Sed Replace

Here we go, so yeah, I came out to my dojo through Facebook. I messaged one of the owners first to be sure I had a solid foothold of support, but then I moved forward in a big way and messaged a lot of the core players there en masse. Let’s just say they are all amazing and I am lucky to have comrades in jiu jitsu like those at Magic BJJ.

This was the first step, but in some ways the most important, as this is a group of people  I’ve suffered, fought, and learned with for years. I told them about being trans femme, that my name is now Sami, use she/her/hers pronouns, and have started my transition. I cannot be more proud of their support and understanding. I cannot be more proud of the time I have spent with them. I cannot be more proud to have started this here and now.

Next was my job. My manager has been nothing but a dream. He has expressed absolute support and has talked to our director and other managers. We are working with Human Resources to build a plan for telling the rest of the team in a responsible manner. The HR person was nothing but polite and enthusiastic. It is more than fantastic. It is more than wonderful. I feel empowered beyond measure.

Then I came out to my parents…

awkward.

But they didn’t explode, say anything too bad, or try to institutionalize me, so that’s at least a thing. And I love them. So that’s cool.

I’ve never lived as my prescribed gender. Nobody could absolutely convince me. They could scare, beat, or pathologize me, but my senses are too sharp. I can hear something different in myself than the beating of a man’s heart. But I never felt that the masculine clothes restrained me, my senses did too good of a job. They interpreted the hate, the disgust, and confusion with startling accuracy.

When my eldest and thought-to-be smartest brother said there must be something mentally wrong with trans people, I heard. When in school, the discomfort I felt about my body was scrutinized till I felt numb. And now neither my safety nor my transness are recognized at my doctor’s office, more a hybrid that wants to recognize, but in effect demolishing both to the benefit of my insurance.

“Samantha/Michael”, that’s what they wrote on the letter to go to my employer as proof of my doctor’s visit. What is this unnatural combination? What is this cruel mold? It burns that this is also drawn along with gender identity disorder. How dare you. You seek to control me at every step. You make me run a loop, wait and wait and wait some more only to be questioned and told that trans issues are on the cusp of being “no big deal”.

My name is “no big deal”, my hormones are “no big deal”, and my job security is “no big deal.” You have no idea what a relief it is to hear that, tell me next month when finally you’ll decide to prescribe me the chemical that should be in my body and tell me the surgery I would love to have yesterday might take some time before it’s recommended. I already had some surgery, bub. I don’t need a dress to express my transness, I have it tattooed into my skin.

I own it, I decide what is on and in my body. I don’t want testosterone and I can just stop it in my body when I want. I’m tired of white cis people telling me what I need to do before I am who I have always been. Do you know what it’s like to be cis gender woman? I don’t, but I don’t know what it’s like to be cis gender man either. I am ready to be the person I have always been, but without the fear and confusion of others to stop me. I am transgender, I am apart and the same as much as any other person.

As I wear what I want to affirm my gender and build myself out of years of misunderstanding and cycling frustration, confusion, and sadness, I take selfies more often now to represent it better to myself. But today is TDOR, and I saw the portraits of all those other trans people doing the same, and now my own portrait becomes a sombre, melancholy piece. I felt the weight of their deaths, that these great people were subject to such extreme measures of racism, sexism, and fear. The act of rebellion that is being trans is an undertaking which also sheds one’s own cisprivilege for the vulnerability of being, opening one to a media library full of questions and doubts. The truth they lived came with a price.

Is it a compound word? Is it a noun? Is it a verb? Or is it a descriptor?

Does it mean to change one’s gender, or does it mean to change gender?

What is it? Why do we act as if we know its every waking moment, awkward few steps, and tragic end? There are so many tragic ends, but the transitive property of those who bear its burden live better for living on. If only transgender were as welcomed a word to one’s vocabulary as gay or ally.

There are so many who question its meaning. Why do people adopt it? Where did it come from? Is it a condition, conditional, or absolute thing? Do we have to question our own identity all the time because of it? Do we exist in flux as well, or is cisgender an anchor on two-dimensions?

How I see it on nights when all I do is lie in bed and think is, “where will it end and my gender begin?” When was I ever my gender? I look back at my life and see that I built walls and doors and pools to protect myself from others, but also to give myself room to occupy it.

How much of this or that is part of my gender, and what of that is trans? Where have I drawn boundaries unnecessarily? How can change them without losing the load-bearing pillars. Truth is something that has gotten me to where I need to be so far. When I can confront what trans means to me individually rather than rely on existing definitions I feel far more confident about where my journey will lead me and what words of others run congruent to my own lived experience.

There is never anything more difficult to ascertain sometimes, but so precious to have than the truth. Living by it can be frightening, but to resist it is to resist nature itself. It is to swim against the current not just when you are strong and determined, but also when you are weak and weary. For all my life this is what being trans has felt like.

It is a powerful truth that comes from myself, from my own being, where no boundaries will cross permanently. It is where I am whole already. It is the source of my greatest strength, that I am a person with the will to be the constant taboo. I have the will to be vulnerable and let that take me where it will. What is transgender but not to change gender itself while also exploring your own.

And my world was rewritten. I saw myself as being part of something not just undesirable but that could be trained out of myself for the sake of another person’s comfort. They “helped” me. Coming from an age of psychology where dogs are only creatures that salivate upon the ring of a bell, now I was the kid who no longer sounded like the gender I was not who liked people of that gender I was not actually a part of just to remind people these are merely mannerisms and not a being who will remember this “therapy” years to come. At least I would be spared that catastrophe while I was at school, right? But all they did was teach me that putting on a mask was more desirable than myself. That I needed to be how I was supposed to identify, which was all the more alien to me as I grew up. Both what I should be, and what I am.

I had no idea why I needed to lose the sibilant “S”, and to this day it only leaves me thinking that cishet culture is not a culture I am a part of at a very deep level, how I speak. But it does not stop there, my body needed to be controlled, to be improved. I needed to experience the hormone that my body does not produce to reinforce the gender I am not because the concept of intersex/transness is something a child should be protected from. Today I need to see a therapist to get the hormones that should actually be in my body, but not when I am a child with no understanding of what hormones are and how what goes into my body is my decision. Where was the real therapy? Not once was there even a question of what hormone I should be getting, or whether my body really matched the gender they perceived it to be. A doctor’s analysis is insufficient to treat a child.

I was given the option not to have hormone therapy altogether, but that was too little too late. I knew what mask I should wear at that time. I accepted the shared dream of fixed genders. However, I was given the option to remove the excess breast tissue in my pecks. I somehow made the better choice. Leave my body as is it is, perhaps it would be shed naturally or whatever may come. Now I realize I might have been drifting out of the malaise just a little, as I see now happened every now and then in my life.

One other way I would like to mention here is that the bulk of my creative writing throughout my life has been written from the perspective of a woman. I wrote a series of poems about a character named Harriet, which I have collected on deviant art. It was a mask itself, as those exploring themselves are wont to do, but it was a mask that fit well and I enjoyed wearing it. I wrote my own story, and made the space I needed to for a voice unaltered by a system. This blog is the revival of my creating that space, but without the mask, metaphor, or literary flourish.