This one makes me really nervous. Obviously this photo is intimate and sensual and I realize that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea — especially not for folks who knew me in The Before Times™. I’ve been sort of tacitly dreading the day we’d get here because I feel like I’m at a real crossroads. For the last 30 years of my life I have hated this body with every fiber of who I am. It disgusted me to look at, let alone be trapped in. I spent 30 years living in that body and following unnatural and […]
Growing Into My Summer Skin — Exploring the Future One Moment at a Time.
One of the most amazing aspects of transition is the change in perspective it brings you. For so many trans people, pre-transition our futures were dark, vague, or missing entirely — a black spot where all of our hopes should be. The future looked like just another part of the prison sentence I was born into when I considered it at all. Most of the time I didn’t think about it. Nobody really prepares you for the shock of waking up one day and… you’re excited. And then the next day you’re excited. And you think about next week and […]
Sealed Away: Back In the Closet
For nearly the last 10 days I have been in relative isolation as COVID—19starts its growth in the United States. The grocery stores have been sold out; businesses are closed. Social life in my city has more or less slowed to a crawl. Fear and apprehension lay like a blanket of tar across the city. Everyone is terrified, nobody is taking things seriously. Somehow these things are both true. My sole contact has been with my partner and with the world through digital means. With Trans Day of Visibility coming up on March31, what does it mean to be visible […]
The Kids are Alright
I had the absolute pleasure this weekend to get to answer some questions about trans and other LGBTQ issues for a class of young folks, they had a lot of great questions and my thoughts about the experience are all piled on top of each other like a box of necklaces I need to untangle before I can put them on display. Our panel was beautiful varied. Some of us were binary trans folks, some of us were non-binary, some of us were elder, and some of us were still in high school. The children were all younger but I […]
Transporting Myself
As I’m typing this first draft at 5 am on my cell phone at a friend’s house near Philadelphia, I’m surrounded by bags of my possessions. A black cat, Padfoot, is sitting on my suitcase, which contains changes of clothes, hormones, makeup, and so on. Today, we’re to go to a scheduled formal event for firefighters, and we’ll be all dressed and made up for the occasion. All of this has got me thinking about how different travel is for me now, both as a woman and a trans person. I used to hate formals. When I had to pretend […]
Transition and Tragedy
I lost my darling husky, Rosa, on January 7th. We had eight amazing, frustrating, beautiful years together with my other husky, Misha. The decision to let her rest was the hardest choice I’ve ever made in my life. She was my family. Since then, I’ve grieved her and tried to get my life in order. Misha and I are going to be okay together – we’ll adjust and we’ll go on. But I’ve had this thought repeatedly about just how different this experience has been because I transitioned – or more specifically how it’s been better for it. Even just […]
Socialized Male
A couple months ago I decided to take some supplies to a person who was having housing issues. I packed up a bag full of essentials they had asked me to bring and I started to walk towards the McDonald’s where we’d agreed to meet. It was dark and I let my friends and partner know where I’d be walking and that I’d bet back in a bit. And then my metamour (my partner’s boyfriend) showed up at the McDonald’s and insisted on giving me a ride back home. My girlfriend gave me quite the talking to about it, essentially, […]
About Hatching
Trans folks call ourselves eggs when we talk about “the time before.” The people we had to be, the roles we had to act out, those were our shells. Realizing you’re trans is “hatching.” We talk a lot about the hatching, breaking free of the restraints that gave us a shape and form that didn’t belong to us. I have a strange relationship with my shell. It hurt me. It hurt me to be in that form, pretending to be that person. It nearly killed me. And so I’m struggling with this other feeling I feel towards it – gratitude. […]
A Phone Number to My Soul
Changing one’s name takes a lot of effort, anguish, work, and patience. So why do we do it? Why are names so important to us as transgender people? Over the last few years, but particularly the last few months, I’ve lived the experience of crafting a name for myself and then wearing it into the world. And sometimes I ask myself why I am going through all this stress. They say that to name a thing is to own it. My dead name was given to me by people who cared for me, enforced by people and systems that had […]
Pictures of You, Pictures of Me
The best photos that were ever taken of me pre-transition are from days where I almost died. There’s a resignation in my eyes in those photos – a kind of surrender that poked through every cheeky smile and goofy pose I could muster. I can see it and so can others, now that they know to look. A fair number of those photos exists – but that’s nothing compared to the number that exist of me from the last eight months, since I started transitioning. The photos I take today are nothing like those old ones. The old ones were […]