NO STOPPING FOR WATER. None. C'est interdit.
So, I'd like to be able to talk about sexual things on this blog, through the lens of my own sexuality and thoughts on it. I've been debating how to go about this for some time. On the one hand, I'm extremely leery of being regarded as part of the "T-girl porn" culture, which is, I imagine, (prior to the whole Bruce Jenner media frenzy) one of the only ways in which many cisgender people have ever been exposed to the idea of a trans person. (In second place is The Silence of the Lambs, and don't even get me started on that.)
But on the other hand, when I have written about intimate events, actions, and thoughts, the responses I've gotten, most often from other trans women, have been resoundingly of gratitude and relief at the real reassurance that things that they had thought and felt were not things unique to them. That they weren't as alone as they'd previously believed, and that to feel the emotions they'd been feeling was not wrong or dirty. And in the end, I feel like almost anything I can do to help make the lives of other trans women even infinitesimally better or easier is going to be a thing I need to do if I am able. And I am able to write. Quite well, in fact.
I suppose that when this blog has been around for awhile, fingers crossed, it will become apparent that sex and gender, as topics, appear not terribly more frequently than they cross the minds of people in general, anyway. This should, I hope, contribute to my goal of sharing my life as fully and honestly as I can, to demonstrate how much more like everyone in the world I am, than unlike.
I will make every effort to appropriately tag posts that deal with sex and sexuality, or that show perhaps more of my body than is appropriate in some settings, as nsfw. But that is, really, more of an acknowledgement of the realities of our culture (that these topics, and images of the naked body, even in mundane and non-sexualized contexts, are literally "not safe for work") than any tacit agreement that shame and filthiness are intrinsic parts of sex or sexuality, or our bare bodies.
With all that said, my number one debate had been not so much about whether to write at all, but about tone; how to approach writing this way if I was going to indeed do it here, seriously, rather than in fragments on my tumblr. My first thought, to counteract the idea that there was anything pornographic about what I was sharing, was to use the driest, most clinical language possible. But sex is not really dry and clinical. We have to approach it that way to study it in any useful, quantifiable way, but that is not its nature.
On top of sex not really being a dry or emotionless topic, inherently, there's the fact that I do already have some idea how to talk about sexual things, because I often do this with my friends already. And we're casual about it. Nobody says "I stimulated him orally until he ejaculated into my mouth, at which point, I swallowed the semen." Right? Nobody's high-fiving you for that. We say, much as you probably say, "I blew him and swallowed his load." High five.
So, that's the tone you can expect from me when I'm writing about sex. It's not going to be overly (or overtly) sexual just for the sake of being sexual, but it is going to be casual, while remaining as descriptive and detailed as it needs to be to get the point across. The point of the text will never be to describe any particular event, but rather to describe enough of it to provide the full and necessary context to understand my conclusions about it. It would be the way I would say things to my friends, because really, that's what I'm hoping you will all be. And I'm hoping that my openness, as soon as I can manage to really get over myself and be as open as I'd like to be, will really help a lot of people feel more comfortable with their own sexuality. I'm sure I will start to get some unsavory attention for this, but I suppose I'll have to just deal with that when or if it happens.
Anyway, a couple of positive things happened for me in the shower just now. The first was just noticing a bare boob shadow for the first time, against the shower wall. I was like, “is that my shoulder? Noooo... Cooooolllll...” (I confirmed what it was, naturally, by cupping and lifting it. It was the left one, if that matters to you for any reason.)
The second (and far more impactful) was that I regarded my penis as feminine for the first time. It was purely subconscious, like my spontaneously regarding myself as beautiful (in a sexual context) when I’d been in the shower the other day. I immediately felt very similar sensations to that previous time — I at first felt very warm inside; happy, and pleased with myself and my body, as it is.
And then I felt a strong sense of unease.
It wasn’t quite so strong as the last time, but then, this was not a sexually charged moment. I don’t think I was even washing my penis, at the time. In any case, I didn't start crying, I just felt sort of gross. I am going to guess that this was a manifestation of cultural influence on my own self-perception. My unchecked thought was that my penis was feminine, which pleased me, because that is how I perceive myself; but my higher, culturally-influenced thought has always regarded any penis, automatically, as absolutely masculine. As literally representative of masculinity.
Ultimately, a lot of my own perception of my gender is tied very strongly to appearances, not just in the visual, but in the visceral aspects of creating those appearances. Which means that, since I will spend a great deal of my life wearing clothing, I need that clothing to be what I perceive as truly “feminine” clothing. (Realize that I am only speaking for myself, here. Whatever defines femininity to you personally is up to you, of course, as it is for me with my own body.)
And that means that I do still think that, even if I consider the possibility of a future where I do not dissociate as strongly from my penis as I do right now, I will end up having full SRS, and not just an orchiectomy. I’ve not touched it in months, aside from incidental contact; nothing sexual, at any rate. Not by choice or force of will, but because I rarely even register its existence anymore. This has been one of the most pleasing results of HRT.
I do still start crying a little bit sometimes, depending on my mood, when I see myself naked. Mostly because of the penis. Somewhat the facial hair and adam’s apple, but those can be addressed to some degree with shaving and makeup and lighting. But the penis is just... there. It’s this big, external reminder that my body isn’t what would really feel right to me. It’s a body part that ultimately defines what it means to be a man for a lot of people, and that is not an easy association to erase when the vast majority of one's entire culture is bent on reinforcing it.
And that is the real issue. I've been wrestling very much recently with how far to transition. My first thought, on realizing I'd misunderstood my gender for my entire life, was that I wanted a completely female body, to the greatest extent possible. And at the time, that meant vagina, breasts, hips, slimmer natural waist, no facial hair, no adam's apple, fundamental vocal frequencies about an octave higher, and certainly not a penis or anything associated with it. The reason that I wanted this was for comfort. To feel right in my own body, to feel at home, and not like I'm stuck in a maze that I cannot understand any more than I can escape.
But I have since realized that that sense of comfort does not really come from inside me. It lives inside me now, but it came from my environment. It was cultural. This is the confusing part about it, for a lot of cisgender people, I think. Passing can be about many things. It's often about avoiding discrimination and harassment and violence. Sometimes even death.
At its core, for me, passing is about personal comfort, and that is informed by our culturally-defined perceptions of gender. When I am out in public, passing is to some degree about what everyone else sees. But when I am alone, and, truly, all the rest of the time, too, passing is not about what everyone else sees, it's about reacting to the judgments that everyone else makes and acts on. And I carry those with me everywhere. I imagine everyone does.
The thing that I've realized, thanks to discovering Laura Jane Grace, is that we can change those cultural definitions. And to some extent, this is already happening. Everything I am doing is geared towards doing that, if you really examine what I'm trying to accomplish.
I spent a few days really agonizing over what to do about my voice. I felt such a tremendous sense of obligation to not change it. Because representation is so, so, so incredibly important. But then I acknowledged that I'm already greatly shaped by the cultural definitions I'd developed and carried over the course of nearly 40 years. I recognized that to not get VFS, possibly making my own life more unpleasant than it needs to be, would be martyring myself to some degree. And I concluded that that isn't necessary.
Where that's left me in regards to transition broadly is not very different a place than I was before, but with a very different mood. Previously, I had a plan, and I was very driven in moving it forward and sticking to it religiously. Now, I have a rough outline, an order of operations (haha), and the actual plan part of my plan is to just see how I feel when I reach the point where I have the resources to actually take the next step. Whatever that may be.
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Friday, April 24, 2015
Feelings Are the Best
I know you’ll probably think that’s sarcasm, but it’s not.
Have you ever had your heart, like... not broken, but... like, you saw it roll off the edge of a table or something, right as it went over the edge, and there was nothing you could do to stop it, and now it's got a little crack? And you're just like, "oh. Well."
Captain America was flirting with me last night on Ok Cupid. It was a really light and pleasant conversation. He obviously didn’t really understand trans women or trans issues very well, but he seemed to be genuinely making an effort, and not fetishizing. He behaved as if he were honestly open to challenging his core beliefs, and revising them as appropriate. I felt like he was flirting with me as a human woman, and not as a trans girl like the ones from his favorite porn, or whatever the hell it is that I get much more often.
I had some trouble sleeping, so I allowed myself to imagine him in bed with me (which, by the way, is a terrible idea). Mostly just lying there in his arms. Some other stuff, too, but mostly that. And I got to kind of air some of my fears in a safe and vacant space, and just sort of enjoy that warm feeling you get when you immediately like someone on several levels, and you know that they feel that way about you, too.
I woke up stupidly early this morning, and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I went to see if he’d sent me any notes. And he hadn't.
But he had deleted or suspended his account.
So, to recap (and expand), this was my journey:
I challenged a lot of this stuff. Internally, I mean. You know, like, “no, I’m not an idiot, I just opened myself up and then he disappeared, and that’ll probably happen again, but I can’t become too afraid of the possibility of this kind of pain to keep being open.” Anything that I had been automatically concluding was bad about me, or my fault, I was able to challenge and basically discard. And I gradually stopped crying.
So now, I’m just kind of like: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had been upset. I had been really very upset. I felt the feels. And then they left. And now I’m basically fine again. And it’s that easy.
I spent so long avoiding feelings at all. I literally spent decades experiencing no emotion because I had become so afraid of how painful it was. My favorite therapist used to ask me, at the start of every appointment, "how do you feel?" and I would answer, "I don't know." But one day, maybe six months along, I said, "sad," and he said, "good! That means you're starting to experience emotion again." I was not pleased.
But now that I’ve discovered who I really am, I’ve also started to feel. Everything. Completely. All the time. And I love it. All of it. Even the bad. It’s so much simpler and cleaner this way. It feels natural. It feels right. It feels like being alive. And now, instead of carrying around some nameless distress that I can’t put my finger on for the rest of the day or the week or whatever, I’m just barely annoyed.
Feel your feels, people. Just... fuckin' feel 'em, it's so much better, I promise.
Have you ever had your heart, like... not broken, but... like, you saw it roll off the edge of a table or something, right as it went over the edge, and there was nothing you could do to stop it, and now it's got a little crack? And you're just like, "oh. Well."
Captain America was flirting with me last night on Ok Cupid. It was a really light and pleasant conversation. He obviously didn’t really understand trans women or trans issues very well, but he seemed to be genuinely making an effort, and not fetishizing. He behaved as if he were honestly open to challenging his core beliefs, and revising them as appropriate. I felt like he was flirting with me as a human woman, and not as a trans girl like the ones from his favorite porn, or whatever the hell it is that I get much more often.
I had some trouble sleeping, so I allowed myself to imagine him in bed with me (which, by the way, is a terrible idea). Mostly just lying there in his arms. Some other stuff, too, but mostly that. And I got to kind of air some of my fears in a safe and vacant space, and just sort of enjoy that warm feeling you get when you immediately like someone on several levels, and you know that they feel that way about you, too.
I woke up stupidly early this morning, and I couldn't get back to sleep, so I went to see if he’d sent me any notes. And he hadn't.
But he had deleted or suspended his account.
So, to recap (and expand), this was my journey:
- he’s kind of cute
- he’s kind of a tool
- okay he’s trying
- he really is kind of cute tho
- oh my god that is adorable
- ok here are some things i am afraid of
- yes thank you
- goodnight
- if you’re still up, i can’t sleep for some reason
- this feels so nice
- oh
I challenged a lot of this stuff. Internally, I mean. You know, like, “no, I’m not an idiot, I just opened myself up and then he disappeared, and that’ll probably happen again, but I can’t become too afraid of the possibility of this kind of pain to keep being open.” Anything that I had been automatically concluding was bad about me, or my fault, I was able to challenge and basically discard. And I gradually stopped crying.
So now, I’m just kind of like: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I had been upset. I had been really very upset. I felt the feels. And then they left. And now I’m basically fine again. And it’s that easy.
I spent so long avoiding feelings at all. I literally spent decades experiencing no emotion because I had become so afraid of how painful it was. My favorite therapist used to ask me, at the start of every appointment, "how do you feel?" and I would answer, "I don't know." But one day, maybe six months along, I said, "sad," and he said, "good! That means you're starting to experience emotion again." I was not pleased.
But now that I’ve discovered who I really am, I’ve also started to feel. Everything. Completely. All the time. And I love it. All of it. Even the bad. It’s so much simpler and cleaner this way. It feels natural. It feels right. It feels like being alive. And now, instead of carrying around some nameless distress that I can’t put my finger on for the rest of the day or the week or whatever, I’m just barely annoyed.
Feel your feels, people. Just... fuckin' feel 'em, it's so much better, I promise.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
#RealDeadTransKid
Today (yesterday) had been going a little slow. I didn't feel particularly well, but I had a lot of homework to get done, so I was really trying to focus hard on that, even though my body was making that especially difficult. Nothing to do with gender dysphoria, just some run-of-the-mill living human kind of stuff. I was actually starting to finally feel a little better when I saw the news that Taylor Alesana had killed herself.
I clicked through to the article, and I read down to the end, and started to well up a bit. It was sad. It was as sad as every other trans girl's needless death, by her own hand or someone else's. But I felt a little numb to it, at the same time. When Leelah Alcorn died, I also felt sad, but her death had hit me harder than most. I had not written any new (pop) songs since my own gender revelation, primarily because nothing was really that horrible in my life. Even the bad stuff, I was weathering, and coming out okay. I had nothing so miserable to write about anymore. Until Leelah died.
The way that I found out about Leelah was what really turned the news of her death into an absolute suckerpunch. I had been browsing tumblr that morning, and I saw some trans girl's selfies of 2014, or whatever. I reblogged them and followed her, as I tend to for anyone I am sure is a trans girl. And then a little further down, I started seeing posts about someone named Leelah Alcorn, or maybe it was Joshua, but were they male, or female, who was saying what, I didn't know. Then I found a post with a link to her suicide note, and I was stunned. Because it was her. It was the girl I had just followed. The one I'd been looking forward to supporting and encouraging. The one who had a build just like mine.
I felt sick. I felt numb. I remember wanting very much to cry, but not really being able to. I had something inside me about it that needed to come out, and ultimately, it was a song. The first (and so far last) miserably depressed song that I've written since becoming basically happy most of the time. I had experienced challenges that would impact my mood since it had stabilized in a much better place, but I had not run across anything like this, any really traumatic event.
I joined with a lot of other trans people and tweeted under the hashtag RealLifeTransAdult, to try to help trans kids who were stuck in a hostile environment just keep their eyes on the future. But mostly I just kind of packed it away into the back of my head somewhere, and kept on just trying to work on me. Just finishing the degree so I could start fixing my own life to the point where I could start helping others. To be able to fight from a position of power, or at least not from a position of such absolute weakness and vulnerability.
Taylor's suicide brought all of what I had stuffed away when Leelah died back to the forefront of my mind. I briefly examined my reactions, wondering why I was feeling so incredibly affected by these two girls, but less so by so many of the other trans girls' deaths that I read about, and reblog. I wanted to be accountable to myself if I had some kind of unexamined, racially-motivated bias. And I decided that that didn't really fit. It didn't feel right. Because every trans girl's death hurts.
I have never been close to my immediate family. Trans girls everywhere are the closest thing to family that I have. That means some of them drive me insane, others inspire me; some have personalities that I struggle to deal with, and others just click with me right from the start. Some of them I just don't really have strong feelings about one way or the other. That is, I like some, I dislike others, and am ambivalent about the rest. But I love them all. Because they're my family.
When a trans girl dies, I realized, how much it impacts me has to do with how closely I feel her life experiences map to my own. With Leelah, it was the broader sense of total rejection from parents, a refusal to acknowledge who she actually was. That was, again, broadly, my experience growing up. My parents never had any interest in getting to know me. They had a plan for me, and I wasn't in on it. The further I drifted from it, the less they loved me, until finally, there was nothing left, and I was just taking up space at home. Leelah's death, with those immediately apparent first details of her parents rejecting her, struck a chord with me. So her death felt like the loss of a little sister that I had just been told I had.
With most trans girls, there aren't such potent emotional hooks that resonate specifically with my own life. These deaths feel more like the loss of a distant relative. One I may have seen from afar once or twice at the annual family reunion, or whatever. A loss that I feel, and a person that I will miss, and a shame, but less hard-hitting for me, personally.
Taylor's death felt like that, at first. I read the article, and welled up a little bit. I got a lump in my throat, and a couple tears fell. Maybe a few. But I didn't feel too terribly much in common with her specifically, beyond the fact that we were both trans. And then I watched her video.
And it shouldn't have hit me as hard as it did, because the thing that made me feel really connected to Taylor was at the very end. It was just word choice, on her part. Telling us about what she hoped to accomplish in the near future, and then saying "wish me luck!" It's not even a trans phrase, it's just a thing some people say when they're about to try some big thing that means a lot to them. It's the same thing I've been saying a lot lately.
I completely fucking lost it. I had been tearing up a bit throughout her video, but at the very end, I was absolutely done. I had spent the previous hour or so doubled over in my chair, trying to convince my guts to relax, so I could just sit up like a normal person and get some homework done. And there I was, doubled over again, but sobbing relentlessly, this time. And, objectively, in far more pain.
I ended up stumbling over to the bed. I couldn't see very well. I sort of fell over and scattered cats everywhere. Cream Puff Cow came up to me and started head-butting me gently while I cried. He's such an idiot when it comes to basic things like, "which way did the ball go that I just watched roll right past me?" but he's probably the most emotionally tuned-in cat I have, and one of the better ones I've ever met in my life.
Sorry, I start to really babble when I'm upset. It scatters me. Um. Yeah, so, anyway, I was sobbing on my bed, and I just started asking Cream Puff Cow, of all people, "why?" A million variations on the same question, for about an hour. But, in between sobs. I was probably not intelligible, but that was okay, because he doesn't understand English, anyway.
Why do people hate us so much?
What have we done to make anyone upset? What? Besides being born this way?
She just wanted to help people learn how to do their makeup better. Who could that have possibly hurt?
Why do they keep killing us?
And we all know the answer, right. It's because we're different. And it's the dumbest thing in the world. We are steeped in this culture of celebrating diversity in theory — thematically in stories, whether in music, text, or video with coming-of-age and fish-out-of-water archetypes — but burying it in practice. We want to see and celebrate diversity, but we only want to do it from afar, and we only want to do it with people that we can find pleasing in enough ways to offset the things about them that we do not understand, things which may disturb us.
And I get that. I just wrote about it. People who are different from us can sometimes seem so different that we get freaked out. What we do with that feeling defines us. When we are children, perhaps we respond by making fun of some aspects of that person that we think tie into whatever it is about them that we can't get our heads around. Of course, once the belittling starts, the target is gradually perceived as less and less human, and let's be honest, they didn't rate very high to begin with.
Believe it or not, I was actually part of bullying a kid in my middle school. Not an especially active agent, but active enough. Certainly not passive, and definitely not in opposition, which is where I really wish I could say I had been. There was a Korean kid in our grade who had some kind of mental or emotional disability. Possibly something developmental. I never really found out. Some of the other kids would get really nasty with him, physically violent.
I never got that bad, but I wasn't much better. Whenever someone made a crack at his expense, I laughed. Yeah. It was hilarious. This kid is different. What could be funnier. I probably made some cracks, myself.
One time, another kid in our grade held him, suspended by his ankle, over a stairwell, a one-story drop. I have no idea why. I walked up on this scene, and I can't remember doing a thing to stop it. I can't remember even wanting to. It was scary shit, looking back. Some real Lord-of-the-Flies shit.
But my real motivation, if I can be honest with myself, wasn't so much that I hated the Korean kid for any particular reason. It was that I was so relieved to not be the target. I was so relieved that nobody was coming at me for my bad teeth, or my shitty haircut, or my cheap hand-me-down clothes from my older brother, which had probably come from a thrift store or fucking K-mart before that, anyway. I was relieved that I could just be another asshole in a sea of assholes.
Because I knew. I fucking knew how much it hurt to even think that other people didn't like me. To even think that they were talking about me behind my back, making fun of me for god-knows-what. Being poor. Being short. Having glasses. Being shy.
I was once happily flirting with a girl in one of my classes. And I do believe she was flirting back. We were just chatting and being silly, not thinking at all about where anything might go. We hardly knew each other. It was the middle school equivalent of meeting someone really cool at a bar. Except that at this bar, her friend showed up, and asked her, without even looking at me, "when are you gonna stop talking to this nerd?" This was probably around 1987, and when someone called you a nerd in 1987, it was not a term of endearment.
The thing is, I know everyone in the entire world knows what it feels like to be the target. To be the object of ridicule. What I don't know is why, when we realize that, we keep being so fucking awful to each other.
Try to imagine the lives of these girls. Imagine knowing who you are, absolutely, unquestioningly, to the very core of everything you are and have ever been. The way most people do. Knowing your gender. The way most people do. Feeling secure in at least that, if nothing else. The way most people do.
Now imagine being challenged on that everywhere you went. From the moment you woke up and your parents denied your identity. To the bus stop where all the other kids ignored you, except when they all turned your way for a second to stare, before returning to their circle to burst out laughing. To school where you get beat up in one bathroom, but looked on with disgust in the other, as if you were some kind of awful beast. To lunch, where no one would sit with you. And then back home. To start it all over again the next day.
At first, you might fight back. After all, you know who you are. It's so obvious. To you. It's the truth. So you fight back. Someone calls you "faggot," you pick whatever you think might hurt them the most, and throw it back. Maybe it's "nigger," or "chink." Maybe you point out that they were adopted. Maybe you ask if they still live in a trailer.
Eventually, you get tired. You can't fight forever, so you stop fighting. But they don't stop attacking. You stop feeling, but you keep taking damage. And before you know it, every day is misery, and you long for death. You long for rest. You long for freedom. You long to be treated and seen as the person you know yourself to be. Your mind becomes very adept at shutting down positive trains of thought, and it becomes more and more fatalistic. Until finally, it kills you.
The next time you feel uncomfortable around someone, ask yourself if they're actually doing anything that warrants discomfort. Are they charging at you, brandishing a frozen-solid slab of albacore, while not wearing any pants, covered in cat shit and Goldschläger, screaming about the motherland? Feel disturbed. Be okay with feeling disturbed. Because that is some weird shit.
But are they just sitting there, having lunch? Are they just washing their hands in the restroom, not making eye contact, and clearly hoping to GTFO ASAP? Are they, in any other words, just existing? Because if that makes you uncomfortable, please be honest with yourself and realize that the problem is not that they exist, but that you are reacting in some particular way to that fact. And when you see other people who feel uncomfortable around that person starting to take it out on them, think long and hard about what you wanted the last time someone laid into you for basically just being who you were.
I clicked through to the article, and I read down to the end, and started to well up a bit. It was sad. It was as sad as every other trans girl's needless death, by her own hand or someone else's. But I felt a little numb to it, at the same time. When Leelah Alcorn died, I also felt sad, but her death had hit me harder than most. I had not written any new (pop) songs since my own gender revelation, primarily because nothing was really that horrible in my life. Even the bad stuff, I was weathering, and coming out okay. I had nothing so miserable to write about anymore. Until Leelah died.
The way that I found out about Leelah was what really turned the news of her death into an absolute suckerpunch. I had been browsing tumblr that morning, and I saw some trans girl's selfies of 2014, or whatever. I reblogged them and followed her, as I tend to for anyone I am sure is a trans girl. And then a little further down, I started seeing posts about someone named Leelah Alcorn, or maybe it was Joshua, but were they male, or female, who was saying what, I didn't know. Then I found a post with a link to her suicide note, and I was stunned. Because it was her. It was the girl I had just followed. The one I'd been looking forward to supporting and encouraging. The one who had a build just like mine.
I felt sick. I felt numb. I remember wanting very much to cry, but not really being able to. I had something inside me about it that needed to come out, and ultimately, it was a song. The first (and so far last) miserably depressed song that I've written since becoming basically happy most of the time. I had experienced challenges that would impact my mood since it had stabilized in a much better place, but I had not run across anything like this, any really traumatic event.
I joined with a lot of other trans people and tweeted under the hashtag RealLifeTransAdult, to try to help trans kids who were stuck in a hostile environment just keep their eyes on the future. But mostly I just kind of packed it away into the back of my head somewhere, and kept on just trying to work on me. Just finishing the degree so I could start fixing my own life to the point where I could start helping others. To be able to fight from a position of power, or at least not from a position of such absolute weakness and vulnerability.
Taylor's suicide brought all of what I had stuffed away when Leelah died back to the forefront of my mind. I briefly examined my reactions, wondering why I was feeling so incredibly affected by these two girls, but less so by so many of the other trans girls' deaths that I read about, and reblog. I wanted to be accountable to myself if I had some kind of unexamined, racially-motivated bias. And I decided that that didn't really fit. It didn't feel right. Because every trans girl's death hurts.
I have never been close to my immediate family. Trans girls everywhere are the closest thing to family that I have. That means some of them drive me insane, others inspire me; some have personalities that I struggle to deal with, and others just click with me right from the start. Some of them I just don't really have strong feelings about one way or the other. That is, I like some, I dislike others, and am ambivalent about the rest. But I love them all. Because they're my family.
When a trans girl dies, I realized, how much it impacts me has to do with how closely I feel her life experiences map to my own. With Leelah, it was the broader sense of total rejection from parents, a refusal to acknowledge who she actually was. That was, again, broadly, my experience growing up. My parents never had any interest in getting to know me. They had a plan for me, and I wasn't in on it. The further I drifted from it, the less they loved me, until finally, there was nothing left, and I was just taking up space at home. Leelah's death, with those immediately apparent first details of her parents rejecting her, struck a chord with me. So her death felt like the loss of a little sister that I had just been told I had.
With most trans girls, there aren't such potent emotional hooks that resonate specifically with my own life. These deaths feel more like the loss of a distant relative. One I may have seen from afar once or twice at the annual family reunion, or whatever. A loss that I feel, and a person that I will miss, and a shame, but less hard-hitting for me, personally.
Taylor's death felt like that, at first. I read the article, and welled up a little bit. I got a lump in my throat, and a couple tears fell. Maybe a few. But I didn't feel too terribly much in common with her specifically, beyond the fact that we were both trans. And then I watched her video.
And it shouldn't have hit me as hard as it did, because the thing that made me feel really connected to Taylor was at the very end. It was just word choice, on her part. Telling us about what she hoped to accomplish in the near future, and then saying "wish me luck!" It's not even a trans phrase, it's just a thing some people say when they're about to try some big thing that means a lot to them. It's the same thing I've been saying a lot lately.
I completely fucking lost it. I had been tearing up a bit throughout her video, but at the very end, I was absolutely done. I had spent the previous hour or so doubled over in my chair, trying to convince my guts to relax, so I could just sit up like a normal person and get some homework done. And there I was, doubled over again, but sobbing relentlessly, this time. And, objectively, in far more pain.
I ended up stumbling over to the bed. I couldn't see very well. I sort of fell over and scattered cats everywhere. Cream Puff Cow came up to me and started head-butting me gently while I cried. He's such an idiot when it comes to basic things like, "which way did the ball go that I just watched roll right past me?" but he's probably the most emotionally tuned-in cat I have, and one of the better ones I've ever met in my life.
Sorry, I start to really babble when I'm upset. It scatters me. Um. Yeah, so, anyway, I was sobbing on my bed, and I just started asking Cream Puff Cow, of all people, "why?" A million variations on the same question, for about an hour. But, in between sobs. I was probably not intelligible, but that was okay, because he doesn't understand English, anyway.
Why do people hate us so much?
What have we done to make anyone upset? What? Besides being born this way?
She just wanted to help people learn how to do their makeup better. Who could that have possibly hurt?
Why do they keep killing us?
And we all know the answer, right. It's because we're different. And it's the dumbest thing in the world. We are steeped in this culture of celebrating diversity in theory — thematically in stories, whether in music, text, or video with coming-of-age and fish-out-of-water archetypes — but burying it in practice. We want to see and celebrate diversity, but we only want to do it from afar, and we only want to do it with people that we can find pleasing in enough ways to offset the things about them that we do not understand, things which may disturb us.
And I get that. I just wrote about it. People who are different from us can sometimes seem so different that we get freaked out. What we do with that feeling defines us. When we are children, perhaps we respond by making fun of some aspects of that person that we think tie into whatever it is about them that we can't get our heads around. Of course, once the belittling starts, the target is gradually perceived as less and less human, and let's be honest, they didn't rate very high to begin with.
Believe it or not, I was actually part of bullying a kid in my middle school. Not an especially active agent, but active enough. Certainly not passive, and definitely not in opposition, which is where I really wish I could say I had been. There was a Korean kid in our grade who had some kind of mental or emotional disability. Possibly something developmental. I never really found out. Some of the other kids would get really nasty with him, physically violent.
I never got that bad, but I wasn't much better. Whenever someone made a crack at his expense, I laughed. Yeah. It was hilarious. This kid is different. What could be funnier. I probably made some cracks, myself.
One time, another kid in our grade held him, suspended by his ankle, over a stairwell, a one-story drop. I have no idea why. I walked up on this scene, and I can't remember doing a thing to stop it. I can't remember even wanting to. It was scary shit, looking back. Some real Lord-of-the-Flies shit.
But my real motivation, if I can be honest with myself, wasn't so much that I hated the Korean kid for any particular reason. It was that I was so relieved to not be the target. I was so relieved that nobody was coming at me for my bad teeth, or my shitty haircut, or my cheap hand-me-down clothes from my older brother, which had probably come from a thrift store or fucking K-mart before that, anyway. I was relieved that I could just be another asshole in a sea of assholes.
Because I knew. I fucking knew how much it hurt to even think that other people didn't like me. To even think that they were talking about me behind my back, making fun of me for god-knows-what. Being poor. Being short. Having glasses. Being shy.
I was once happily flirting with a girl in one of my classes. And I do believe she was flirting back. We were just chatting and being silly, not thinking at all about where anything might go. We hardly knew each other. It was the middle school equivalent of meeting someone really cool at a bar. Except that at this bar, her friend showed up, and asked her, without even looking at me, "when are you gonna stop talking to this nerd?" This was probably around 1987, and when someone called you a nerd in 1987, it was not a term of endearment.
The thing is, I know everyone in the entire world knows what it feels like to be the target. To be the object of ridicule. What I don't know is why, when we realize that, we keep being so fucking awful to each other.
Try to imagine the lives of these girls. Imagine knowing who you are, absolutely, unquestioningly, to the very core of everything you are and have ever been. The way most people do. Knowing your gender. The way most people do. Feeling secure in at least that, if nothing else. The way most people do.
Now imagine being challenged on that everywhere you went. From the moment you woke up and your parents denied your identity. To the bus stop where all the other kids ignored you, except when they all turned your way for a second to stare, before returning to their circle to burst out laughing. To school where you get beat up in one bathroom, but looked on with disgust in the other, as if you were some kind of awful beast. To lunch, where no one would sit with you. And then back home. To start it all over again the next day.
At first, you might fight back. After all, you know who you are. It's so obvious. To you. It's the truth. So you fight back. Someone calls you "faggot," you pick whatever you think might hurt them the most, and throw it back. Maybe it's "nigger," or "chink." Maybe you point out that they were adopted. Maybe you ask if they still live in a trailer.
Eventually, you get tired. You can't fight forever, so you stop fighting. But they don't stop attacking. You stop feeling, but you keep taking damage. And before you know it, every day is misery, and you long for death. You long for rest. You long for freedom. You long to be treated and seen as the person you know yourself to be. Your mind becomes very adept at shutting down positive trains of thought, and it becomes more and more fatalistic. Until finally, it kills you.
The next time you feel uncomfortable around someone, ask yourself if they're actually doing anything that warrants discomfort. Are they charging at you, brandishing a frozen-solid slab of albacore, while not wearing any pants, covered in cat shit and Goldschläger, screaming about the motherland? Feel disturbed. Be okay with feeling disturbed. Because that is some weird shit.
But are they just sitting there, having lunch? Are they just washing their hands in the restroom, not making eye contact, and clearly hoping to GTFO ASAP? Are they, in any other words, just existing? Because if that makes you uncomfortable, please be honest with yourself and realize that the problem is not that they exist, but that you are reacting in some particular way to that fact. And when you see other people who feel uncomfortable around that person starting to take it out on them, think long and hard about what you wanted the last time someone laid into you for basically just being who you were.
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Cellos for Violins
One of the only things I liked about The Jason Construct was his voice. It wasn't always that way. I always wanted to be a good singer, and I always wished I was, but I didn't get any real encouragement, and friends would usually take cracks at my singing voice, so I did it less and less. Even when I took my very first demos to a real studio to get mixed and treated by a real audio engineer, the guy said my songs sounded good, but that I needed to get a new singer. And he wasn't even trying to be a dick, he was just being an objective professional. (Fun story: I ran into him again about 20 years later, when I went to my school's open house to find out more about it. He's an instructor here for audio, and used to head the department.)
In a way, he wasn't wrong. I did need a new singer. I needed the new singer that I became after I started learning how to actually sing, instead of just doing it and hoping for the best. It started with a book: Set Your Voice Free, by Roger Love, a "vocal coach to the stars" kind of guy who had coached the likes of Billy Corgan and Michael Jackson. The book came with a CD, and I was able to do exercises as if guided by a live coach, sort of.
I made noticeable and excellent progress with my voice. The difference is hugely apparent when you compare an older song like one big walking, which predates my exposure to any vocal training of any kind, to i've lived too long, or three days in a hospital, both of which I wrote and recorded after working with the book. The first song is a bit pitchy, definitely screamy, not inherently unappealing, but definitely of a garage aesthetic. If the sound of a clearly untrained singer wailing over washed-out guitars with a high noise floor appeals to you, then it's a shame we didn't know each other back then. In the second two, it's clear that someone has given me a stern finger-wagging about proper breathing, and there's the beginnings of an understanding of middle voice. It's all much stronger, purer, steadier... less pitchy until I get to the very highest chest voice notes when I'm belting.
By the time we get to more recent recordings like resection, which follow two quarters of vocal coaching with a retired professional touring opera singer who had over 30 years of experience, an even bigger improvement is heard. I have more confidence, so any shakiness in delivery can be attributed to the emotive performance, not incapacity to actually hold a note. It becomes a deliberate choice to introduce it (or allow it to be introduced, more accurately) rather than just a quirk of this performer. Harmonies beyond the simplest arrangements are still magical and confusing to me, though. I have been known to drift from track to track, and stumble my way through multiple keys on my way.
But then I had my gender revelation. And I felt so incredibly, indescribably happy.
One of the first things to really bring any kind of melancholy back into my head was realizing that part of why my voice had always bothered me and seemed inadequate was that it was a male-typical voice. I mean. Testosterone will do that. Usually. Anyway, in sort of having become accustomed to my depressive state, I had started to cling to my voice as the one really redeeming quality about me.
I've always loved the sound of the cello. I can't even remember the first time I heard one. I can't remember not knowing and loving that sound. One of the most effective ways for me to try to come to terms with the placement of my chest voice range (about an octave lower than I would feel more natural in) was to tell myself that I was more like a cello, which I adore, than a violin, which I could kind of take or leave.
And then I realized who I was, and without really thinking about it too consciously, I stopped singing. I had gone from constant singing anytime I drove anywhere by myself to sort of humming along in falsetto, maybe. I had gone from bringing my guitar to school and just breaking it out and playing little sets wherever I was, to barely even touching my guitar.
Part of this had to do with writing. A quick pass over my earlier lyrical work reveals a pretty clear and serious trend. Everything I wrote was rooted in self-hatred. I had an endless void of it to draw from, and I wrote pretty prodigiously. The works that are "complete" enough to even share on the web site make up probably less than half of all material I've actually produced. The rest is scattered in 20-second clips on various drives, ideas for later, along with scraps of lyrics in tiny text files with names that make no sense to me until I open them, and remember how that particular play on words worked.
But suddenly, not only did I not hate myself anymore, I loved myself. I liked myself, on top of that. I would still hear music, but not as often, and not the same kind. I had stopped hearing lyrics entirely. My need to share information about myself was channeled elsewhere. I revamped my tumblr, turning it from another run-of-the-mill League of Legends blog into a much more fashion-oriented blog, with much more feminism than I had previously reblogged, as well as shared pictures from my Instagram. The one constant between the two styles was cats. Lots and lots of cats. Okay, and owls. But those are really just flying cats, and you will never convince me otherwise.
Another part of why I had stopped writing, never mind that nothing was really coming to me anymore, was that I felt very acutely how wrong my voice was for me. I wrestled with how to solve that problem for awhile. My preferred course for awhile has been to try to acquire or save up enough money to get Voice Feminization Surgery (VFS). Yes, that is a thing. I had seen some videos, patient testimonials, from a place called Yeson Voice Center. Videos like this one:
This same bit of text was used when I first started going to speech pathology appointments at the VA hospital. It's phonemically balanced, so it provides a good "drone" to get a baseline on someone's vocal properties.
Speaking of speech pathology, that's another possible "solution." I never liked the idea of trying to change my natural vocal habits, because it feels too much like an act. I want to be able to just relax and be myself, not worry about whether I managed to convince enough people that my voice was a cis woman's voice. I've noticed that in interactions with strangers that are going to be very brief, such as with a bus driver (usually), I will pitch up, and try to alter timbre as much as possible, too. Which, you would think, I would consider to be putting on an act. But it's so automatic that I don't think of it that way. But with friends, or on dates, or for more extended interactions, I just relax and talk.
A long time ago, I fell absolutely in love with a band called Crumb. I used to frequent Moby Disc, when I lived in Los Angeles. I would scour the dollar bins, and try to find cool, edgy, unknown bands. Most of them were trash, to be honest. But a few of them were just. Fucking. Amazing.
Crumb was one of those bands. I started going to every Moby Disc location I could find, so I could rifle their dollar bins, and get every copy of Romance is a Slow Dance, to give away to anyone I thought was worthy of it. Not long after that, Seconds Minutes Hours came out, and I happily paid full price for it.
Years later, I started looking for their work again, because my copies had been lost when our storage locker had been robbed, along with all the other CDs I owned, basically. And I thought that Crumb had put out more records, at first, but a closer look showed that it was a different band called Crumb, and still more research showed that my beloved band called Crumb had broken up after their second album. But, I did finally find some old MP3 rips of those albums that had managed to survive, and I started listening to them again.
And somehow, I found good-Crumb lead singer Robby Cronholm on Twitter. And I wrote him a note kind of telling him about how I'd found his band way back when, but didn't know they had broken up, but that I found his new band while I had been looking for his old one. I told him that I was glad to know that he was still making music, and that I looked forward to hearing more. I asked him if he'd listen to some of my music, if he wasn't too busy, and let me know what he thought, because I really respected him as a songwriter, as a singer, as a musician.
And he wrote back.
This blew my fucking mind, at the time. This guy, to me, was really basically in the same league as Billy Corgan or Morrissey. Really, I felt very much as if either of those guys had written me back. I would listen to Crumb, then some Smashing Pumpkins, Morrissey, back to Crumb... it was all professional-quality music with high production values, excellent songcraft, and very, very skilled performance. So, I told him that.
And he wrote back again, gushing that anyone would ever compare him to Morrissey, because Moz is one of his main influences, and a major idol for him. (I will finally confess, here, for the first and last time, that I already knew that before I wrote him and told him that, because I had read it somewhere else. But it was still true. Sorry, Robby. Everything you know is a lie.)
We chatted on and off for awhile, but at one point, he sent me a note asking how I was doing, and I didn't see it for, oh, I don't know, maybe three years? To be fair, it was right around the time Jenn and I had gotten evicted, and were homeless for a fair time, without the best and most constant access to the internet. The first time I saw that note was in September of last year, about a month and a half after I had realized who I was.
So, I told him everything. And, to be honest, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was optimistic. He'd been such an absolute sweetheart before, taking time out of a busy schedule to listen to some random schlep's music and tell them that he thought it was really good, and actually make specific comments about specific songs by name... it felt like he really cared about other people and was a really great guy. But some really great guys have one big problem, and it's hating trans girls.
Robby Cronholm is absolutely not one of those guys.
Seriously, what an absolute sweetheart.
Anyway, part of this went over my head at the time. I didn't know the name Laura Jane Grace. And as this was while I was pounding my way through 21-credit quarters at school, I didn't really give any of this much thought. Partially, I realized later, because I didn't even understand his sentence because of the probable autocorrect error, "translation" for "transition."
Very recently, I saw some interviews with Laura Jane, and some performances, and I thought... wait a second... her voice is like mine.
This gets into everything I was talking about in my last post. I started to think that maybe the reason I felt like my voice was wrong for who I really am was that I was buying into a variation on the myth that femininity is only and absolutely defined by certain sizes, textures, and colors of things. This is really not that different from how most girls feel every day about their entire body, because our media is constantly telling girls that their bodies are okay, I guess... but they could be so much better, if only they bought this and used that.
I'm telling my story because I don't want the next trans girl like me, who figures out, just shy of her 40th fucking birthday, that she's been someone else all along, to feel like there's nobody else out there like her.
So now, I don't know. I don't know what to do about my voice. Before making the whole Laura Jane connection in the first place, I had started singing again, but only in private, because I figured that if I kept up on good vocal health and strengthening/toning techniques, I would recover much more quickly from surgery later. This was also the number one reason I agreed to try the voice feminization program at the VA hospital, with the speech pathologists.
Not long ago, I was in a Live Sound II class, and we needed a singer. So, I got up there and sang. I didn't want to, but I felt like I was the best qualified among those there by a fair margin, even as out-of-practice and self-conscious as I was. I suppose it's sort of ironic that when everything else flipped in my head, the one previous positive, my own view of my own voice, became really one of the only big negatives.
Later on, that instructor approached me outside of class about collaborating musically. He has a degree in music composition from Cornish, and generally knows what he's on about. He's also the drummer who had complimented me at the Up All Night event (in the paragraph by my selfie in the pink dress). I obviously said yes.
That, then, combined with having later found out about Laura Jane Grace, and hearing her sing and speak with confidence, had left me debating just how necessary VFS was, and how good it would be. Not just for me, but for everyone. VFS is not cheap. It has risks. And even if I get my voice pitched where I want it to naturally sit, with the right harmonics, it may impact how well I can sing. There's even a slim chance that something could go wrong, and I could lose my voice entirely, permanently.
Oh, or die. I mean, it is a major surgery with general anesthesia.
When I first realized I was a girl, I considered all of that, and determined that I'd rather try to get a voice that fit my self-understanding, even if it meant I could possibly never sing well again. Even if it meant I might not be able to even sing or speak at all again. Even if it meant I might die. That was a risk I was willing to take, rather than live with this voice. But why?
Because there's no representation. There are no girls out there like me, being shown in a positive light, speaking with their deeper voices. Girls who have cellos for violins.
But now that I've seen some representation, and I look at everything I say I'm trying to accomplish here, I feel like I almost have a responsibility to NOT get VFS. To keep carrying out my mission of living out loud as much as I can, of promoting myself into every possible space, of becoming everyone's trans neighbor that they know and love, or at least don't hate. To show everyone that it's okay to have a voice like this and be a girl, because I'm a girl, and I have a voice like this, and look at me, out there, living life.
While I was mulling all of this over, I messaged a friend that I met through school, another Cornish grad who works professionally now as a musician in Seattle. I asked him about an event going on tomorrow, downtown, and we started talking about similar concepts for the future. I mentioned wanting to cover a whole Radiohead album, because Thom Yorke is an absolute genius, and I love, love, love singing along with him. My friend, Tristan, said he'd always wanted to cover The Cranberries' first album.
It wasn't long before he asked me to send him a demo. I froze. I was terrified. But I mean, come on. I had literally just told him that I could do this. And then he asked, and I was like, Jesus Christ, are you serious? He said, "send me a video of you singing dreams, maybe just the vocal thing after the first chorus when it changes keys." In case you don't remember, he's talking about this part, which I'd completely forgotten about when I told him I could probably sing it.
Merde.
I listened to it through a few times to try to remember how it went, the pacing and cadence, the breaks in and out of falsetto. I had no real warm-ups. I had not really been doing anything for my vocal health or readiness all day besides drinking my requisite daily fuckton of water, and sitting here in relative silence. But then I went ahead and tried anyway.
I still can't believe I sent this to him. In my goddamn pajamas, no shave, no makeup, and no backing music. Solo vocal covers of existing songs that have supporting instrumentation always sound weird as shit to me. Then I sat around for a few minutes trying to pre-emptively console myself. This guy had just graduated Cornish, which has two very prestigious voice programs; one for classical, and one for jazz. And he had literally just said that he needed "a fucking good singer" to pull this off. And I briefly was a fucking good singer, I thought. For a guy. When I was in practice.
But I'm no Dolores O'Riordan. Just like I'm no Kimbra, I'm no Imogen Heap... none of the artists I feel like I ought to sound like, in my own head.
Anyway, he watched the video, and it sounds like he wants to put it together with me and see if we can't pull it off.
So, for now. Um. I guess I'll start trying to sing more, to sing like I used to. More seriously, with warm-ups. With less shame about the fact that I sound, to myself, like a guy. I sound like Jason. But maybe that's not true. Maybe Jason just always sounded like Sera.
In a way, he wasn't wrong. I did need a new singer. I needed the new singer that I became after I started learning how to actually sing, instead of just doing it and hoping for the best. It started with a book: Set Your Voice Free, by Roger Love, a "vocal coach to the stars" kind of guy who had coached the likes of Billy Corgan and Michael Jackson. The book came with a CD, and I was able to do exercises as if guided by a live coach, sort of.
I made noticeable and excellent progress with my voice. The difference is hugely apparent when you compare an older song like one big walking, which predates my exposure to any vocal training of any kind, to i've lived too long, or three days in a hospital, both of which I wrote and recorded after working with the book. The first song is a bit pitchy, definitely screamy, not inherently unappealing, but definitely of a garage aesthetic. If the sound of a clearly untrained singer wailing over washed-out guitars with a high noise floor appeals to you, then it's a shame we didn't know each other back then. In the second two, it's clear that someone has given me a stern finger-wagging about proper breathing, and there's the beginnings of an understanding of middle voice. It's all much stronger, purer, steadier... less pitchy until I get to the very highest chest voice notes when I'm belting.
By the time we get to more recent recordings like resection, which follow two quarters of vocal coaching with a retired professional touring opera singer who had over 30 years of experience, an even bigger improvement is heard. I have more confidence, so any shakiness in delivery can be attributed to the emotive performance, not incapacity to actually hold a note. It becomes a deliberate choice to introduce it (or allow it to be introduced, more accurately) rather than just a quirk of this performer. Harmonies beyond the simplest arrangements are still magical and confusing to me, though. I have been known to drift from track to track, and stumble my way through multiple keys on my way.
But then I had my gender revelation. And I felt so incredibly, indescribably happy.
One of the first things to really bring any kind of melancholy back into my head was realizing that part of why my voice had always bothered me and seemed inadequate was that it was a male-typical voice. I mean. Testosterone will do that. Usually. Anyway, in sort of having become accustomed to my depressive state, I had started to cling to my voice as the one really redeeming quality about me.
I've always loved the sound of the cello. I can't even remember the first time I heard one. I can't remember not knowing and loving that sound. One of the most effective ways for me to try to come to terms with the placement of my chest voice range (about an octave lower than I would feel more natural in) was to tell myself that I was more like a cello, which I adore, than a violin, which I could kind of take or leave.
And then I realized who I was, and without really thinking about it too consciously, I stopped singing. I had gone from constant singing anytime I drove anywhere by myself to sort of humming along in falsetto, maybe. I had gone from bringing my guitar to school and just breaking it out and playing little sets wherever I was, to barely even touching my guitar.
Part of this had to do with writing. A quick pass over my earlier lyrical work reveals a pretty clear and serious trend. Everything I wrote was rooted in self-hatred. I had an endless void of it to draw from, and I wrote pretty prodigiously. The works that are "complete" enough to even share on the web site make up probably less than half of all material I've actually produced. The rest is scattered in 20-second clips on various drives, ideas for later, along with scraps of lyrics in tiny text files with names that make no sense to me until I open them, and remember how that particular play on words worked.
But suddenly, not only did I not hate myself anymore, I loved myself. I liked myself, on top of that. I would still hear music, but not as often, and not the same kind. I had stopped hearing lyrics entirely. My need to share information about myself was channeled elsewhere. I revamped my tumblr, turning it from another run-of-the-mill League of Legends blog into a much more fashion-oriented blog, with much more feminism than I had previously reblogged, as well as shared pictures from my Instagram. The one constant between the two styles was cats. Lots and lots of cats. Okay, and owls. But those are really just flying cats, and you will never convince me otherwise.
Another part of why I had stopped writing, never mind that nothing was really coming to me anymore, was that I felt very acutely how wrong my voice was for me. I wrestled with how to solve that problem for awhile. My preferred course for awhile has been to try to acquire or save up enough money to get Voice Feminization Surgery (VFS). Yes, that is a thing. I had seen some videos, patient testimonials, from a place called Yeson Voice Center. Videos like this one:
This same bit of text was used when I first started going to speech pathology appointments at the VA hospital. It's phonemically balanced, so it provides a good "drone" to get a baseline on someone's vocal properties.
Speaking of speech pathology, that's another possible "solution." I never liked the idea of trying to change my natural vocal habits, because it feels too much like an act. I want to be able to just relax and be myself, not worry about whether I managed to convince enough people that my voice was a cis woman's voice. I've noticed that in interactions with strangers that are going to be very brief, such as with a bus driver (usually), I will pitch up, and try to alter timbre as much as possible, too. Which, you would think, I would consider to be putting on an act. But it's so automatic that I don't think of it that way. But with friends, or on dates, or for more extended interactions, I just relax and talk.
A long time ago, I fell absolutely in love with a band called Crumb. I used to frequent Moby Disc, when I lived in Los Angeles. I would scour the dollar bins, and try to find cool, edgy, unknown bands. Most of them were trash, to be honest. But a few of them were just. Fucking. Amazing.
Crumb was one of those bands. I started going to every Moby Disc location I could find, so I could rifle their dollar bins, and get every copy of Romance is a Slow Dance, to give away to anyone I thought was worthy of it. Not long after that, Seconds Minutes Hours came out, and I happily paid full price for it.
Years later, I started looking for their work again, because my copies had been lost when our storage locker had been robbed, along with all the other CDs I owned, basically. And I thought that Crumb had put out more records, at first, but a closer look showed that it was a different band called Crumb, and still more research showed that my beloved band called Crumb had broken up after their second album. But, I did finally find some old MP3 rips of those albums that had managed to survive, and I started listening to them again.
And somehow, I found good-Crumb lead singer Robby Cronholm on Twitter. And I wrote him a note kind of telling him about how I'd found his band way back when, but didn't know they had broken up, but that I found his new band while I had been looking for his old one. I told him that I was glad to know that he was still making music, and that I looked forward to hearing more. I asked him if he'd listen to some of my music, if he wasn't too busy, and let me know what he thought, because I really respected him as a songwriter, as a singer, as a musician.
And he wrote back.
This blew my fucking mind, at the time. This guy, to me, was really basically in the same league as Billy Corgan or Morrissey. Really, I felt very much as if either of those guys had written me back. I would listen to Crumb, then some Smashing Pumpkins, Morrissey, back to Crumb... it was all professional-quality music with high production values, excellent songcraft, and very, very skilled performance. So, I told him that.
And he wrote back again, gushing that anyone would ever compare him to Morrissey, because Moz is one of his main influences, and a major idol for him. (I will finally confess, here, for the first and last time, that I already knew that before I wrote him and told him that, because I had read it somewhere else. But it was still true. Sorry, Robby. Everything you know is a lie.)
We chatted on and off for awhile, but at one point, he sent me a note asking how I was doing, and I didn't see it for, oh, I don't know, maybe three years? To be fair, it was right around the time Jenn and I had gotten evicted, and were homeless for a fair time, without the best and most constant access to the internet. The first time I saw that note was in September of last year, about a month and a half after I had realized who I was.
So, I told him everything. And, to be honest, I didn't know exactly what to expect, but I was optimistic. He'd been such an absolute sweetheart before, taking time out of a busy schedule to listen to some random schlep's music and tell them that he thought it was really good, and actually make specific comments about specific songs by name... it felt like he really cared about other people and was a really great guy. But some really great guys have one big problem, and it's hating trans girls.
Robby Cronholm is absolutely not one of those guys.
Seriously, what an absolute sweetheart.
Anyway, part of this went over my head at the time. I didn't know the name Laura Jane Grace. And as this was while I was pounding my way through 21-credit quarters at school, I didn't really give any of this much thought. Partially, I realized later, because I didn't even understand his sentence because of the probable autocorrect error, "translation" for "transition."
Very recently, I saw some interviews with Laura Jane, and some performances, and I thought... wait a second... her voice is like mine.
This gets into everything I was talking about in my last post. I started to think that maybe the reason I felt like my voice was wrong for who I really am was that I was buying into a variation on the myth that femininity is only and absolutely defined by certain sizes, textures, and colors of things. This is really not that different from how most girls feel every day about their entire body, because our media is constantly telling girls that their bodies are okay, I guess... but they could be so much better, if only they bought this and used that.
I'm telling my story because I don't want the next trans girl like me, who figures out, just shy of her 40th fucking birthday, that she's been someone else all along, to feel like there's nobody else out there like her.
So now, I don't know. I don't know what to do about my voice. Before making the whole Laura Jane connection in the first place, I had started singing again, but only in private, because I figured that if I kept up on good vocal health and strengthening/toning techniques, I would recover much more quickly from surgery later. This was also the number one reason I agreed to try the voice feminization program at the VA hospital, with the speech pathologists.
Not long ago, I was in a Live Sound II class, and we needed a singer. So, I got up there and sang. I didn't want to, but I felt like I was the best qualified among those there by a fair margin, even as out-of-practice and self-conscious as I was. I suppose it's sort of ironic that when everything else flipped in my head, the one previous positive, my own view of my own voice, became really one of the only big negatives.
Later on, that instructor approached me outside of class about collaborating musically. He has a degree in music composition from Cornish, and generally knows what he's on about. He's also the drummer who had complimented me at the Up All Night event (in the paragraph by my selfie in the pink dress). I obviously said yes.
That, then, combined with having later found out about Laura Jane Grace, and hearing her sing and speak with confidence, had left me debating just how necessary VFS was, and how good it would be. Not just for me, but for everyone. VFS is not cheap. It has risks. And even if I get my voice pitched where I want it to naturally sit, with the right harmonics, it may impact how well I can sing. There's even a slim chance that something could go wrong, and I could lose my voice entirely, permanently.
Oh, or die. I mean, it is a major surgery with general anesthesia.
When I first realized I was a girl, I considered all of that, and determined that I'd rather try to get a voice that fit my self-understanding, even if it meant I could possibly never sing well again. Even if it meant I might not be able to even sing or speak at all again. Even if it meant I might die. That was a risk I was willing to take, rather than live with this voice. But why?
Because there's no representation. There are no girls out there like me, being shown in a positive light, speaking with their deeper voices. Girls who have cellos for violins.
But now that I've seen some representation, and I look at everything I say I'm trying to accomplish here, I feel like I almost have a responsibility to NOT get VFS. To keep carrying out my mission of living out loud as much as I can, of promoting myself into every possible space, of becoming everyone's trans neighbor that they know and love, or at least don't hate. To show everyone that it's okay to have a voice like this and be a girl, because I'm a girl, and I have a voice like this, and look at me, out there, living life.
While I was mulling all of this over, I messaged a friend that I met through school, another Cornish grad who works professionally now as a musician in Seattle. I asked him about an event going on tomorrow, downtown, and we started talking about similar concepts for the future. I mentioned wanting to cover a whole Radiohead album, because Thom Yorke is an absolute genius, and I love, love, love singing along with him. My friend, Tristan, said he'd always wanted to cover The Cranberries' first album.
It wasn't long before he asked me to send him a demo. I froze. I was terrified. But I mean, come on. I had literally just told him that I could do this. And then he asked, and I was like, Jesus Christ, are you serious? He said, "send me a video of you singing dreams, maybe just the vocal thing after the first chorus when it changes keys." In case you don't remember, he's talking about this part, which I'd completely forgotten about when I told him I could probably sing it.
Merde.
I listened to it through a few times to try to remember how it went, the pacing and cadence, the breaks in and out of falsetto. I had no real warm-ups. I had not really been doing anything for my vocal health or readiness all day besides drinking my requisite daily fuckton of water, and sitting here in relative silence. But then I went ahead and tried anyway.
I still can't believe I sent this to him. In my goddamn pajamas, no shave, no makeup, and no backing music. Solo vocal covers of existing songs that have supporting instrumentation always sound weird as shit to me. Then I sat around for a few minutes trying to pre-emptively console myself. This guy had just graduated Cornish, which has two very prestigious voice programs; one for classical, and one for jazz. And he had literally just said that he needed "a fucking good singer" to pull this off. And I briefly was a fucking good singer, I thought. For a guy. When I was in practice.
But I'm no Dolores O'Riordan. Just like I'm no Kimbra, I'm no Imogen Heap... none of the artists I feel like I ought to sound like, in my own head.
Anyway, he watched the video, and it sounds like he wants to put it together with me and see if we can't pull it off.
So, for now. Um. I guess I'll start trying to sing more, to sing like I used to. More seriously, with warm-ups. With less shame about the fact that I sound, to myself, like a guy. I sound like Jason. But maybe that's not true. Maybe Jason just always sounded like Sera.
Monday, April 13, 2015
What Even Are We?
I have had. A pretty emotional couple of days, here. I still have so much to backfill on writing about, I need to actually write down some of the events and the general dates, so I can remember to write about them in the coming days. But sometimes, a number of events collide and draw my attention to that point of intersection between them. Today's collision occurred at "what even are we?"
Because I thought I knew what I was. I'm a trans woman! So, I was designated male at birth, but that was wrong, because I actually identify as female. One of the only two possible choices, as far as most people in Western cultures understand, so. Great! That's me, all sewn up. But if I say I'm trans, and Quinn says he's trans, but his experience is not mine, is one of us more trans than the other? Or less? Am I better at being trans than him? Very much like the whole TERF War thing, the answer is, "no." As he says, "not all trans narratives and experiences are the same."
He describes himself as nonbinary, but uses he/him pronouns. If nothing else, that, right there, confuses the shit out of me. I'm not here to challenge him, or try to say that he's wrong. Not at all. Here, too, I recognize that the problem is not his gender identity or expression. It's my (in)capacity to understand it. My reaction isn't good, because it's a confused one. But it's not bad, because it's not an angry or fearful or violent one.
Much worse than that, though, is how the general population, who is, by and large, cisgender, sees us. Here is a tasteful example of the kinds of messages a trans woman can expect to get when she is dating. Not only does this guy, I imagine, have no real idea how to approach women in general, he has not even the slightest clue what he's on about when he wants to approach a trans woman. I mean, he literally doesn't even know how to refer to me. Predictably, when called on it, he gets defensive.
People can get defensive when they feel like they've done nothing wrong, and are being attacked for it. Even if, when called on the wrong thing that they've done, they start to see how and why it's wrong; because of the nature of the dialogue, and the subject, the conversation is adversarial. And I'm disappointed in myself for going so heavily on the offensive that there was no room for him to actually realize how painful it is to be treated like that constantly, to connect and identify with that, and to ask why things are like that. To ask how he can help.
But this guy probably just legitimately has no idea at all that trans women struggle. That we're not rare, beautiful, exotic birds, which, maybe, if one is very lucky, can be caught or tamed or touched just once in a lifetime. That we're people. That, because we're not the norm, we're punished in a variety of ways. Among them, being murdered without repercussion because someone basically didn't like that we were trans. It's like some guy you've never met before just sidling up to you while you're caught in a firefight in a warzone, while all your people are dead or dying around you, asking if you wanna go the mall later and maybe get some Indian from the food court. How out of touch can someone be?
To be fair, a large part of why I blew up on him had very little to do with him. Ordinarily, given our match/enemy numbers, I would've just ignored the message, or maybe put it up on my tumblr, but without any response. But I'd just been through about an hour-long emotional barfnado which was chiefly characterized by me shaking, with tears in my eyes, while trying to write a response to a post I found from another trans woman. I was very upset.
I had initially planned to repurpose a lot of what I said there into a standalone text post here. But then I thought, if I rearrange my portion for clarity, the sense of my struggle to even articulate it would be lost. So would the frustration of that, of writing to someone to communicate with them, but being unable to find the words. That also is where the tone lies, I think. It reads less like expository, and more like a scene. There's a lot of passion to it, and a lot of pain, in both parts. I had also spent most of that hour, ultimately, getting to the point that her voice mattered, and that we need her to keep using it, so I thought it would be extra hypocritical if I turned around and just summarized her post to set mine up, or something.
It's not just that the different viewpoints matter. It's that there are different viewpoints at all, and that they all matter. The trans story in the mass media right now is very rudimentary. It's like watching a JPG load over dial-up.
Oh, right, I turned 40 yesterday.
Anyway. Right now, "transgender," in the mainstream media, means, what. Bruce Jenner? Chaz Bono? Laverne Cox? Lana Wachowski? Their stories are their stories, so they have that inherent value. I'm not going to try to convince anyone that my story is more important than any of theirs, or more necessary. But I will argue that it is as least as important as theirs, and at least as necessary. Because the trans experience is only very rarely defined by wealthy celebrities.
If you're a black male, which celebrity defines you? Denzel Washington? Laurence Fishburne? Maybe someone younger. Jaden Smith? But if you're a black male in America, your experience is almost certainly light years away from that. It is, depressingly, probably quite a lot closer to Eric Garner's. Or Trayvon Martin's. Or Jonathan Ferrell's.
My experience as a trans woman is not even remotely close to the celebrity trans experience. Most of us don't have the resources for clinically proven effective treatments for our gender dysphoria. Some, like Zaira Quispe, try dangerous "back alley" measures. Some, like Leelah Alcorn, kill themselves. Far too many, like Penny Proud, are murdered. Stories like Legacy's on tumblr are commonplace.
Celebrity stories are the book jacket. They're the synopsis on the inside flap. They're still people. But so are we. They still matter. But so do we. There are so many more stories, and without them, the trans experience is not defined. It can barely even be understood. It's a couple of big blocks of different colors that might be trying to represent a cow, or maybe an airplane, or love. Who can even tell? We need more blocks, higher resolution. We need the rest of the picture to load. We need more pages. We need more stories. And we need them to be heard.
Because I thought I knew what I was. I'm a trans woman! So, I was designated male at birth, but that was wrong, because I actually identify as female. One of the only two possible choices, as far as most people in Western cultures understand, so. Great! That's me, all sewn up. But if I say I'm trans, and Quinn says he's trans, but his experience is not mine, is one of us more trans than the other? Or less? Am I better at being trans than him? Very much like the whole TERF War thing, the answer is, "no." As he says, "not all trans narratives and experiences are the same."
He describes himself as nonbinary, but uses he/him pronouns. If nothing else, that, right there, confuses the shit out of me. I'm not here to challenge him, or try to say that he's wrong. Not at all. Here, too, I recognize that the problem is not his gender identity or expression. It's my (in)capacity to understand it. My reaction isn't good, because it's a confused one. But it's not bad, because it's not an angry or fearful or violent one.
Much worse than that, though, is how the general population, who is, by and large, cisgender, sees us. Here is a tasteful example of the kinds of messages a trans woman can expect to get when she is dating. Not only does this guy, I imagine, have no real idea how to approach women in general, he has not even the slightest clue what he's on about when he wants to approach a trans woman. I mean, he literally doesn't even know how to refer to me. Predictably, when called on it, he gets defensive.
People can get defensive when they feel like they've done nothing wrong, and are being attacked for it. Even if, when called on the wrong thing that they've done, they start to see how and why it's wrong; because of the nature of the dialogue, and the subject, the conversation is adversarial. And I'm disappointed in myself for going so heavily on the offensive that there was no room for him to actually realize how painful it is to be treated like that constantly, to connect and identify with that, and to ask why things are like that. To ask how he can help.
But this guy probably just legitimately has no idea at all that trans women struggle. That we're not rare, beautiful, exotic birds, which, maybe, if one is very lucky, can be caught or tamed or touched just once in a lifetime. That we're people. That, because we're not the norm, we're punished in a variety of ways. Among them, being murdered without repercussion because someone basically didn't like that we were trans. It's like some guy you've never met before just sidling up to you while you're caught in a firefight in a warzone, while all your people are dead or dying around you, asking if you wanna go the mall later and maybe get some Indian from the food court. How out of touch can someone be?
To be fair, a large part of why I blew up on him had very little to do with him. Ordinarily, given our match/enemy numbers, I would've just ignored the message, or maybe put it up on my tumblr, but without any response. But I'd just been through about an hour-long emotional barfnado which was chiefly characterized by me shaking, with tears in my eyes, while trying to write a response to a post I found from another trans woman. I was very upset.
I had initially planned to repurpose a lot of what I said there into a standalone text post here. But then I thought, if I rearrange my portion for clarity, the sense of my struggle to even articulate it would be lost. So would the frustration of that, of writing to someone to communicate with them, but being unable to find the words. That also is where the tone lies, I think. It reads less like expository, and more like a scene. There's a lot of passion to it, and a lot of pain, in both parts. I had also spent most of that hour, ultimately, getting to the point that her voice mattered, and that we need her to keep using it, so I thought it would be extra hypocritical if I turned around and just summarized her post to set mine up, or something.
It's not just that the different viewpoints matter. It's that there are different viewpoints at all, and that they all matter. The trans story in the mass media right now is very rudimentary. It's like watching a JPG load over dial-up.
Oh, right, I turned 40 yesterday.
Anyway. Right now, "transgender," in the mainstream media, means, what. Bruce Jenner? Chaz Bono? Laverne Cox? Lana Wachowski? Their stories are their stories, so they have that inherent value. I'm not going to try to convince anyone that my story is more important than any of theirs, or more necessary. But I will argue that it is as least as important as theirs, and at least as necessary. Because the trans experience is only very rarely defined by wealthy celebrities.
If you're a black male, which celebrity defines you? Denzel Washington? Laurence Fishburne? Maybe someone younger. Jaden Smith? But if you're a black male in America, your experience is almost certainly light years away from that. It is, depressingly, probably quite a lot closer to Eric Garner's. Or Trayvon Martin's. Or Jonathan Ferrell's.
My experience as a trans woman is not even remotely close to the celebrity trans experience. Most of us don't have the resources for clinically proven effective treatments for our gender dysphoria. Some, like Zaira Quispe, try dangerous "back alley" measures. Some, like Leelah Alcorn, kill themselves. Far too many, like Penny Proud, are murdered. Stories like Legacy's on tumblr are commonplace.
Celebrity stories are the book jacket. They're the synopsis on the inside flap. They're still people. But so are we. They still matter. But so do we. There are so many more stories, and without them, the trans experience is not defined. It can barely even be understood. It's a couple of big blocks of different colors that might be trying to represent a cow, or maybe an airplane, or love. Who can even tell? We need more blocks, higher resolution. We need the rest of the picture to load. We need more pages. We need more stories. And we need them to be heard.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Welcome to My Life
I should clarify something. When I started this blog, I knew I
wanted it to be a platform from which I could disseminate some firsthand
accounting of the experiences of a trans woman. But then I started to
wonder, should I write only about things specifically related to
medically transitioning, like HRT, electrolysis, and SRS? Or, would it
be better to just treat it like a diary, and rely on tags to sort
content for people who only want to read about certain things?
Ultimately, I realized, my number one goal in any media is to present the trans experience as just one part of the larger whole human experience of any number of people's lives. That I want to shift the focus of the concept of "transgender person" away from the "transgender," and towards the "person." I mean, when you get right down to it, that is the problem. People who hate transgender people, usually in concept, without any actual firsthand knowledge of or exposure to anyone they know is trans, hate because they do not feel anything in common with us.
The fact of a trans person's existence, that uncommon gender presentation, is, itself, such a fundamentally threatening thing, for whatever reason. It makes us seem so alien to some people that they can only think of the "transgender" part. Which means we're not actually people. So, if we die, who cares? The "trans panic" defense, recently outlawed in California but still legal everywhere else, exists as a testament to this problem. People would rather allow our murderers to walk free than to acknowledge that we are human beings. Rather than think, "how could one human being murder another?" they think, "I don't know, what would I have done if I found myself in bed with one of those freaks?"
The problem is a lack of education. Partially due to a lack of information. I've seen a statistic floating around that only 8% of people (maybe Americans, I can't remember) self-report as knowing a trans person. (That they know is trans.) Which means the rest of them are making up their mind about what trans people are based on the media, and not on their friend Sally, who was born Mike, or whatever. That's another barrier to humanization.
On top of all that, on the macro level, nobody is even sure how many of us there are. Part of that, again, gets back to the same lack of information generally about even the fact that we exist. I knew that trans girls existed, but the only ones I'd ever seen were in porn, so it wasn't something I really thought about much. It was so far out of my mind, and I so thoroughly lacked access to any real live trans people, that it took me a lot longer than it could have for me to even realize that I was trans.
Once we get past the how-many-even-are-there hurdle, it becomes pretty clear that what the mass media has decided is a good representation of the trans community is about as useful as the rest of what the mass media has decided makes for good representation: better than nothing, but only just.
So I concluded that it would be best to treat this more as a journal than as a very narrowly-focused trans information resource depot that would really mostly only directly help other trans people. I will do my best to tag things with some modicum of intelligence, so that certain topics can be followed more closely than others as you prefer.
The idea is to just lay my life out there, as much as I can. It'll be like reading someone's posthumously-published private journal, only while it's actually being written, instead of after they're dead. It'll probably be pretty embarrassing sometimes, and I will be alive to feel it, but if all goes according to plan, by the time THAT starts happening, people will be getting embarrassed right along with me, because they'll identify with me on some level.
I'm absolutely positively certain beyond even a shadow of a doubt that I am going to:
It's what I've started calling Aggressive Vulnerability. If you are just relentlessly open about your experiences, your challenges, your fears, your failures, your triumphs, your family, your problems, your solutions and compromises... if you just let everyone in, they are all going to find something in common with you eventually. And when they do, you become a part of them.
And when you are a part of someone, you aren't scary anymore. You become important, integral, familiar, known. They may still feel uneasy about some things about you. But they will listen to you when you speak, and they will see you as ever more human while they do.
The point is that I'm not here to put my best foot forward. I'm here to put my next foot forward, and it's not always gonna be pretty. But I will be moving. I hope you'll walk with me.
Ultimately, I realized, my number one goal in any media is to present the trans experience as just one part of the larger whole human experience of any number of people's lives. That I want to shift the focus of the concept of "transgender person" away from the "transgender," and towards the "person." I mean, when you get right down to it, that is the problem. People who hate transgender people, usually in concept, without any actual firsthand knowledge of or exposure to anyone they know is trans, hate because they do not feel anything in common with us.
The fact of a trans person's existence, that uncommon gender presentation, is, itself, such a fundamentally threatening thing, for whatever reason. It makes us seem so alien to some people that they can only think of the "transgender" part. Which means we're not actually people. So, if we die, who cares? The "trans panic" defense, recently outlawed in California but still legal everywhere else, exists as a testament to this problem. People would rather allow our murderers to walk free than to acknowledge that we are human beings. Rather than think, "how could one human being murder another?" they think, "I don't know, what would I have done if I found myself in bed with one of those freaks?"
The problem is a lack of education. Partially due to a lack of information. I've seen a statistic floating around that only 8% of people (maybe Americans, I can't remember) self-report as knowing a trans person. (That they know is trans.) Which means the rest of them are making up their mind about what trans people are based on the media, and not on their friend Sally, who was born Mike, or whatever. That's another barrier to humanization.
On top of all that, on the macro level, nobody is even sure how many of us there are. Part of that, again, gets back to the same lack of information generally about even the fact that we exist. I knew that trans girls existed, but the only ones I'd ever seen were in porn, so it wasn't something I really thought about much. It was so far out of my mind, and I so thoroughly lacked access to any real live trans people, that it took me a lot longer than it could have for me to even realize that I was trans.
Once we get past the how-many-even-are-there hurdle, it becomes pretty clear that what the mass media has decided is a good representation of the trans community is about as useful as the rest of what the mass media has decided makes for good representation: better than nothing, but only just.
So I concluded that it would be best to treat this more as a journal than as a very narrowly-focused trans information resource depot that would really mostly only directly help other trans people. I will do my best to tag things with some modicum of intelligence, so that certain topics can be followed more closely than others as you prefer.
The idea is to just lay my life out there, as much as I can. It'll be like reading someone's posthumously-published private journal, only while it's actually being written, instead of after they're dead. It'll probably be pretty embarrassing sometimes, and I will be alive to feel it, but if all goes according to plan, by the time THAT starts happening, people will be getting embarrassed right along with me, because they'll identify with me on some level.
I'm absolutely positively certain beyond even a shadow of a doubt that I am going to:
- make an ass out of myself
- say some shit that is totally out of line, and have to recant it later
- get super defensive just because I feel attacked even when nobody is attacking me
- change my mind and vigorously defend something I had previously attacked (or vice-versa)
- maybe change my mind again, who even knows
- apologize and hope that I didn't hurt too many people too badly
- fuck everything up all over again
It's what I've started calling Aggressive Vulnerability. If you are just relentlessly open about your experiences, your challenges, your fears, your failures, your triumphs, your family, your problems, your solutions and compromises... if you just let everyone in, they are all going to find something in common with you eventually. And when they do, you become a part of them.
And when you are a part of someone, you aren't scary anymore. You become important, integral, familiar, known. They may still feel uneasy about some things about you. But they will listen to you when you speak, and they will see you as ever more human while they do.
The point is that I'm not here to put my best foot forward. I'm here to put my next foot forward, and it's not always gonna be pretty. But I will be moving. I hope you'll walk with me.
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