i’ll start off by saying that i feel like i’ve been ‘in transition’ my whole life, so it’s weird for my ‘transition’ to only have weight and acknowledgement now that i’ve made a medical, body-altering related decision around my trans-ness. this isn’t only something other people have done to me, but also something i’ve done with myself. it sucks how the trans-mind still has as much work to do unlearning what we’ve been taught about ourselves and everyone else, to the extent that we feel hurt by our own habits around how and when we think of ourselves as legitimate. but i notice the habits and i begin to (or continue to, really) dismantle them. i’ve always been this way, in so many ways.
things from the distant past are making sense to me, or opening up to me in ways i never could’ve expected. in many ways, i’m so glad i waited until now, that i didn’t do this while enrolled in higher ed, when my identity and my life felt so fraught & caught up in scrambling for legitimacy in this weird official way, when despite being so out of place in that context and hating everything it stood for, i also was craving some sort of belonging. it was something about finally being a part, even if in a removed way, of the cute granola semi-alterna-families i saw on tv. angela chase’s family would accept rickie, where his didn’t. “friends” supporting me by hating on my family because i was closeted & they wouldn’t get it because they are “uneducated” (or so i thought). sigh. so many things always having to be so secret. never being wholly anything in any space, maybe only when alone, if even that.
when i could logically parse myself against economical differences of those in these academic communities, how my poorness has shaped my whole experience, how i never feel enough, how i never fit, how i felt both more real (by way of being acknowledged) but also more fake. so many different performances. how my trans and queer identity was made to come off as a product of fancy knowledges, but really i had gotten it from queens, had lived it there too. had learned it, really, from my family. it feels so good to see that. it’s so good to reclaim outsider, to live in it. it’s so good to reclaim my family, as is. it’s still really hard, but it makes it so much easier to say “fuck you” and to say no. no, which feels like one of the most empowering things someone can say for themself. no to being exploited for being other, no to giving in to “legitimacy,” or whatever i’m supposed to desire from the arbiters of subcultural artist communities and fake radical communities.
i don’t really know how to relate to the physical changes happening to me. i’m kinda just thinking a lot, feeling a lot, and paying a lot of attention to those things. i’ve felt disconnected from my body for so long (for 800 reasons, even prior to recognition of trans-ness), i’m always so in my head or in my feelings. so i guess that’s my entryway.
other people notice my voice sounding different. my mom asked if i had a cold. “no, i guess my voice is dropping, ha!” “oh. i haven’t seen you in awhile, whaddaya looking like these days?” “not much different. but yr phone is working again, i’ll send you pictures!” jova says she thinks my weight’s re-distributing. micah looked at a picture i took of myself and he said, “yeah the jawline starts changing right away.” i was like ???? oh yeah, lookit that my jawline is changing, ha!
the voice change thing, though, is probably most noticeable. because of the voice cracking and hoarseness, but also because my throat hurts. it feels like a minor cold, or like there’s something stuck. i keep clearing my throat or forcing a cough, but nothing. and i guess because my brain associates throat pain with sickness, my body keeps telling me to rest.
on another note, i think about how musical and theatrical i was as a child. how, by way of growing up female, i was allowed to be so feminine and flamboyant. how reading and movies were an escape for me. from a lot of things. but for the sake of keeping it light and not opening up a can of ptsd/poverty worms, i’m not gonna go into it. but reconnecting to all of these good things—like lol my obsessions with barbra and bette midler and dionne warwick and later whitney (bodyguard) and hitchcock movies and musicals and madonna and boy george, wanting to be blanche dubois but also loving her, as imperfect as some of these influences are (everything is, in some way), i see myself spilling out from them, toward an integrated future where i’m both/and. and it helps to draw from them, to draw from what my fam encouraged in me, at least even by way of just getting a kick out of my past & belting out old timey songs in my grandma’s living room, or acting out a striptease from gypsy. instead of living in the pain and confusion of everything from then, always. i realize i don’t have to be ashamed of anything, and i can use it all. and i’m excited to get back into theatre, that my friends and i are writing a drag musical, etc.
also i’m like so happy i got this far. like that i survived psychologically what it means having grown up in a poor, chaotic, huge catholic family with all its problems, all its abusiveness. the patriarchal voices that made me feel bad for everything that i now value about myself and the women in my family. how i only really relate to the women in my family, and my connection to them is becoming even more clear at this point in my life. and that now i can focus more on the joy and love that was there.
lol also my aesthetic is so totally influenced by my fam and how we were all so trapped in the 50s/60s. when i think of interior decorating at least, bc duh we couldn’t really afford to update shit, so it all actually was vintage. and also that shit LASTS. but also we were so much more complicated than family values and def not all-american at all. too loud, too mouthy, too uncouth. but, you know, all the catholic stuff meant that we just were taught to hate everything about ourselves because we were never enough, which is pretty all-american. all of the things.
