My first thought is, I don't know how to Tumblr.
My second thought is, I don't know how to social media.
My third thought is, I don't know how to be a human being.
And it's this last, unfortunately, that seems to stick with me.
So I take a bath and call my mom, because my relationship with my family's been doing better recently and I'm trying to talk to all of them regularly. Dad's a steadying force in my life so I try to get a few minutes with him every day; but Mom's always been better at fielding my existential dilemmas.
I ask her what she'd read, if I sat down to jot my thoughts down for a half hour every morning. Turned into a chatterbox at six months old and never really stopped, except for a brief period of moderate head trauma that made it oddly difficult to remember nouns and verbs--still kept most of my adjectives, for some reason, and prepositions were practically untouched. Swears safely tucked away in the reptilian depths responsible for grunts, growls, shouts of ecstasy or pain.
So I ask my Mom, You've heard me yammer on for years. Which of my thoughts are the interesting ones?
Well, that's the part that's hard to talk about. Do I remember what she said or not?
Start with the good advice, which I do remember. She sent me a meditation on insight timer and said, Try this for five minutes every morning while you're coffee's brewing. When you're feeling clearer, sit down with your coffee, set your timer for a half hour, and write whatever comes out. Don't worry about your audience. You'll find out something about who you are, and who's interested in knowing the real you.
No idea what kind of conversations she's been having with my brother; but I just spent a week in his company, looking after you. I can't help thinking that maybe they didn't talk to each other at all, just spent time with me and noticed where the cracks were forming. They're both reasonably perspicacious, when it comes down to it.
And here's the part that's hard to talk about, the part I'm not sure happened.
She said--I *think* she said--that she and Dad rewatched "Girl, Interrupted" last week and there were ways the main character reminded her of me.
(I've never been diagnosed with a personality disorder. That's the truth. I've had no real reason for a Complex PTSD diagnosis, either. PTSD, yes. Depression, yes. A handful of anxiety disorders that change with the doctor prescribing the medication. A therapist tried to get me coded for DD-NOS, on account of the depersonalization and derealization issues, and I'm grateful to him still. But let's say I have PTSD. Let's say that no matter how much work I put into myself, that's the diagnosis that keeps coming back like a bad rash.)
Here's what I think my mom said:
I think she said, You went through some things as a teenager here, and it's hard for you to always know who you are and what you want.
She said some other things, like that the one thing everyone in the family agreed on was that they wanted to support me in continuing to write fiction. She said she was happy I got to spend that week with my brother, because he was good for me and loves me fiercely, although he gets a little exasperated sometimes when he can't figure out how to help me. She said she wanted me to take the time to work out what I really wanted to do for work, whether it was nonprofit work or LGBT advocacy or coffee roasting or something else. She said if I only wanted to do it part time, so that I could keep writing, then that was not just alright, but something the whole family would support me with. She said I had a lot of life experiences, and that I'd experienced them deeply, and that I could do just about anything.
I don't remember what all she said. I try to get it down in order and it tangles together with chit-chat about Grandma, and Dad off at band rehearsal, and the sewing class she's trying to take in her off-hours, and our respective forms of neurodivergence.
I try to write it down, though, because she's your grandmother and she adores you, and you should know what kind of woman she is.
I hope to document this year, River, because it is the year I transition. Thirty minutes every day, and maybe someday you'll read these words; or anyway, someone will.
I just put together my to-do list for starting that journey. I'm elated. I'm terrified. I'm thinking the list is probably lacking in granularity.
There are things I started to tell Mom about today. She broached the topic of my 10th grade experience for the first time in...years, probably.
My brother asked me about it recently; it might have been the night of our cousin's funeral. Was it the next night? My sense of time remains uncertain. But we were sitting up late together, your parents and I, on the porch of the cabin by Lake Champlain where our cousins held the memorial service. I don't know if we'd had a frank conversation about my gender experience before--certainly not sober. But I told him I wanted to go on T, and that led other places, like the impact of the conversion therapy written into my IEP, that last year of public education.
I had to explain what derealization was: I had no idea I'd never told him about all that. I have a vague memory of texting with him--perhaps once, perhaps twice--that year or two I was in therapy specifically for personality consolidation. I couldn't remember much about being fifteen, so I asked him what he remembered. He told me about what his life was like, and witnessing a few of my meltdowns at home. There were only two or three, I think. It wasn't a terribly dramatic breakdown that I had. Nothing was real, and then I was sleeping all the time, and then it got hard to get me out of bed in the mornings. But academically, I shone. My writing won awards.
There was just...no one in there at the time. I had a parent who pushed me and two parents who supported me as well as they knew how. I went to college two years early on a full scholarshop.
Only...I never entered another contest. Twenty-five years passed before I submitted another piece of writing for publication.
I even stopped playing soccer. Competition made everything feel distant and strange, as though it were farther away than it looked.
What happened to get me into therapy--the story I told your father, my brother--was this:
I got a new GP. Same office, different doctor. A woman, this time. She took a fresh case history and bumped into the cardiac event I survived twenty-odd years before. And I told her, Conversion therapy was written into my IEP when I was fifteen.
She said, How long were your sessions?
And I said, No no, it was all day at school, and at the bus stop, and during extracurriculars. They calmed down a bit once I got a steady boyfriend. But it was still this constant surveillance--how I spoke, how I sat, how I raised my hand, what I read, what I talked about, how I walked, how I participated in class. It's one thing to fail at girlhood--every fifteen-year-old of that generation probably felt like they were failing at their assigned gender. It was the primary marketing tactic the Viacom-Industrial Complex used to sell us things.
I was failing at something nobody would explain, and all the adults around me were afraid, and nobody would explain what was happening or what I was doing wrong. I didn't know gay people existed. I didn't know a thing about transgender identities, except in little flashes here or there--the prophets Daniel and Nehemiah, who in all likelihood have no influence on your life, were castrati, and figures like Loki and Old Man Coyote switched back and forth from male to female. There was an older kid in school whose name I didn't know, whose gender I couldn't code by looking at them; but I took that to be a failing of my own, and I was too embarrassed to ever tell anyone. There was a sweet gentle kid I knew from my sixth grade class who never quite walked like a boy; and later, in seventh grade, he stopped coming to school. Some of the kids said he'd told someone he was a girl trapped in a boy's body, but almost everyone thought it was because he had a couple different learning disabilities, and acted more like a super-innocent third-grader, and spent most of his time playing games of make-believe by himself. And some of the kids said he shoplifted from a gas station so that he could go to juvie, because no matter how bad it was there it wasn't home and it wasn't our school.
I never knew the truth of any of those stories. I never connected them to my own experience of genderfluidity. Mom and Dad let me be what I was at home, and dress up however I liked for Halloween, and play any make-believe character I wanted. That's how it was. When I was in second grade, my class had more girls than boys, and when we split up by gender there were some girls--myself included--who would be honorary boys for the day. And other girls would ask me in the morning, Are you a girl or a boy today? And I'd feel into it and answer--but more often, I'd already be dressed as the gender I felt. So I learned something important about myself that year: I was a girl who was sometimes a boy. My best friend was a girl who was always a girl, and my brother was a boy who was always a boy, and my next-door neighbor was a girl who liked to pretend to be a boy, but woke up a girl every morning and remained a girl throughout the day, whether she played Peter Pan or Captain Hook or Smee.
So until I was about nine, I used to tell other kids I could switch back and forth between being a girl and a boy, just like Loki, and sometimes I could choose which one I'd be but sometimes I'd just shift for a while, so they should ask which one I was. And that tapered off around fourth and fifth grade, but even in a conservative farming community none of the other kids acted like it was weird.
I was a girl who was sometimes a boy.
In retrospect, given the culture wars of the 90's, it seems almost a miracle that I made it to fourteen before any of it came to a head.
And here's the truth: left to my own devices, I may have ended up vaguely butch, and bi, and probably some flavor of TERFy essentialist second-wave feminist. That's its own form or repression, in its way.
But I wasn't left to my own devices, was I?
The reality is that you can break down someone's gender expression and rebuild it in whatever image you like, but to make it stick you have to break down their gender identity too. And it's maybe the popular thing to claim that gender identity is immutable--that's certainly an experience people have, trans and cis alike. But believe me when I say that gender identity can be broken down like anything else about a person.
You have to break just about everything else about a person first, though, up to and including reality-testing.
And they did. They stripped away everything that made me a person--not just on purpose, but in planned, methodical fashion, with goals and dates and benchmarks. They kept meticulous notes on my progress. They did these things because they believed it was the right thing to do. And Humpty Dumpty never quite went back together again. I never felt like a girl or a boy or a man or a woman, and I never quite felt like a Something Else either. Gender was a rich subjective experience--a color to paint with, a way to play dress-up. On good days, it felt like a kind of spiritual attunement. It was a changing force for the rest of my life.
But I'm telling you a different story, I suppose. About my doctor.
I told her what happened. She was too professional to say, You know uh people die from that. But I wondered, then, if that's what she was thinking. It's something people said to me, and say to me, when they find out.
She was a consummate professional, but her eyes were all blank and she kept going for her pen to jot down notes, only she wasn't looking at her pen or her notepad and her hand kept missing.
I remember that part clearly. I remember it, but it might have been a different doctor, or maybe a therapist. It might have been a different time that that happened.
The clearest thing I remember--the last clear thing I remember--is that she asked, very matter-of-factly, whether I had experienced other abuse before the age of eighteen.
The next thing I remember is standing on a street in a strange part of the city. I could not have told you my name, how old I was, or what city I was in. I was sober in the strictest sense of the word--I had not imbibed any substances, prescription or otherwise--and I had a receipt in my pocket from a series of finished errands at the post office. I couldn't read anything properly, which is usually a sign that I'm dreaming. So I thought that's what was going on.
Worked it out eventually that I was standing in a crosswalk weeping, because a woman walking a golden retriever stopped and pointed out a cafe across the street, and the lettering on the sign was big enough I could read it. So I crossed to the corner and she asked if I could look after her dog for a few minutes while she stepped inside and bought herself a coffee, and I don't know if I said anything but I sat on an adirondack chair in front of a brilliant fire-truck-red cafe and petted a golden retriever for a while, and that was nice. I think I had some vague sense that I was being managed; but I was also petting a dog, so that was alright then. The woman came back out eventually and brought me a cup of coffee and I couldn't stop crying but I felt calmer. I don't remember anything about her--not her face, not her age, not her race, not the sound of her voice--but I remember her dog vividly.
Anyway. Drank my coffee. Third of the way through the cup when my pocket vibrated, and I discovered I had a phone stuffed in there. I went to Google and wrote, I am a conversion therapy survivor and I need help. And Google, quite helpfully, supplied the number of Seattle Counseling Service, which at the time was one of the oldest LGBT-centered mental health organizations in the city. And I got on the phone with a clinician who helped me navigate to the bus stop, and then to their offices.
Here's another true thing: I don't know why I told you this story, unless it's to avoid telling you what I told my mom, which is to say your grandmother.
I don't really remember what I told her. Something about how growing up queer in that part of the world, during that particular era of the culture war, trained me to protect parts of myself--and more to the point, to protect myself by protecting information. To manage my life in terms of circles of privileged information.
(I lied to my brother last week about something painfully stupid: the platform that hosts my serial novel. I could have just asked him not to read it. I know him well enough to know he'd respect that boundary. I want to say I don't know why I did it, but that's not how it was at all. To tell him about my novel at all felt like heaving a boulder uphill, sometimes with more success than others. I could talk about the reader community all day--that part was effortless. But a dangerous detail like where to find the full text? I told him the closest thing to the truth I could bear. It's not deliberate dishonesty so much as a failed effort at honesty. He worked it out before I could heave the real answer out of my mouth. And then he confronted me, and I couldn't bring myself to talk about it.)
Circles of privileged information.
That's what Mom and I talked about today, a little. I told her that two things were true: the women who tried to craft me--whatever I was--into a straight submissive Christian girl did something deeply unethical and deeply harmful; and they did it because they believed with all their souls that they were doing the right thing. I told her I'd done a lot of work in therapy to let both of those things be true at once.
But that wasn't the important thing, was it? The important thing is that I got quiet for a few minutes.
When I go quiet and there are no words, just the feeling of heaving a boulder uphill. Maybe it's a successful push and I manage to say something true. Maybe my aim's off and I land on a near-truth instead, and if I remember I'll try to go back and correct myself later. If I manage it. If I can.
Fiction is simpler. The words flow like water and the details land faraway enough that I can bear to say the unspeakable things. And anyway, we all know it's supposed to be make-believe. We all know to trust the substance, and forget the details.
This? This is harder. But there's 566 anti-trans bills kicking about this stupid country; there are lawmakers trying to legislate childhoods exactly like my 10th grade year across whole states; there are children like the one I was standing in the crosshairs.
So I'm trying to write my own experience as a nonbinary human: messy, dangerous, yes; and yet our community has this love for one another that is incandescent. I learned the reality of love from fabulous queers. I'm trying to document a year in transition.
Know that I love you, kiddo. Know that I'm doing my best. Nothing has made me happier this year than learning to be your uncle.
