Across and Beyond 004: We are More Than I
I’ve written a lot of memoirist words about being a transsexual over the last two decades. Starting in the mid-1990s I wrote “Interstitial Living,” a bi-weekly column for Chicago’s LGBT paper Nightlines/Outlines, a time when little information existed about transsexuals. How long ago was that? I came out and transitioned when transgender was not commonly used. In fact, transgender was only just beginning to be debated as an umbrella term for members of our various communities.
Every article I wrote the pronoun “I” figured prominently.How could it not? “I” drives all memoirs and forms of personal sharing. Any attempt to use “we,” the first-person plural, or “you,” the second-person singular, would have been met with silence.
Of course in English we use “I.” But I believe the social climate (vague, I know) and political content (even vaguer, I agree) driving transsexual narratives allows us to use only “I.”
We do, indeed, labor under a kind of singular, solitary experience reflected in “I.” Acknowledging gender dysphoria requires sharing it with ourselves first. Then maybe we share it with others. Even after sharing it, though, we still go the road alone.
I gave little thought about the “I” in transsexual experience until I read Julie Otsuka’s Buddha in the Attic. The book changed not only how I conceptualized writing but also how I understood my experiences as a transsexual.
Throughout the book she uses the first-person plural “we” to describe the experiences of Japanese picture brides coming to America. She refuses to encompass the individual experiences in a single experience. The “we” includes opposite and contradictory experiences. A “we” always contains many “I” opposites. We just don’t do enough to acknowledge that kind of “we,” preferring instead a bland, uniform “we” that exists only in our fantasies.
Otsuka gave me permission to write differently. Her worked encouraged me to embrace all the pronouns in the English language.
So I did. Our “we” experiences seem largely unconsidered by others and ourselves.
Below I offer an Otsuka-inspired “we.” How does “we” strike you as a reader?
We grew up feeling different, out of sorts with our bodies. We just knew we were one way, despite what family and church and doctors said. “It’s a phase you’ll grow out of.” We didn’t .The dismissive phrases stopped once puberty began, if we were lucky. Words became fists, if we were lucky. Many of us got cuffed and slapped much earlier.
Some of us were from cities like New York or Chicago, with gay community centers and pride parades, where we could disappear into a crowd of people and felt grateful we didn’t grow up in some hick town up- or downstate. Some of us grew up Hemet or Mio, populated with one thousand people or fewer, where we were frozen by the gaze of our neighbors and hitchhiked out in the cab of the truck that came by once a week to deliver heating oil. Some of us came from Berlin and cut out pictures of the clothes we would buy and wear freely, once we could. Some of us came from a farm collective outside Beijing, where we kept our hair short, always wearing the uniform of the PRC, singing the “East is Red.” Some of us are from Dubai and travel for business and pursue pleasure in places like Key West, finding blessed release in stockings and dresses and in the eyes of men who desire us.
Some of us evaporated in Hiroshima. Others immolated in Auschwitz. A few of us died from heatstroke working the fruit crops and still others during the Middle Passage. We fell on the fields of the Somme and El Alamein and the beaches of Normandy. Some of us overdosed and some of us drank ourselves to death. A few of blew our brains out.