Letters from the Hearth

A place for me to document my nonbinary transition - agender, they/them/their.

[lfthearth]

Coming out Day 2018

I don't really love Coming Out Day (or coming out, generally) because of how it becomes increasingly compulsory overtime, which happens regardless of how safe it is to actually come out, how many times and ways we have to do it, etc.

I also want to point out that these narratives focus on gender and orientation, often ignoring the ways I would rather be read online. I want all of you know to that transmisogyny is killing us: leaving us homeless, jobless, without access to healthcare, survivors (or not) of extreme violence and that those things won't change without you being aware and vocal on these issues; knowing that I'm genderqueer doesn't really get you there.

But, I still think these narratives could be cathartic to share, interesting or relatable to my queer and trans friends, and enlightening to folks who are allies. Just know this is not a full-accounting; a full-accounting isn't possible. I even tried to number and list these experiences, but coming out defies discrete categorization

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My first coming-out was to my mom. I was a preteen, and was just on the precipice of 1st puberty so had given it some minor thought, but wasn't incredibly interested in romance or sex. I assume my mom realized this and so started asking me about my thoughts and feelings, and explicitly, my orientation from this young age - though it's entirely possible she had been asking me since I was younger and I just was too uninterested to remember. These conversations are pretty far from solid memories from me, and I feel like I gave her slightly different accounts of who I was each time...which was common for me as a kid and I've learned is a part of who I am as an adult. At the time, I felt I had explicitly gay family in my "uncles" (quite literally my parents' chosen family, though I lacked that kind of nuance in understanding at the time) and so it didn't seem like too big a deal to tell my mom whatever was going on in my head. I wouldn't say it was a compulsory coming out, but I definitely lacked the communication skills to opt out of the conversation or lie and it's hard to say if that was good or bad at the time.

Interestingly, it was around this same time I started enjoying films and TV with queer characters, especially drag queens and other bitchy queens, in part because I noticed the dichotomy in how my family seemed to like them in some contexts (ie The Drew Carey Show) and avoid them in others (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). My family was by no means monolithic on these topics, but I remember feeling really drawn and connected to exactly those characters that made folks the least comfortable and that passion for these outcast femmes would over the years.

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My second coming out was as bisexual when I was in middle school, whenever Myspace was big... so probably when I was 12~13 years old. I didn't identify as gay or queer and didn't see my orientation as anything I would ever act on (for any gender; more on that later) but it felt important and terrifying to let the world know what was up. The world did not respond at the time

Even still, it was one of my better comings out. I didn't have to talk about it, and it gave me space to learn who was like me and helped me gravitate towards certain people as friends. Eventually, nearly a decade later when my brother came out as gay, he confided in me that he knew about me the whole time & figured I'd be supportive because of my Myspace. Thanks Tom Anderson, you're a peach!

At the same time entered my orientation on Myspace I had started feeling all kinds of unexpected ways about my body, and my emotional response to that was shame. I could never really place why my body disgusted me, but it just looked and felt wrong to me and that somehow made all of the pent-up sexual desires and cravings I was starting to have all the worse. When I started looking at porn I'd get really confused by which parts I was into and which parts and roles I wanted to have or do so I'd just stop thinking about my body at all. Honestly, I still have no real idea of what I want my body to look like but I at least now I know how that connects to dysphoria - that unhappiness is bothersome, but at least it's no longer confusing.

As a result of all of my body shame, I kind of just projected it outwards and felt disdain towards ever dating or having sex. Even when I got older and had and expressed clear crushes, the idea of sharing my body was unthinkable which led to some really awkward and naive confessions on my part later on. But, during middle school and high school, it meant that I occupied this weird space of occasionally talking to my friends about my orientation in an abstract way and having them outright forget about my coming out to them. There were some people I came out to 5 or more times over as many years, and I gained a (not completely inaccurate) reputation as being part of an asexual trio of friends. I imagine my queer friends and acquaintances knew what was going on, based on some very round-about conversations we had at the time and more direct conversations we had as adults, but somehow I spent most of my teenage years in the closet despite my best efforts.

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The third time I came out was in college, and was inadvertent. Despite my history, I didn't really grasp heteronormativity or understand that I had to explicitly come out to most people in order to be out so I simply failed to realize I was closeted by default, especially as I was trying much harder to give myself room to explore those identities (if not those desires). About halfway through my freshman year a friend and I took some pictures giving each other a half hug and looking awkward, which I guess is how we imagined couples behavred, and posted them to facebook as a joke. 

Unfortunately, someone had a crush on my friend and the situation exploded into heavy backlash - why was [Deme] pretending to be gay? At one point I was confronted, face-to-face about this, to which I could only shrug and hold back tears while I responded "I'm not pretending about that part, so I don't know what I did wrong?" I didn't realize that the straight girl was entitled to the straight boy, and even joking that that may not happen was a big no-no.

Not much changed after that, though I made a point to remember that if I hadn't vocalized my queerness to someone I was closeted to them, and I attended a few Queers and Allies events for good measure. I also kinda started following a gay friend around like a lost puppy, who I eventually went clubbing & doing the gay tourism thing with throughout Honshu when we lived in Japan. Interestingly, my time in East Asia turned into a kind of double-life of being out and living my best, clubbiest gay life because my first night in Seoul almost turned into a fight when a boy tried to buy me a drink and my chaperone didn't like it.

When I came back to the US I almost immediately started dating under the tutelage of a close friend. I went on a few dates with women, but I found my feelings were a lot less confusing and complicated when I dated men, and that I was a lot less nervous about how my body would be received - when I started dating bears it felt like I had overcome that anxiety, at least for a few years.

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The fourth time I came out was bisexual, again, over and over, to gay men because I dated women sometimes. I lost friends over this and started gravitating away from "gay men" and towards queers, more generally, as a result.

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The fifth time I came out was as polyamorous, which I've had to do anytime I meet someone interested in a second date. At first, this led to many false-starts with monogamous people that left me feeling used, until I eventually started to only date other polyamorous people to avoid that specific heartbreak.

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The sixth time I came out was when I was 25. I came out to my then-boyfriends that I was gray asexual, meaning the ways I experience sexual attraction are limited and inconsistent. Most of my dates and partners have been supportive, but many don't know what this means and it has strained more than one of my relationships, and limited many more before they really started.

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The seventh time I came out was at that same age, a few months later, as nonbinary. I came out very tepidly in a few spaces when I was 24, and became distraught when nothing in my life changed. I felt like everyone was ignoring me. At 25 I became forceful, and began donning dresses, using different pronouns, growing my hair, and more - anything to get people to realize I was serious and stop calling me he.

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The eighth time I came out was when I was 26 in grad school. I started realizing that nonbinary didn't capture the weight of my experiences re: exclusion, harassment, and violence and so I came out as transgender and, specifically, as trans femme. Ironically, I came out to my school as transgender so I would be taken more seriously (they did not), but once I had I knew it was right. My specific gender identity has been evolving and transforming ever since and it's no longer something I can easily account for.

Coming out as trans femme has given me the space and clarity necessary to resolve some issues that were stuck in my own head; it's made it easier to accept my body because I understand why I don't like it. It makes it easier to date other women and femmes because those complicated feelings now make sense. I understand better what kinds of supports I need to thrive.

But, it's also deeply complicated my life; reducing the opportunities I have to succeed and excel, exposing me to physical and emotional violence, and eliminating my credibility when I seek community support around certain experiences with anyone who is not also a woman or femme and/or trans.

I'm happier being out and knowing these things about myself, but it often feels incredibly dangerous, isolating, and depressing.

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I focused only on orientation, but there's so much more I could have talked about - both in terms of identities and things that I have done or experienced and I hope those gaps are as clear as the text on the page.

[lfthearth]

Dating and Emotional Labor

In light of a new crush, I've been spending a lot of time thinking through past relationships/folks I dated and had regrets about. Mostly I was thinking about times where I felt guilty about how things panned out, about actions I took or didn't take, related to the specific folks I was thinking about. A lot of that came down to this notion that I think of some of these folks as being "sweet" and not deserving of how I treated them (eg breaking up with them, dropping contact with them, generally not continuing to date them despite them having that caring "sweet" personality, etc).

It gives me a weird sense of anxiety and regret when dating new people I've designated as sweet in my head, and I think it's a troubling notion that needs to be deconstructed a bit. Like, when I actually try to think through why I think of these various people as sweet, the structure kind of breaks down. And I think that's because I've been socialized to conflate disparate constructs: being caring and being passive

Like, I have a really clear concept of what sweet actions are. Those are things like picking up your bestie from work, or making your partner coffee in the morning, or buying your friend a burrito when they're low on cash, it's not taking the last smore at camp when you know someone hasn't gotten one yet, or asking your coworker how their parent's doing when they're sick. Being sweet involves exercising emotional labor to show care or regard for another person. It can involve being actively engaged in something, or it can be a passive consideration for another being.

Yet, when I think about sweet people, I almost always think of folks that are passive and soft-spoken. And I think often these folks are thought of as sweet socially - it's kind of a title that they just get given, and they kind of accept for themselves.

But, passivity isn't at all the same thing as being a caring person - it often is a way of deflecting emotional labor onto someone else. Especially in the cases where I only went out with some of these folks a couple times, being soft-spoken about how they feel about me when I'm direct and blatant, waiting for me to contact them to set up dates, or even avoiding talking about upsetting things are not acts of caring: they are ways of avoiding doing emotionally brave and difficult things and preserving one's own comfort.

That isn't to say one can't be passive *and* sweet in an emotionally laborious way, but that the concepts are not synonymous. This is especially important to me right now because when I reanalyze a lot of these relationships in terms of divide of emotional labor the story changes: things broke apart in a lot of cases because there was an unspoken expectation that either I would do this or that emotional labor, or things would not continue (and they often didn't). In other words, I have left these various situations with long-lingering (many of these situations occurred when I lived in DC, 4-5 years ago) guilt because I have categorized the other person has being sweet and caring and myself as not being so. I have literally shamed myself for not living up to the unequal expectations of labor, devaluing myself and the work I have done and do in relationships, and placing folks on a pedestal for essentially being inaccessible. ------------------------------- I think there are far reaching consequences to this as well. As in, I don't think I'm alone in reducing these personality structures into these ways. A prominent example is the whole "nice guy" complex. I think most folks on my FB are pretty critical of that notion, but we also know that society in a larger sense totally accepts that nice guys deserve dates/marriage/sex/women, specifically because they are nice, sweet, good guys. But what makes them so? The only defining characteristic this trope seems to rely on is the inherent passivity and soft-spoken nature of these "nice guys." In other words, this same conflation between being passive and shirking emotional labor with being a caring person. Furthering that with the idea that women and femmes are typically the folks expected to be emotionally laborious, whereas men and butches are expected to not engage in that labor at all, and you have a hidden, gross underscoring of the nice guy's masculinity: they deserve women because they are successfully enacting their gendered role.

[lfthearth]

Back to School Blues

Today felt like kind of my first day back in the school environment, and I felt myself kind of emotionally close up until I got home and just kind of relax and all the sadness sorta flow out overwhelmingly/confusingly disconnected from the things I was unhappy about. It was extremely bizarre at the time, since today has been full of little victories (friend/metamour giving me all sorts of cute clothes, exciting packages coming in the mail, small but solid victories around changing the diversity praxis in my department, socialization, etc...)

But, that feeling is really familiar to me. I hadn’t realized it until I felt it again, but I guess I reflexively have been closing up and compartmentalizing school life and everything else. And, it’s been really successful in getting me through each school day and the longer quarters, but I think the unrecognized toll has been coming home every day and either having a bunch of work I can dig into to stay in that mindset, or just emotionally relaxing and letting all of the sadness and hurt pour out. Over the summer, I’ve been completely drained and utterly demotivated and I’ve openly been questioning why, but the reality is pretty obvious now: they’re just the long-term effects of coping the way I have been coping and if I go through it again I will crash again, just the same.

And while I've been fighting and struggling with my environment to try and soften it so I don't have to go through exactly this next year (or earlier, since it’s building and it’s not like I’ve really processed last year yet), but I know those changes will be incremental at best. So, now I'm just sitting here terrified of doing that again, but know I'm likely going to anyway...

At least I have a therapist now to patch me back up? She’s gonna have so much work to do :x 

[lfthearth]

Double-Standards

My instinct is to apologize for the lack of posts this summer - I’ve basically only posted a couple of times since my Spring Quarter. However, as part of accepting and getting used to my limitations, and in recognizing that my blog can be just a casually updated space, I’ll just start by putting out there my desire to apologize (which is different, somehow).

As you may have gathered from my last post, the past few months have been pretty difficult for me. I’ve spent most of it reflecting on this past year and the transitions that came with it: moving back to Portland, starting school, finding work, building community, forming relationships, and how my gender transition colors all of those elements. I had been so caught up in my classwork, internship, research, and working life that I simply did not have the mental energy to process all of these things until school ended, and now that I have the time for it it’s been all-consuming and somewhat earth shattering.

During the school year I was so caught up in so many different things I really only had the energy to feel sad, defeated, and overwhelmed. Now that those responsibilities have dipped and my energy reserves have replenished, I’m finding those reserves are constantly burning with rage at the experiences. Moreover, I’m finding myself unable to contain this rage and have been (somewhat productively, somewhat unproductively, seeking change and meeting resistance. Here are the big things that have been going on:

Resistance to permanent and consistent sharing of all employee pronouns at work as a way of avoiding employee misgendering/placing that burden on trans staff

The director of my department’s apparent/perceived/projected indifference at my being misgendered and excluded due to my gender

My therapist telling me that I was asking too much by wanting trans-competent care, objectifying/fetishizing trans needs and competent care as “fascinating” subjects to ruminate on, and ultimately not being able to distinguish marginalized care of one sort from another (ie he compared the desire of survivors of sexual assault to be treated by other survivors to the desire of queer/trans folk wanting queer/trans therapists)

Certainly there are a lot of larger and smaller components to each of these, but the underlying structure that bothers me is the hypocrisy of the double-standards that allow each of these situations to exist. I’ve come to this conclusion (with the help of many long talks with my boyfriend, thanks love) primarily through gender-swapped thought experiments:

How would these various gatekeepers respond if my gender was binary conforming?

Certainly I cannot prove that things would be different, but common-sense says that it would completely change these situations. Let’s imagine these scenarios, using the marginalized gender of the two binary genders. What if a woman brought these concerns to these various institutional sources of power?

How quickly would a supervisor, the director of a school, squash harassment in the form of peers intentionally misgendering a woman because her body had a little extra hair, or she had broad shoulders, or a flatter chest? I imagine even the professors overhearing this kind of harassment would step-in and administer some kind of discipline, whereas for me they often perpetrate it. Similarly, how quickly would faculty swoop in, or even other students, to include me in study groups, field trips, and social events if they knew a female student was being excluded because she was a woman? There would be significant legal repercussions as well - how easily would that student or employee win their Title IX lawsuit? (Pretty easily, so long as they’re not transgender).

In the case of the therapist, the scenario is simply absurd. Women wanting female therapists is more or less the expectation, and a male therapist so much as suggesting there aren’t enough female therapists in a major city to provide competent care could easily ruin his career or practice. In my case, I didn’t even suggest I needed a non-binary therapist - merely a transgender or even trans-knowledgeable queer therapist.

Yet - the reality is these comparisons are not visible to ciscentric society. When I talk to my supervisors, I have to explain why staff being misgendered is a big deal - and do so slightly less I seem like I’m just out to make trouble. With the director of my department I have to focus on scarier issues, like harassment and how exclusion affects my grades and learning, least she dismiss me completely (she still has). With my therapist, I filed a grievance and the eventual response was that they provided my therapist with opportunities to advance his understanding - no suggestion of discipline, not even forced retraining, and no apology.

And why should there be? At the end of the day, my gender is more joke than real in most eyes. Asking for respect surrounding it has to be a joke too, right?

[lfthearth]

People ask me a lot what grad school is like

The more I reflect on this past year as a graduate student, the more I’m convinced that academia is a roach motel. It’s designed to attract marginalized people, folks of little means, folks who differ, folks who aspire to be more than society wants them to be with an ever-increasing list of sparkling promises:

Jobs, Career Potential, Health Care, Food and Housing Security, Meaning, Power, Understanding, Community

Once we’re inside, it becomes clear that those promises are empty shells. We are provided work in ways that conflicts with our work schedule, or with wages below survival levels. The promise of careers afterwards has been disproven so many times it’s hardly worth mentioning. Housing is provided, but only at significantly above market price and often with a waiting list. The increasingly common campus food bank only operates during course hours, and runs out of food within 15 minutes each day. Health care is subsidized only at a level sustainable for healthy youth - for a chronically ill trans person such as myself there is no relief. “LGBTQ counselors and physicians” are provided just enough training to tolerate me existence when I say I’m trans, but repeatedly fail to understand my body. Moreover, our insurance leaves so much of the specialist fees, whom I have to see regularly, at my expense.

Moreover, these promises are really sticky traps. Even superficial, the small taste of what the rest of the world does not provide for us keeps us here - how else can we survive?

But we’re not supposed to. Our diversity is valued only so far as it brings return value to our departments - through grant funding, through prestige, through our knowledge and labor. We are not here to change the system, as many of us come to do. We are here to provide a labor, at our own cost, and then vanish.

[lfthearth]

One Year

So, I’m still gathering the motivation and energy to get back into posting now that school is done (clearly I’m having a lot of trouble, though). But, today marks a pretty significant milestone so I felt compelled to document it somehow...

One year ago today I got my first dress. 5 days later I went out in public for the first time in it (my profile picture to the left). Here’s the photo my partner took for me:

When I first saw myself in this photo, all I could see was the clear terror and discomfort in my brow, my defensive stance, the bulges and gaps in the fabric of the dress where it was clear the custom fit done by the tailors had not accounted for my body. At the time I thought I looked disgusting in it, which I attributed then (and still attribute now) to internalized transmisogyny. I figured the only way to get over that impulse of self-loathing and revulsion was to keep doing it, to keep looking at myself as I express the ways I want to until it feels natural.

Now, a year later, I look back and the photo and see strength. I see power in my ability to push through, and resist the feelings to find some amount of self-love. There are a lot of days where I don’t have that power or that love. But when I see this photo, and the ones from my first days out in public presenting more “femme” (not really femme, but definitely not butch, right?) I have hope that I can and will find those things in myself again.

Here’s to another year of being an out and open nonbinary trans person, and another year with this dress because it’s cute and I finally feel great in it.

[lfthearth]

So originally I was going to post about how the head honcho of my work referred to me in official correspondence as “they” and how validating that was (and still is), but something way more exciting happened in the meantime: an Oregon Court recognized a person’s (said person prefers not to be referred to with pronouns) gender as non-binary!

This is amazing news, not just for the person in question, but for a whole slew of third gender, no gender, and other non-conforming Oregonians who are comfortable with “non-binary” as an identifier, but in the US broadly as this was the first time a US court has made this kind of declaration. This might go beyond that narrow range, too, as this case was completely unprecedented - the implications appear to be that nonbinary is a valid “gender category” for transition in Oregon, but the truth seems to depend on future court cases. Maybe we will see other gender umbrellas or specific identities in future cases - maybe this will be a breaking down of prescribed categories Oregonians will have to select, and an opening up of legally recognized genders in the state (and beyond)?

Although those implications are big, that is about as far as I am comfortable speculating right now (and honestly I may have gone further than I should have, but I am pretty excited still).

There are definitely clear limitations to this case that are worth noting:

Although this sets precedent for other folks having their gender marker changed to non-binary in Oregon, it does not necessarily give us a clear legal path to follow. The person in the article blazed a trail, but at the end of the case that person had to rely on the decision of the court and the rest of us are the same way. Some common elements of that are: 

A letter from a therapist

A letter from a doctor

Hormonal therapy

Surgery

“Other treatment,” which sort of boils down to “court’s discretion”

Even if you jump through all of those hoops, Oregon can only change Oregon documentation...so for people like me who were born in other states we would not be able to change or birth certificates based on this. Additionally, if we move to another state, our gender as recognized by Oregon might not be recognized by our new state (or, as of right now, definitely would not be).

Additionally, the US federal government does not recognize nonbinary as a gender category, so presumably we would not be able to have our passports changed to match, either.

As a final point, as a long-term goal it might not really be desirable to have government recognition of gender identities since there will always be limitations to how it’s done, and legal implications surrounding how government forces define those gender categories. It is also extremely unclear why government documentation needs to record gender or sex as a category at all, especially given the confusion and red-tape it often provides for gender non-conforming, transgender, nonbinary, intersex, two-spirit, and other individuals in our day-to-day lives.

I mean, trans people (in particular trans women and trans femmes) have been having enormous difficulties and invasion of privacy thanks to the TSA, which requires genders “match” between flight reservation and government ID (ick), though in reality kind of does whatever they want (double ick). Considering the sheer lack of human decency the TSA has already been showing trans folk, I cannot imagine agents will respond well to licenses with a gender they are unfamiliar with/do not understand that also potentially mismatches boarding passes (cause airlines still only offer those two options, right?).

That’s a mess we can touch on at another time, though. In the meantime, I am pretty excited that I might be able to get an OR license that says nonbinary (or maybe even agender), and I can always use my passport as photo ID if I need something that says otherwise. Plus, this might be kind of the pushing factor that makes me start seeing a therapist - a thing I have been wanting to do anyway. I feel like it might be a good time to start building a case, you know? :)

[lfthearth]

Faculty Meeting

So, one thing that kind of got lost over these past few weeks is that I was made my department’s new student faculty representative. I took the position (unopposed) so that I could escalate some of the concerns I have been having with my program: lack of faculty support, funding scarcity, food and housing insecurity, and discrimination (ie harassment and exclusion). Originally I hoped to bring up these points at my first meeting so I could get them set to the agenda, but unfortunately, the previous rep attended so I did not get a chance to speak. So, the plan became that I would bring these issues up today and it has been super nerve-wracking just waiting for the day.

But, I got my platform today and it was really good to unload some of those points. Afterwards, four different faculty came up to me to apologize to me and thank me for sharing what I did, as well as to generally reassure me that the faculty would take these complaints seriously. First among them was the chairperson of our department, who wants to meet with me over the summer to discuss my experiences and how we can work on making the program a safe space for everyone. Very excited that I got this opportunity, and that I’m being taken seriously, but also nervous about what’s to come and how we can move forward.

[lfthearth]

A few updates

Unfortunately it’s been a few weeks since I’ve had a chance to update, but I only have about a week and a half left of classes so things should ease up soon and I’ll be able to post more.

Some quick updates:

A couple weeks ago I finished my first bottle of biotin! This was really exciting for me since it is a very real mark of my progress, and is kind of a new way to keep track of time that’s specific to my transition. This felt like a super significant milestone :) (also my hair is getting soooo long now, it’s great)

I was recently made the faculty representative for my program, and my adviser has positioned himself as my ally to help facilitate me taking time during faculty meetings to address the problems with exclusion and discrimination I have felt as a queer nonbinary person in the program. I don’t know what this looks like, but I’m very excited that I will have this sort of stage moving forward.

I started an Instagram account and have been using it to post fairly regular selfies as a way of becoming more confident and proud of how I look, especially as I transition. I definitely still have a lot of misgivings when I leave my house in a skirt, tights, or with a purse, and many days I’ll leave my house feeling good but feel anxious and scared when I’m out in public (today was one of those days - not at all helped by a guy shouting “Are you kidding me” as we passed each other on an otherwise empty sidewalk). Some days I will feel so anxious I’ll change into something relatively butch, but I’ve been doing that less and less often. Anyway, I know I’m late to the Instagram party, and I know a few of my followers mostly like my selfies (thanks!), so definitely seek me out on there :) Willing to follow any NB/genderqueer/questioning person back, just let me know.

I’m pretty sure I can change my earrings out now at will :)

Anyway, I expect to have more free time and energy this summer, and as there were a lot of posts I didn’t get to over this school year, I should have lots of content to add. I appreciate everyone’s patience and support though, you all have made me feel really good about starting this blog and transitioning!

[lfthearth]

Meta-Update

Sorry all - I have a lot of posts in me to come, but finals stretch is making it hard to find time to write them. Thanks for your patience so far, I’ll post real content soon <3

[lfthearth]

Tradition and Femme Ritual

I’ve always been fascinated with ritual traditions; ways of circumscribing community, togetherness, and all sorts of emotion into behaviors that traverse the ages due to their own inertia. Maybe it could go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: gender roles are shaped by these traditions, even as they color those traditions. For a long time I assumed that this connection could only be repressive, but given my transition I’ve had to reconsider.

I’ve grown accustomed to viewing gender traditions as a way of both codifying modern gender roles into norms and placing the entire weight of (an invented) history behind it as a way of securing that set of normative expectations. This is often (always?) connected to misogyny - just look to the argument against women in the workforce (either in specific roles, or generally...take your pick). The arguments can be summed up as traditionally women have been homemakers and not employed in the private sector, they have a number of home-making rituals that they are the keepers of. Those rituals must be enacted by women because that is how it always has been, or there is something that is essential to women that makes them best suited for those roles, or whatever. The historic precedent of women working in factories during the industrial revolution, or again during either world war, or of men being paid for those same rituals being professional and therefore okay (when a woman is a homemaker she must cook and bake based on her ritual knowledge and sometimes science when it leads to more capital exchange, but outside of the home restauranteering and the kitchen are suddenly a man’s game).

My point above is not to discredit any of these structures because they are very real and very damaging. Instead, what I’m learning is that these same structures and practices can be co-opted by trans people to form, create, or simply gain confidence and empowerment in our own genders and bodies. The trick that makes this work is that tradition and ritual are not solely a means of creating and distributing normative values along gender roles; they are also a way of sharing emotions and feeling connected to a community, to a long lineage of people experiencing and expressing gender and gender variance that we can then recapture and absorb. This is separate from the judgment that community has value, or the social knowledge that communities have a specific history, that we traditionally think of as being shared by ritual. Instead, I’m referring to the sheer emotional, psychic, spiritual connection that comes through ritual practice that is one hand merely a feeling and on the other the fundamental building block to society (Could we really create things like law of there was no basic feeling of sympathy or empathy? Who with power would bother?)

A big part of my fascination with ritual and tradition has come from feeling disconnected to my own heritage. Although I’m Jewish, identify with the religion and culture to various degrees, and have grown up with various involvement with the synagogue, most of those elements have been somewhat superficial. Like many other Jews, attending services and receiving bar mitzvah (if someone has a gender neutral variant of this please let me know so I can edit this later <3) was a mix of cultural inertia and community face-saving. The ritual coming of age was far disconnected from any consequences related to increased responsibilities or a change in household role after - we (me, my siblings, my friends, my cousins, etc…) did it because our parents wanted us to, and they wanted us to because our extended family and community expected us to. Up until my bar mitzvah I would try and find space within the community where ritual had feeling, and on occasion I did, and on occasion I still seek those feelings in those same places, but my bar mitzvah service largely disconnected me from that feeling, and collapsed a lot of those traditions into nothingness.

The story there is actually quite straight-forward: although in theory I was training all my life, in truth the year before my 13th birthday in my synagogue was dedicated to preparing me to read from the Torah and Haftarah and lead the Shabbat service. For the better part of a year I was ridiculed and by instructor in the hopes that it would shame me, at the time an increasingly disinterested 12 year old, into caring about my studies so that I would lead a beautiful service. However, about three months before my bar mitzvah date my retina detached in my sleep and months of (in my case, desperately) needed prep time was completely lost. Before I could feel any panic about my inevitable failing, the lead rabbis of my synagogue stepped in and cut 3/4ths of my Haftarah portion, effectively removing any potential challenge for me and completely depriving the day of what little meaning it had left. Without that struggle for preparation, and without a connection to any kind of change in role, behavior, or responsibility afterwards, I saw the event as an empty day - one where I was expected to exploit my family and friends for financial gain (the money a middle class Jewish white kid’s family gives to the bar mitzvah child would give me financial security for my next 6 months of grad school, easily). As my family only practiced our Hebrew rituals sparingly, this rift felt like the final string tying me to Judaism and I quickly stopped attending synagogue altogether.

Due to these circumstances, I have only been able to realize the potential power of ritual in terms of transition through other queer and trans people, especially trans and queer femmes and women of color. The ways in which latinxs incorporate brujeria, or black femmes and women center the importance of their women and place themselves in that history, or the way my southern femme pals channel their mothers, grandmothers, and distance ancestors into the art of baking on intuition all are glorious acts of femme creation that I have felt absent from my own life. The family heritage that I know is one that I have found empty and rejected, and the more personal stories and histories are ones lost to ages. The only thing I know of my ancestors is that we spread the way my family spreads today - my closest relative is over 300 miles away, and most over over 1000. I know of pinpointed stories, but of no tales, no traditions, no single recipe has been passed down the ages to me and so the heritage of my sisters and siblings has become both a thing of awe and envy for me.

But that doesn’t mean I am totally excluded from ritual, nor the feeling of atemporal community that comes with it. Even if the heritage of my practices is within one generation, some of that feeling remains. This is something I’ve been slowly trying to realize, but was directly confronted with tonight. Over the past 5 years or so I’ve gotten really into cooking and baking as hobby. It started out of a need to be thrifty, as a broke college student (things haven’t changed too much), but I came to love it as a means of self-expression, of self-sufficiency, and more recently, as a way of non-verbally sharing joy, love, and tenuous connections to heritage with my friends and loved ones. Although I don’t have family heirloom recipes, I do have dishes and treats that I got to enjoy thanks to the bounty of New York’s widespread Jewish community, and recipes my mom could scrounge up from wherever. Although I don’t have those recipes (and probably could not eat most of them these days anyway), I’ve adapted my mom’s habit of scavenging for whatever recipes I can find that look good, and adapt them to my own tastes.

Recently I’ve been trying for blueberry muffins, a treat I have only the vaguest of memories of my mom making, but that fill me with feelings of warmth and joy. However, when I made them for the first time last week the results were disappointing and I could not place why. They were tasty, they came out more or less how they should have, but they lacked that nostalgia factor. Today, I tried again, combining a couple of recipes and tricks, more out of boredom than any hope and, when they were finished, I felt transported back to my mom’s kitchen as a child.

It was purely an accident, but it showed me that there are some tastes and traditions that I have from my youth, even if forget them sometimes. And, moreover, the act of creating them and the knowledge that I could create them and share them as I please gave me a sense of connection to my mother, and faintly, to her grandmother whom I know was a great cook through my mother’s adoration for her (even if none of her recipes survive). So, there’s a tiny, tenuous chain there that connects me to this tradition. It doesn’t matter if this recipe, or even this type of baked good, goes back particularly far in my family tree because that feeling is there, and that emotional connection exists. Through it I can channel something of a connection to the femmes of my family line and let it shape the queer I am today. That feeling, that connection, belongs to me and is something I can adapt, carry with me, and subvert as necessary as a power source and motivational tool for my own survival in this world. And, even if it’s tenuous, I am overjoyed to have it.

[lfthearth]

Doctors

So, I've had a sinus infection for about 5 weeks now weakened/resurged after 10 days of antibiotics. I'm starting a new round, but if they don't work the next step is to send me to a specialist and all I can think is that this round of drugs better be effective because I don't want to deal with accessing yet another doctor's office and feel like I have to make the choice of advocating for my gender or advocating for my health.

[lfthearth]

New Tops!

I found a shop (5 pound everything) with cheap tops, and they arrived yesterday! I am very excited (mostly because they seem to look okay with my one skirt) so I'm gonna show them off.

This one does a stellar job of showing off my nips. I'm not sure that's what I was looking for or not, but there it is.

The other one looks exactly like every other top I own, but in knit/with sequins, so obvi I love it. Also, sequins!!

Okay, that’s all I got. Thanks for humoring me!

[lfthearth]

Pronouns and Validation

The last couple weeks have been really weird for me regarding how other people talk to me for a few reasons. On one hand, a few relatively important (folks I see often) have stopped misgendering me. On the other hand, for basically the first time, folks I don’t know at all have started commenting on, and asking me questions about, my gender and pronouns to my face. In my head this has kind of been a goal - so many folks close to me have lots of questions but don’t have the will, or language, or confidence, or whatever else to actually ask me. Now that it’s happening though, it’s kind of...really awkward and weird and I feel a little guilty for that disconnect since I basically was asking for this.

Before I began transitioning, I naively believed there were only two ways folks could deal with transitioned pronouns - they could use my actual pronouns and help validate my identity, socially and personally, or they could misgender me and invalidate me. I kind of expected a lot of people would misgender me, and a few folks would use they pronouns. What I’m actually finding is that most folks go a totally different route - they sort of avoid gendered language altogether, including pronouns of any sort. This might seem like a really weird thing to notice - how do you spot a non-use of language, especially something as infrequent as a 3rd person pronoun referring to you in your presence? But, I’ve definitely become hypervigilant about pronouns...I have so much anxiety and dread, not just over whether or not folks will even use the right ones, but this fear that my non-normative pronouns will lead to some kind of confrontation or exchange where a person (or group of people) will insult me, make fun of me, harm me, who knows. It hasn’t happened yet, and when I say it it seems unlikely...but in reality I hear about exchanges like that all the time, so maybe it’s not such a weird fear.

Anyway, my point was that some of my classmates, supervisors, and bosses have recently gone from avoiding pronouns around me to actively affirming my identity by referring to me as they/them/theirs. I’ve even heard a few people, who as recently as March would only refer to me by my name, correct themselves and each other. The feeling here is so absurdly good, it’s in many ways a huge pay-off for months of work (though I can’t really know what caused that change. It doesn’t seem like much, in theory as long as nobody’s misgendering me I should be happy, but the reality is that each person who simply avoids misgendering me hides themselves as an ally, a friendly face, a node of support in a network of indifference and hostility. Living in social circles where I can go weeks or months without having my gender affirmed feels so isolating and lonely, especially after that simple, one syllable word can make me feel so good, so connected, and so respected by my peers, colleagues, friends, and loved ones.

But, as I mentioned before the cut, I’m starting to see another side of being gendered correctly on occasion. To be honest, these effects were a bit more expected. Basically, in response to the fact that I loudly advocate for myself (I introduce myself with my pronouns in each of my classes, to most new people, on my professional website, and in my email signature, and a few other highly-visible tactics) folks are becoming increasingly comfortable singling me out for my gender, as the only example of a population. Now folks are confident singling-me out during course discussions about “issues I must care about” (eg anti-trans bathroom bills and unisex bathrooms), calling me by name in the middle of a lecture or seminar and forcing me to talk about my personal politics as if they’re playing back a quick-sound bite. Folks who have heard me introduce myself a few times are also coming to me with highly-pointed questions (the other day was “Why does it even matter if people use your correct pronouns, it’s not like people use pronouns in front of you, right?” with a few follow-ups), without much regard for my time or comfort. I know these exchanges are pretty common in our communities, and they’re not totally new to me (when I ID’d as a gay, cis-man I would constantly answer questions about queer hook-ups, HIV and AIDS, marriage, organizations, etc), but I’ve never had trans-specific questions directed to me, and rarely have I got questions that aim to challenge my own narrative about my experiences so blatantly. I don’t mind the questions in and of themselves, but I’m pretty shocked at the level of disregard and lack of awareness around how the questions are coming in.

But, if it means more folks will positively affirm my identity, I guess it’s still a net win? :/

[lfthearth]

Earrings Revisited

My new earrings finally arrived! It’s still too early to take out my starter piercings, so I don’t have any glamorous fashion shots. But I am very excited for my future with these buddies!

Here’s one shot of me, new hoops gracefully balanced on my current studs:

And the entire haul of new earrings:

[lfthearth]

TDoV 2016

Wishing a powerful day of trans visibility to all!

While those who can are out being seen, fighting invisibility, erasure, and discrimination, let's keep in mind the high costs of visibility and how they're unequitably higher for some folks in our community, especially BIPOC trans women and femmes. None of us are liberated until we all are liberated!

[lfthearth]

Growing up with Jewish Hair

Recently I’ve started to grow out my hair, as a way of trying to create a femme-r, or at least less butch, appearance. This is a pretty common practice amongst trans folk - a lot of us either grow out our hair, invest in weaves and wigs, or some mix thereof if we can. For me, I’ve been hitting some snags in the ways my hair will actually grow, and with the specific iterations and lessons learned from growing out my hair. I’m still doing it, but it makes the process feel complex and confusing.

Word of warning: This is going to be a long post 

I have always been somewhat of an outsider, and my hair has always been one of the more distinctive elements that mark my difference from other (white people). Because it is such a visual, physical representation of how I’m different it’s come to symbolize for me a lot of my “otherness,” and so I have a bit of a tenuous history with it.

As far back as I can remember my hair has been a focal point of my identity. When I was really young, it would grow wild and frizzy and adults loved to run their hands through it and comment about how cute my hair was.

When I hit grade school adults continued to praise me for my curls, noting how I looked like my mom or else how obviously Jewish it marked me (they also thankfully stopped playing with it at that point), while my classmates and friends would make fun of me for having poofy, frizzy hair.

Since graduating high school, it’s pretty rare for someone to actively make fun of my hair, and instead I mostly receive “positive,” fetishizing comments about how nice it would be to have my curls. During college it also started to become clear that my hair wasn’t just a minor difference for a lot of white people, but an element that marked me in some ways as ethnically distinct.

In courses and conversations about race, ethnicity, and embodied difference, especially when all or most of us were white, if something about native, black, or otherwise curly, frizzy, or kinky hair came up the other white folks in the room would turn to me and nod, laugh, or say something to connect me to that point. This is not because my experiences with white supremacy are congruent or even particularly similar to BIPOC experiences - while some folks find me ethnically ambiguous (it does not seem to matter what my ethnicity is so long as it is apparent it isn’t strictly Western European/colorless white), there is wide-scale agreement that I am white and I’m granted the privileges that come with that status. Instead, the underlying, systemic point serves to remind me that Jews have only recently obtained this white status, that it’s tenuous, and that I’m fortunate to have only lived in nations, and parts of those nations, where anti-semitism isn’t a threat to my life or livelihood. Nobody can actively make fun of my hair (or other distinguishing Ashkenazi traits) because that would be anti-semitic and, over the past century, we have been given privileged white status (meaning anti-semitism is conceded to be unacceptable). But, reminding me that these traits mark me different, mark my ethnicity, and trace back this history of anti-semitic violence and exclusion through comparisons with groups where these things are still actively happening is fair game.

The general result of this is I’ve grown up severely confused about my hair. When I was younger, I understood this all to mean I should de-frizz my hair. But, that was a pretty tall order at the time - not only did I have minimal access to products, but most of them seemed to have no effect on me. Additionally, the few Jewish celebrities with hair curly like mine is are generally known for it being unkempt and frizzy. So, the next best thing I could think of was to cut it so short that the curls were either gone, or at least couldn’t blend together, poof out, and frizz. Every now and then I would try to grow out my hair and tame (read: straighten) my hair, but I would always give up and shave it - generally cutting it all off.

Now that I am transitioning, I feel like I have to grow out my hair. Long or short hair does not necessarily mean femme or butch, plenty of folks subvert those presumed gender roles and do so magnificently - and I may choose to have shorter hair down the road in recognition of that. That said, I feel like having long hair will be one of the more effective ways I can alter how I’m read - especially since I don’t currently have plans to go on HRT, shave my beard, or wax, shave, or even cover my body hair.

Additionally, growing out my hair has become a sort of mission for me now. When I first started socially transitioning and playing with my presentation related to that, I found it really hard to look at myself in the mirror due to internalized transmisogyny - I felt monstrous, and decided I needed to wear “femme” clothes more often to overcome it. The repetition helped, but there was always something not quite right about my style - like I was trying to hard to be something that wasn’t quite me.

Here’s one from July 2015 (my first dress!):

And September:

Around the same time, I was shown and encountered some famous genderqueer identities, including Darkmatter - and it started to click what was wrong. Part of what makes Darkmatter and their fashion so amazing is how they connect with who they are, including their cultural history, and express that in their own unique way in their fashion, in their clothes, in their styling, and their make-up. They don’t run from these facts the way I kind of had been. I don’t really believe in authenticity as construct, but I think there are ways we can work with our flesh, our cultural connections, and the general forces that have helped shaped us to be who we are and form that into something beautiful. I think Alok and Janani manage this outstandingly, and it made me realize that I want ot be able to capture this for my own self.

November:

December:

And, finally, March!

Part of this for me is learning to more fully respect the Jewish femmes that have come before, showing respect for them in my own style and callbacks. For example, in this whole narrative I haven’t even talked about my mom or my grandma - both gorgeous women, who have the same hair type as me. Up until very recently it never occurred to me that I could have what they have. Another part of this is learning myself how to actually care for my hair, not fight or run from it. I need to grow it as long as it will go, learn the ins and outs of caring for it myself, and style myself in ways that feel like I’m taking care of my body, respecting it, even as I struggle to change it.

As my hair grows, having curly/frizzy hair has been a bit scary for me as it relates directly back to grade school insults - and is generally something outside of my control. The big issue I’ve had with my hair is less that I can’t get it to look how I want it to, but that I feel like that look is non-static. My hair kind of reverts to a big poofy ball within a few hours, no matter what, and I definitely internalized some gross sexist norms that butches have unkempt hair/femmes have kempt hair. This means that the longer I’m out, the frizzier my hair gets, the more I feel this sort of unjustified fear that my gender will be increasingly invalidated by those around me.

Although I am definitely trying to learn how to reduce, or at least manage, frizziness, another, much bigger, part of this process is just learning to accept that my hair will not always be in my control and that that doesn’t make me lesser, and definitely doesn’t make me male, masculine, butch, or whatever else.

So, last week I did a bit of a photo experiment and tracked how my hair changes throughout the day to get a sense of what’s actually going on, and you know...to chill the fuck out about it :p

Freshly done:

After a ride downtown/walking around a bit:

Back home:

Bedtime:

Morning (I think I am mostly cool with the fact that my bedhead makes me look like a gorgon):

All wrapped up :p