On Gender Policing in Trans Communities: transitioning is not weakness

note: after writing this I realized that I was deeply inspired by and bascially restating a lot of what Julia Serano has to say about Gender Artifactualism in her book Excluded here's a crash course in that.


It's very common in transgender and nonbinary communities for folks to applaud each other for choosing not to medically transition or not to wear binders or heels or whatever else. Usually it's just the standard “Good job doing that soul searching.” and “I'm glad you found a choice best reflects you.” This sort of encouragement is wonderful. It's a big part of why trans people (and other marginalized individuals) seek community. It's tough for us as trans folks to find this sort of encouragement in the world at large. And it can feel especially tough for nonbinary trans folks who have ostensibly zero out role models in the greater public eye and must seek validation almost exclusively through community. There is excruciatingly small public awareness about what it means to be transgender and specifically nonbianry.* So the encouragement we give each other is necessary.

Unfortunately, sometimes the support sought or given becomes politicized in a way that's problematic or even exclusive. When such choices are described with the language like “fight against gendered expectations” it casts those who do choose to undergo more physical and medical changes as somehow “giving in” to society. It can also call into question the identity of the trans individual's nonbinary-ness, implying that there are rules and standards to being nonbinary that exclude folks who take HRT or get gender affirming surgery. Worst of all, it shoves a political value onto trans folks's personal care choices and tells them they are weak, shallow, or backward for adopting particular traits. We're already heavily and mercilessly politicized by the cis world. Can we not politicize each other this way?

My choice to refrain from chemically or medically altering my body to better express my gender doesn't make me morally superior to trans people that do choose to treat their dysphoria with medical and chemical procedures. Not taking HRT doesn't make me more stalwart than those who do. Not getting surgery doesn't mean I respect my body more. And I'd appreciate it if people (trans and nonbinary included) would stop telling me these actions means more than I say they do.

For myself and for other trans individuals, I view being transgender as a complex condition of life for which there are medical and non-medical treatments available. Deciding to take HRT and or have gender affirming surgery is no different than deciding to take anti-depressants or getting a mastectomy in the face of highly probable breast cancer. These are serious health choices, ones that aren't usually made in direct reaction to a discrete risk to one's immediate health or well being but made after careful consideration of lived experience and potential outcomes. These are decisions made in hopes of shifting the way someone balances the conditions of their life. It's a complicated self care process.

Let me break it down for you with a hypothetical:
Say your best friend has bipolar. If she decides to explore life without meds after years on Zyprexa you don't tell her that she's fighting the good fight against society's expectations of sanity and those evil drug companies. You say “that choice must have been a tough one.” and ask her what you can do to help accommodate this change in her life. If it doesn't work out for her and she chooses to go back on meds you wouldn't see her actions as “giving in” to Big Pharma. You don't assume her choice was about your politics or your identity. Because that would make you an egocentric jerk. Instead you recognize that her choice was about her own self care. You'd see it as her choice to manage the conditions of her life (regardless that her choice is different than the ones you make to manage the conditions of your own life).

The way we sort out and express our needs and desires is unique, part of what makes us individuals. And it should be respected. This is clear to me as a poet and a person with conflicting desires. Sometimes I hate that gender even exists, so yeah, I do sometimes dream about a world without it. But those dreams are mine, they aren't fit to be mapped onto the desires of other trans and nonbinary individuals or groups. My desires for a world without gender are not more politically pure or correct than the desire I to have a huge dick. My occasional desire for a less round body as well as those for a less gendered world do deserve to be expressed, but not at the expense of other's choices for expression and self care. These desires do not deserve to be seen as intrinsically appropriate for other trans and non-binary people. Like any member of a marginalized group, my desires and doubts aren't representative.

Being skeptical of medical transition steps is currently my personal choice. But it will never be a symbol for my politics. And as much I want to meet people whose experiences mirror my own,  I work not to project my personal skepticism of medical transition onto others. Because it's not my business to decide how others best manage their personal and unique experience of being transgender. It's not yours either.



*In popular culture there's been a fantastic surge in representation of binary trans folks  in the last 5-10 years (particularly for trans women). I have a suspicion that some of the exclusionary distancing language used by nonbinary folks comes from the pain of being erased or simply not recognized at all by the limited portrait of transgender lives currently seen in pop culture. I can see refusals to conform to those binary narratives as politically important to the nonbinary community, but I don't think they belongs in the language we use to support each other's self care choice. It certainly shouldn't come at the expense of others. There is not a scarcity of acceptance and recognition. We don't need to steal/win it away from our siblings.

Lessons from the impossible

I have absolutely no idea what to write about today. The ever apparent ragged I've run myself into keeps raking through the possibility of any cogent string of thoughts.

Yesterday in my burst of activity, when I said "do something impossible". I did not mean do something unhealthy. But I guess that is what my body heard.  This morning I woke ill, reluctant, and subsequently decongested into something that stung like wisdom:

My art it not worth my sacrificing my health for.

Fatigue/exhaustion aches and tenses me in a way that stops me from trusting myself. My mind learning from the bodily punishment that there is danger in going deep and committing to anything (and yes there is, but mostly worthwhile).

For instance I've spent more than an hour today generating new content. Most of it extremely surface level and brimming with frustration. Regardless of the state of my body and soul I try and make space in my life for the not-so-conscious creative magic of my brain to do its thing. Every day. Often it doesn't come.

Like today, everything I wrote just felt like empty cycles of word shuffling. My ability to string thoughts into a sensible sequence of ideas for was massively depleted.  It was like going to yoga full of fear and stiffness. No wonder my thoughts couldn't hold a pose for more than 15 minutes.

Still I'm glad I did the work. Proud I showed up. And to me, that seedling pride can be so radical. Today I am recoving from my poor self-care choices. I need that recovery. And also I need to show up here for what I've committed to.

Unfortunately there is a very loud part of me that insists being present/visible while in recovery is impossible. That part of me is, I think, mostly shame. And that shame tells me that this process must be private. So that's the impossible I'm doing today, revealing my nasty, unproductive recovery.

But hang on. Where did I learn to feel this shame? Why must recovery be a private/invisible thing. Why must we only ever present ourselves to others at our very very best?

Nothing against our very very best, but seriously, WTF?

Maybe it has to do with how it's apparently some sort of American value to look like you don't need anyone or anything to just live you life the way you normally do (see here "I woke up like this").
In the past I've written about how narratives of "inspired"/"genius" works can erase the truth about how messy the process of writing/creating can be. And I get the feeling the way we view taking care of ourselves (as private/only for loved ones to know about) relies on a very similar sort of erasure. As if knowing about the craft of our lives or our work and our presentations ruins the magic.

Any skilled craftsperson will tell you. It doesn't. I just makes you feel like a wizard.

Misunderstanding and creativity

I have amazing and loving friends who know exactly what beautiful and inspiring things I need and send them to me on a nearly daily basis.

I've been sick for the past few days. Yesterday I thought I might be getting better but this morning I woke up with the mysterious and alarming symptoms of a concussion. I don't think I hit my head, but for the first forty minutes I was awake today I experienced something like aphasia. I forgot and couldn't understand certain words. I could read the words in a sentence but I couldn't understand them or how they fit together to form complex thoughts.

I felt terrified without immediate understanding.

Luckily, without even knowing I might have this problem one of my dear friends sent me this comic.

When I finally got to reading it, and in between paranoia about strokes and meningitis, I started to be okay with the the fact that I didn't know words as well as usual. One of the places I find the most stability and comfort is in language and my ability to use it. I was terrified this morning by having lost some small measure of that.

I still have a headache and probably am not thinking as clearly as when I am 100% healthy. But that doesn't mean I can't create or should stop working altogether. I might slack off a little bit today and only meet part of my writing goal. But I can still show up. Because I don't have to know everything or really even know much to write.

There's this piece writing of advice that I can't stand being thrown around.

"Write what you know."

Now believe me, I understand the importance of research and inquiry (especially for nonfiction and novel writers) and making publishable content accurate to reality. But I learn the most when I write about things I only half-know or know an astonishingly little about. This type of writing is never guaranteed to produce anything substantial, however it presents the most exciting risks and often leads me to a sort of digging deep that I don't reach by sitting down with a known plan in mind. (this is especially true for poetry)

I certainly had other things on my mind this morning (namely frustration and fear) but now that I'm on my way to some semblance of wellness I do wonder, what might have come out of me in my state of nonsense.

I used to be really uptight about what ideas I thought were a good enough to write about. These restrictions kept me from writing poems more than a few times a month. While this mistake probably stopped me from writing some bad poems it also stunted the development of my craft.

These days, barring emergencies, I show up everyday to write despite my bad feelings. Somedays a screen's light is too harsh for my eyes too look at and I let my phone record a spoken outline of my ideas or I just cobble together a collection of what I find to be touching inspiring or upsetting and make notes. But I show up for my craft for at least 10 minutes every day. And it's usually not pretty.

I guess what I'm saying is that the writing process doesn't always look cogent, or knowable or smart. It's hard work to unlearn the erasure of creators methods which are often mired in long and intuitively rich periods of misunderstanding.

No-home Sickness

My partner and I are currently between cities; in the process of leaving Seattle and finding a new city. Our roots are raw and recently cut. It's hard to be without a real home. It's even harder when I get sick.

I'm sick today and I was sick yesterday. I thought I might not be for a full 12 hours. But i was wrong. I suited up in an unapologetically dapper ensemble and took my sweetie out for fancy french food. It was excellent except for the vapid couple sitting next to us prattling on about the pounce of internet speculation. Though even through that my companion and I enjoyed exchanging mutually disdainful looks.  My partner tweeted about his fears and cynicism surrounding the tech culture and ruthless gentrification in San Francisco.

Neither of us want to live here but the job might be the right thing for my partner. So for now, we tolerate it.

After dinner and the 3 tablets of acetaminophen one of the waitstaff was kind enough to give me we left to go to a party. It was a party hosted by my partner's employer and the second one of this type that I've been to.

I had great conversations and even remembered a lot of people's names this time around. I was having a good time but found myself a bit lonely.

My partner was doing some "work" (having private conversations and bolstering confidence of students and coworkers). This meant I had less access to him and  ended up talking to people I didn't know very well. I don't mind this, but it takes energy.

And I like the people my partner works with and for. They are friendly and think well of me. This is apparent in every interaction I have with them. But the conversation fatigue set in much faster than I'd anticipated. But I miss the ease of a crowd that include people who're already my friends. A social slight completely unintentional and certainly indiscernible to anyone but myself  started me down a spiral of thought about how I don't belong.

One of the funny on-topic things I'd tried to put forth didn't fly and was passed over in favor of input from a community member. In that moment my joviality came crashing down. I made myself some tea and crawled out to the fire escape to spend some time alone. It was restorative but even then I felt my muscles shuddering softly in fatigue.

It took us an hour after that to leave. The long good byes were very long. We got wrapped up in an engaging but ultimately draining conversation about health insurance (which only served to remind us of how very uninsured we  currently are). I knew I was tired when we got out on to the street. I let my partner talk as we walked toward the BART station. I wasn't really listening and found myself grateful that one of my partner's friends accompanied us and that they conversed while I could concentrate on walking.

When we got on the BART I felt good to be away from the party (crowds can be an big energy suck) I felt almost normal, minus the slight nausea and high sensitivity to the hot stuffy  atmosphere of the train. My partner and I spent the whole ride back to the East Bay barely touching staring sappily into each other eyes. I was grateful for this elongated moment of emotional intimacy.

Unfortunately the instant I stepped off of the train I felt my energy crash again. On the escalator up to the terminal my partner stepped up to embrace me and I said "No. Too close."

The escalator up to the street was out of service so I had to climb the steps. The first two seemed fine, but each of the 25 or so after that seemed to threaten me with upheaval. I had to stop at the top and rest for a moment to make sure I didn't hurk.

During the seemingly endless four blocks from the BART station to our for-now-home in oakland I had a hard time walking and talking at the same time. The poet in my tried to consolidate what I was experiencing "I feel like a ghost".

My lungs worked half time, even the slow steps I took shortened my breath considerably. I felt my heat beat like an echo. The lag in my body's transmission of sensory information made legs clumsy and inarticulate. My marrow turned heavy like mercury in my bones. Last night was the first time I've ever asked a loved one "will you help me up the stairs?" If I'd had any energy left to feel I might have felt ashamed. But all I had room for was frustration and effort.

I wish I could just talk about just one of the three things that happened to me last night. My sickness, my social anxieties, my partner's bitter fears about career/location/health insurance, but all three happened in a drawn out mixed up progression that left my heart exhausted and my body ghostly.

This afternoon there is a part of me that thinks "maybe I shouldn't have gone out last night." It was extremely spoon-expensive and nearly drained all my bodily resources. I had no idea how fully it was going to take my energy. But ultimately I'm glad I could and I'm glad I did make it out last night. I'm lucky to have had the small burst of energy I did. And to have the energy I richly enjoy most of the time.

Fancy clothes and fancy dinner, flirty party conversations were worth the risk and the cost. But it's important for me to talk about that cost. At the end of the night I was a wreck. I needed my partner to help me up the stairs and into bed. I didn't have the energy to empathize with his fears about my health or our future I could only ask for tea and help taking off my clothes.

We're both scared about the future and uncertain about what we can handle and what will sustain us. Cobbling together hard limits and expectations form the world around us is nearly impossible. But we're working on it. Together. For that I am endlessly thankful.

This Body is a Metaphor: thoughts on weight loss and gender

I lost 15 pounds since I started a restrictive diet experiment six weeks ago. 20 pounds total since this spring. Even though I've been tweeting and speaking publicly about the effects this diet has had on my health overall I haven't talked about my change in weight. Partly because I don't want to be buried under a barrage of accolades.

I don't want to be congratulated on decreasing a number society has so inexplicably tied to my worth as a woman. Even when I tell people about the weight loss in private I make certain to include that the reason I've dropped weight is that the diet I've started for health reasons has me eating less.

I've been consuming an average of 1,500 calories per day. For my size and level of activity this is probably too little. I've also been spending more time alone which for me means a decrease in appetite.

But the thing I'm especially unlikely to talk about is the satisfaction I feel about losing weight, I can't deny that some part of me still buys into the less is better mentality. But the rise warm feeling I have about the small changes in my body is more than just a reflex of learned attractiveness.

I'm pleased because the only parts of me that I've noticed as discernibly smaller are my breasts and my thighs. I'm delighted that my belly has stayed decidedly paunchy. I enjoy having breasts but lately I've been fantasizing about having smaller breasts tighter to my chest. Breast that I could have at least some success at pressing into a straight line.

I've considered buying a binder for this purpose, but the tightest sports bra I own does a pretty good job already. And I worry that a binder wouldn't do any better and that bra. More importantly I worry a binder would kick up my acid reflux even worse than my sports bra does. The heartburn makes me sweat nervously. This makes the sports bra itch. I want to wear button-down and tie without having to disguise awkward lumps with patterns and loose fits.

I like my clothes to touch my body and show off the stability of my barrel chested square torso. I'm scared that if I keep losing weight my belly and waist are going to become more concave.

It's been a year or more since I stopped trying to define my waist. I still have a few fabulous belts for showing off my high waist. Which is sometimes want to put on but mostly not. But the desire exists.

I'm both afraid of and desiring the loss of my belly fat. If the fat stays I know I will enjoy its benefits of balancing out my torso. I will more easily look masculine. But I also know I will miss wearing pretty belts and lose out when the urge to do so strikes and they don't fit anymore.

It hurts me that perceptions of gender aren't flexible enough for my expressions to seem genuine. I didn't mean to write about my gender but writing about my weigh makes me worry that I am not trans or genderqueer enough and that I should just commit to expressing my masculinity exclusively.

But I still like being feminine and I'm angry to tears that the vast majority of people I meet & even know and love won't be able to see me as truth of the delicious fluctuating mix I am.

Changing my diet has changed the way I relate to my body. It's seemingly impossible to think about such changes without triggering thoughts about body gender, perception, and presentation.

The categories of recognition and representation society offers me is an array of compromises, each limiting and inaccurate. My body's given me one such compromise in the form of my digestive health. Finding ways to be both satisfied and nourished on this restrictive diet sometimes serves as a painful reminder of how my identity is impossible to balance and communicate is a way that nourishes me.

I know I can't ever fully know my body with all this stuff in it: food, fluids, the bacteria that is more numerous than even my own collection of cells.

I'm comprised of many things. I often wish I had more body more bodies than I just this one.
The experiences of trans people are often laughed off and oversimplified with a joking or oversimplistic reference to being “trapped in the wrong body”. It's not funny to me. It's actually peculiar to me that so many people are so settled with just the collection of cells that they've got. Have these people never been sick or felt the pressure of an insurmountable ache?

It's not urgent or acutely painful but I feel nostalgic for a body this is as changeable as my mind both consciousness and subconscious. Dysphoria isn't a joke. It only is peculiar, but I'd be willing to bet it's more common than I think humans allow ourselves to realize. It happens to children whose parents call them inside and tell them to stop being to be dinosaurs.

Writing about all this stuff makes me think about the literally transformative power of metaphors. The audacity of assigning identity or meaning to anything is just an illusion. One we can take back at any time we choose.

The task of communicating our being is an impossible and obsessive dive through language, projection, and prediction. Anything shared between humans is a metaphor and it's metaphors all the way down.

This body, these words, they're just a metaphor. I am who I am independent of the meanings I or anyone else decides to make up about them.

Finding Value in the Discomfort of Loneliness

I've been spending progressively more time alone in the last year and acutely more time within the past two months.

In September my partner started some contract work with a company in San Francisco. We'd been living together in Seattle for 2 years before this. In order to stay close I agreed to house and pet sit for some of my partner's relatives about 70 miles to the north.

In the last seven months we lived together I was out of work and he was working a 40 hour week. I ended up spending huge swathes of time alone in our apartment.

Being two hours away from him in Davis the loneliness is often very acute.

I do have new friends but having only just met them there is not enough trust there for me to access the intimacy I crave when I feel lonely. I'm lucky that I get to see my partner on most weekends. We're only a train ride apart and for that I am deeply thankful. But the weekdays themselves can feel particularly lonely. It's harsh, but also extremely valuable.

Have this gift of so much time alone has forced me to realize that my feelings of loneliness are not so much about wanting or need to be be around people or or to share m experiences with other people. My loneliness is a combination of my hunger for intimacy and my deep and insistent restlessness. The hunger was not a surprise. I love being with others, even when it's tiring and taxing on my system.

But the restlessness was a shocking to me. Not that it should have been. People have been complimenting to drive and commitment for years saying things like "I don't think I could really work as hard on stuff if I were unemployed" and "I think you would really get a lot out of an artist's residency because you will sit down and face your craft." Less than two weeks into my stay in Davis I was riding my host's bike to Sacramento and back.

It would be dishonest of me to say that I don't also feel drawn to just mire in bed all day eating microwaved quesadillas and watching back to back episodes of Columbo.

But I need more than that and what being alone stokes inside of me is that fiery itch to pay attention to what my body needs to out. What words are lurking under the false control of my conscious mind? What journeys need journeying?

I don't think I ever feared being alone except for along the lines of Marianne Williams

In the past I've feared my restlessness (in which might be the seeds of greatness?). But now I try to run to it. It takes me to a place where I forget that being alone is not the horror our culture makes it out to be.

I can even forget the hunger I feel for intimacy. For a little while anyway.

In all honesty I probably started this daily blogposting business in some small part because I feel somewhat staved for intimacy. This forum allows me some sort of intimacy with the people who read about me and my thoughts.

Last night I had two of my friends (one of them new and another one I've known a long time but only online) tell me they felt a little bit creepy reading some of the thoughts I posted. But the thing is I don't mind random people knowing about mental, emotional, and physical struggles.

I'm certainly not against anybody who wishes to keeping such information private, but I wish there was less of a cultural taboo on talking about (mental/emotional) health problems. While I'm sharing primarily it because I want to, I also am sharing my stories of dis-ease and mental/emotional illness because I want to assuage the stigma people feel about their own health concerns.

Also the filter of this blog, while quite revealing, still leaves me with most of my experiences and their details largely unshared. Even daily, this writing of posts is just a skimming off the top of what I experience and feel. Only I, alone, can dive deep down into my experiences and harvest the nutrients and rich texture of seaweed roots.

I made an e-book!

It's been a long while since I have posted. Rest assured, my goodbye letter to Seattle was not a goodbye to this blog.

However saying goodbye to Seattle and starting my long transition toward a brand new state (I'll eventually be landing in Madison WI this winter/spring) has been quite a task. Writing of course has remained a constant but finding time to refine my words has proven a challenge.

I have been putting work into a personal writing project for the past few months. As some of you may now I've been experiencing some health problems lately. The problems themselves aren't new but their severity and frequency have spiked in the last six months. I've been learning how to navigate the world at a reduced capacity and it's been tough. More than just physically.

I made a project out of documenting the disconnect and frustration I felt with my body, the medical industry, and my own conception of self.

I am really excited to announce that in addition to the various hard copies of Symptoms I've been printing out and sending off to my loved ones I finally took the plunge and e published the contents of this collection via amazon.

This is the result.

I wanted to share it with the world. I've wanted to since I finished the project last month.

Hell, it was tough not to immediately publish some of the things that came out of this project right here on this blog.

So sorry to have held out on y'all but it needed to be a collection. As recourse I'll let you taste the preface:

Crafting records, quiet bravery, and beginnings


This is just a beginning.

We all know what it is to want to feel better than how we're feeling. This is a beginning because the work of becoming comfortable in our bodies is never finished. This work deserves recognition. It is my hope that the pieces in this collection offer a safer space to recognize the discomfort of living. 

In the following pages I detail my own experience of discomfort, frustration, and conflict within my own body. In doing so I have crafted as true a record as I can of my body's experiences. I, like so many, often misread or misremember my body's signals. So when there are minute shifts in my functions and capabilities it can feel like my body has betrayed me. Having this record reminds me that when it comes to my body there is not a “normal” and that my expectations can always and often should be changed. 

Going through uncomfortable body stuff has challenged me to surrender to uncertainty as much as I can. And to really listen for new information about how to live in my body more sustainably. This surrender requires a new kind of bravery. One that is quiet and almost invisible, but a bravery that has become vital to my survival.
On your journey through the words that follow and beyond, I hope that you find this bravery and that it carries you from beginning to a place where you can feel better than you're feeling now.

If you've already received a paper copy of Symptoms buying an ebook version is a great way to show your support of my writing.

If you don't have an e-reader or really really just want a paper copy let me know and I'll send you one by post.

Thanks.