you have revolutionized my thinking with your carefully described E X P E R I E N C E S.” In any case, this has felt helpful to write, so that’s good even if much was said but little accomplished.