Trans Day of Spitting in the Face of Expectations

I don’t have words for my gender.

I have too many words for my gender.   

An endless traffic jam, sticking in the wires of the permanent retainer cemented to my lower incisors, lodged behind my molars, caught in the scarred pockets that once held my wisdom teeth, stuck in the hollow of my throat where too many bouts of strep dissolved my tonsils.

These changes in me were transformations too. Why do they disturb you less? What makes the intervention to keep my teeth aesthetically pleasing more “natural” than my choice to undergo a second round of puberty?

Why now? You’ve been trans all this time, why now?

Who are you, to demand these answers of me? Of my body? Of my spirit?

Do you think any of them will satisfy you, hungry onlooker?

I unsettle you so.

Would it bother you more if I say that I was bored? That this vessel needed a renovation?

Would it bother you more if I say this is something sacred? That I am tossing my hands to fate to be remade?

Would it bother you more if I say that I am vain? That I want to look in the mirror and for once, for once, for once, feel pleasure at the sight of my own face?

Would it bother you more if I say that I am horny? That I want to fuck and be fucked as a version of myself that can feel this collision of flesh as more than a gift to my lovers?

Would it bother you more if I admit I am lonely? That I have kept so many others company, held so many in my hands, in my body, in a thousand different arrays of love, but still find myself a stranger stranger stranger sitting in a rented house when I am alone?

Which truth are you wanting of me?   Which truth repels you?

Because that’s part of this too, isn’t it? A push/pull of curiosity and revulsion.

I, by existing in my truth actively instead of passively, destabilize the foundations you have built your truths upon. You say the body is fixed, gender is fixed, something immutable pulled from the wombs that birth us that we must carry all our lives. An invisible umbilical cord tethering us to the divine.

I say the body is changing, changing, changing, so why wait for time to do it for me? The same way we coax trees to grow oranges–splicing branches to lemon trees, the same way we dye the fibers of our clothes, the same way the world has breathed into us and we have breathed into it (but oh, how many of us have forgotten this, that the land lives and shapes us as we shape it, that we relate, relate, relate with every press of our feet and palms and backs to the earth), I coax my body to be more itself. That is divine.

So you would become a man?

No. I have known men. I am not among them. Never completely. Never only.

Then what are you doing?

I am becoming myself. Unmanly, effeminate. Disgraceful. Unladylike. Resplendent. Gawky. With hair and flesh alike blooming in the places unexpected. With absences that invite questions and additions that raise eyebrows. With a body that I stumbled into on my first breath and have chosen somewhere passing my two hundred and millionth.

Let me be.

Let us be.

Be not afraid.

Of myself

Ourself

Yourself

Look in the mirror. Is there a stranger?

What would it take to recognize them?

Will you do it?   What’s worse? The alienation, or the churning unknown you must cross to understand?

I will not force your choice.

But I will not relinquish my own choosing to restore your comforting illusion that you’ve never made a decision here.

Good morning, good evening, good night.

Good luck darling.