Here I Am Composing A Burlesque

So, here's a night that's steadily become more and more familiar to me as I've gotten older and stayed in college. Tomorrow I put my ass on a plane and head back to the good, old college, this time around for my senior year. And man, much as thought finding myself a senior in high school was a trip and a half, being a senior in college is about a thousand times more intense. The realization that I'm rapidly coming up on true adulthood is enough to make me want to throw up in my mouth.

I'm the kind of person who still wears Batman boxers for Christ's sake. Surely that has to disqualify me from responsibility and shit. Given the choice, I would spend most of my days watching reruns of Gargoyles and eating cereal from tupperware.

I remember being an eighteen year old trying to fit as many years of life into suitcases. It was so hard back then to sort through all the things I owned and decide what I needed to take and what I could leave behind. The essentials were easy (obviously I was taking my jeans and my undies), but it was the knick knacks and detritus and the stuff that was hard. I think, in a way, we can be described as the sum of the little things that are important enough to keep near.

Three years later, it's weird to realize that I can fit everything that's important to me in one big duffel bag and one small duffel bag. There's a even the annual pile of stuff since deemed unnecessary that now belongs to my sister. Tee shirts I haven't worn and jeans that I've outgrown. Right now the big, heavy, ugly pink bag is packed and what's left are the odds and ends that go in the small one. It's a weird realization.

Why Can't We Be Frieeeends?

Your Experience Isn't Mine, And That's Beautiful via The Spectrum Cafe

Man, let's talk about how much I needed to read this right about now.

Back in that dark, misty time when I first questioning whether or not this whole female body was going to work for me on a long term time frame, I got a lot of my initial information by typing "transgender" into Google and clicking on whatever popped up. Of course, I know from long experience on the internet that ninety percent of anything you find is going to be crap and a good portion of that has the potential to be dangerous crap, but it was the only resource I had at my disposal that I felt comfortable using.

Most of what I found was what I think is the very traditional trans narrative in cis-land. It's the story of the trans woman, who knew from birth that she was a female despite what she had been assigned at birth. It was a story of spending a long childhood and adolescence in agony, knowing that she was in a body that expressed the totally wrong sex for her gender. It's the story of having every available surgery, and hormones, and becoming a very typically feminine lady.

And hey, down the line, I know that this narrative is true for some trans women and I have all the respect and love for them in the world.

But man, reading only that story did a hell of a number on my feelings at that time. Because there I was, a queer little FAAB kid who had only begun to really question hir body after puberty. I spent most of my childhood not even thinking about gender, partially because I was lucky enough to have a family that didn't too stridently enforce gender roles and partially because it was just something that never occurred to me. I had a female body, therefore I must be female. It seemed logical in the way that 2+2=4 seems logical, even if I can now trace the dissatisfaction with that equation that would grow and grow to where I am now.

But even now, I don't really ID as a man. I ID as a boy or a boi or a transmasculine genderqueer human kid type person. I'm lucky, too, to have found a community of people who share a portion of my experiences and prove every day that I am not alone, I'm not invisible, and I'm not fake.

But this policing shit is a problem and I think it's something that so very much needs to be worked on within the community. And that in and of itself isn't a completely unproblematic thing to say, because with it comes the awareness that a whole lot of the crap that trans people have to deal with is our own internalized crap that comes from a fucked up cis medical establishment that wants neat boxes and consistent narratives, not fluidity and shifting perspective. It comes from there only being one acceptable narrative of being trans, when that narrative is told at all, in the cis media. And it comes from the whole damn world wanting us to sit down, shut up, "fix" ourselves, and disappear.

And hey, fuck if I know exactly how to fix it. But I agree with the lovely linked post said. A damn good first step could be for all us trans people to decide that instead of breaking each other down, we're going to lift each other up.