There’s magic in desire

Confidence, Consent, and Making Requests

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Part II, Chapter 9.

Previous.

A baby blanket was gifted to me when I was born. I still sleep with it. My grandmother. Lillian’s friend Mae, whom she met in kindergarten, made it. When I was eight or nine, I learned to crochet—poorly. I learned on a ski trip with family friends. The kid who was my age, Alex, died this past year. In order to reconnect with him and the me I was when we were closest, I picked up crocheting again.

I’ve needed to repair my baby blankey for years. The holes had grown big enough for me to wear the whole thing like a poncho. Last year I gave it to a friend experienced in darning to fix. She struggled with how to approach it. But as I learned to crochet, I took it back and began repairing it. Faced with the choice between preservation and allowing it to become something new, I chose the latter. I used a yarn that had been given to me by a friend who had suddenly ended our friendship so as much as I loved the yarn, it came with a tinge of grief, but so did my learning to crochet. I created organic, amoeba-like repairs that looked like growth. As I sat on my couch surrounded by my pets repairing this blanket that had kept me warm as a baby, I was exceptionally aware that this moment was fated for me nearly 100 years ago.

It’s all the same thing.

•••

Chapter 9: There’s magic in desire: Confidence, Consent, and Making Requests

June 2, 2021

Wednesday

7:45am

Halfway through the year. Wow. I’ve lost weight. 99 pounds. Pooped 5-6 times yesterday.

There’s such a history of queer people saying, “I was born this way,” or, “I always knew something was different about me,” but my experience has been one of becoming. I feel that perhaps what I was born with was a potential and a fluidity, and via exposure and community (which I both consciously and unconsciously sought out, in search of permission) I have not become more my self but rather uncovered new potentials that I didn’t know were there. I don’t feel at all that I’ve ever repressed who I am or have been. I’ve never felt unable to be my self. It feels like being trans is a potential. I could go down that road and really like it. But it wouldn’t mean that I was always trans or ever repressing my (potential) transness. It would mean that I chose that path. (This is all coming from someone who believes choice is mostly an illusion and everything is more or less predetermined. How do I reconcile that?) If I made the choice to try that path, perhaps it was chosen for me as one potential. This issue with this line of thinking is that the “born this way” argument has been relied upon to adjust legislation and legislated protections. There’s a privilege associated with choice/desire that’s not associated with need/survival.

June 6, 2021, 9:89am

I’m considering microdosing T. I filled out a questionnaire with Folx.

I was thinking about the privilege of being genderfluid and how I often feel at home in anything I wear and I can pass, etc. The curse of it is that when I do experience dysphoria, there’s nothing I can do because any permanent changes would only cause dysphoria on the other days when the pendulum swings back. I’ve been feeling so boyish lately. I love it. And I love that I’m confusing to people. I’m confusing to myself.

I have to be careful what I say. I’ve said, “I could die now” and 45 minutes later nearly gotten side swiped by three cars not checking their blind spots within one drive. Words are spells. Words are as heavy as objects can be. “It is true because I just said it so there it is. It’s out there, look there it is right there can you see it yes, there on the floor between us this thing I just said, not going away” (from Cock by Mike Bartlett, one of my favorite plays and playwrights of all time).

Growing up is not something that happens to you—it’s a choice you make. I remember turning 27 and thinking about the characters on Friends, “They’re adults. And that show started when they were like, 24. What am I waiting for?” I realized I wouldn’t feel like an adult until I decided I was an adult.

I was also waiting to feel like a woman. All through my childhood, having been really small and looking younger than my age, I desperately wanted to grow up. I wanted to wear deodorant, shave my legs, wear makeup. I was a late bloomer—I got my period at 14. I thought womanhood would come, and that that’s what adulthood would feel like. But at 27 I was still checking my watch, trying to understand what Shania Twain and Aretha Franklin were talking about when they sang of feeling like a woman. I was torn: I both knew I had to choose to grow up and be an adult, and I also began to think that womanhood was never coming. I was faced with the project of recreating what my adult self was going to look like, act like, and do as I relinquished the future I had envisioned for myself as a woman.

What are adults like? In my teens, I thought that they were organized, they were clean, they showered regularly, they had a job, they knew themselves, they had sex, they paid bills, they had keychains and bank accounts and carried purses. As I crept into my twenties, I began to recognize that if I wanted to be organized, I was going to have to choose to be organized. If I wanted to shower regularly, I was going to have to choose to shower regularly.

My gender is fluid, so it’s confusing to choose a label like trans. I have no problem referring to myself as “not cis,” which, by some definitions is necessarily trans, but there’s something about that framework that poses a new binary and a fixedness that I resist. I don’t like “non-binary” either. There’s a part of that term that also feels reminiscent of co-opting or appropriating something that is not mine.

When I try to figure out why it feels that way, it comes down to a feeling of separation from trans people because I love my body and feel little dysphoria around it. I I don’t want or need anything to change in order to feel affirmed in my gender. But the next thought is that I want to live in a world where being trans isn’t associated with pain, discomfort, struggle, and alienation from oneself. Am I trans enough if it doesn’t cause me pain? I believe yes. And yet it’s hard to take on the identity.