For me my first step toward transitioning was when I stopped taking testosterone. This act grants me a fair amount of autonomy over my body and over my transition. It grants me the freedom some trans women do not have, the freedom to see testosterone as merely another medication for another person. That concept of autonomy was the inspiration for getting my tattoo. I think the concept of owning your identity and letting it guide you is incredibly valuable. I am not a fatalist, but I have had to, over my life, recognize the futility in trying to control every aspect of what people will think of you and dive into it. Which is why I got my trans symbol tattoo.
Upon recognizing my transness as an inevitable and inextricable part of me, I knew where I was headed. The journey itself has been beautiful and painful, revealing and empowering, and ultimately about accepting that what I love about myself cannot be divided and portioned out. I can’t pretend that my dreams are separate. How I live and where I go in life is as myself, and I have to let go of what people think of me. Thus it being the trans symbol, a combination of masculinity, femininity, and the portion that combines and/or stands apart from both. Or how I like to think of transgender, the idea that we change gender itself, escaping a strict binary concept but recognizing the importance of its representation.
I may self identify as female, but the concept of adhering to a strict concept of what female is to me seems only to set myself up for failure. So I see this symbol as a compass rather than as a label or brand. And the snake tattooed on my right shoulder, its orientation toward the trans/femme half, has incidentally become intertwined in the trans symbol through both their placement and how they interact with my identity. As a result they signify the intersection of a lot of aspects of my life. The snake depicted being the one I’ve known for some years now, and came to adopt a couple of years ago, represents to me the time I spent after college training martial arts and how I see myself on the mats as moving with the same conservation of energy as does my snake Boltzmann. Him being on my right shoulder, the one that has been historically the weakest and most commonly injured one, is a reminder me to care for myself as I have cared for him daily. That my survival is linked to my ability to incrementally be faithful to the things for which I care.
This goes even deeper as my time training martial arts intertwines with my transness in two very important ways. It has provided me with the confidence to live as I need to for myself, and not as others think I should. Secondly, the injuries I sustained in the past years (some directly related to martial arts and others not) forced me to realize I could not train as I once had. I needed to care for my body with greater patience and reflection. This realization forced me to address a long time issue that I don’t feel comfortable with my body as it is. I used it as a tool and compartmentalized the unease that I felt about how I was perceived and how I perceived myself. I thought I could just dive in and swim against such a current, but it dragged me under.
These tattoos are the result of a life spent up until half a year ago worrying about where I would be. But I am now owning that existence and not letting others’ perceptions and fears control who I am. I will exist guided by the experiences, friends, and passions that inspire me and push me to live out, happy, and free.