The Exquisite Terror of Trans Creation
I wrote a novel this year, and it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever done.
It’s a terrible thing, to be gripped by the desire to create, to have the skills to do it, and ideas worth using, and to still find yourself powerless to actually do it. To stare at the page, trying desperately to pierce through the roar of dysphoria buzzing in your brain, and to barely be able to get a chapter down. To then throw away that one chapter when the self-loathing hits, when your mind admonishes you for the hubris of thinking you might have something worth saying. So eventually you stop. You stop writing. You stop outlining. You stop even letting your imagination run wild with thoughts of what could be. And you are so terribly depressed from the dysphoria that you barely even feel bad about it. Not sad. Just numb.
Life goes on. And then one day you’ve had enough, and you make the appointment. You go, you get your HRT, and…it works. Not the very first day. But you’re two weeks in and the roar has quieted to a whisper. Your mind is clearer, you’ve gained an ability to focus. And a quiet part of your mind dares to ask if maybe, someday, you might be able to pick up your pen again. You don’t, not then, but the thought is there.
The next two years pass in a blur. You figure out a lot about yourself. The shell of a man that hid you is falling away, and the woman you are has to learn to walk on her own two feet.
You have fun. You make mistakes. You get hurt. But you’re actually living.
You dye your hair red. You get an undercut. Everybody thinks it suits you.
The person you thought was one of your best friends in the world, a queer comrade in arms, outs himself as a manipulative, deceitful narcissist when you become someone he can’t easily control. He hurts you and someone you love immensely, he lies to mutual friends about you, and then he disappears, leaving you to pick up the pieces. It’s only once he’s gone that you realize just how coercive and manipulative he had been.
Your roommate becomes your best friend, and then your girlfriend, and then your wife. The circumstances of this are so incredibly juicy that you suspect you’ll turn it into a book someday.
Your state government changes the law, so everything about being trans gets more difficult less than a year after you started transitioning. You still keep moving. The weight of government restriction feels light compared to the depression and self-loathing you’ve left behind.
You discover so much about what you need and want, and you finally stop forcing yourself to perform masculinity. You let go of so much performative bullshit, from your clothes to your music to even a hobby or two. You don’t ditch it all though. Only that which no longer serves you.
You embrace your femininity, and find so much new to explore. You reteach yourself to cook. You let yourself examine your aesthetic sensibilities. Your living space transforms from a sterile, cluttered bachelor pad to a warm and inviting space. You begin to dress yourself differently, and you like the way you look.
It turns out you’re still kinda butch. But that’s okay.
You get an Audre Lorde poem tattooed on one forearm, and a FFXIV quote on the other. They’re quickly followed by a copy of Nami’s tattoo from One Piece, and Jolyne Cujoh’s butterfly tattoo. Your first instinct is to feel like a dork, but it gets overridden by the realization that you look fucking sick. One night out, a pretty girl with purple hair and a septum piercing affirms your estimation.
In defiance of a world that hates and fears you, you become a giant, tattooed trans dyke. You discover there are sapphically-inclined girls who are very much into that, which does wonders for your self-esteem. For the first time in your life, love actually feels stronger than hate.
And then it’s January 2025, and you finally let yourself think about writing again. You are older and wiser. You wonder if you can really do this. And this time the answer is “I won’t know until I try.” So you try, even though you’re scared out of your mind that you’ll fail to finish anything, or worse, succeed at creating something bad.
You take everything you’ve done, everything you’ve felt. You let it guide you. Your anger and fear and sorrow, but also your love and your joy.
And then it’s July and you’ve written a first draft, nearly a 100,000 words of fantasy, with strains of romance and horror blended in. It’s about queerness. It’s about magic. It’s about alienation and betrayal and suffering. It’s also about the radical act of becoming. It’s a first draft and thus terrible, but it’s better than you expected.
It wasn’t easy. It took focus, discipline. But you did it. You proved to yourself you could do it. And even more shocking…you kind of like it.
Sure, it takes a lot of revisions to not totally suck. But there’s a seed of honesty there. You think you might’ve actually captured something. So you do the next really fucking scary thing, and you reach out to your friends, and you ask them to read the dumb second draft you wrote.
But they don’t think it’s dumb. They like it, not without critique, but they like it. And you kind of don’t know what to do with that. You never expected to get this far.
The best feedback is the stuff you get from your wife. In the evenings, you read it aloud to her. It gives you an incredible sense for the readability of the prose, but you also get to see her emotional reactions to developments in the text. She’s laughing at the jokes, crying at the bits supposed to pull at the heartstrings. When you finish reading her the big love scene, she quietly leads you to the bedroom and pushes you onto the bed, fade to black.
You take all the feedback, and you create a third draft. And this one you’re almost proud of, even if you know an editor will one day work it over.
You realize you’re starting to believe you could be a published author. A month later, you send out your first query letters to agents. Once again, you’re terrified. You’ve put something you love deeply in front of people who don’t love you, and who will explicitly judge the worth of what you’ve made.
Three weeks later, you get your first rejection. A polite form letter.
You expect to be devastated. You expect to feel judged.
But you’re okay. You are okay. And even after a dozen other rejections, you are still okay. Even after a rejection by the world, you still believe in yourself.
It’s October of 2025. You still haven’t gotten an agent. But you aren’t scared anymore. Instead, you reflect on how far you’ve come. You allow yourself a sense of pride.
You wonder just how far you might go. You have a few chapters of a sequel already dive, and an outline for the next book after that. You have a whole file at home with ideas for other books, in other genres.
You still believe you can get published. You also realize you’re going to keep writing even if you can’t. The world is falling apart around you. You’re still the happiest you’ve ever been.
