BlogHer

I really, really have to wonder: what sort of representation do trans women have at BlogHer? Anyone? Beuller? I mean -- and I'm not being dismissive here -- MommyBloggers have carved-out a niche, there, and are a similarly genre-fied subgroup of "obligate" bloggers. Why should transition blogs be necessarily so much different? The lifecycle is rather similar, and I'm hardly the first to observe how transition is an awful lot like giving birth to oneself, right down to the hormonal confusion, betrayal by one's body, and periods of excruciating physical pain in a medicalized setting. Why shouldn't we trans women fill-out a similar niche?

And hey, those of us with small children can do double duty! I can already see the session title: TransMommyBlogging As A Radical Act ...

Okay, so I can dream, can't I? But really, I do wonder. Maybe I should just go this year and see. Hrm.

Socks

It’s been a very long time since I’ve written. I’ve had my hands full with living. A newborn in the household is probably all the excuse I really need, but there’s also been the experience of, after nearly nine years with a company, being laid-off. Whee. Why didn’t I do that last one three years ago and get it over with? Oh well.

Many things have come together and begun to make sense. Many more questions have opened-up. A few things have fallen-apart entirely. I suppose this is all normal, really, for any such suite of colossal life changes, but that fails to lessen the impact. There has been no time, no energy, and too little sleep. There have been no mute crises to voice, no burning questions to articulate, so there have been no words. And so there has been no writing. Only living, getting through each day alive and awake, and talking. So much talking!

It’s marvelous to be able to speak freely to my wife, now. Challenging, too, but no less of a marvel. Closing the yawning breach from six months of silently growing apart is hard, and I had begun to wonder if for us it might be impossible. I’m glad it’s not.

But now … now I’m beginning to feel the need to capture thoughts, again. I’m beginning to unfold, and I’m finding all manner of interesting details lost within the creases.

It’s dreadfully tempting to draw-out the paper metaphor a little: I’ve always had a peculiar philological love for the word ‘palimpsest’, and so it delights me to find it so apt. Certainly in most aspects transition (for me) is a process of completing the last chapters of Part I, then beginning Part II. Yet there are numerous ways in which it feels rather as if I am rubbing-out the older, irrelevant text in order to reinscribe this dirty, worn — yet irreplaceable and thus priceless — vellum with these sacred verses, newly translated from their cryptic forms of antiquity.

Hah. I wonder how many transitioning transsexuals have come upon that particular analogy, before, and thought themselves ever so clever. Ah, well. I’ve given up striving for novelty (or so I like to claim); to comport myself with grace is my remaining hope. And if I really mean that, perhaps I should get a little less enraptured of my own florid prose, hmm? As if.

But really, wasn’t I posting to capture a few thoughts that might otherwise float off and be forgotten? Wasn’t there some fragment of an idea that needed articulation, maybe a little exposition? Oh, yes, that’s it:

I wonder if, some years hence, I’ll note the birth of my son — and the coincidental internal transformations, as I began to pare and revise my wardrobe and care so much more about my deportment — as the point at which I ceased to lose socks.

Seriously. I haven’t lost a sock in the laundry since then. It’s a little bit creepy. Do the mad, vestokleptic demons that inhabit our washing machine also suffer from severe transphobia? Have I somehow miraculously exorcised them? I don’t think so. I’m still losing my son’s socks, left and right, so there must be some other mechanism at work. Go figure.

In separate news, while doing some financial planning worksheets the other day, and tackling the difficult issues of how the expenses of transition would impact our already overtaxed budget, my spouse gave me a quiet, perhaps even unintentional gift of confidence and commitment. We were touchy from discussing finances, and skittish from discussing transition; I posited a rough, large sum as what we'd need to save to complete the medical and legal necessities of transition. She thought briefly, then, with a concerned tone, asked if that figure included money for fertility treatments.

At the time, I was just startled, and confirmed that yes, that was in there, I'd kept it in mind, which seemed to satisfy her. Every time I recall the exchange, though, I am more and more moved.

Some transitioning spouses may be blessed with self-actualized, openly bisexual partners, for whom transition in no way equates to the potential extinguishing of romance and attraction. Not so, I. Instead, we have other gifts.

This post was going to be a voice for the turmoil that's been engulfing my inner world, of late, as transition becomes ever more real -- as hair removal progresses and I begin voice work and as my name and internal image begin to recenter. But, somehow, I couldn't begin without acknowledging that I am no longer the woman I was before that marvelous birth at the end of November, and, as I have already observed, such acknowledgments have a way of warming and softening the sternest demeanor.

Perhaps tomorrow I can avoid reflecting on my therapeutic infant long enough to experience and vent some frustrations ... but it's true, I'm addicted: I can't go long without my fix.

And, honestly, I can't presently imagine anyone faulting me.

Time and Perspective

Good lord, it's amazing what chocolate can do.

Hey, look, the margin keeps narrowing. You never know: the as-yet-uncounted absentees may be incredibly enlightened individuals (and particularly numerous).

And oh, look at that: the high-speed [potential] boondoggle may just pass! Despite the risks involved, I'm excited. Yay rail!

*sigh*. I should have known better than to get invested in an election. they always leave me all torn-up with angst (for the chasm between me and my society) no matter how well they end.

Sad and ashamed. Anger later.

Right now, as the last quarter of results trickle in, and the gap fails to narrow on the constitutional amendment that says my wife and I cannot be who and what we are, I feel a sick, stiff knot grow in my gut. Tonight I am sad and ashamed to be a Californian, born and raised. Tomorrow we will take our daughter to daycare, then have our full-term unborn son measured for a probable induction this weekend. I do not know when or how the anger will find a place, but it will, as I am Californian; I love this state, and I love its potential.

I know that the hate fomented across these great valleys was heavily funded out of pockets thousands of miles away (though certainly not entirely so). I know that this travesty of discriminatory doublespeak was made possible by a profoundly broken popular-initiative system. I know that I am not alone, and that this will be fought, tooth & claw, in whatever way possible. In fact, I do keep reminding myself that the remaining 20% could close that 2-point margin. All the same, there's a fury at the potential passage of proposition 8, a rage. How dare they do this to my family?

But, for now, exhausted and apalled and impotent, all I can do is write. And eat some chocolate chips and drink some milk and hopefully get some sleep.

And yay for our 44th president! It's not all gloom and doom. Goodnight.

a whimper in the dark

My little girl took a glow stick to bed, tonight. It's not the first time -- she thinks they're just the most fun thing in the world, sometimes, and she's recently discovered Star Wars, and can't get enough of telling me how they look like light sabers. However, it will be the last time for at least a year or so. She got a little bit overzealous with the twisting and cracking to evenly free the catalyst from its little rigid compartments, and cracked the tube. I woke to a confused sort of whimpering (my wife being doped-up on codeine cough syrup and solidly out for the night) (okay, let's face it, I'd be the one doing the wake-up-and-check-on-the-kids routine even were she sober and awake, that's just who we are).

It was an interesting sight -- thank goodness it had been a green stick; had it been blue I'd probably have been distracted by weird memories of American Zombie (great film, except I can't even handle horror spoofs) and much too creeped-out to empathize. The poor dear had managed to spatter her blanket and bedsheets and pajamas with luminescent fluid, and had (in the dark, probably on the verge of falling asleep) rubbed her left eye, causing sudden, lasting stinging and burning. O Pathos! Sleepy, hurty, whimpery 3-year-old!

One exciting, howling- and struggling-filled trip to the bathtub (what, you don't want your painful head held upside-down beneath a faucet running full blast? really?) later, I was helping her out of her [faintly glowing] jammies and talking about how scary it must have been to suddenly start hurting and not know why. She was even extra-brave for me and blinked her eye open numerous times as I flushed it more gently from a cup. It's funny, the odd situations where we find these moments of sympathy, of connection and understanding. I was so proud of her: I knew just how upset she was to be pouring more things into her eye, and I knew she trusted me if I said it was necessary and that it would help her feel better.

Since this is, nominally, a "trans blog", there's an odd sense of incompleteness if I don't tie my convoluted sense of gender identity into this, draw some tangent of meaning, but I can't. There's nothing "T" about this. It's a facet of my life that I want to tie to the person I'm slowly describing, here, but only in that it's part of the foundational self from which that person springs.

Love is always hard to describe, isn't it?

Naming and Necessity (with apologies to Kripke)

I have a name: "Rachel".

I've pondered it for years, really, and never found another. It's odd how I came to know it. I remember being a junior in high school, and visiting a bunch of relatives in Los Angeles. An American melting-pot family, ours; Irish and Czech and Italian and various bits of Central Europe, and everyone goes and marries around the globe. The cousins we were visiting that night had four of the most beautiful children imaginable. Their youngest daughter, at the time, was five, perhaps six: a sprightly little almost-Levantine waif, all dark curls and flailing limbs as she ran and bounced about. Her name was Rachel. And it suited her.

I don't know why I thought that. I didn't understand a lot of things. I have no sisters; of my close friends with sisters, their ages were mostly very close to mine. So I was unprepared for the well in my heart that she uncapped, with her energetic gymnastics (around the dinner table, to her mother's consternation), her mercurial shyness, and her bright, thoughtful eyes. This was a little girl in the heyday of early girlhood. I saw myself in her. I don't know if who and what I saw were really there, or if something deep inside was projecting, desperately, earnestly, upon my unsuspecting young cousin, but the effect was and is the same. Here was childhood, a childhood I didn't recognize, yet knew, instinctively.

Bear in mind that I had no real concept of my own transness at the time. I had begun to look in those directions to explain my inauthentic personalities, my sense of hollowness, but the clear connections had yet to be made. So I had no framework in which to place this recognition, with which to explain it. So it was an amorphous sort of understanding—I knew that I recognized and understood something, but I couldn't articulate it. Not at all.

Such gnosis seems to live in me as experiential memory: a sheaf of visual percepts, uninterpreted, but instead edited to discard everything unimportant to the meaning contained, all then bound together with the faint memory of feelings, intangible impressions, acting as glue and binding to carry the memory down through the years, until I can pare it apart and begin to read it anew. I see her curious, shy face, mahogany curls setting off dark, watching eyes. I feel startled. I hear the name "Rachel". Did I know I was being named? Could she know, then, impossibly, that I somehow shared her name, and wonder "who is this unfamiliar person, this boy, this stranger, to take my name?"

I met her again, briefly, when my daughter was tiny, at a family wedding. She had grown into a stunning teen, and I suppose I should have noted myriad other details … but all I can recall is that her face, while it more strongly echoed her father's and mother's adult faces, having lost the baby fat I remembered, was the same: the shy curiosity, the reticence, the alert life behind her eyes. And the name still fit; it fit admirably.

And no other name fits me. I don't really know why not. I think I named myself so many years ago, when I first encountered the sort of child I might have been (and who, unsurprisingly, my daughter is swiftly growing to be), and perhaps it's simply that, once forged, the name will not be broken.

Certainly, my old name—avoided, set aside, but not denied—will never cease to be me. That might have happened, once. That individual might have half-died, given-up their presence so that I might "truly live", had I transitioned in my teens or early twenties, before I learned to love again, before I found my crafts, before I began to build a home. But there's something ineffable and powerful about giving life and welcoming life. He—I—fathered my children. I may know myself, now, to be their mother, but I have always been their father. I can no more erase that existence and presence—my existence—than I can cease to be their parent, cease to love and cherish them.

I have managed to present as a strong, feminine man for the entirety of my (pre-transition) adult life. I have accomplished things, as such, of which I am deeply proud: things with which I define myself, which have persisted in my identity as I have shed the male, para-masculine shells and windows and screens and grown me around my heart in their place. Accomplishments that continue to matter, even as my speech lightens, even as my curves soften and increase, even as I strive to recenter all the friendships I've knocked askew along the way. I cannot disavow that earnest, confused, conflicted person, because their heart is my heart, stripped of the rest of me so as to fit in that awkward man-like form. Their name is my name. Even when I do not want it.

Names, it seem, are more permanent than clothes, and not so easily outgrown. And perhaps when I saw that little girl whisk around the dining room table and peek-out from behind her brother's chair, I saw, suddenly, a ghost of the child I had half-been for so many years: unaccepted, fearful, confused, confusing, and eventually exiled. Perhaps I glimpsed this little girl and learned that her name was "Rachel". And so that is her name. My name.