I was recently talking with my mom about a woman she’s become friendly with as part of a group she goes to for parents with trans kids. We’ll call her Susan. (I have no idea what her real name is, but I get tired of saying “this woman” over and over again.) Susan has two children: a son – lets say Ben – and a child – lets go with the gender-neutral Casey – who keeps insisting that she’s a girl, even though she was assigned ‘boy’ at birth. Both of her kids are pretty young, definitely not yet in highschool, and Susan has been trying to understand Casey but having a hard time. She was apparently retelling a conversation she’d had recently with her children, in which she had asked Casey, “But why do you like the color pink, playing with dolls, wearing dresses, and don’t want to be called a boy?”
Casey replied, “I just think I want to be a girl.”
Now, from what I’ve heard from my mom, Susan has been trying hard to help Casey be happy, but she is still having a hard time accepting that the child she thought was a son might really be a daughter. Indeed, Susan was holding this response, and specifically the words “I think I want,” as evidence to my mom that Casey wasn’t sure what she wanted. That there was still hope Casey would change her mind and realize she was really a boy.
My mom, in turn, was asking me what I thought.
Obviously I’m not inside Casey’s head. And, as someone who is a decade and a half older than Casey, it’s hard for me to say that anyone can know what they want when they’re 10. But I distinctly remember using the same language in my mind, and even when I came out to my parents. And the use of “I think I want” wasn’t because of any uncertainty of my desire, it was because of my fear of failure.
Continue reading '“I think I want to be a girl”'»
coming out, family, gender, memory, trans, transitioning
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desire, kids, language, memory, specificity, transitioning
I know I just said that I’m not going to “pretend (explicitly or via omission) that I’m not trans” as part of a response to a post from Being T about photos and their place in the author’s life as a trans woman. But I’m currently going through old home videos because I was hoping to use some of them at some point in the solo performance project I’m working on.
And they just make me want to cry.
They make me feel like I’ve wasted 23 years of my life, and lost something I can never recover.
They make me remember that I’ll never experience childhood as R, grow up as R, go to highschool as R, go to college as R, graduate as R, and on and on and on.
They make me hate who I am now, for dallying and postponing and delaying and waiting.
Continue reading 'The Past'»
For my 16th birthday I was given a copy of Sandman: A Game of You. This is part of the larger Sandman series of graphic novels which, if you haven’t read, you should do so as soon as possible. Really. (The first volume or two are perhaps the weakest of the series, but once you get through that it’s just masterful storytelling.) One of the main characters is Wanda, a pre-op trans woman. I can’t imagine this was the first trans character I’d seen in fiction, but she stays with me as my first memory of seeing a strong trans character in fiction; one of the first experiences I had saying “She’s like me!” when relating to a fictional character about my trans identity.
I remember flying through the book, eager to see what would happen next and impatient when the action shifted from Wanda. (Something I’ve managed to surpress in later rereadings. Fortunate, as the book as a whole is wonderful as well.) I stayed up later than I should, in those high school days where going to bed after midnight or one or two and getting up before seven all week long just seemed routine. But I couldn’t imagine waiting until tomorrow to see how the story turned out.
A spoiler warning. Those who haven’t read the book, think they might, and want every moment to be a surprise, should stop reading this post now. (I don’t know if the information ahead will fundamentally change your first read, but I’ve had friends give spoiler warnings about the information on dust jackets, so I know some people take these things very seriously.)
Continue reading 'Wanda'»
The shadows were long across the bed, the dark deep purple of the sky just after the sun sets. Her neck fit my lips perfectly and when our eyes met I started to cry. “Why are you crying?” she asked, and the not-knowing made me cry all the more. Her neck tasted of her and of the salt of my tears. At last I was able to say, “I’m stronger when I’m with you. I’m happier when I’m with you. I’m better when I’m with you. And I don’t want to be without you.”
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