|
Dear Friends, First of all, allow me to apologize for having neglected this website for so long. To be honest, chronicling my transition - such that I have done, anyway - turned out to be a task so personal and so intense that I have balked at sharing a lot of it here. It’s true that sharing something intimate and intense was my original purpose. Who could look at the idea of transition and not imagine that it would be inexpressibly profound? Be that as it may, however, the more I think about transitioning, and the farther along I go, the more I think that transitioning is to the non-transitioned akin to the idea of death as contemplated by the living : utterly impossible to comprehend. Like Sir Gawain embarking on his quest for the Holy Grail, I had no way of knowing where my journey would lead - I only knew that I could not ignore the call I had received. Now I look back at myself before starting out on this whole thing, and I think, I was so afraid. And then I look forward and think, I’m still really afraid! I don’t completely mean afraid as in fearful of what may come, although I feel that way too. I guess that mostly I mean I’m vulnerable. The thorny bramble that I’ve cultivated around myself my whole life is being cleared away, shrinking and shriveling beneath the new light cast on me. I am soft as new skin beneath all that. It’s terrifying, but exhilarating, to be so raw and new again, to be as helpless as a newborn after being so hard and so cold for so long. It’s also frightening because, let’s face it, you can only read about so many transgender and gender-variant people being brutally murdered, tortured, beaten, and raped before you start to feel like you’re walking in a mine field. Who is going to walk in on me in a men’s room stall and beat me to death in disgust and terror? Who is going to tell the wrong person that I’m trans, the person who will want to rape me to show me what I ‘really’ am? Frat boy types, military types (and Baltimore is teeming with both) really raise my hackles - my heart pounds and my palms sweat, and I wonder if they’re going to detect a faint curve under my shirt, or notice the sparseness of my sideburns, or maybe be disturbed by the roundness and softness of my only subtly changed facial features. My stomach always involuntarily drops when I have to hand my ID over (still says my birth name, still says female) to airport security. I know the day will come that I’ll be asked to step out of the line. I cross my fingers that my name change will go through before that time has come. But here’s the thing about fear, if you ask me - grab a hold of it and go wherever it takes you, and you, my friend, will have the ride of your life. This is what I’m learning from being on testosterone, and testing my own tenderness the way you might press experimentally on a bruise. The fear of being exposed, the fear of brutality, these only bring into focus the overwhelming and humbling joy of transformation. What does the butterfly feel as it sits on the husk of its relatively safe cocoon, flexing its new wings, knowing that it is throwing itself headlong into the unknown, the dangerous? I think that now I’m beginning to understand. This is not to say that this exhilaration I speak of is exclusive to people who hormonally and surgically reconfigure themselves. Transitioning is more than just a restructuring of the body, it’s a reshaping of the soul. All of those who have willfully defied narrow gender roles know that, in the step out of denial of yourself and into the assertion of yourself, you are transformed for all time. I AM. It is the shortest sentence in the English language, and quite likely, the most powerful. And imagine! Just a few tiny drops of a hormone solution, and my genes immediately, unquestioningly stop what they’re doing and go to work building a whole new set of sex characteristics. My genes don’t care how I was born, they just do what they’re told. My DNA pulls the ‘male’ characteristics off the shelf and start outfitting me with those. A little less fat here, a little more here, some hair here, some muscle fiber here, bring the larynx a little lower... and... perfect! We have the person we would have had if your chromosomes had come together in an infinitesimally different fashion. It shakes the very foundation of the significance that we place on physical sex and gender. I am only 11 months into my physical transition and my whole life is changed. The floodgates that held back a lifetime of pain and shame have started to burst open. Over the summer, I was in my bathroom washing up for bed at the sink when I caught my own eyes in the mirror. Ordinarily, my gaze would skitter over the mirror’s surface, balking at beholding myself for so long - but this time, it held. I looked at myself long and hard, studying the surfacing angles of my face, the sprouting facial hair, the recent bulk of muscle, and I was suddenly overcome. I fell to the bathroom floor and wept in gratitude and relief for the chance to become myself and leave the grief and isolation of my female life behind. This is not to say that I regret having been born female. I don’t. I am proud to stand among the ranks of trans people fighting oppression and violence with creativity, love, and compassion. I am glad for having passed through the harsh refinery of a rigid sexual and gender system, glad to have come out bloody but unbowed. In Buddhist fashion, I cherish where I am and all that conspired to place me here. This has been my experience. What about you? While it is incredibly important for personal accounts of transition to exist, I would like to change the mission of this page to reflect a variety of personal accounts. I already have my own journal site, and I have proven myself, in true Taurean fashion, far too lazy to attend to two separate journals! So, I want to have your stories of becoming on this site. I want you to share your pain and elation, and in doing so, bring yourself closer to all of us who share your struggle, as well as make your struggle known to those who haven’t had to face it themselves. I want to work with you to help the world understand that our struggle spans, but is often shaped or amplified by, issues of race, nationality, ability, economic class, and so on. Are you willing to share your story of transformation, your ideas on masculinity and manhood? Are you willing to share something very intimate and personal with strangers on the Internet? Are you willing to be photographed? And, as an added bonus to me, since my travel purse is small at the moment - do you live in Maryland, DC, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York City, or South Florida? Please E-mail me at anticapitalist@punkass.com if you would like to discuss participating in this project with me. Thank you for reading this site, and thank you for having the courage to be. Love, -Ian |