"Come some sweet blue bonnet spring"
A funny thing about transition, for me, is that it perfectly mirrored my first adolescence despite involving an entirely different balance of hormones. First there was the stage where I became aware that I had a body, which was awkward and constantly embarrassing and very sweaty. Often, I was angry about this, and about the fact that other people could see my sweaty weird body, which was constantly doing new things and telling me about them later. I spent a lot of time fixated on various elements of my own physiology and convinced that they in some way were reflections of: the validity of my transness, whether or not I deserved to be trans, my inherent worth as a person (or lack thereof), whether or not I deserved love, and so on.
Then there was the stage when, having become resigned to the fact of my body, I started caring about it to a truly unsustainable degree. (Working in a salon did not help with this.) This was, both times, the natural evolution of the conviction that my body was somehow a reflection of my worth as a person from a matter of correlation to one of causation — the desire to control the body, and thus control that worth. I got very picky about clothes and relegated a large number of them to storage boxes, became very particular about haircuts, and finally managed to stop picking most of the skin off my face on an hourly basis.
The stage where I am now is the stage I had achieved before I realized I was trans, which is kind of a controlled apathy, designed to avoid both the compulsions of the previous era and the self-awareness of the one before that. In all honesty, it’s a kind of low-level dissociation that allows me to avoid becoming self-conscious to a debilitating degree. It also lets me ignore the dysphoria I will not be able to directly address until elective surgeries are widely available once more. Before I transitioned, it was easy enough to externalize my self-awareness, to understand my appearance and presentation through the eyes of others. I had an entire wardrobe designed to control that outside perception, to project a particular range of images based on what I was looking to do on a given day: avoid attention, or attract and control it.
I don’t know how to do that any more. I have no idea what people see when they look at me, with one exception — the people who think I’m a freak, and want to make sure I know that. Otherwise, most people guess the correct pronouns these days, though I couldn’t tell you what changed, or where the tipping point was. It wasn’t my haircut or the way I dressed; those remained consistent. It wasn’t whether I wore a binder or not, because I very rarely did. It wasn’t the way I spoke or moved or behaved, because I never made an effort to change any of those.
(If you’ve spent any amount of time on the trans Internet, the subreddits and Instagram pages where trans people gather to talk about how to convince insurance companies to cover our healthcare, and what recourse we have against transphobic employers and landlords and parents, and how to teach our own doctors and therapists how to treat us like people worthy of care, you’ve probably run across “passing tips” that, for trans men, often include the suggestions to smile less, wear darker colors, adjust your posture, and change your personal preferences if they deviate from those prescribed by conventional masculinity. These lists make me sad. I did not transition only to be bound by yet another set of expectations. I did not give up everything I gave up in order to be told once more what to wear and how to talk and who to be.)
Most of the time, now, I try to present myself neatly and comfortably, to wear functional clothing that feels good on my body and in the mirror. It’s much less deliberate than it used to be, much less performed for the benefit of others. Whenever I talk about this, I feel like I’m just confirming gendered tropes — when people thought I was a woman, I dressed in a way dictated by (my assumptions about) their expectations and perceptions. Was that because I thought I was a woman and was seen as one, or was it because I had no idea how to be a woman and relied on other people to tell me? Now, people no longer think I am a woman, and I dress in a way that is largely unrelated to those things. Is that because I no longer think of myself as a woman and am no longer seen as one, or is it because I am finally figuring out how to be myself? Is there any difference? A lot of the experiences that I once thought of as fundamentally related to womanhood now seem fundamentally related to dysphoria to me. What is the difference between the dysphoria of being told from an early age — by men and women alike — that your body is not yours, that it is an object to be seen and judged and touched by others, and the dysphoria of knowing that your body is not yours because it does not match what your brain thinks it should be?
Before I transitioned, I could easily have listed off fifty hobbies I maintained to keep glamour in my life. Now I’m not sure if I have any that qualify. My relationship to glamour has changed, I think, not least because my definition of the word used to be the archaic one, predicated upon illusion and misdirection. Now it is based on finding out what I truly enjoy, the little touches I can add to a day to make it feel special — too earnest, perhaps, for true glamour. Here, nevertheless, are the ways I triangulate it these days.
Tea, preferably lapsang souchong or Assam if black, sencha or jasmine pearl if green
Wine, preferably Pouilly-Fuissé or Grüner Veltliner
Furikake, preferably katsuo fumi, preferably on white rice under a barely cooked egg with a few drops of soy sauce dripped into the yolk
A papasan with a dedicated blanket, with a small Ionic column as a side table
The small indoors herb garden we’ve started this year: two pots of rosemary, one of thyme, one of apple mint, one of last year’s parsley
Local honey, preferably clover
Local eggs, preferably brown
Locally roasted coffee, ground fresh every morning
Lavender oil, preferably angustifolia, in the diffuser Dylan bought me years ago to make the apartment I shared with two roommates feel more like a home
Learning how to paint my nails again, this time as the fuck you I always wanted it to be
Maldon, in and on everything
Poetry, as much of it as I can read, of extremely varying qualities
Shows about rich white people with rich white problems, preferably as unrelatable as possible
The world is a monstrous place to live right now. I don’t know what to do about that. On Tuesday, the President declared that he would cut off U.S. funding to the World Health Organization. It’s easy to try and spin this as a matter of strategy, an attempt to deflect blame for his own administration’s catastrophic failure to respond to COVID-19 in any effective way, but I think it is a mistake to ascribe that kind of intent to his actions. This is the classic tell of an abusive narcissist: Nothing is ever his fault. There is always somebody else to blame, and therefore to punish.
The Treasury Department is delaying the release of stimulus checks just to make sure Donald Trump’s name is on all of them. New York has run out of places to put bodies. Disabled people, an incredibly vulnerable demographic, have been left even more vulnerable by equipment shortages and eugenicist rhetoric. Racism against east Asians is open and vehement: about what we eat, where we live, how we speak, whether we’re even human. The White House is trying to bankrupt the U.S. Postal Service. Retail and grocery workers, unable to leave work, are dying for minimum wage. Incarcerated people, unable to isolate, are dying in captivity. Healthcare workers, short of personal protective equipment that the federal government is seizing before it can reach those who need it most, are dying on the job.
I don’t believe that glamour is a bulwark against darkness, and I don’t believe that hope is a prerequisite for survival. There is a shortage of both in the world right now, and I don’t think it would make a difference if there wasn’t, and there isn’t much we can do about it anyway. I don’t think the signs that Ohioans are putting in their windows and on their doors (“STAY STRONG” in crayon, “DON’T GIVE UP” on a lawn sign) do anything other than make their creators feel like they’re doing something. I don’t think that’s meaningless, but I don’t think it’s particularly meaningful, either.
Here are the things that have given me hope since March: Yesterday my unemployment benefits were approved, which meant I could stop worrying about emptying my bank account to pay rent. Yesterday one of my coworkers texted me to let me know that she’s doing all right, and has heard from one of our more vulnerable clients, who works in Cleveland healthcare and is also doing all right. Most people who I see out and about are wearing masks and keeping their distance from other people. Dylan and I see a lot of dogs who are having a great time right now, with their people home all day. A cat whose Petfinder page I refreshed approximately once a day is no longer listed there, which I hope means he’s found a new family. Our mint plant has new baby leaves. It is the small, material things that make one day demonstrably better than the one before it. It is learning how to pass them along to others, and making a practice of it. Good is not something you are, but something you do. It is work. It is, right now, the only work that matters.
—R.