things you choose
To move to a new country, you have to choose it. This is a matter of survival. It’s the only way to get through a process that is exhausting, undignified, and psychologically violent – you have to find the part of you that wants the end result, and you have to lean on it until (and, honestly, after) you’re there.
We joke about this, lately. If we do have to move to England, I tell Isaac, we’re lucky to have his latent Anglophilia to carry us through. Oh no, he says, and sighs. Your horrible country, with its beautiful old architecture and its rich literary heritage. How will I cope.
This was how I made it to America. Oh no. The monstrous imperial core, founded on genocide, with its high wages and its beautiful landscapes and its foundational willingness to dream, like, stupidly big. It’s a mind trick that you have to play on yourself. You see the evil; you know it’s there; of course you do, because the evil suspects you’re the wrong sort of person and is dead set on keeping you out. (More so than ever! Lmao!!) But you don’t meet its eyes. You see what you want. You fall in love with that, instead – in my case, at least, because you fell in love with someone who was born here, and you’d do just about anything to make a life with him.
I think this is how you get the phenomenon of immigrant patriotism. When you have to work for something – when it isn’t handed to you by an accident of birth – it means more. The idea of the thing carries more weight with you, because you’ve had to want it extra. I wouldn’t call myself a patriot; I wouldn’t even do that for my native country. But I am sentimental about America in a way that I know, frankly, it has never once deserved.
When I was still waiting to move, I wrote a poem about that feeling! Thus:
America
In the dream America was home.
In the dream I came home to America
watching America on the hot bright screen
in love with America, within America, without.
In the dream I came home to America,
nested in my papers and waited terrified
for America to fall in love with me,
my dollar bills and solemn attestations,
the complete history of my living flesh.
In the dream America held me to be self-evident.
In the dream I came home to America
pleading America I’ve given you all,
America won’t you let me be something.
A cool development – arising directly from my move to America, specifically to California – is that I have now been on testosterone for a year and two months.
I don’t remember having written about this before, in part because I figured I would live to regret anything I wrote about medical transition based on less than a year of experience. I’m honestly not convinced I won’t regret writing this. Having lived as a non-binary person for over a decade now, I’m in the strange position of being simultaneously Trans Old and Trans Young: I’ve been doing my thing for longer than many people get to, but I’ve only been doing it medically for about five seconds, all told. A dear friend warned me, very thoughtfully, not to write any heartfelt thinkpieces about my transition for a year at the very least. At the time, I told him I wouldn’t write any heartfelt thinkpieces period, which I guess shows how well I know myself.
When it was time to give myself my first shot, I panicked for two straight hours. I sat on the bed, syringe in hand, and sobbed like a big dipshit at my own inability to tolerate mild pain. Or perhaps “tolerate” is the wrong angle. I am prone to static shocks, for reasons I don’t fully understand; for reasons I understand completely, I hate them with my life, and I will hesitate to touch anything that I think might deliver a shock. I know it isn’t serious pain, and I know it isn’t consequential, but the anticipation stops me cold every single time. Giving myself a shot was – is – the same. Isaac had to do it, in the end, and has had to do it every week since.
Subcutaneous shots are not awful. Most of the time, you get a tiny flash of pain where the needle breaks the skin; but there are no nerve endings in fat, which is where the needle ultimately goes. But every so often there’s a spicy one, where you hit a particularly cranky nerve or a spot you’ve injected once too often. That game of roulette is what keeps me hesitant. Sometimes I will hold the syringe in my own hand, and let Isaac guide it. Lately, every time, my arm tenses up and stops the process before the needle touches flesh.
Here’s the thing, though: I wouldn’t have cried if I didn’t want desperately to do it. I am not always the most in touch with my own emotional responses from moment to moment. They catch me by surprise, or they happen in a dull and muted way that makes them hard to discern until they’ve passed. But on that first day, I had never grieved anything so acutely as the way I grieved my own inability to inject myself with T. Ten years of assuming it would never be possible, only to learn that it wasn’t, without help? I was crushed. I had to cancel plans with a friend because I’d spent so long crying that I couldn’t fully catch my breath.
It matters because you want it. Sometimes it’s as simple as that. And when you think you only want something out of self-defence (against loss, against disappointment, against inertia), think again, because self-defence does not sustain desire for very long. You fall in love whether you mean to or not, because you have to, because want is the necessity that carries you through to your end.
Some things:
If you’re on Bluesky, I’m on Bluesky, and you should come and find me there.
Isaac’s latest book is available for preorder! It is a far-future literary speculative novel about a trans journalist rediscovering the lives and legacies of his adoptive trans parents. It made me cry on a plane to Louisiana. Here’s the Bookshop link because fuck Bezos; every purchase makes it more plausible that we will not starve if my job (scientists’ minion) falls victim to NIH funding cuts.
My hindbrain told me to end this newsletter with the words “big kniphe”.