Come To My Arms, My Beamish Boy

The past four days were spent sitting in a not-so-lovely grotto of statistical formulae. I had a Statistics mid-term; this is not a subject that is reflexive for me. If you want me to put pen to paper or write a song, do an interpretive pas de une, sculpt with found objects, mime, joke, cut up text from Paradise Lost and collage it into something new – in other words, be singularly right-brained, mutable, incomprehensible even – then fantastic: you shall find yourself Welcome To My World of Wonderment.

The margins of my school notes are populated by octopus and cuttlefish, with heads of roses, cupcakes, crab carapaces. Muscular men, multiple moustaches, ladies turned into gentlemen: these are my soothing companions to the summation of n squared times its probability. I’ve been patrolling my own borders with these characters since I can remember, and while they’re a comforting protection, they are also defensive, a diversion from whatever’s threatening me.

Mathematics is a threat. Rather, my perception of mathematics is that it is a threat. There’s something about the action of testosterone, however, on this former lady-brain, that has created, if not an opening, at least a beginning of an understanding. I find myself in less of a panic around all things algebraic, is what I’m saying to you. Now, you might posit that this is an effect of study, or of maturity even, and I will assent; these things have certainly abated my abject terror of calculation.

But the level of my dread, my incomprehension, my capacity for sheer dissociative terror, cannot be underestimated.

Nine months into hormone therapy, I find myself understanding what it is I don’t know. I understand how I need my information packaged. The free-floating alarm is contained by this new capacity. I am teachable. Some part of my foot is connected to earth.

Everything about being a lady, for me, was scattershot, gaseous, dilute. It was my version of the reknown female empathy, our relatedness to others, our Aquarian ability to merge air and make connections in space. The hormonal male has a heat-seeking capacity the hormonal female did not, at least in this body. I can zero in; I feel less pixilated. Untethered is the word that comes to mind, pre-T.

For observers the clarity and definition is less sure. I was having coffee with my sweet friend Sarah at Open Eye when she startled me by telling me it pained her to watch me interact with certain people, groups – that in these particular herds I was some kind of token, not truly accepted. This explication was very different from my own, admittedly block-headed, experiences. I can be mercifully unaware to the challenges my transition presents to others and I can definitely be ridiculously Sally Fieldian with the “you like me, you really like me’s.” Other times I’ve bristled, and challenged people to do better, better with the pronouns, better with their breezy invocation of the “tranny voice,” the parody of a deep, masculine attempt at femininity which I find painfully offensive, even as I am chortling at my own crackity-crack, T-induced, manvox.

But we’re all finding our way with this, right? It’s a huge social change, a shift like assimilating homosexuality, or racial parity, which we’ve all had to do at some critical juncture in our personal lives. Even as it occasionally offends me when friends call me “tranny,” (as often as it cracks me up, so how am I to police that?) I see the poignant attempts at intersecting, finding a place of comfort with something discomfiting or unusual as incredibly moving. I don’t need you to be politically correct, all the time, but I am moved to tears that you care enough to try, and are shame-facedly grumpy when you forget.

It’s interesting to try to field-note one’s own brain. These changes are so nuanced, such deft chemical rewires – they feel so natural – they almost defy observation. I have to dig deeper and deeper to connect with my pre-T neurochemistry. I like this guy brain. It’s very stolid. It will hold down the papers on my desk, which are everywhere. It also has sense enough to still be moved by every little thing; there’s always a moment in every English class I attend, that I have to suck in the tears urged from a tender short story, a tragic poem about the horrors of war, the artful exposition of race and class by Alice Walker. I’m a big crybaby. Thank God.

I wish the testosterone would make me super-fantastic at math, but a humble plod beats a frenetic anxiety attack any day. I’ll take that, and my new inability to not spit “Cuntbag!” at the glowering human trying to get around me in the parking lot. For some reason this feels really, really personal. Oh well. In other places I feel less bandied about by a mercurial wind and more like a kite, jauntily taut by a firm if possibly over-zealous youthful hand. I’d rather be sailing, as bumperstickers along the Chesapeake used to alert.

And I am sailing, although I have no idea who’s at the helm. Someone with a weird, sharp, but sweet sense of humor.

Fire, Walk With Me and While You're Here Could You Get Me Some Ice-Cream?

I just got off the phone with one of my fellow spirit-travelers, Kat Nas, who was preparing her fire-walking workshop in Long Island. She’s going to take a gang of New York men and women and show them how to break arrows in half by jamming them point-wise into their own necks. She’s very brave, that one. Kat and I used to do the S/m circuit in Manhattan; it’s what many of us stumbled into on our search for expansion into freedom and bliss. Now she workshops fire, and I stick myself with hormones. I jest, sort of; my freedom and bliss, my dive into sublime Consciousness continues organically, and my body is like a crystal in a kaleidoscope, rearranging into newer, sometimes just different, glorious calls of love to my creator.

I know, don’t gag. I really feel like that though, like I’m fractally imploding into Love…I’m typing this and I looked up at this Klee print I have and it started expanding and moving with my third eye. That’s just how it is for me. Shut the fuck up. Get your own print if you don’t believe me.

Two weeks ago, I was deeply concerned about the shape of my body. Dysmorphia plagued me. I was a dolphin trapped in a tuna net. These breasts, these thighs, this overall inclination to a certain, dare I say, Zaftig physiognomy? Oh this female fat threatened to smuffocate me, headlock me with larded thighs; I was half-nelsoned with swinging underarm ladyfat, choking on a mouthful of Secret, bitch-slapped by two mammoth teats. Could this really be my body? How could I possibly go on, much less leave my room, if this was the form I took?

This was a whole ‘nother level in self-loathing. Of course, dysmorphia is an American illness. How am I different from someone who has come to believe they cannot have love with their current nose, cannot find a job without a more substantive bosom, cannot go on one more day with this wretched body, this betrayer, this Thing – what did I ever do to deserve this Thing?!

Yes, arguably the transgendered host their own insidious breed of discomfort, and perhaps it is righteous even. But I’m old, and I want peace.

The fire-walker learns to transcend, not pain, but space/time. The universe will accommodate this, is what I’m told. The fire-walker, the one who rends arrows on her neck, is the one who has transmuted her terror into joy, who has shifted energetically into a state of willingness to meet some goal. This is my goal: to walk twenty feet on burning coals. This is my brain: how the fuck am I going to walk on fucking coals without scorching my fucking feets!? How am I going to be a Sam-man if I’m blanketed with delicious womanly lady-lumpage? How the fuckity fuck!???

Transmute the terror into joy.

Well that’s easy for you to say, Tranny, is what I believe you’ll be muttering. Let me tell you what happened, allow me to guide you on my coal-walk…

Chapter One: Whereupon our lad reaches for his whaling knife, to scrape the blubber from the mammal’s skin.

I had a thought. It looked like this: if I could control my food, if I could diet, if I could drop twenty pounds, I’d have NO TITS. Because it’s true; I wouldn’t. I’ve been skinny, and I can tell you empirically “I have no tits.” I would have no mams, and no hips. Easy peasey. When you’re on crystal meth!

Chapter Two: Our hapless hero is daunted by this Sisyphean task, and so regroups for a more...economical solution.

I realized, no matter what I did, how I “controlled” any bit of my body, there would always be something. I was never going to have peace with this Thing. That’s a stunning piece of information, that’s very useful. It means I need to make some peace, find a place of ease in this…me…this corporeal construct.

JL said to me “You’re on a journey. I used to think ‘when I lose this 10 pounds, when I get this job, when I have this money’ in some future I would be happy. But you’re where you’re at right now, and in this moment you can’t change that. Be happy for Sam! He’s changing, every day! Be sweet with this person!”

I didn’t throw up in my mouth. You can hear certain things from certain people. JL is one of them.

I’m standing on the coals but I don’t feel them now. I can’t make the world “see me for who I am” – when do we ever see one another for who we are, except by intimacy or by accident? I have to love this little Sam who is on this scary, wondrous journey, who likes the wind and the tumult yet wishes it weren’t so tempting to hide beneath the bed.

This body, it’s a body. It does wonderful things – it makes all kinds of pleasure, and noises which I like, and movements, although last week it threw up out of its butt. I love this body. If it loses weight, cool, that’s awesome. Two less things to worry about. Perhaps. If it doesn’t, I’m still me, still making toast of the soles of my dogs, watching and laughing aloud because there’s no meat sizzle, no blistering, and you’re still holding my hand, which means we’re both standing in the middle of a motherfucking fire, yo, and look, look what’s happening right now. We just alchemically transmuted pain into joy.

That's "Mr. Manners" If You're Nasty

This has been an all-trans action weekend. Full-on tranny. In your face trans-man. Shut yer tranny hole. Okay, not really, not so much trans. But a wee bit, petite trans.

I know I’m fixin’ta (as we say in Tejas) bust a bitch in the face if I don’t get some tranny respeck around here. What is up with people who see me, week after week, in the same motherfucking jernt, calling me “ma’am” or “Miss Sam” or “she?” Seriously, I have to have the same ridiculous conversation with the same people EVERY WEEK.

I have been the very model of trans-civility. I have gently corrected the people, or just observed, even, as they bit their tongue with a “D’oh!” and hung their head abashedly. I figured I didn’t need to shame anybody – we all seem to be plenty good at doing that for ourselves – and I understand first hand the difficulties of referring to me by my chosen gender. I forget too.

Here’s the thing: those who persistently mis-tag me haven’t known me for 40urkle years. They don’t have memories and events and experiences dating back to 1960murp of me as a girlchik, a woe-man. These people have known me for maybe two years, and now for nearly one of them I’ve been going by “he.” This obdurate refusal to acknowledge me on my terms sometimes seems deliberate and even passively aggressive, although I suspect it is mere self-absorption or laziness. It’s not that hard, people. It’s not, but it does mean paying attention to the world that doesn’t reside in your interior. Or in some cases, posterior.

My apologies. It’s been a rough morning. My friend Susan, after watching me get publicly “ma’amed” in front of 50 people today by someone who really, truly knows better, who even made a trans joke (either on my behalf or at my expense, depending upon how generous one is feeling), observed my stunned and rubicund expression and said “maybe now it’s time to get angry.”

Susan explained, “You’ve been so patient and great about letting everyone have their process with this, but maybe now it’s time to start correcting people that can’t ‘seem to remember.’”

I lowered my head, looked up at her and replied “It’s really hitting me today for some reason. It’s really pissing me off. I don’t know what to do; I don’t know what I need, and I don’t know what other people need to make this work.”

“I think being angry is okay now. I think it will help people remember,” she urged. “It’s completely appropriate to be mad.”

I’m sincerely grateful to know that – I don’t always have the maturity to understand when anger is appropriate and am thankful when others can validate this feeling. Plus, she’s a social worker, if you couldn’t tell, which somehow lends credence to her diagnosis.

My mind says “You’re failing. You don’t look like a man so why should anyone kowtow to your invisible party line?*” I don’t know how I could look any more manly than I do. I don’t have facial hair; my incoming foliage has been sparse, and committed to rather more outlier regions, like my ass-cheeks or my elbow. Yes, my elbow. Not both. Just one. Such is the random beauty of hormone therapy. I seriously have a patch of elongated monkey hair on my left forearm and elbow. It’s about a 2 inch square of arbitrary mammal signifier left unfettered. The thicket of my lower legs gets pants-cropped, by which I mean it’s so primate long, it gets pulled and snapped off by my clothing, perhaps in envy for its luxurious coverage.

No such thicket resides on my face. Yet. It’s only a matter of time. I wear men’s clothing, my voice is as deep as many a man’s I know; my gestures are neutral to spastic and I’m not sure what gender that reads as. Sure, there are the boobs, but as my big trans-brother observed yesterday, “You’re kind of okay there, now it’s winter. Big ol’ sweatshirt and who knows the diff? Spring’s gonna be hard….” he predicts wistfully.

The bottom (surgery) line is this: when someone asks to be called a thing - a new name, a new gender – it is proper etiquette to respect that. It’s the civilized thing to do. One doesn’t question; one acts politely. It doesn’t matter if I am sporting 3mm worth of lip gloss and a Farrah do, atop an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse and knee high stiletto boots: if I ask you to call me “he” it is gracious and correct to do so. After all, what’s your investment in this? It makes you uncomfortable? Eight years of George Bush made me uncomfortable but did I take it out on my Republican friends? Don’t answer that.

My transguy coffee date relates that his lesbian ex refuses to call him by his name. She will only call him his former lady-name. There’s something distinctly, wrong-headedly lesbian about that – it’s like when the lesbians were hating on the bisexuals. Why are lesbians hating on anybody? You know I’m speaking from personal experience here: why were “others” always so threatening?

Well, for me it spoke to my immaturity, my ungenerous spirit. I needed a rock to stand on, certainty, and if that rock was your back, and your face was underwater, well then so be it. Just don’t move.

Certainty is still my little mind killer. I’m always looking for stability, stasis even, for a predictable, secure outcome if it guarantees that I’m not alone and not scared. And the truth, The Truth, THE TRUTH is there’s simply no such thing. I can pine and long and suffer all the do-da-day and I do, often, but those things which gave me comfort mutate and change like a new trannyman on testosterone.

Will I be forgiving and compassionate then, to those acquaintances who consistently fail to “he” me, for whom my transition is evidently a challenge to their personal hegemony? If all things are mutating and changing, then yes, perhaps I will forgive out of compassion, because I will become forgiving and compassionate. I believe this to be possible. But for now, for today, I’m freakin mad.

*should it be "kowtoe a line?"