Cycles and Conversation

Put a man and a woman on a stage with a piano and I’ll fantasize about the piano. As soon as I figured out what it was to like somebody I preferred girls, not just as partners but also as friends and as role models. Yet, for the most part, people confuse me.

This is just as much a part of me as any other thing. I’ve never really felt the pull to center this thing over other — the way I’ve felt about other frameworks. It’s strange to think that I’ve become emotionally attached and dependant on frameworks. Not that its a strange or uncommon thing — its very human in fact. But when I say that I’ve fallen in love with a framework and we’re bonding, permanently, how else will you understand?

People are just atoms, dots, points in space and time that bounce around — bonding, breaking bonds, changing, being changed, warping, and being warped. We don’t really exist in any classical sense when you look at it. I doubt there is really ever going to be a way to pinpoint just who exactly a person is in any sort of empirical sense. The uncertainty principle keeps things interesting yet again I guess.

In my head, the man plays the piano and the woman sit atop it — singing sweetly into an old microphone. I feel the vibrations, the pegs twisted firmly into place hum as my palms sweat. I can feel their passions playing out above, sending me twisting with pleasure. My bones hold steady and the moment passes.

I get things, I need to get things. I love the sensation of learning how they work. Turning a grey rod with soft rubber numbers on it into a map of circuits and functions and control. Someone told me that Portland didn’t have fluoridated water and that people were protesting about it. I couldn’t remember which side had the protests. I went back to my dorm room and straight to my computer: ‘is fluoride safe in drinking water?’. A few years later a close friend will give me a treasured gift, his own father’s textbook on Municipal Water Engineering.

The thing about atoms is that under most circumstances they tend to form larger structures. Weather planet’s, oceans, animals, or molecules complexity forms spontaneously and we love it. It’s all an illusion, of course, these structures are as imaginary as the triangles on chalkboards in thousands of geometry classes. Symbolic representations that are useful for describing and predicting function is all. We know they are real because they interact, they warp each other and become changed. There is no being a part of something and not being changed.

Sometimes I long for the days the voice in my head had the wool pulled down over my eyes. I long for the days when I didn’t see masculinity as something that was inflicted on me. I remember it in some ways. I remember being less afraid of the future. I not thinking about what I was wearing, though looking back at pictures of myself — it must have been embarrassing for those around me. I didn’t care. I only care in so much as people treat me differently depending on what I wear.

My orientation has always been towards things, now those things are less often physical. I poke around and explore the nuances of theory. Not very successful alone, but within a dialectic… uhh… I lose myself.

I fall in love that way, there is a merging of self — a bond that warps so fully that it’s hard to identify individual components. Some people fall in love on a dancefloor, or in a glance, I fall in love in a conversation. One of those ones that go on and on until you, laughing, come across something so strange it makes you question how you got there. The kind of stream of consciousness connecting that takes another conversation to untangle and track down that one thing that turned us down that path.

The people on TV were just as good case studies on how to be human as any flesh and blood person I knew. Yet I knew, somewhere, that they were constructs — the product of many people and many decisions among them. I wasn’t convinced this was the right reality until… I can’t quite pinpoint when. I think it was on the old stone steps of a dorm that was not my own. I was waiting for my second shift to start — the most public and brutal of my punishments. I had been ordered to two days of public manual labor because I let a man talk me into something stupid. It wasn’t the last time.

Ever have those dreams where your whole family turns into monsters as soon as you leave the room. They are large mounds of green-brown flesh burbling at each other across the kitchen island, plates of chicken and rice and asparagus with a creamy lemon sauce still warm on their plates. They frantically signal as I turn the corner back from the bathroom and they are in their normal forms again.

“Am I asleep?”

‘What does waking up feel like?’

The thing about gender, as a framework, is that its function is a conversation with the world. Gender can’t just exist within a body. There are lots of ways to break this down — gender identity vs. gender expression is probably the most useful I think. We have a cultural system of gender that collapses the differences between the appearance of the person and the way the person should operate internally.

This is one of the reasons I still cringe at the practice of claiming a gender — of attempting to overwrite the conversation that is happening with sheer willpower. I’m not claiming this is how it should be, but what I’ve learned about gender is that it’s not a choice. Waking up one day and realizing that the years of fears and anxieties are real, that the gender you were taught to be doesn’t fit and you don’t want it to fit — doesn’t make you suddenly magically another gender. It is the first step of many, and largely the most important one.

For most trans people who don’t pursue passing or whose attempts at passing fail to meet society’s impossible standards, we understand this implicitly. That why and how the practice of claiming becomes important, necessary. It’s less stating the fact of the matter and more a request to those present to adapt to a new context. We can’t control what the others in our conversations believe, but we can ask them to change.

I don’t know if it will ever be easy for me to say that I’m a woman. It sure as hell doesn’t feel easy. But in saying so, I’m not denying the nature of my interactions with the world. I’m not denying that I use masculinity to hide sometimes, or to affect people, or to project authority. I’m instead asking that you open your eyes and see the fact that I haven’t lived my life as a man. That this isn’t some phase that will pass, and that you can either treat me with respect or not — that is your choice and I will make it easy for you.

I’m asking that you understand that this is who I’ve been for longer than I could have had the words for it. I’m asking that you understand that I needed to build up a wall of safety around me because I was literally under attack. That though the suit of armor I made kept me safe and operated well — it’s wasn’t who I was.

I still don’t really know who I am or what I want. Those questions take lifetimes to answer. I know that I’m going to take a few steps to make myself feel better and that those steps will affect how the world sees me. It’s hard to ignore the societal implications of growing masses on my chest in hopes that someday I am seen as more than a freak. It’s hard to ignore the difficulty I have — just thinking about walking into my grandparents home as a woman.

Honestly, I may never do it. I may never step foot in Florida again. I don’t know. I don’t have to know. I reserve the right to disappear, even though I’ll never fully do it. I’ve tried and tried before, but it doesn’t take. I want too badly to be seen, especially when people think they see and are so very wrong.

I freeze up and can’t act when I think about them too much, the people who raised me. I tried so hard to be the thing they all thought I was. Most of it I enjoyed. But the cracks just continued to grow and now I sit in a ruin. There is nothing left for me to do. I must claim. I must ask of them, of you, to see me as I am. See me as I live: gentle, caring, nurturing, passionate, insightful, observant and accepting.

I’ve left my desires to conquer and save back in a life that never really belonged to me. It will fertilize the land as it decomposes, refusing to just disappear despite my pleading. Something I wore around me for decades won’t simply disappear if I ask it to. So for now, I ask that you ignore the heap on the ground — the thing that used to be me — and look only at what I have become. Look at me and see what I am becoming.

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