therubymuse
The Ruby Muse
The life, transition, and shenanigans of Sweet Ms Lily.
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Women's History Month 2024
While International Women’s Day has been and gone this week, we are still in the midst of Women’s History Month, which happens to be every March. That’s good for yours truly the slackass, because it means I have had some time to organize my thoughts; to sit with them and really get a feel for what needed to be said.
It’s also worth noting that it’s been awhile since I could pickup up the metaphorical pen. The last time I shared something I wrote was last summer, a piece about how important it was for me to be a dyke. It was a good piece, but the words have been all jammed up since. Like logs in a river. The only way to get out of a rut like this is just to let my consciousness ramble, and to accept it’s output as just as valid as any authors or people I look up to. And that’s a hard ask some days.
So today, let’s talk about what being a woman means to me. And why it’s a label and a cause I’ll gladly give my life for as necessary. The first thirty years of my womanhood was denied, in equal parts by those around me who said I was an effeminate man who needed to be toughened up, and by myself, having buried those traits so I could fit in with others. It also didn’t help much that I was born with a penis, so the doctor naturally assumed I was a boy. I’ll forgive him, it was 1986.
I believe I was born a woman, and that I’m biologically female. What we know about science backs up claims of both. Sexual characteristics do not solely present all as male, or all as female, in most of the animal kingdom, so why should we be any different? Many cultures outside of our nightmarish puritanical capitalist hellscape not only recognize genders outside the traditionally masculine and feminine exist, they celebrate our existence.
And yet, there are those who recoil at my claim to the word, and who claim my existence is erasure. These people virulently insist that me and any of my trans sisters are in fact just delusional men. But here’s the thing. Feminism has long sought to define a woman as more than just a birthing machine. We are strong, capable, smart, creative and wise in ways that extend beyond our recorded history and agreed upon definitions. We have always been here, in all the different ways. The true erasure is demanding women occupy only a box of preconceived notions of what others think we are.
It’s shocking to me that so-called “feminists” will fall over each other to tightly define who is allowed to call themselves a woman. Trans women have always been subjugated by this behaviour. We were at the forefront of the modern Pride movement over fifty years ago, and yet it took only a handful of years for cisgender feminists to push trans activists out of said movement, and we’ve been barred in varying degrees from doing anything like that since. Now that trans women can be visible enough to ask to be treated better, that’s seen as appropriating women’s rights for ourselves.
But women’s rights are our rights. Because we are women.
Cisgender women stand to lose a lot more than they gain through the targeting of trans women with hateful legislation and incendiary speech. Increased scrutiny and policing of appearances in public places will lead to mistakes ranging from the embarrassing to the traumatizing. This is already happening, with gender-nonconforming folks and butch lesbians being harassed in washrooms because they look trans, So are a lot of perfectly cisgender and heterosexual individuals who just don’t happen to dress and act in the prescribed way.
All of this puts you in just as much danger as it puts me, if bigots think you’re a tans woman too. And it matters to me that you, me, and my trans sisters are all safe, no matter what.
The label of “woman” means so much to me, because as it turns out, I fit the definition just fine. No matter what shape I contorted myself into, I never neatly fit into my expected gender roles. I was a mousy husband and an effeminate boyfriend. It was visible to everyone except me, and once I started knocking down the closet walls, I felt suddenly like I’d come home. When I said it out loud for the first time, I wept. I was standing in front of my mirror, in my bedroom. It was February 1st and I was getting ready for work. And I had to have a full-on ugly cry over the realization that I had known all this time, but for lack of a matching label, I had been unable to explain it to anyone.
Nobody can take that from me now. It has shaped me as a person, and I’m extremely proud of that person. I have parented my inner child, as we’re making progress on a lot of very deep, very old trauma. I have showered my body in affection and positive language, now that she doesn’t cause me such pain and discomfort via dysphoria. I have learned how to love more fully than I’ve ever known, and more patiently than I ever thought I could. I have allowed myself space to be vulnerable again. And all the while, I’ve been me; a gloriously unhinged disaster lesbian who is growing, changing, and finding a little more of herself every day.
And, of course, I’m a woman too. And as I wipe a tear from my cheek finishing this up, I have to admit that hits me just the same as it did all those years ago.
Photo from Summer 2019.
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Pride 2023: On Queer Cinema & Being a Bigger Dyke
This Pride, I don't have any more closets to come bursting out of. In the space of the last ten years, I was pansexual, then I was transgender and non-binary. 7 months into my transition I shifted my identity to "trans woman", and finally, shortly after that, I came out as a lesbian. I've had a rich journey of discovery and change, and I'm really glad these revelations about who I am have stabilized with time. There is no doubt in my mind that this is who I'm meant to be.
As we know, the world is changing. We seemed to hit a high water mark around the year I came out, in 2018, and since, we've seen the re-emergence of violent bigotry, both in the physical realm, and in the legislative realm, with the goal being no less than to disappear queer people. Trans people who exist in public spaces have been the victims of increasing instances of verbal and physical abuse, assault, even murder. It can be easy to lose hope that the world we were on the brink of in 2018, has missed it’s chance to flourish, as we’re dragged back into the 20th century by hateful politicians and angry fascists. In the last year, I don’t know a single trans person who hasn’t been bedevilled by these fears, and these questions.
I had the opportunity to watch a cult classic film I’d never heard of this weekend, called Better Than Chocolate. Yes, thats a reference to a Sarah McLaughlin lyric. The film follows a group of queer people whose lives revolve around an LGBTQ bookstore in Port Coquitlam called 10 Percent Books, which, if you’re a native of Vancouver, you’ll recognize as analogous to Little Sisters Book & Art Emporium, a fixture in the Davie St Village for decades now. The film follows Maggie, a young woman going through her lesbian awakening, her complicated relationship with her mother, and the experiences of the other queer cast members in a city that hadn’t yet openly embraced their queer identities.
Anyone familiar with queer cinema from the 1990s will know how explosively traumatic representation can be, with tropes such as bury your gays, strict moral lessons levied for queer behaviour, and sexual assaults often vividly portrayed, but Chocolate manages to avoid so many of these. Harassment is depicted, including a scene where a trans woman is confronted in a washroom, and these can be hard to watch, but the scenarios are always defused/corrected by the arrival of other cast members who stand up for and protect each other, which is quite unlike queer cinema then or now. The trans woman character is played by a cis actor, but I'm willing to forgive this because the performance was empathetic and powerful and clearly informed by real trans experiences. And as a trans woman, I've seen a lot worse.
You may be wondering what one has to do with the other, and I’m getting to that.
Watching this film and its depiction of 1990s Vancouver, and the kind of harassment queer people faced, galvanized me, because in some ways, we’ve almost come full circle back to public harassment of visibly gay, queer, or transgender people. Because the film always comes back to the message that we will protect our own, and that we have a right to be here. The same right being challenged by modern-day revivalist moral panic right-wingers. Being called groomers and pedophiles now is no different than what was said to gay and queer people in the 1980s during the last hand-wringing reaction to the increased visibility of queer people.
And the characters in the film experience this first hand, but it doesn’t stop them from existing. I would never consider de-transition as a response to the hatred we’re seeing in the world. Because who I am, who I really am now, brings me too much joy. And they can make trans people as illegal as they want to, it isn’t going to stop us existing. Our first duty is to ourselves, and our community. We keep us safe. And making space for trans and queer joy flies directly in the face of right-wing rhetoric. They want you to think of queer people as mentally unstable, miserable, disfigured and broken people. And that is not at all who we are.
We have returned to existence itself as an expression of resistance. We are going to define the cultural zeitgeist of queer people in this decade, or we can let them do it for us. We have a long fight ahead, but it’s not a hopeless one, as I may have felt at various points in the last year. And so I will continue to exist, and continue to define myself, in ways that bring me joy, and which other queer people can feel safe around. And I’m grateful for my queer family who already see me this way.
Something the queer community has been really good at, historically, is reclaiming language that was used to attack and silence us. I mean, the sheer number of times I’ve used the word “queer” in this piece, is an indicator of our progress in that regard. It was once a slur, and now, the majority of the people in the community that I engage with use it as a means of including everyone and in defining themselves. While it’s not coming out of the closet, shifting the words and definitions we use for ourselves gives our identities power, whether you prefer many labels, a few, or an absence of them. Which is why I’ve decided to start reclaiming a word for myself that some of you may hesitate before using. But I am encouraging you to use it in reference to me.
That word is dyke.
Lesbians have a long history with this word. I understand that it originated as a slur, and that at various times it’s meant masculine or androgynous, but it also means tough, strong, resilient. And these are absolutely things I am. I will never back down from a fight to love who I choose, to be who I am, and to support my community and my loved ones in the face of hate, and I am a militant feminist in the face of patriarchal oppression. I am someone my community views as safe and protective. I’m proud of that, and I’m proud of being a woman who loves women and femme leaning humans. I’d say that makes me a fucking dyke.
You might say that flies in the face of the image you have of me, and on the outside at least, I am pretty soft. But softness is not akin to weakness, and hardness is not strength. One of the beautiful things about our evolving understanding of the gender-universe is that things that once needed to be pinned to a binary, can now be liberated, and used to stand alone. This is another reason why I want to use dyke as one of my labels. Those who have wronged me or those I care about in the past have come face to face with my feminine rage. And it is every bit as powerful and strong delivered by a cupcake in a sundress as it is by a butch in Carhartts. You’ll know this if you’ve ever seen me truly angry.
This soft woman possesses a righteous fury and an incredible strength, and anyone who wants to argue that I have no right to the word, just as terfs have told me I have no right to the word lesbian, can kiss my entire ass. Happy Pride!
Unsure of the photographer, but a picture of Lisa Ben at the first national March on Washington for Gay Rights in 1979, with a quote perfectly encapsulating how I'm feeling right now.
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Biologically Angry
Preface
Recently, a trans woman by the name of Dylan has been the focus of intense outrage from conservatives who live on the stuff, but today, I want to use one of her actions as a jumping off point to talk about who owns the writ on womanhood. Before she was (in)famous for Bud Light and Nike sponsorships, Dylan was taking heat from trans-exclusionary reactionary fascists for another reason: because she carries tampons in her purse.
I have recently been having some complicated feelings on the limitations of my body, as a trans woman, and owing to either autism, borderline personality disorder, or a mix of the two, I feel a need to share the loss and mourning I’m experiencing with those in my circles. This has, in turn, brought up more complicated feelings.
It may or may not be a surprise for you to learn that trans women have periods. I never know who’s going to read this stuff so this may feel a little Trans 101, but owing to feminizing hormones, a lot of the experiences cis women have with menstruation, like the cramping, the moods, and the cravings, are all things people on feminizing hormones also experience.
The technical reason for this is hormonal levels dictate fertility cycle windows. Put estrogen and progesterone into a body, and it’s going to react the same way cis bodies that produce those hormones naturally react. As to cramping, it’s not actually the uterus doing the squeeze, but the smooth muscle lining around the intestines, which means that despite not having a uterus, I still get cramps that have knocked me to the floor at times. The only thing we don’t experience is the bleeding, cause of the aforementioned lack of uterus.
All of this absolutely outrages our some folks, of course. They claim we’re erasing and robbing meaning from the feminine experience. They claim that people like Dylan “masquerade” as women and that her carrying tampons is just another shake of salt in their wounds. It doesn’t occur to them that the reason Dylan does this, the reason I do it, and the reason lots of women, trans or cis, do this is so we can help other women when they’re stuck. I don’t know a single cis woman who hasn’t at one time or another been caught short with her period. Why wouldn’t you want a friendly sister in the next stall over to pass you a pad or a tampon to help get you by? Why should it matter if that sister is trans or cisgender?
Apparently these things matter a great deal to a vocal few, because according to some recent study work, most cisgender lesbians, for instance, are fully supportive of transgender lesbians. But you wouldn’t know that to sit on Twitter and watch the stream of hatred and calls for outright genocide of people like me. Which is why most of the online world ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
However, my complicated feelings tie back to Dylan’s actions and experiences in a few other ways. And it’s my intention to air them here for your perusal, because I’m nothing if not a vulnerable trove of queer trauma hastily plastered to the wall for your education.
We are so often told that what is in the physical realm, is not what makes us women, and I agree with that statement. But it doesn’t change the emotional and physical longings I’ve felt and the loss and mourning I’ve experienced. I don’t expect anyone to believe me, but I do wish people would stop telling me what I should and shouldn’t feel, or that I’m better off for the loss. Cause I’m not.
I: Bleeding
People will often tell you, with varying degrees of veracity, that an experience cannot ever be truly understood unless it is felt. It is this concept that is used to bludgeon transgender people back into our assigned gender and roles. I can’t know that I’m a woman, because I don’t know what a woman feels like, or some variation on the concept.
Except there are many ways that I can.
When I grew up in the 90s, there was no awareness or support for transgender kids. Most of my friends were girls, and they told me often the reason I was their friend, instead of most other boys at school, was because I wasn’t like those boys. One of them invited me over to a sleepover once, but their parents forbade boys from sleepovers. I asked my mother if I could join the Girl Guides, but the Guides didn’t know about trans kids at that time, so the answer was no. As I got older, my shy and feminine demeanour made me a target for bullying. I was often called a chicken and a f*gg*t for not engaging with boys. And so by senior high, I had learned to hide who I was really well, and continued to wear that mask into my 30s.
My high school had a gay/lesbian support group, which I attended once, thinking I might be actually be gay. But I didn’t find I had much in common with gay boys, either. There was no support or wisdom for trans individuals. At home, my parents were not homophobes or particularly religious, but trans people weren’t talked about there either, and films with any gender incongruences such as The Birdcage or To Wong Foo were considered adult viewing, so I didn’t get to see them until much later in my life. Not that those films are paragon examples of trans experiences, but it would have been something.
Despite all this, when I discovered what trans people were, and that they’d been here all along, I couldn’t explode from the closet fast enough. I knew with every fibre of my being that this is what I was missing. It didn’t matter that I’d never been a girl, I had been so painfully awkward and uncomfortable most of my life, that an answer so simple, that I was a girl, made perfect sense.
We do trans people a disservice when we gatekeep these experiences. I was trapped inside the body, gender expectations, and social stature of manhood that felt completely alien to me, but there was nothing else, until I learned about being trans.
I have a body that doesn’t have a uterus, and as such, I don’t bleed on my periods, but I have extended the thought to other folks who do experience this that I wish I could take that from them. And mostly, the response to this suggestion is incredulousness, bordering on anger. The thinking goes, that because I can’t know how this feels, I shouldn’t want it. And wanting it anyway feels disrespectful or demeaning to some.
And to say I struggle with those emotions would be an understatement. It’s pretty much standard operating procedure at this point to deny a trans woman’s validity based on what she cannot do, but this doesn’t fit with feminism as I know it. There are women who are born without uteruses, or who are infertile, or who otherwise can’t have kids. The fact that they mourn that loss isn’t seen as an afront to womanhood. But it is when a trans woman does it. I don’t want to be angry at my sisters, but sometimes I am, because even allies struggle to understand why this hurts so much.
The feminism I grew up with, that I saw in school amongst friends, told me that womanhood was not a club whose cost of admission was the strict adherence to patriarchal ideals. You didn’t need to bleed to be a woman, or have kids, or devote yourself to housekeeping and partnership at the cost of your artistry or personal development. The freedom to choose, not just in terms of bodily autonomy, but in all aspects of our identities, was paramount. And it feels like this notion has all but turned on it’s head in an attempt to keep trans women out of the club. The fact that I don’t bleed, that I can’t have kids, that I don’t want to devote myself to housework and partnership, are all points used against me, to prove I’m not a real woman. And yet, my desire to share things with other women is also somehow demeaning and shameful.
That shrill charge of inauthenticity rings in my ears every time you tell me I don’t actually know what we want. And it only makes the pain of loss more potent.
II: Childbirth
When I was quite young, I had some sort of Cabbage Patch Kids-adjacent doll. I carried it around the house, calling it my daughter. I think this alarmed my parents, as I was 7 years old at a time and this wasn’t something typical 7 year old boys did. Like most things I did as a child, I suppressed it when it became unacceptable, only to have it pop up in later life.
I didn’t really give much thought to parenthood in my adult life until transition, admittedly. I was speaking with a friend about their kids, and afterwards, I had a very messy breakdown over the loss of that experience. In several ways, the world considers me unfit for motherhood. Biological essentialists say I’m perverting womanhood to have a child and teach them that I am their mother. My mental health and my financial dependence on the state means that I’m not fit to adopt a child, nor do I have the space to do so. And of course, my body will not create a life in the way I suddenly wanted to experience.
The pain of realizing all that was very much akin to the pain of someone dying. It was like being made aware of a life I didn’t know I wanted, and then having it taken from me, all in the same realization. I have had to spend a lot of time coming to terms with it. And when I have opened up and spoken about it, I’m either mocked, or I’m told I should be grateful to be free of the trouble.
When cis women who are able to have kids decide to have them anyway despite warnings of how difficult the experience will be, they’re applauded and supported and given space to experience those feelings. When I express that I want the same, I’m insane. And I’m honestly just so tired of having to justify it.
I have found ways to be a mother to myself, in the absence of my actual mother. A huge drive in the desire to be someone’s mother figure is to be a better mom than my mom was. I carried my mother’s trauma all my life, and wasn’t allowed to hold boundaries or space for myself. Borderline and dissociative identity disorder are both challenges that carry beginnings in the treatment I experienced. Now that she’s gone, I’ve worked to be my own mother, to the figures in my head who have needed it. My 7 year old self, my lovely Coral, I have loved her even though she causes a lot of distress and pain.
And so, I don’t need to be a mother as much as I once did, but the pain of loss is still there. The experiences I won’t have and the mourning I’ve done weighs so much. And I haven’t felt like I’ve been able to share that without someone trying to offer me alternatives, or talk me out of it entirely, as if I just don’t know how bad it could be.
My mother was in labour with me for 17 hours. She had opted for natural childbirth early on in the process and by the time she felt enough pain to want to back out, they couldn’t give her the drugs. So she struggled. They offered to put her on a helicopter to a bigger hospital to maybe assist, and I’m pretty sure the swearing and throwing of things was interpreted as no, cause there I was, born in Tofino in the middle of a storm. She told me the story once, and then told me, in a rare moment of emotional clarity, that I was worth every second of her pain and every opportunity she gave up, just to have me.
And I still cry, thinking about that, because it’s not like she didn’t know what was coming. But she thought it was worth it anyway. That I was worth it anyway. And that’s how I feel about the children I won’t ever bear.
They’d have been worth it.
III: Coping
Once upon a time, I hated myself for my appearance. I hated my thin, frail body, my tall forehead, my facial hair. I was deeply ashamed of my figure and would hide myself in oversized clothing and shirts/shorts when I went swimming. I hated how I was aging, looking more and more like my father, and looking old beyond my years due to the stress and strain of my life and it’s many masks.
Today, I have the opposite relationship with my body, partly because I could transition, and partly by accepting the parts that aren’t perfect. There are parts of me I adore, like my curves, my thick and recovered head of hair, my eyes. And then there are parts I’ve accepted through radical self-love, such as my voice, my eyes (but in a different way), and my nose (something I rarely admit to having hated in the past). Overall, I’m in a really healthy place.
However, some things haven’t been as easily let go, such as my longing to be somebody’s mom. I’m working on it, and Coral certainly helps me a lot, because helping her heal trauma from our shared childhood means she is having less meltdown responses to emotional stimuli. I feel proud of her, and the work I’ve done with her. But my invisible head child is pretty hard to explain to strangers, and it’s unfair to ask her to fill all of the emotional cavities I find in myself. That would make me more like my mother than I ever want to be.
I don’t hate my body for what she is unable to do, but I feel a hole in my chest when I think of what she might have done. There are so many ways that I can be a mother figure, and some of those roads I’m already on in various ways. One of my challenges with borderline is how intense all emotions feel. When I think about not having a child, it hurts just as bad as losing a loved one. I can’t explain why. I think it’s similar to what happens when a cis woman loses a child in pregnancy, although I’m certain that saying so will cause more ire. I can imagine who they would be, how I would have been their friend and parent, what our family would have been like. Sometimes I see them in dreams. And then I wake up, and mourn again. And people tell me what I’m experiencing is insulting to them.
If the world doesn’t go completely to hell, it’s entirely possible that within my lifetime, trans women will be able to have children via uterine transplants. This has already been done successfully but it’s still quite experimental. If it does go to hell, probably not, and either way, it won’t happen soon enough for me to take part in it.
It’s going to take a long time to work through these emotions, learn how to cope with them, and direct some of them towards becoming a motherly figure in the ways I can be. But I doubt the ache I feel will ever go away. And I’m tired of pretending that it will, or not talking about it, to save the feelings of others. Motherly longing is part of a lot of trans women’s experiences, and coping requires recognition.
I need to make space to process and feel those things, but we need to make space as a society for trans women to feel these things without persecution, abuse, and belittling. Our womanhood, and our motherhood, matters just as much.
Photo of French Beach, BC, taken by me.
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On Discovering My Inner Fatness
CW: I’m going to be talking about a subject that a lot of people find uncomfortable, both because of how they’ve come to see their bodies, and because of how society dictates our worth. The usual content warnings apply, including but not limited to talk of weight gain and loss, weight numbers, and eating disorder discussion. You are welcome to go and return to this at any time, or peace out entirely. No hard feelings. You do you, boo. Know your boundaries.
~
It’s all too easy to write off our experiences as children, and the experiences of our children, as just weirdness we’ll grow out of. It comes from a place of relief for parents, knowing that every new thing they see a child do, is not some indicator of their futures, positive or negative. However, as transgender folks can tell you, a lot of time, when we wished our parents had noticed our differences, they chalked those differences up to childhood weirdness. And a lot of times, this becomes one of the first disservices we do to our children, and that we do to ourselves, when examining our own childhoods. That important turning points in our young lives were of no consequence.
I’ve used being transgender as a starting point for this examination, and will continue to throughout this work, but it can easily be extended to other truths children discover about themselves. When I was a child, it was extremely painful and laborious, addressing my body. Part of that was the incongruences I saw between myself and other girls, growing up as I did in a body that told others I was a boy. But part of it was also how small and fragile my body appeared compared to other bodies. I had no extra weight on me, at any point in my childhood and into young adulthood. This developed into a pathological need to keep that weight off, and for a few years in my early teens, I was anorexic, though I didn’t tell anyone. I just never took my shirt off in front of other people, and I dissociated when people made comments about my body.
One of the comments I heard often in young adulthood and into adulthood was, why would I be ashamed of my body? (Insert person/group here) would love to have a body like mine! I don’t know why people thought this was comforting? I guess a lot of people’s trouble with their bodies is rooted in what other people think of them, but for me, it was what I saw, not what others saw. The other regularly repeated comment was, if I was so uncomfortable, why don’t I go work out? Surely that would help how I saw myself, but this too caused me discomfort and more dissociation than I care to admit. When I saw bodies that worked out, the supposed ideally attractive body for young men, I was uncomfortable, and aghast when I realized this was what people expected me to aspire to. I did not want to be a bigger and harder version of myself.
So what did I want? Surely if I was that uncomfortable in my body, I had some ideas as to what could fix it, right? Well, no, not really. Transgender people were not on my radar at all growing up, and even in sex ed and Gay/Straight Alliance clubs, we weren’t talked about, so I was never able to take that extreme discomfort in my body and pin it to anything. I ended up blaming all of it on self-esteem, or a lack thereof. So did others.
I do not assign the word “fat” a negative connotation. It is simply a descriptor for a certain kind of body, but that took a lot of time and work to achieve. I was never shown that fat people were desirable, growing up. All of my family, except me, were somewhere on the fat spectrum. But I wasn’t, seemingly no matter what I did or what I ate. There was very little positive representation of fat people that didn’t lean on well-worn stereotypes and tropes. It seemed like every cartoon in the 1990s that I watched had a story arc where the main character doesn’t pay close enough attention to what they eat and they get fat, and that was always, always their fault. So I grew up simultaneously internalizing the lesson that I should not get fat with my already supremely uncomfortable physical form. That was the basis of my anorexia.
Even though it’s been a long time since Karen Carpenter famously died of its complications, anorexia isn’t well understood by most, and part of the reason for that, is we pathologise its behaviours as a net-benefit to a person not being fat. Calorie counting, obsession over body measurements, and skipping meals, all behaviours from which an anorexic person cannot escape, are behaviours that are praised when undertaken by anyone who is even marginally bigger than we think they should be. They are behaviours of someone who takes their health seriously, we’re told. After all, anything is better than being fat. Except when it isn’t, in the case of Karen, at which point we frame it as a failure of the individual, and not a failure of our societal values.
If I hadn’t wrested myself from it’s clutches, I would likely have joined her in early death. At the age of 15 and a height of 5’11” I was 127 pounds soaking wet. My circulation was poor, my heart was weak, extreme exertion such as moving furniture or lifting heavy objects all day would land me in bed for days recovering, because I had no extra energy to spare other than what was keeping my body alive. If I had continued along that path, I wouldn’t be here now. Over the course of my 20s my weight slowly recovered, but I never shook the effects of the poor circulation or lack of energy. And all the while to a chorus of well meaning but infuriating professionals, friends, and partners asking me, why don’t you just work out?
~
I went to my family doctor yesterday, and she was thrilled to hear I have recently started walking short distances in the morning as a means of increasing my strength, both externally in my limbs and internally in my heart. But almost immediately, she had one question for me.
“So, have you lost any weight?”
I ignored the question. It’s a subject we’ve spoken of a few times, and I’m indicated in no uncertain terms I do not want to lose any weight, that I’m happy with my body as it is, I just want to make sure I take good care of it, because I want it to last a long time yet.
“But, have you lost any weight?” came the question again. At which point I stopped, addressed her directly, and said “I don’t want to talk about my weight with you.” I wanted to get angry about it, because we’ve been over this, and we’ve been over how hard it is for me to deflect this question after a lifetime of being extremely thin, but it doesn’t seem to be sinking in. This is my first experience with a doctor who has done this repeatedly, though if the experiences of my fat friends are any indication, it won’t be the last.
In the last few years, I’ve found mental health medication that has worked for me, and I’ve started taking feminizing hormones for my transition and support in womanhood, but I’ve also gained a fair amount of weight. Prior to hormones, I was 160lbs. Due to muscle mass loss via estrogen, I found myself back in the 120s within six months of starting, and that was scary for me in ways I’m sure you can now understand. But then, I rebounded, and I kept rebounding. I’m 215lbs now. And on my way there, something marvellous started happening to me.
I started to like this body.
It’s immense how revolutionary that feels. It’s something I’ve literally never felt towards myself. Part of that was absolutely due to the effects of my hormones. My body hair thinned out and in some places disappeared entirely, my skin became soft and smooth, and my facial features brightened. I had boobs! So many sources of joy at once. But something else that started to happen as I started to change is I started to see softness not just in my features and my skin, but all over. The lines of my bones disappeared one by one. The gaps between my arms and ribcage, between my thighs, even between my fingers began to fill in. My body started to move when I moved, and sometimes continued to move when I stopped moving. I had no idea how happy each of these little discoveries were going to make me, but they have.
I’ve always had a blindspot when it comes to societal expectations, as applied to other people. I’ve regularly cheered on the self-expression and self-acceptance of fat people and their bodies. But just like with being transgender, that blind spot did exist when it came to my own body. I cheered on transgender people and their rights for years before it dawned on me that I was a woman. But that realization didn’t happen overnight. Decades of discomfort, and little clues littered here and there, built up an overwhelming case of evidence such than when the final piece fell into place, it was an infallible discovery. Which is why I stepped quite suddenly into it.
Despite cheering on body positivity and fat liberation from the sidelines, and appreciating other people’s bodies when they were bigger, living in a small body for so long blinded me to seeing myself in any other way. Just as I was unable to see myself as a woman, I was unable to see myself as a fat person, too, until my body started to change. I had vilified my own femininity at the behest of culture for so many years, and I had vilified my body in the same way, until I realized how beautiful I could be if I didn’t.
~
Today, I get different questions, ones that I’m not always ready for. A lot of folks have asked me why, in my journey from thin girl to fat girl, numbers are so important to me, and I think you’ll find the answer in this confession. For so long, the numbers were a prison. No matter how I felt about my body, I would step onto a scale and be crestfallen, to not find myself changed any, even if I felt happier at the time for some reason or another. I longed to have some indication that I had changed, and until I transitioned, I couldn’t examine my body closely without severe discomfort, so the numbers could offer consolation, if only they’d ever moved, but they never did, until I started this journey. Now, every time I get on a scale and the number goes up, I feel an immense sense of joy and relief to be free of the prison. Each of my pounds comes with me wherever I go. They keep me warm, they give me a store of energy, and they make me look as amazing as I feel.
My body finally feels right to me, and that can be hard for others to accept when society’s valuation of my body is so pervasive. When I see myself smile in selfies and I see my chubby cheeks, I am filled with a sense of love for myself I didn’t think possible. When I reach my arms around myself and give myself a hug, my hands and arms sink into my supple frame, almost the same way they do when I snuggle a plushie. When I see myself walking in the windows I pass by, I see myself gently swaying side to side, it brings a sense of comfort I’ve never known. When my thighs and my tummy jiggle as I walk, I take up space in a way I’ve never been able to.
In the same way as I was always meant to be a girl, I believe I was always meant to be fat, too. There is just too immense a comfort to see myself as I am now, too immense a joy. I think that there are ways in which we exist that are truest to our selves, but I also believe that societal influence, and via that other people, will do almost anything to keep us from reaching that place, if it doesn’t align with popular values. Transgender women are pressured ascribe to high femininity or be ridiculed or even killed, but my femininity doesn’t exist there. I am comfortably somewhere between adorable mom-friend and plaid-wearing wrench-slinging futch (a combination of femme and butch). And to choose to exist in that space means people judge my efforts, and attempt to take away my validity.
This is something fat people can relate to with most fibres of their beings. You can find the right clothes, the right routines for you to feel comfortable with your fitness, the right forms of self-expression, and some asshole will always lean out their car window and sling unflattering words. It makes it difficult to maintain that acceptance of ourselves when it’s so socially acceptable to judge others. It feels exactly the same way to be unconventionally beautiful and transgender.
I believe these identities of mine are complimentary. Both of them have brought me to a sense of peacefulness within my skin that I never thought possible. Sometimes the answer isn’t to love yourself as you are, and that’s okay. That’s not who I was, and I didn’t get a say in how I was shaped or why, until recently. I had to become and embrace these parts of me to be happy, but sometimes, I feel the imposter. Transgender women and fat women invite the same cruel, unpolished contempt, and to combine the two, sometimes feels like heresy. Not woman enough for some and not fat enough for others. I’ve often had people tell me I’m not that fat, as if that’s some kind of compliment, and likewise, that I’m attractive, for a trans woman. And as this maelstrom comes to a close, and the oceans come crashing in, I realize how much I just don’t care anymore.
This body is mine, and it makes me happy. And that is all I could ever really ask for in this life.
Art by hxbagels
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The State Of Things
A little while ago, I started thinking about social media, and the control it has over my life. I think it’s a conversation a lot of us have been having since a certain narcissistic billionaire thrust his latest pet project irretrievably into the zeitgeist, because his actions represent a threat to how we communicate, and how we define ourselves. Our pandemic, the one that appears set to dog us for years to come because we can’t take a few months off from grinding society into a fine powder for the oligarchs to snort at their next retreat, has shown us that our online lives are just as real as our offline lives. I won’t even use the term IRL, or “in real life”, because I think it is dismissive of a medium that allows many people, including disabled folks, to have meaningful connections in our lives, without the stress of existing in public spaces. But how do we have meaningful connections on platforms designed to monetize our every thought?
Back when all this was farmland, social media didn’t have an “algorithm”, it was merely a chronological timeline into which your friends (or enemies, I don’t judge) poured their daily reflections and recent heartbreaks and triumphs. We would pick up an app like it was a newspaper, and see spread before us the antics of those we wanted to connect with. This is something that most social media doesn’t allow you to do anymore. Instead, it asks you to rate your friends, by assigning them values like Favourites or Default or Restricted, and asks us to trust the algorithm’s math that we’ll see the people we want to, when we want to.
But as you and I both know, it rarely is so sanguine. It’s no secret that some of these networks spy on us via our smartphones and probably other devices too (looking at you, Amazon), and that the tech they use for that can make a suggestion so targeted it’s uncomfortable. They have amassed a vast picture of each of us, and using algorithms and AI, instead of filling your feeds with your friends, you’re seeing “suggested” content that other people are paying for your eyeballs to see. The amount of privacy we’ve lost in the social media era is incalculable, honestly. And then if that weren’t enough, to make the experience a little bit better, we’re now being offered the chance to pay these same companies, who have made billions of dollars on the trade and sale of our personal information.
And you see, by introducing a “premium” tier of the experience, this releases them from any sense of duty to maintain some quality in the original experience, cause if you don’t like it, pay up, chump. The free versions of the service will continue to erode. We’ve already seen Twitter take an expected security feature like two factor authentication and put it partially behind a paywall. With Facebook and other companies preparing their own version of this final rug-pull, I’m sure other features will disappear too.
So where does that leave us? Are we willing to sift through an ever increasing volume of shitty recommendations and advertisements just for a glimpse of our friends? What started as a beautiful idea in the digital world where anything we believed was possible, has become a cynical exercise in monetizing every aspect of human interaction. There are social media sites that don’t do this. I left Twitter last year for Mastodon, once Boy Wonder was installed as overlord, because the spike in hatred and harassment was too much for me to justify staying. I wish there was an alternative to Facebook, but that’s why everyone loves to hate the network but none of us can escape it. Because of the gravitational pull of all of us being there.
I’m not sure I’m there yet, but I think in the near future, I might consider taking Facebook off my phone. I’ll still post things I write there, or use Marketplace or look for events, but my feed will become a ghost town, because I’ll spend more time interacting directly with people and not through a glass wall where we can see each other clearly but neither of us can hear each other. As I said, there’s other places I can put my effort and time, and maybe that will be good for me. Maybe it will end the rut I’ve been in with my creative process since last year. Giving that time and energy back to myself, instead of sifting through the river water like a crazed prospector for a glimmer of love and possibility.
Maybe we can crawl back out from under the almighty algorithm and then we’ll stop knowing what being so connected, and yet so lonely and unsatisfied, feels like.
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On this day four years ago, something magnificent happened to me. I was only a few months into my transition, and only a month on feminizing hormones. I was in the midst of a 55 hour work week, and only a couple weeks into dating one of the great loves of my life, someone I’m still grateful to be sharing this journey with.
I came out as Morgan, the girl. Now admittedly the name still needed some work, which is why I am now Lily, but something fundamental had changed my view of myself. When I recognized that I was transgender, I had come out as a non-binary person first, because at the time, that was accessible to me, where “girl” hadn’t been, because of some deeply internalized shame.
When I was young, I often found myself socializing with girls and women more than anyone else. Most of my close friends were girls, but I wasn’t allowed to go to their parties or sleepovers, because nobody knew I was a girl yet. Anything feminine that I pursued brought me ridicule and shame, from my fellow classmates, and even from some adults. Eventually, I decided it was best for me to hide those parts, so I created a persona that was quirky and outgoing but suitably masculine to pass society’s expectations. And I wore that costume for fifteen years. All through university. Through my marriage. And into my 30s.
So while I recognized I wasn’t masculine, I hadn’t been ready to accept that I might be feminine, because I would never be accepted as enough when compared to other women. I could never be as attractive, as pretty, or as cute as the women I aspired to. And so I had chosen a different constellation in the galaxy of gender, one that lacked enough definition that surely, I would fit there.
I don’t believe gender can be confined to a spectrum, and certainly not a binary. I think of it more like a galaxy, with incalculable constellations that reach everywhere. And yet I still approached femininity with those cautious footsteps, thinking that if I allowed myself too much, that those ghosts from my past would be awoken, and they would remind me that this was all “just a big mistake”. If I’d let them talk me down, I don’t think I’d be here today, telling you this story.
Transition saved my life, and part of saving it, was accepting my feminine energy. Something I had fought for over half my waking life, only allowing very trusted and very close people to see those parts of me, at a time when I didn’t know what they were or what their presence meant. Four years ago, I woke up to go to work, and put on my work makeup before driving downtown and saddling up to get ready for the day.
And then I saw her, in the mirror. I had been dressing more brightly in the months leading up to that day. My makeup had been getting better, more elaborate. My eyes had gotten brighter and deeper. And who I saw staring back at me, she looked happy. In a way I can’t describe in words and which I hadn’t felt for a very long time. I had a really good cry, seeing her there for the first time. Ruined my makeup and had to do it over again and was late for work. But when I got there, I added “She/Her” as my pronouns to my name badge, and came out to my staff that same day.
In the intervening time, I’ve learned a lot about Lily, the girl. And the several dissociated identities I carry with me, most of them girls. I’ve learned to be comfortable and see myself as feminine even without makeup or hyper-feminine attire. Some might think that, compared to those high-zoot early days of dresses and power makeup and boots, that I’ve given up, but on the contrary, I’m actually closer to my real self than I’ve ever been. What has changed is that I’m comfortable. In jeans, t-shirts, and sweaters, in my cozy-mom aesthetic.
And it all started because, four years ago, after seeing her in the mirror for the first time, I said yes. Forget the years of denial and masking. Forget what the bullies said about you. Forget about the expectations you’ve carried for far too long. Forget the judgmental partners and bigoted friends.
She asked me, are you ready to be that girl?
And I said, I’ve been waiting for this day my whole life.
Happy Transiversary, Lily.
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Cobwebs
I haven’t written for awhile. Not anything beyond a couple paragraphs on various content I’ve shared on Facebook. And I think that has a lot to do with how cluttered my internal workspace has been. The words have not been flowing. However, since purchasing a writing program a couple months ago, what I have done in the interim is collect all of my past and sort it into working files where I can call past work up very easily, I can make edits to it and keep track of revisions, and I can export collections of work in an automated way, all things a basic word processor can’t really do. And I’m finding that’s helping my brain a lot.
One of the subjects I’ve broken out into it’s own library is my poetry. For a number of years I was enamoured with writing poems, it probably started when I was 15 or so, and I wrote significant quantities of it. Back in 2018, I came across an old backed up hard drive, which contained all this work that I thought had been lost to time. I converted it all into more modern formats, and have kept it with me since, but rarely looked through or at it in any thoughtful way.
So imagine my surprise then when I began sifting through these documents, to find not only some striking lyricism and images, but also some positively sapphic passages about prior crushes and loves, things I never shared with them because I had learned by that point in my life that my “sensitive nature” was not in keeping with my presumed gender identity. I am elated to find out that I’d never deleted any of these works, even the ones that make me cringe. The earliest work in the pile goes back to 2002, a whole two decades ago now.
It’s also curious to note the change in tone and style as my life progressed. In my earliest works, I see a vividness that belied the use of exacting or efficient language, and instead revelled in the flowery and the awkward. When I went to university and took writing classes in 2011 and 2012, they appear to have sapped a lot of that latent joy and individuality from my voice. My focus became efficiency, there was a drive to remove all unnecessary articles and non-descriptive language. Whenever I’ve attempted to go back to writing poetry, I’ve returned to that secondary style that supplanted my earlier work, and I think moving past that and really examining my prior work will help me find my real voice again.
So while I haven’t made any progress on the now-passed Nanowrimo, I think I’m getting myself into a space where I could have a chance at it next year. I’ve created collections for my poetry, blogs, short stories, and film reviews, creating what are essentially the digital version of binders full of writing, much like I used to keep when I was working mostly with a typewriter. And hey, maybe I’ll even bust out the typewriter again for some inspiration when I feel inclined. While I wait for the flow to resume, I can at least rearrange my workspace to help me find and inspire the right words.
One day, where all that stood here was grass, I intend there to be a cottagecore village full of laughter and inspiration. I can't wait to see it take shape.
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Dissociative Identities, A Roundup
Coming to realize I have DID was both a slow-burn discovery and a headlong collision into myself. I have the history of familial trauma, both physical and psychological, and so from an early age, the original alter, the child, has been present, and she has come forward in times of breakdown and stress, and I didn’t understand who she was or why I no longer could hold back her emotions. Looking back there are several formative encounters with her that shaped our relationship now.
But another event also pushed me into awareness, and that was weed trip I took a few years ago in the presence of my partner. I had taken edibles before, and never felt much, so one night in the lead up to dinner, I took one 10mg edible. But what I learned is that edible weed can have considerable psychotropic effects on me. A friend of mine says what I describe from this event sounds and feels a lot like an acid hit. I dropped completely off the earth, and traversed some places I’d never been. My partner talked me through it isolated in a bedroom. She says she spoke to dozens of us, and I believe her. So after that event, I started taking stock of things in my life.
And I realized I had been losing a lot of time. Sometimes I’d go for a drive and not remember how or why I ended up where I did. Sometimes three days of work would go by and I wouldn’t remember barely anything outside of my commute and bedtime routines. One of my alters straight up bought a car after work one day, drove us home, and I didn’t remember the next morning what had happened. I thought my old car had been stolen until I found the keys to the new one in my purse and a folder of paperwork in my backpack. I never dared to tell anyone any of this. I know that, by and large, institutionalization is no longer a looming threat, but I still felt that stuff like this was so bizarre that they’d make an exception.
So I started writing things down. Thoughts that seemed out of character. Time I couldn’t account for. Dreams that I couldn’t understand. And I started to get a picture of who is here, and form identities and find names for them. And I allowed myself the grace to do this without having the inner critic tear my ideas down and call me crazy. Here’s what I found.
The child’s name is Coral. She’s around seven or eight years old, and she holds a lot of emotional trauma and some physical trauma. When I become hysterically upset, it’s often Coral expressing what she can’t anywhere else. And until this year, I didn’t really have a figure that was able to take care of her. I had to learn to mom parts of myself. And the mom figure that has emerged is Rainbow. She’s about my age, late 30s, and her aesthetic is the chubby mom. I find her presence really helpful, not just for Coral, but for all of us, because we didn’t have a healthy relationship with our blood mother.
Then there is Ramona and Alastor, the two protectors. Ramona is like a tough punk dyke. If a fight is worth having, she’s going to have it, and so when someone is rude or disrespectful it’s often her at the ready with a face full of defiance. Alastor is a fictive, a term I’ve learned for alters who are fictional characters. I had to work a lot on Alastor to come to terms with him, because I didn’t think it was possible for a fictional character to completely encompass an alter’s persona, but here we are. He’s dramatic and will also defend the system but where Ramona has limits, Alastor has none. He is connected to a lot of the shadow work we do in our witchcraft, which is where he draws his power. He is at once one of the most charming and most dangerous elements in the system.
Lastly, there are two muses, Yorkie, and Francesca. Yorkie is very loosely in reference to a character in the Black Mirror episode San Junipero, but unlike Alastor, she does not embody that character, it’s more that she embodies the aesthetic. While all of the adult alters are lesbians except Alastor, Yorkie represents the awkwardness and angst of our second puberty the strongest. She is gay longing and quiet rebellion.
And then there’s Francesca. She is also a muse, but unique in the system, because she is actually a manifestation of a past life I discovered years ago but, like much of my dissociative discoveries, I hid away for years. Fran was born in 1951 and spent the majority of 20s in the 1970s. She wears flowing clothes and large hats, and carries herself like the nameless love interest in Al Stewart’s song Year of The Cat. Incense and patchouli and large plastic framed glasses. Through Fran, I have access to memories and spaces that are razor sharp but that I couldn’t have possibly lived through, as this body was born in 1986. I know she passed in 1982, suddenly, but haven’t found the reason. She is the source of our powers of intimacy and fashion.
And combined with Lily, the placeholder and our system’s home, that makes the Leroux System.
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Returning To The Inkwell
CW: Family member's death. Trans surgeries. Talk of suicide.
If you follow me in one of my many circles, you’ll have heard by now that in July, I travelled to Vancouver to get something that has changed my life: a vagina.
Obviously I’m not shy about it, and the reason for that boldness is that, all of my life, I felt shame around my genitals. I deeply disliked them being perceived or having intimate attention focused on them. I wore clothing that was baggy enough, both as a guy and a girl, that you couldn’t see. And swimming outfits caused me deep discomfort, as they tend to cling to you when they’re wet.
So when I open a conversation like this, you need to understand, it took thirty six goddamned years to get here. My excitement about my body, how she looks, and what she can do, is no less euphoria than those of you who are cisgender felt when you had your “spring awakening”. I’m just 20 years late to mine. But at least someone left the lights on and a couple bottles of rose wine in the fridge. It’s my party.
I had started writing a lot of soul-searching after my discharge from the hospital, but my inkwell dried up. The physical costs of healing swelled and took much of my energy with it, and now that they’re dying back, and I’m able to do things like write on my laptop (it took almost two months to be able to sit with my laptop on my, well, lap). But now a new spectre has reared its head in time for the fall equinox, that of my dead mother.
I told my mother I didn’t want to speak with her anymore, about two years ago. By March 2021, she had passed away from cancer I didn’t know about. And I found out she died just recently. I don’t know how I feel about it. My mom was probably the closest person to me emotionally in my family, but she also emotionally abusive, because she carried stuff from her own family she never healed. Her and I shared a lot of mental health challenges, and that made it harder, not easier, to connect.
I always thought I’d have more time, or at least, one more chance.
Where I was expecting my energy to rebound by about the two month mark, physically, I have, even though I still can’t lift heavy things, but emotionally I’m shorted out. It’s not just numbness, it’s complete dissociation. My mind runs so fast I forget my body can’t keep up, and yesterday, I was so physically exhausted that making macaroni and cheese was the extent of my powers. I slept 12 hours last night. Today I’ve done more, and feel a little more connected, but I don’t know where to start with the grief. If I don’t face it, it’ll come find me, that I know. But I still don’t want to.
This whole experience has affected the system in some interesting ways. Coral has been joined by a caretaker named Rainbow. I haven’t seen Yorkie in awhile. Ramona and Alastor have been angry and defensive. Fran is elated still about our surgery. One of the people who hurt Coral and Ramona are gone now, but their emotions are still here. Rainbow is helping a lot. Not sure where she came from. But it’s allowed Ramona and Al to express their rage rather than act as defenders all the time. It’s been a hard couple weeks for my partners, who I am eternally grateful for, cause I’ve been everywhere.
I’m really glad to be finding my words again. I don’t feel like this is kind of magnum opus level work, but for over a month all I could do is stare at my laptop from my bed, writing what I could in my phone. The fact that this writing exists at all, is a triumph of two months of will and healing. It might not be slick or polished, and it may not be work on my book, but it is words on paper (so to speak).
Death and I are not strangers. In 2015 and 2017 I made attempts on my life, and survived both times. I buried my favourite grandparents, and several friends since leaving high school almost 20 years ago. The concept of someone just not being there anymore isn’t new to me. It’s the terms on which we left off that are breaking our hearts. One of my biggest fears is being absolutely alone. And my mother, difficult though she was, occupied a space in my psyche that is quiet now. As an abused kid, I thought I’d be dancing to find out I’d never have to hear that voice again. But somehow I’m sad?
How does this woman fuck with me still from beyond the grave?
I’m so tired.
Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash
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Revelations
This post is for my trans sisters specifically. It uses gendered language and discusses body part realities specific to trans girls. Thanks for understanding babes.
So, I feel like I owe my sisters an apology. Cause when I started this, I was absolutely certain that surgery didn’t make me a woman. And I still believe that. But I feel like there is as nuance in the statement “I feel complete” that I was lacking, and that I may have disregarded your realities in my haste to prove that surgery doesn’t make the woman.
And for this I’m sorry, babes.
What I didn’t understand is the very visceral connection with this part of our bodies. As a trans girl I’ve been made to feel pretty nice in this body, all things considered. Certainly a lot more connected to myself than I ever did presenting as a guy. I regarded my sexuality as nice to have, but never crucial to my identity, and that prevented me from exploring it, beyond as a call and response to things done to me.
I’m a fairly rare case in the realm of trans femme bottom surgery, in that in the last four days, my nerves have been ping-ponging this way and that, lighting up a region of my body I’ve largely tried to ignore for the last 30 years. They have me on gabapentin for nerve sensation because it’s literally so loud my brain is on fire.
There are various medical reasons for this. I have been known to be hugely sensitive to stimulation since starting HRT. I’m also a bit of a medical marvel in my history, as the only babe ever born out in Tofino with Horner’s Syndrome, and a textbook case at that (I was documented and put in textbooks at BC Children’s Hospital for some time).
But there’s also a reason I’ve been considering, that is less medical and more spiritual. I’m a witch by trade, a sea hag, and I believe in the power of the divine mother whose life flows within every branch and every wave and every gust of wind on this earth. The Goddess.
Now I don’t believe that a devine feminine being appears in any specific way. Trans people have been known to us since before time immemorial, but we have been cut down and cut back by those that feared what we were. Up until 20th century medicine, there was no gender surgery for trans people. We were as we were. So I would never suggest that trans people approach their divine energies only when made to look or function a specific way.
But what I think I am discovering is that the divine feminine in myself, needed this. There was no way to reach her otherwise. Now that the offending ligament has been repurposed, it’s energy has dispersed, to be replaced by what feels like a connection to the goddess herself, bridling with energy and sensation, waving in the night sky, whistling in the wind, ebbing with the tide. It pulsates when my partners smile at me, warms me when I eat food I love, it tingles when I watch curious videos on my phone. When I am in pain, it writhes and flails.
I think this was the missing piece to my puzzle, not to be duplicated or expected from anyone. Just for me. And now I understand, tears streaming down my face, what you meant when you said “complete”.
Thank you,
Your Girl Lily
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I've seen several versions of this art in the last couple of days, and I've linked to the artist so that you can support them, as you should. https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/988053198/trans-the-lovers-tarot-card-print
I love this so much. My experience as a trans woman has been that our healthcare expects us to want to mimic a cis woman in body and in mind as much as possible, and I feel like this erases part of who I am. I took a year to consider whether or not I wanted to pursue GCS, and it's been almost three more years getting ready for it. I decided that's what will make me happiest, and it will resolve a lot of dysphoria I experience.
But this surgery does not make me a woman.
I've always been a woman. I explored the idea that I was genderfluid, but the more I presented as femme and found happiness, the more presenting masc caused me dysphoria. So in that way, I learned where was most comfortable for me. And it's not like I didn't give masc a chance, I tried to be cis for most of my life, and recognizing my transness answered too many questions and brought too much happiness for me to continue to ignore. As much as dysphoria forced my hand, euphoria did too.
Trans women face enormous pressure to conform to high femininity, and it's something I've stopped doing in the last couple of years. I've accepted my broad chin, my high forehead, my bushy legs, my deep voice. I don't see these things as masculine anymore, they're just me. And I wasn't hiding them for me, I was hiding them to be accepted. Much like cis women are told they must do to be attractive.
But I don't have to prove my womanhood to anyone.
The reason I love this art so much is because it celebrates what society deems are incongruent elements, and recognizes us as sacred beings. Whether you choose to have surgery, or not, you are no less beautiful a trans person for that choice. You do not have to abide by what the gender binary dictates.
Sometimes, when other trans women find out I'm one of us, the first thing they want to talk about, is surgery. And it makes me sad that society pressures my sisters so hard into believing that they're not a valid woman without it. I’m talking about relative strangers here, not my sisters who know me and whose experiences we’re relating to. Sometimes, I don't want to talk about it. I want to talk about spinny dresses. Floral prints. Herbal tea. Second breakfast. Art. Music. I'm basically Rosie Cotton, Sam Gamgee's wife. I've been living as a woman for years now. I want to talk about the joy that brings me.
What's in our pants shouldn't define us, before or after we emerge from the closet. Just because I choose "woman" as my title, does not mean I have to perpetuate harmful gender stereotyping. We're experiencing a resurgence and acceptance of gender outside the binary the likes of which the world hasn't seen for decades. And just because I'm a woman, doesn't mean I don't want to be a part of that new world.
It really is about damn time.
#pride 2022#lgbtq#queer art#tarot#gender confirmation surgery#transgender#trans pride#gender stuff#trans positivity
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All In The Eyes
There are things we are scared of, or that make us uncomfortable, and then there are phobias. I’m not a scientist, but a fear is a natural response to a perceived threat. A phobia is something that triggers a fight or flight panic/survival response, even if we’re not in any physical danger. I don’t like to talk about my phobias, but there is one I’ll share with you, on the house, if you promise not to send me these in future.
In horror films and other media, notably games, there’s a well worn horror trope turned aesthetic that involves portraying characters with empty eye sockets, and I just can’t. Sometimes artists will take it a step further and have fluids pouring from them, turning them aesthetically into open wounds.
The first time I saw this, it was in a film, and sadly I can’t remember the title, but these haunting, graphic, gaping holes I saw in someone’s face awoke something deeply fearful. Almost a primal response. I screamed. And like, not, I’m going to an amazing concert with my girlfriends screaming. I screamed like someone was actively murdering me. The sound I made scared me almost as bad as the visual echo of that image.
That night, I didn’t sleep. I stayed awake until the next afternoon, and when I did finally sleep? Guess who was there. Holding a teddy bear that was missing a few limbs standing amongst the ruins of a building on fire. Staring off into the distance. Her fiery silhouette, illuminated only by a pale white streetlamp about halfway between her and I. She stared another moment, and then rather casually turned around, as if I had called to her.
And there they were. Two inky black pools of darkness outlined only by the streetlamp’s sickly pall. Black fluid running down her cheeks.
She fucking looked at me. Saw me. Without eyes.
I woke up in a state of sheer terror, crying hysterically, waking up my partner at the time. She would claim she never again saw me like that. I eventually cooled down enough to whimper myself to sleep, but it wrecked me. I consigned myself to sleep with the absolute last of my physical energy. I’ve ever had the dream again since, but I’ll never forget having it just the one time.
I still can’t deal with it and it’s probably been fifteen years since this happened to me. Stationary images, or art, of something like this, I can sort of stand, to a degree. But moving images, I just can’t. It turns out this is called ommetaphobia, or a fear of injury to eyes, so I guess maybe I’m seeing myself in these images, and the fear of it happening to me is too much to process. All I know is, it still catches me off guard in some films, plunging me back into the depths of that terrible dream.
Alone. Facing a girl with empty eye sockets that can see me.
Art by Vyacheslav Belov
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Thoughts On Artisanal, Hand-Crafted Genitalia
Chapter I: Identity & Surgery
It’s a grey, wet, windy early May evening and I’m sitting by the window, listening. This is one of my favourite places, being able to hear the whistle of the breeze in the newly leafy limbs of the neighbourhood’s mighty maples, some water dripping on the aluminum flashing of our windows pat-a-pat-pat.
This is the first of what I’m sure will be several thought pieces on the process and experience of vaginoplasty, which I’m getting in Vancouver on July 19th.
I first realized I was ashamed of my body, and of my genitals, when I was 6 years old. My family took me to the local indoor pool for Red Cross swimming lessons, and I had to get changed into my swim trunks in the change room, and out of them afterwards. I started wearing my shorts to the pool and changing at home, and would wrap myself in several towels before I took my trunks after the lessons. So trust me when I say, I know how uncomfortable being scared of your own body is.
As I got older, I stopped taking my shirt off when I went swimming, because my thin, lanky frame made me feel massively uncomfortable. I obsessed over having baggy enough trunks that my genitals couldn’t be seen in them, which often meant they fit poorly, again, because I was so thin. I rarely took my shift off for anyone, even during intimacy with my partners. And yet all this time, I was never able to connect all these things together, and discover why. It wasn’t until my 30s, when I met other trans people, that I figured out what was happening to me.
And so, you could say most of my life has lead to me deciding to pursue gender confirmation surgery, and that undertaking it will bring significant changes and comfort to me, and you’d be right.
When I first came out as transgender, I called myself non-binary, because I knew I wasn’t male, but I also wasn’t sure what I was either, and it was an affirming middle ground to exist within. After about seven months, I had finally gathered the courage necessary to come out again, this time, as a girl. And it’s important to note that, the first time I came out, I hesitated to call myself a woman because I didn’t think I’d ever be one. I’d never be pretty of feminine enough to be a girl, I thought. I had some internalized trans-misogyny, and I worked it out until I could get out of my own way.
That belief is a really common one in our community. Any woman can tell you that enormous pressure is placed on us to dress well, to fit in, to not be too fat, and so on and so forth. A lot of trans women, upon embracing womanhood, feel they have to follow that archetype, lest the world not treat or see us as women. And we do ourselves a disservice in doing so, but often, we’re not secure enough in our womanhood to know that yet.
There is no set way to be a woman. Cis women come in all shapes, sizes, body types, skin colours. Some cis women are hairy, others fat, some have small breasts, some have facial hair. In other words, there is no right way to be a woman, despite what popular culture and billion dollar industries predicated on self-hatred will tell you. And it is in this universal truth that I have fully accepted myself.
You might be wondering where I’m going with this, and I ask you to trust me, I’m getting there.
For me, gender affirming surgery is not about making myself a woman. It’s about removing a very painful and upsetting part of my body, and remaking it into something as beautiful as my womanhood. Something just as unique. Something that compliments me, rather than completing me.
I get uncomfortable around language that frames my surgery as something that completes my womanhood, and because I’m massively empathic, I notice when others find that kind of talk uncomfortable too. I am beyond excited and happy for the trans women I know getting closer to their transition goals, but I am leery of language that reduces us to walking genitalia. This is something that women have been fighting since the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, that a woman is more than her parts. Perhaps ironically, those same women denied trans women a seat at the table even then, despite us being the living embodiment of the idea, but I digress.
My identity is going to be massively validated by having a vagina, but it won’t define it. It will mean I can go swimming without complete breakdowns and panic attacks. It will mean better fitting into women’s clothes, often not made with space for dangly bits. And it will make my intimate experiences with others much more affirming and enjoyable.
But when I come out of that surgical room, it won’t be anyone else who wakes up and takes my place. It’ll just be me. Because I’ve been a woman all along, just a woman who massively tanked a couple roles during character creation and ended up with some weaponry that was an ill fit. The girl who wakes up in that recovery room on July 19th? She won’t have been reborn, she will have just had an upgrade.
Ultimately, that’s what my “hand crafted, artisanal genitalia” will mean to me.
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