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By Rebecca, February 10, 2010 12:53 am

Something has been bouncing around in my head. From Picture Frames, a post from Cedar’s blog Taking Up Too Much Space, written in response to my show Trans Form :

What I realized, when I heard [in Trans Form] about the photo albums, and the pictures on the walls of her [Rebecca's] parents’ house, was that these were the memorabilia of an occupation, held onto and commemorated by its collaborators (witting or unwitting). Yes they represent a historical “truth,” a “past” one does not want to “deny”–but so do guns and chains and whips and bombs, and you don’t see them in the family photographs. Well, not if you were on the receiving end, anyway.

That concept, viewing photos or keepsakes of my past as “the memorabilia of an occupation,” finally clicked with me today.

This past weekend, my dad and I were talking about my depression. I was saying that I regretted not transitioning earlier, and he was saying he was sorry for not doing something when I was younger. Seeing something, noticing my unhappiness and its cause. And he said that, with the more tangible problems my older siblings had, it was easy to see me – with good grades, friends, a voracious apatite for books, no small skill at playing piano – as the ‘normal’ child. The child who didn’t need ‘fixing.’

And I realized, as Cedar indicated, that where we find ourselves today is not simply a result of the “truth” of history. It’s a result of how that history is viewed.

Continue reading 'Escaping an angry photograph'»

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By Rebecca, January 20, 2010 10:40 pm

I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous post, about the This American Life piece which discussed two eight-year-old trans girls. Because, at some point over the last few days, I realized that I’m still angry about being trans. That things I thought I’d gotten over are still bothering me.

But I’m feeling rather clueless and impotent as to where I should direct the anger; how I can diffuse it. What ceremony can I perform? What ritual can I undergo? What right of passage is there for trans people who see their transition as a slow journey, not one marked by specific milestones?

Continue reading 'Where should the anger go?'»

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By Rebecca, January 19, 2010 2:23 am

Saturday afternoon, I was driving to pick up a friend on the way to work. We were heading to see the midway ‘in progress’ showing of the high school theatre class that I’m helping to direct and whose final show he, in a few weeks, will be stage managing.

As is my habit when driving to work on Saturday afternoon, I flipped to This American Life. (If you’re not familiar with the show, you really should be. It’s a weekly program that has various documentary-ish stories about everything ranging from haunted houses to the financial crisis. Start by listening to something from this list, and go from there.)

Anyway. I’d heard the promos for this week’s episode. It was about finding that one-in-a-million person, the one who you weren’t sure you’d be able to find. Act One of the episode was about a man going back to China to find a woman he’d met years earlier, and I caught the tail end of the act when I switched to NPR. Act Two started up after the station break, and was totally unexpected: it was about two eight-year-old transgender girls. (The episode is available online here, via This American Life.)

Continue reading 'Tom Girls'»

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By Rebecca, December 8, 2009 4:00 pm

The first night of tech for Trans Form was last night, and I’m kind of a mess.

(For those of you who aren’t theatre people, tech refers to technical rehearsals, where lights/sound/etc are set. It comes before dress rehearsals and/or previews, the final rehearsals before a show opens.)

The show is going fine, although I’m planning to head out of work early tonight and finish up some sound and video work. And yet, I’m really scared about it opening on Friday. Not simply stressing out, but scared. And, after thinking about what parts of the show terrify me, I realized I’m not just dealing with stage fright (although there’s some of that) but with some deeper internalized transphobia.

Continue reading 'Internalized transphobia'»

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By Rebecca, December 1, 2009 11:47 am

In my upcoming show, I stage something along the lines of the dialogue from this post:

I don’t do it as often anymore, but I used to have conversations in my head between myself and Rebecca, who was not yet “myself.”

My conversations would usually start when I was feeling particularly stupid, or sad, or masculine. She’d start, this Rebecca that I imagined myself as in some alternate universe, speaking to me across the barrier which separated our realities: “You’re never going to be happy if you keep on like this.”

The section was well-received at the work-in-progress showing, but I realized that the audience was watching a very different scene than I thought I was portraying. The response I got from the friends who were at the showing was, “There’s a great dramatic irony to that scene, because obviously Rebecca ‘wins.’ You did transition, and you’re no longer who you were.”

But my emotional connection with the scene is very different.

Continue reading 'I’m not yet myself'»

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By Rebecca, November 15, 2009 2:10 pm

One of my roommates and I went bowling Saturday night (I did not great,  but not horrible – bowled a 94 and an 87) and we had sort of a funny conversation.

We were talking about bowling names, because we’ve both used the same ones for years. But I haven’t gone bowling since changing my name, and my old bowling name was based on my (male) name.

My roommate said, “Well, you can use the same bowling name. But I guess it was based on your old name. And now that your name isn’t…that that isn’t your name, we could try to come up with something new, based on Rebecca.”

I said, laughingly, “It’s not Voldemort – you can say my old name!”

I’ve been thinking about that idea since then, though, because there is an aspect of “He who shall not be named”-ness about it. I’ve entirely avoided using my old name on this blog. I only rarely use it when talking about my past, even with friends or coworkers. And it definitely bugs the hell out of me when I get mail addressed to…my old name.

I just hope that getting rid of my old name won’t require five hundred in-need-of-editing pages containing meandering, lost-in-the-forest whining and in-fighting…

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By Rebecca, October 23, 2009 3:39 am

I just finished re-reading Boylan’s I’m Looking Through You, and it’s brought up something that’s really been on my mind lately. From page 256 of the hardcover:

Shell looked thoughtful. “I don’t know, Jenny. About ninety percent of the time, you seem like the happiest person I know. And then, every once in a while, I”ll catch you looking out a window like that. I don’t get it. How come you’re so sad, if you’re happy?”

[snip]

“I don’t know, Shell. I said. I mulled it over. “I get tired sometimes, of being different.”

[snip]

I wiped my eyes. “It’s like, I went through this whole amazing change, and at last I feel content, at last I feel whole. But what about that kid I used ot be? What about all those memories? That’s the one thing they can’t give you in surgery: a new history.”

I’ve been having a really hard time with that: how do I reconcile who I am now, who I want to be, with who I was?

The weight of that history, of the twenty-plus years I was living as male, feels like it’s overwhelming the ten months I’ve been living full-time as Rebecca.

Already ten months? Only ten months?

Continue reading 'Reconciling regret'»

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By Rebecca, October 21, 2009 1:52 pm

This is an excerpt from the script I’m working on for Trans Form, which is going up this December. Enjoy!

I’m fourteen, sitting on the chair in my therapist’s office.

I started going to therapy by choice, because the year before, at thirteen, I still couldn’t get past the panic attacks and separation anxiety that had kept me from sleepovers and overnight school trips and sleep-away summer camp for as long as I could remember. The pattern was always the same: I would get excited about staying at a friends’ house, at an overnight event at the Museum of Science and Industry, at whatever. I would go, convincing myself that this time would be different, that this time I’d be able to make it all night.

But as we started to get ready for bed, the panic would creep up. For those of you who have had a panic attack before, you know how it feels. To everyone else, it was a very physical sensation, a creeping along my arms and legs to my core, to my center. My blood would start to rush, tears would inevitably spring to my eyes, and if I didn’t go home, if I didn’t get away from whatever mundane childhood experience was driving me to a panic, I’d go into fullblown hysterics.

Finally, the summer after seventh grade, when I’d missed most of the seventh grade weekend trip to Wisconsin because of a panic attack, I decided  I would go to the eighth grade trip to Washington DC. So I started seeing a therapist. We worked for months on controlled breathing, biofeedback techniques, ways to divert my focus from panicking.

But the trip to DC is in the past. (I made it, by the way, and haven’t had problems being away from home since.) Now, I’m fourteen, sitting in the chair at my therapist’s office, across from my parents, about to come out to them.

Continue reading 'Coming Out'»

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By Rebecca, October 1, 2009 9:24 pm

I was a boy, growing up.

At least, people saw me that way: I had a boy’s name, boy’s clothing, wore swimming trunks to the pool or the beach, had a Bar Mitzvah (however grudgingly), changed in the boys’ locker room before gym, wore a suit and tie to important family occasions, participated in Indian Guides (however briefly), had my hair in a buzz cut every summer for years,  played on the boys’ teams after school, lived in the boys’ section of the dorm at college, was never taught how to put on makeup…

Looking through old photo albums, or at the pictures on the walls at my parents’ houses, it’s clear – boy, boy, boy.

Continue reading 'I was a boy, I was a girl'»