Courageous Spinelessness

Friday I left UNC's Spine Center rubbing my chapped mitts with the kind of joy one gets from a new medical diagnosis (surely the Germans have a word for that). "Brachial Neuritis or Radiculitis Nos" said my important papers--I couldn't wait to google.

As it turns out, Brachial Neuritis typically follows injury "such as gunshot or stab wounds" or follows a viral infection or surgery (double mastectomy, anyone?). It does have a genetic marker, is fairly rare, but basically no-one really knows what it is or how it functions, but it might be an auto-immune response.

It struck me that the language around this syndrome was very much like fibromyalgia, which I had been diagnosed with nearly a decade ago, with some strong differences. Brachial Neuritis is a "man's disease." Fibromyalgia, at least when I got it, was a "woman's disease." Doctors treated me as if I was a Victorian lady, hysteric, suffering from the symptoms induced by my own lively imaginings, as if I had indulged in too much busy manly brainy work and was now suffering the consequences. "Women who have been sexually abused get it" said one doctor, fairly rolling his eyes. Had I gotten fibromyalgia from stab wounds or gunshot I'm sure we all would have been much happier.

I'd like to suggest something, something dangerous. I'm going to (for one, for once) ignore the ridiculously preferential and gendered medical language and suggest this: what if this uptick, this surge, in auto-immune responses, in disease where our bodies seem to "feel too much" or "feel the wrong thing," is an evolutionary move towards the kind of all-bodied sensorium of octopuses?

My spine is crumbling, encrusted with the barnacles we call spurs--but I believe like a fossil, my original spine is nearly gone; it has been replaced by the minerals and shell bits and heavy metals of my past. I believe we are moving towards the kind of embodiment that "thinks" with its arms--like an octopus--that our bones are attempting to shore us up against what we have sunk into this earth, poisons and pesticides, and that our central nervous system, being overtaxed by impact, the crashings of sensations from constant electric immersion (tvs, cell phones, electricity) is both attempting to protect and to extend itself because it needs more room.

Enter then, this new being, still bilateral, still sentient, but sensing and thinking from its softened arms and legs. The fad for muscularity will presently be replaced by a delight in bodies that can move in even more spectacular ways, requiring...drum roll please...a surgically implanted (at first) flexible spine, allowing our new being to squeeze under doorways and through cracks like mice. Later, this being will have no spine at all.

The pain I feel, radiating from the various injuries to my spine, my chest, my self, might actually be evolution. The delicious, damnable, brutal heavy electric stabbings of evolution. You with me? If you, like me, have experienced interstitial cystitis, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, fibromyalgia, and now some kind of hyperalgesia induced by multiple incidences of violence not limited to but including (as they say) car wrecks, assaults, concussions, mosh pits, then you might feel a reluctance, anger even, by the suggestion that your pain, your trauma, is some kind of motherfucking evolution.

Sisterbrother, I feel your pain. Let's look to the octopus for a sec. The octopus brain isn't centrally located like ours, or rather, it has dense neurons everywhere--it does something like "thinking" with its arms. (I do something like "thinking" with my....oh never mind.) This makes it a supreme test subject. The octopus is often used as a lab animal because of its incredible intelligence, its unique capacity to experience life through not just its enlarged head, but through its eight motile arms. As a test subject, it is an uncommonly able subject--its sensorium is geared for sensation, for pain, all over. Not like we are. More, I imagine, how those of us with amped up sensations are, those of us for whom a whisper of wind relays stark horripilation, whose bones require battening against the everyday, whose fascia begins to set after a second, rendering ordinary movements like getting out of ones chair an excruciating exercise in what feels like breakage. The octopus, particular as test subject, is my kin.

How then, to relinquish what many of us feel is our only raft in a terrifying ocean, that is, our identities as disabled? Too many transfolk I know have one or more of these diagnoses, and I'm confident this isn't merely because I gravitate to people of similar experience. Transbodies in particular (like octo-bodies) are subject to the kind of abuse that leaves a neural stamp, the imprimatur of pain...Transbodies in particular are forced to be complicit with the medical industry, to get our hormones, our surgeries, our care.

I am, just for today, relinquishing this identity, except for bureaucratic necessity. I am willing to explore this idea, this embodiment, this, these pains, as yes the result of myriad abuses but parlaying themselves into exploration, into a riot of sensation yearning to be without armature, longing for and making exodus to a free body, a body that moves any way, goes anywhere, is free, not of pain necessarily because pain is important--a body that is always, already oceanic and celestial. I can bear some of this pain with the knowledge that my sisterbrothers after me might endure less, that bodies might move to...dare I say it aloud? Invertebrate. Sister Sea Slug, wrap me in your tongue-like body; naughty nautilus, invite me to tea. I will slip underneath the heavily guarded and locked laboratory doorway and free all my kin, all my octo family. Are you in?

Boys with their Baby Vein Faces Shining Neon

It's been dark around here, I'm not going to lie. I have friends whose ability to stay tethered to this dimension seems fragile and full of pain, the pain of lusty, unhinged cells replicating and replicating. Just as they seem to become full of something Not Themselves and slow of pulse and breath after so much quickening, do I become leaden, full of bile and blood. I feel like rot watching my friends be sick.

I myself am enduring one of many detoxes. I am in a some kind of perpetual withdrawal state--kicking one chemical after another in an attempt to relieve my own constant neuralgia, being prescribed cymbalta, vicodin, gabapentin, lexapro; getting rolfed and massaged and acupunctured and just generally torturing myself at the gym. I am in a state of pain I'm confident would be solved by opiates, and indeed, they bring such a sweet relief it's almost ridiculous. Like, why aren't we all on opiates?

I watched the Peter Weller documentary about William Burroughs, a man I had the good fortune to meet not once but twice, and actually spent an afternoon with. Peter Weller comes off as the biggest kind of art douche, but Burroughs? My kind of guy. I was heartened to hear that he struggled with dope til the end. Not in some kind of schadenfreude way, but because I struggle with dope now and again. It's a solution to a lot of things. I was a heroin addict in my twenties and on methadone for nine years. It has a way of changing you. Or rather, I came to it because I was already changed, I was already awash in some other stream, one that neither parallels nor crosses the so-called "stream of life," one that creative people seem to wade and occasionally drown in. Burroughs was so charming. You can be charming on dope, junk, to use Burroughsian vernacular.

In my neurochemical jazz fest, the one that's happening in my brainy parts right now, I recall Burroughs coming to the book shop I worked at. I ran in a crowd that worshiped him. We both did and did not understand his genius. It's taken me years--getting older does that, you ripen, your memory cells accommodate and imbricate information in gratifying ways. Stanislavski, the great actors' teacher calls it Emotion Memory. You overlay and shape memory with your new experiences, archiving and adding like a hypermotile librarian in the Strand Bookstore of your brain. Burroughs came to Lambda Rising, in Dupont Circle, where I was employed as a cashier/book seller/only one there. We carried his books in 1980 to be sure, but they didn't sell. Nope, gay men bought sad, horny romance novels by Gordon Merrick, and Inches and Blueboy. Not Genet, not Burroughs, not even Rechy. There I was, all New Wave-punk lesbo behind the cash register, reading Fleur du Mal and Seasons of Hell, Naked Lunch and Queer, all written by homosexual geniuses. You can imagine the attitude I was handing over with your change.

Burroughs came upstairs to do an impromptu reading. It was wonderful. Four of my besties and me alone, hanging on to Bill. He was polite and unconcerned by what  for me spoke to the general state of the gay male industrial complex--that it routinely sacrificed its most hard-won gifts for tawdry emotional appeal, in art, in literature, and most obviously in music. Of course this is true of another kind of 99%, right, the regular ol' world, the other 1% of us having been "blessed" with no discernibly useful talents except for making art. But Burroughs brought something real to the table. While the queers were buying poppers and jack mags--and why not!?--Jane and Paul Bowles, Verlaine, Barnes and Proust were getting thumbed by yours truly, who would then "sell" them back to the bookstore as "used." Oh, there's another financial amend I owe. Fantastic.

Burroughs didn't seem to need gay approbation, and why would he? He wasn't Lambda Rising Gay, then a mixture of 70's clone (hoodie in jean jacket, moustache, aviators )--he was his own thing--but my favorite part of meeting him was when he sent down his Aryan amanuensis James to ask "if it was okay if Bill took some magazines home." And sure enough, when they left, Burroughs carried a paper sack stacked with Numbers, Inches, Colt, and Honcho that I had packed up for him myself, secretly dreaming an unseen dream of being someone, something, that William Burroughs might jack off to.

Maybe we didn't shoot our wads together, but possibly that night, William and I might have shot other things, in hotel rooms, basements, rest rooms. I met him again with John Waters. I would never want to be the man John Waters would jack to, but I admire him just the same. They both articulate the life of men who cannot be anything other than themselves. Iconoclasts. Heroin had Burroughs. It was a love affair that lasted his entire life. What heroin, addiction in general is to me, is a way of grinding myself to my body. I haven't tasted dope since 1993 but I know its smell, I can conjure it any time. I want to curl up behind Burroughs, my thick torso and gloppy belly smashed against his sticky bones, the filo dough of old man skin wrapped around a skeleton. Poppies in your ear man. Burroughs left poppies in my ear.

Bats With Their Baby-Veined Faces--Part 1

Patti Smith is on my mind today. My beloved soul-sister Stephen called me yesterday. He's dying of cancer but his inevitable cellular expansion into the unknown has been put off for some months, hopefully some years. It turns out he's of the blood type that can undergo genetic resequencing. There's been a lot of work in this area, much of it experimental and much of it hopeful. He's on some kind of drug--we didn't talk about it in depth because we had too much to say to one another, mostly about what he's going to do with himself, now that he's got all this time. These therapies can be very successful, just not permanently. Yet.

"I feel pretty good these days," he explained to me, even as he was calling because he's going through withdrawals from the fentanyl patch he's been on for a couple years. "I don't know if I should travel the world, see Bali with my husband, fire-walk, or stay here and get out of bed and get breakfast for the kids and take them to school and, you know, just live my life."

Steve and I both survived the 80's AIDS crisis. We were both in New York City when Reagan cut funding for social services while tacitly denying this distinctly American genocide, Steve a robustly sexual gay man and me a intravenous-drug addict. I say "intravenous-drug" because there was a time when I was as addicted to the needle as I was the drug. (Consequently I have injected any number of interesting substances, both purposefully and by accident: cocaine and pastel dust, isopropyl alcohol, and dirty water come to mind.) I watched as my city streets filled with humans, people disgorged into the streets who had been (some for years) in mental wards, treatment centers, and hospitals. Elevators were crowded in a new way even for Manhattan, filled with the collage-phrasings of schizophrenics and the ramblings of dementia, people leaning on sticks and crutches as limbless and lost as people I had seen in Haiti. Little wonder heroin was my drug of choice; it was a soft and comforting euphoria spansule that enveloped and protected me as I roamed through Hell.

It changed everyone who was there. It reminds me of John Shirley's novel "A Splendid Chaos," where people go to this disco and it turns out its some kind of technology that takes them to this "Survivor" like planet where they're forced to figure out how to live on this weird planet with multiple other alien species and diseases. There's this electrical field that travels like a merciless storm cloud, and if you're caught in it, it "twists" you electrically. Some part of you emerges that was always there, but the phenomenon dislodges and even enhances it. So if you went through the 80's in a big city that was devastated by AIDS you've been through that electric event, and some part of you is distorted and enhanced. If you're lucky, it was your compassion.

It seemed to have been so with Steve. He has an incredible generosity and almost unlimited compassion, even and maybe especially as he took care of his partner through his partner's death from AIDS. But I'm waaaay off topic now so I'll get to the point. Steve recently finished reading "Just Us Kids," Patti Smith's homage to her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe, which is also kind of a billet doux to New York in the 70's. Steve and I both had a similar experience reading the book, which evoked an unsentimental awe for the decade before the madness. BM. Before Madness.

Extending that device, I could also parse a significant movement in my own life, that being Before and After Patti Smith. Seeing the still stunning Mapplethorpe photo of Patti for her first album at age 15 changed my life. For a burgeoning lesbian and future transperson, the impact of an androgynous, iconic contemporary woman artist was meteoric; I was caved-in and smashed to bits in the kind of wonderful way in which you are then magnetically rearranged into something greater, this particular impact having merged with your molecules. That she existed NOW, in my space/time--unlike Marlene Dietrich or Romaine Brooks, whose photos and biographies I had devoured with a longing I can only now begin to identify--and, that she had agency, was an artist, was enormously important in 1975. I mean, I didn't even particularly like Romaine Brooks, but in a desert of a certain kind of androgyny, one had to make do.

Gertrude Steinian butchness didn't quite capture it, and while I adored the male forays into femininity, like Bowie and even young Robert Plant, I needed to see a woman doing it. At fifteen I was already exhausted by masculinity and its tantalizing yet repulsive allure. I could not have any of it. Those moments in which I allowed it to transmute my body, to "twist" me, were often abruptly halted by someone taking the piss out of me, or by my own hyper-vigilance. Patti offered a way to allow the cells of masculinity to pass through my membrane and infuse me with near luminescence. It was liberating beyond belief to release some of the tension in the reins I had bridled myself with.

Her impact merely began there. Because of Patti and her genius eruptions, her own literary/artistic obsessions, I read Rimbaud, Ginsberg, the Bible; I listened to Coltrane and Ronnie Spector; my eyes slid greedily over Brancusi's "Bird in Space." I probably read about and saw more demanding work during my Patti-era than I did any time in art school. I hope the kids have somebody today, somebody whose presence forces them to confront as much of themselves as they are ready to, not in a "Beautiful" way, or in that way in which people like Pink and Katy Perry have made an industry of, "comforting" us by telling us we're "okay." "You're beautiful the way you are" always rests on the substrate of "you are actually not beautiful." And why do we need so much reassuring? Patti was only reassuring in that I knew there was someone else out there, like me, dying to create, chafing at conventional genders, yearning to roll in a field with Wilhelm Reich, Jane Bowles, and Mick Jagger.

When Stephen asks the wonderful question, "what will I do with my time?" I inevitably ask it to myself. My adolescent obsession with Patti Smith showed me all I need ever know, that I flourish in commune with others, that relationships are everything, and that everything is creating all the time. Stephen offers intention
as the light that moves a life from the prosaic to sublime. My intention then, is to foster and care for my relationships, with my lover, with friends, with animals, with systems, and with objects. And then, turn it into art.

HE'S BAAAACK! (putting the "ack" into...well, you get the picture)

Gosh it's been a long time! See, you didn't know I had incorporated "gosh" into my vocab it's been that long. Well there you go. I've used this site to document my experiences on testosterone as I changed, paying some attention to the delicious physical outpourings of hair growth (ok, more like weed growth in an abandoned construction site), sexual VIGOR, Rowrr!, but really so much more interested in what was happening to my BRAINS.

Ye Gods. The brains. Please plunder the goods here; there's a lot of writing and whining and OCTOPUSES and also some moments of divine intervention. Not my doing. Think of me sitting on a cat-clawed comfy chair wearing my girlfriend's striped calf-length long johns, laptop atop two pillows, clacking away on my toast-crumb ridden keyboard when all of the sudden...

The GREAT SHE KRAKEN. "YOU'RE WEARING THOSE HORRIBLE LONG JOHNS AGAIN"
yes, I say meekly. SIGH.

And now this is reading like a Terry Pratchett novel.

I've reemerged from the briny deep to report that while terrible things are happening to the planet, and humans seem desperately resistant to changing the way they see things, other things are happening too. There are creative, mischievous, passionate forces at work here Dollface, and they might be coming out of YOU. Things are going to look very different tomorrow, and transgender is having an enormous impact, holding hands with queer while extending tentacles and eye-stalks in divergent directions.

Just this week I read about body-mod folks implanting magnets in their fingers as the next step towards cyborg. They're able to sense microwaves, and hold pictures to fridges. Called "body hacking", it may seem frivolous, it is absolutely a foray into the margins, the liminal space of the what-else. And it's in this space we'll find where we're going to live, shaping our bodybeings into configurations that connect with whatever landscape we emerge from.

I read about a woman who inseminates sea corals, suggesting that this dying ecosystem may no longer live in the ocean, but will continue in aquariums or other spaces. I saw that a friend of mine, who has been working with a team to create chemotherapies that denote only when they reach the cancer, has been having some great success in trials.

I myself just repurposed  a table, some pegboard, and some wood, retrofitting my shed and my studio with new old objects, not the stuff of cancer research perhaps but environmentally awesome plus points for making furniture. Retrofitting old stuff is kind of like transitioning...

These are hopeful moments. These are NOW moments, not just future hopeful moments. The GREAT SHE KRAKEN recedes now--my own work is with my body and pain, juddering synapses and hyperalgesia, the ongoing evolution of sensation. I'm convinced we're moving towards an embodied sentience, like the octopus, which shares neuro-optical brain heirarchies with humans. They "think" with their bodies. I imagine this is what my hyperpain sensitivity is doing in me, extending a knowing into worldings. But it hurts.

Enough out of me. For NOW.
LOVE,
Sam.

Picture What Will Be - So Limitless and Free

This has been an amazing ride. Writing this blog has not only been a great source of relief for those transitioning times that were especially challenging – unbeknownst to me, other people actually read it too! And so I made some friends here, forged some relationships I have come to value as we bolstered one another through some stormy seas, told one another how freaking adorable and hot we are, teased and tickled, and otherwise bonded in this strange interwebbed vitreous cyberland.  I made a couple videos and got published in Bear Bergman and Kate Bornstein’s ground-breaking anthology “Gender Outlaws – The Next Generation.” It has been deep and silly and fun and heartbreaking, this tour-de-trans.

Now, with the help of my mentor and Papa, J. Megel of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Performance Studies department, I am writing a show. I’ll let you know how it goes – or – you can see it next year when you come visit me in NC! I hope it beams back the love I’ve been given, from you and from the Great Blue Horned Salted Octopus that made me. The salted part is actually taken from all this chocolate I’ve been eating, with sea-salt and cayenne. Because that’s how I ROLL.

Anyhoo, I may come back to this space in a week, or this project may have ended. We’ll see! Meantime, much love from me, the kittens, any deep sea creatures lolling about, and D. 

Namaste Beloved Friend!

Sam

"Monsters Meet Such Interesting People!" - B. Bunny

Don’t ask me to be the spokesmodel for trans-etiquette – when it comes to gendered language, I’m just as dick-fisted and cunt-mouthed as the rest of you. There’s something about the presence of a gender non-conformist in the room that incites an outbreak of trans-tourettes, and there are some inelegant slang words I’ve been accustomed to using since before I was even noticeably a girl, much less a boy. “You guys,” for instance – it simply won’t leave my vernacular, even though every time I utter it I experience the noxious fumes of its jet stream backwashing my face. “Guys,” like Bugs Bunny, simply had no gender whatsoever for me for the longest time. I remember asking myself, “is Bugs Bunny a girl or a boy?” It seemed like the kind of oracular conundrum of classical literature, or like those obnoxious smarty pants riddles about the hanged man and the water puddle.  Bugs seemed to inhabit a space between those clearly delineated outcroppings of “boy” or “girl,” at least for this five year old. I could only distinguish between genders by play, both forms of which – either brutality or dolls –repelled me. My love for Bugs began with a purely dopaminergic response to a being who playfully donned, mocked, trounced and flounced gendered presentations in a way I’ve yet to experience – but work to emulate – in real (non-animated) life.

I find myself “Madame-ing” the blurry, and “Sir-ring” the lady. I am as awkward and as prone to subterranean blurtations as someone who doesn’t know better. I have experienced and invoked the sensation of falling like Jimmy Stewart down a vertiginous rabbit hole of disassociation, the place where deep shame can take you, the place of no voice. Shame from either side is rarely a helpful emotion, I find. I’m sure it has value, I’m sure it’s larned me a thing or two, but more often it’s clipped my wings, or merely stuck me in a cage and left the door open and laughed as I believed myself too disabled by it to leave. 

I’m going to try to look at this phenomenon another way. What if, when people mispronoun us -what if, when I trip all over my big clown feet in room full of transpeople - what if I’m experiencing an outburst of confusion, one that perhaps I do well NOT to suppress? What if gender-confusion is WONDERFUL? The very fact that I’m being so neurochemically disrupted is FANTASTIC! Of course I don’t wish to hurt anybody – there are only about two people in this world I’d like to hurt intentionally, and one of them likes it. But I see this phenomenon, in me at least, as part of the neurochemical rewiring process, one which must begin with interference and disorder, a static intrusion violent enough to force my brain to its default setting. Which, again in my case, is sometimes idiocy. 

Gender non-conforming people change space and time. We queer everything. Just yesterday a young person came up to me with tremendous sincerity and asked,“is this going to be part of your one-woman show?” after I had literally just invested ten minutes performing the heartbreak of being misconstrued as female. I’m going to revisit these moments as being ecstatic, as serving as part of the architecture of Awakening, for both of us. Whenever a human blurts something, the thing they’re trying to avoid saying, the thing they may be subcutaneously grappling, the gendered stutter of the mind that is attempting to do something new against an ego that is mired in the old, perhaps there is something healing in it. I’m not speaking about the resolute, those awful humans who will not pronoun you correctly because it “goes against their belief” (in their own absolutism, their superiority), or who repeatedly “forget” because they’re too self-involved to really care about how you feel, or even your benighted family members, although it could end up working on them too: I’m talking about the Trickster Tic, the mischievous brain spasm ejaculated from the mouths of We Who Know Better, who stand frozen in our tracks as the leaden word balloon leaves our mouths and thuds to the floor, or the feet, of the transperson we’re addressing. The Trickster Tic, or Trans Tourettes, is simply a symptom, some gas expelled from a depth that has been newly churned. 

I’m going to embrace this idea, to save myself another shame enema, and to witness neurologic/shamanic alterations in others. Loki dances everywhere, but especially where there’s need – a signifying monkey in the lair of the lion. This is what Trans does, this is our job, I am an ambassador (I wrote ambassODOR first, which is more accurate) of interstitial mischief, a messenger from the Gods, so if I think I’m going to be exempt from humiliation it’s only a sure, short amount of time before I’ve got to display my humbled rump for the masses. 

So “she” me, “he” me, what can you do me? I love you.

I Forgot I Had Gills When I Got Here

After a panel discussion last night, someone in the audience leaned his head in close to mine and said “So. You were pretty vague about your gender up there.” I said “’transman’ isn’t vague” but he was insistent. “Well, later, you were saying something about this other space…” 

Oh yes, the “other space.” The interstices. I imagine bodily gender as a cellular structure, within which floats two, oh, let’s call them mitochondria. These objects, "male" and "female," in their solidity, have been mistaken  for the entire organism. Trans, using this metaphor – I know, bear the fuck with me – is the cytoplasm. In this way we can begin to see the fluid as having substance, of being substantial. I haven’t been around here much lately because I have been hella writing for dumb school – every class I’d chosen requires what amounts to a paper a week, of the kind that demands a works cited page – the creation of which takes more of my time than the actual writing. I’m that guy. Works cited is like algebra to me. Anytakepityonanancientundergrad, I recently wrote a paper about consumer identities vis a vis transgender, in which I suggested that “transition” become a gender placeholder. 

Transition, as typically understood, is a deceptive verb because it relies upon moving between fixity that exists only as an idea – that is, as an idea of gender as two poles (no pun intended). It’s not that these two genders don’t exist – male and female are not “constructs” entirely, they’re real, they have substance, right? But whatever they’re composed of makes man/woman appear different depending on where you’re standing. Nonetheless, as subjective and illusory they sometimes seem, there they are. They are floating in the buoyant and balmy jelly of transition. If gender were a map, then Male and Female would be two delightful (if demanding) little islands. Rosie might take her cruise ship there, and, depending on which side of the island the liner landed, shipmates might be greeted with jeers or joy. 

I’d like to offer transition as a place, as a “sea of possibility,” if I may quote my beloved Patti Smith, and I believe I may. I might on occasion hoist my anchor and harbor myself in the Bay of Manlitude, but I don’t have til sundown to build a lean-to and find water because there’s no need to stay. It’s not that I don’t feel some relationship, a kinship, with man – I do. But I think my kinship makes me more of a cousin than a brother. Man is something once removed.

Does trans longing ever cease, ever cede to something else? Whatever alterations I make, will I always ache for something else, something more? I like my body just fine – and having a “mussy” (you can break that down yourself, Smarty) seems like the best of all possible worlds sometimes…but I would be lying if I said I no longer suffer phantom limb syndrome. Do bodies born with penises ever long to experience what it might be like to have a vagina? To not have this mess of giblets always cluttering their plates? How strange must it be to have one’s insides enclosed in a drawstring purse between one’s legs! It’s like being permanently at a Renaissance theme park somehow – oh, there’s my clove orange! It seems obtuse and archaic…and yet…

Well. I can visit the island, but this transperson can never stay. It’s up to me to embrace the ocean – less defined, indefinable, peppered with terrifying, wondrous creatures; it’s briny, moody, and capable of scattering me like hermit crabs on the shore. It’s so way bigger than me, so way bigger than anything I know – those two islands for instance, and anything else that may emerge from its depths, I’m incapable of fully understanding it. Nevertheless, I know it’s real. 

So swim with me, transpeople, nontranspeople too. Let’s join, let’s link, and be tossed by these waves. They’re feisty now because they’re disgruntled with those islands – the ones that think they’re all there is. But the islands are really just toddlers – they haven’t matured enough to understand that an entire universe exists around them, with them, in them – not for them. It may our oceanic mission, to wash up upon their baby beaches, and let those island dwellers ponder what else might be out there beyond their carefully limned, yet ever shifting shores. They fear a return to the sea, my friends, as do we all. We’re just lucky we live there already.