It's a Boy

I talked to my friend Anna the other night about theories of attraction, but in explaining mine to her, I realized that I was actually talking about just one facet of a much larger problem.

My theory of attraction is that people experience a sort of bodily sense of increased gravity around someone they're attracted to. It's a feeling of being pulled towards them. We may be able to see some patterns emerge in the general types of people we are attracted to, but I don't know that we actually have a lot of choice in the matter. Given things like anti-LGBT priests being caught with male escorts, or government officials who vote against LGBT equality and end up getting caught exposing themselves to other men in public restrooms, I confidently believe that whomever we are truly drawn to, we are drawn to, and that is that.

Knowing that, it's easy to extrapolate that this is the case for not just me, but everyone else. But I must remain especially mindful of including people to whom I am drawn; because they may not be drawn to me. Or perhaps not in the same manner.

I should clarify that this kind of pull does not have to be sexual or romantic.

Returning to Anna as an excellent case in point, I am about 3000% sure that neither of us has a particularly sexual or romantic sort of attraction towards the other. But we do seem to mutually feel a strong platonic attraction, which has created, in me, a sense of being in a sort of sisterly relationship. We enjoy each other's company, and the easy conversation that flows between us. We hardly know each other, really, at this point. But we feel a mutual attraction in this familial and easy way that is often referred to as a "kindred spirit."

Seeing @annabelle__perez off on her last night at #papamurphys with @aldamodeling 😊🙏🏻 #mytransreality

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Sep 9, 2016 at 9:45pm PDT

I went on to explain that when I experienced a more complete sort of attraction in the past (up to and including the very recent past), I noticed that I would feel a sort of compounding secondary attraction to the idea of being attracted. I was enjoying that feeling, and wanted to hold onto it. In order to do that, I began to paint over the person I was attracted to. They became, from my point of view, a canvas onto which I told my own story about them to myself. In the very beginning of this kind of painting, it is not hard to adjust to things I notice about the way they are that are different from the way I was going to draw them. But before long, they are invisible, hidden by what I want to see in them. The weight of expectation.

I noticed this happening in my mind most recently as I was drawn in a way I have never been drawn before to anyone. I don't mean that in the simple sense of Xtreme Powar Pull or anything. I just mean it is unique in its character, this sense of attraction. I feel powerfully magnetically pulled to her to the extent that I can tell when she enters a space I'm in before I have any way to really know that. I sense that she's arrived, because I feel pulled. I look in that general direction, and see her. I also feel equally powerfully magnetically repulsed, at a fixed distance. It's as if I am a comet who gets pulled into orbit. Exactly this close; hang around; but no closer. It is the most remarkable thing. I treasure it for its uniqueness. But I noticed myself beginning to covet her as its source.

So it was that one day when she did a thing that I found injurious, I found it especially so. Because on some level, I'd permitted myself to believe that she was not capable of injuring me in that way. I had painted over that part of her. I'd made it the realization of a beautiful dream, for me; a woman I'm drawn to in this powerful and mesmerizing way, who is also incapable of hurting me in the most painful ways. But it had nothing at all to do with her. The weight of expectation.

The pain of being hurt was doubled by a tiny sense of betrayal, just large enough to echo the pain back on itself, and double again, and again. But in experiencing that pain mindfully, I saw how empty it was. It was the realization that the movie I was watching wasn't real after all. This angelic creature — for what else would I be drawn to? — was just an actress in a role I'd cast her for, a role I'd been trying to fill without realizing it. She wasn't an angel at all. No flying warrior princess with gleaming armor and a sword that never missed, even when she threw it. No invincible Valkyrie, who would unfailingly be on my side in any fight. But a woman. Not just a woman, or only a woman. A woman. A completely independent person. I would say I am fond of her, but that is a thing I cannot say honestly while setting expectations upon her, for that is not kind. Expectations always weigh something.

I realized that many times in my past, when I'd allowed myself to believe that the women who joined me in failing at being together romantically had really been the ones at fault, I was engaging in this same practice, but not mindfully. I let it play out and run for months, or years. The ones who left me were betrayers. The problem wasn't that I'd misread them, because the attraction was so real. The painting I'd made was so lifelike. The problem had to be them.

But it never was. It never even could have been, because the biggest problem was that I was more interested in being with some idea loosely based on their life than with them. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that they were also doing the same thing with me. But what they were doing doesn't really matter, because what I was doing made every one of those relationships doomed from the start. (Yes, even with #FKAgirlfriend.)

The pain of experiencing all of those kinds of feelings was delightfully brief, this time around. And I am confident it will be one of the last, because most of the pain was the sense of mourning all the time I spent invested in these tools for painting the people I was drawn to out of existence, under a picture of what I decided they had to be.

This most recent and unique attraction still exists, of course. I still feel drawn to her, in exactly the same way I did before. I suppose this is why break-ups hurt so badly. Anyway, she messaged me the other day, telling me about a date she had coming up that night. I felt instinctively a sense of joy. This beautiful creature I was drawn to and intent on observing and protecting in some way, being kind to in some way, was telling me about something that she was excited about. I noticed a sense of joy in myself, a sense of satisfaction that my instinctive response to her telling me this had nothing at all to do with me. I worried that perhaps a few hours or days later, I might feel something else. But so far, I haven't.

By accepting who she is as she is in every moment, and not investing myself into an idea of her that nobody could ever live up to — if nothing else, paintings don't move; people do — I can be as kind as possible to everyone. To her, by seeing her truly, as she is. By demonstrating kindness to that actual person, and not my idea of her. To myself, by not carrying around this painting, and trying desperately to keep it between us, so I can only see something I want, and not someone I can be kind to.

I understand that this is the kindest way to relate to people, now. For myself, anyway. Your mileage may vary. But in understanding that whatever sort of attraction I feel towards anyone is entirely a product of myself, even if I qualify it as a response to them or something about them, I can understand that by extension, everyone else has the same set of conditions to work with, more or less. That is, whether I'm attracted to someone is not up to me; whether someone is attracted to me is not up to them.

What is up to each of us is what we do with that sense of attraction. For myself, I figure if I am going to be inexplicably drawn to someone, I may as well make the kindest possible thing out of that feeling. If nothing else, that keeps things simple; I try to find the kindest action in each moment as it is, already. I have mixed success. But the goal doesn't change, the intention doesn't change, and as long as I don't lose sight of that — as long as being present and being kind are the two foremost practices in my life — I think I shall do much less damage going forward. In fact I think I'll foster some real joy.

In coming to understand these mechanisms through the lens of romance, I realized that the same fundamental principles for attraction can be used to understand the bond between parents and children, because the same kinds of things go wrong for the same kinds of reasons. When children come into our lives, we feel some kind of pull towards them, generally. If we have two or more, we probably feel more pulled towards one, and call them "favorite," to ourselves, and hope nobody else notices. But in any case, it's a pull. It's the pull that we build a bond on, the one that has us doing our best to come home from grocery shopping with the same kids we took there.


I got my birth certificate in the mail the other day. In order to prep for a working retreat over the winter in Mexico, I need to get my passport, and in order to do that, I needed to get a certified copy of my birth certificate. I was born in 1975. I'm not sure what sort of technology they had back then for guessing at my gender. What I am sure of is that until a guess at my gender was made based on what my body looked like, I was freer than I would ever be after that.

The weight of expectation around gender is one of the biggest any of us has. It's even built into the phrasing we have used in birth announcements for at least as long as I've been alive: It's a _____! Without the reveal, we are not even people, really. Not "they," but "it." A thing waiting to have gender conferred upon it. But that is a false construction.

So, I was born, and the doctor said, "It's a boy!" and I screamed for the next 39 years. Mostly internally. Mostly at myself. What I was screaming for was my mother. I wanted her to see me. But she didn't. Because the moment someone told her, "it's a boy!" she started painting.

Being trans is not the only way to get a ticket to this show. In my case, it just put me in a seat with just the right view to see how the magic happened on stage; to see the painters painting. Had my mother been correctly told, "it's a girl!" when I was born, she would still have started painting. Perhaps she would have seen me longer; perhaps the things she felt she ought to paint, the things that said "girl" to her, would have naturally aligned better with what I was actually doing; with who I actually was. But she still would have been painting, and eventually, I would have disappeared.

I understand that teenage rebellion is not rebellion for the sake of rebellion. It is a child saying, I am tired of not being seen. I am tired of being unknown to you. You're so busy staring at your painting of me from when I was born that you haven't had time for me since. Well, you will make time for me. I will make you make time for me. You will see who I am. You will know.

It is rage and hurt at realizing on some level that the people who were supposed to best love us for who we are — the people who we know, deep down inside, were always supposed to teach us how to love ourselves, to teach us that receiving kindness is our birthright, that giving kindness is our duty — taught us that we were only worth covering up. That we were not even worth seeing, never mind acknowledging. Never mind loving.

To disappoint your parents is not a cruelty. It is a kindness. It is freeing them from the weight of the painting they've been holding up between you, the painting that parents start before their children are even born. It is offering them the opportunity to see you. It is giving them the only chance in the world that they will ever have of really putting that painting down. It is giving them the chance to learn how to love someone they have finally just met.

Learning to Fly

I've been meaning to write something for release today for about two weeks. And none of the ideas I could think of for theme or intent or anything of that sort panned out. I mean, I'm certain that someone, somewhere, if I were to post a sort of dispassionate analysis of what it was like growing up with my dad, would say "a-HA! See? This is why you think you're a girl," which is cute. I can't think of another word for it. It's cute in the same way it was cute when Bailey, my middle child, wanted the hotel swimming pool to be warmer, and I told him to just keep swimming and he'd warm up. He came back to me about 10 minutes later and said, "Daddy, I warmed up the pool!" Adorable.

I'd write more about playing the part of dad with my own kids, but there's no good way for me to do that without talking about their other mother. Perhaps by next year, I'll have figured out a way to tell those stories effectively, while still deliberately leaving so much out. The anecdote above doesn't require context. But if I string enough of them together, they'll open up conversations that I can't have, because I've resolved to do my best to speak as little as possible about their other mother publicly.

So instead, I'm going to just sort of ramble about growing up with my dad. I'm a self-motivated, unpaid blogger, so I think this will be okay, the rambliness. Like, I'm not going to upset any advertisers. I certainly won't feel like I've ripped anyone off. If you've ever wondered what child-me was like, wonder no more. These are my memories of my father, who is still alive, last I checked. We interact sometimes on Facebook, but we're not Friends, which I think is appropriate, since we're not friends, either. My niece set up a private group for blood relatives, and we're both in it. In the last ten years, we've probably had fewer than ten minutes of interaction of any kind.

When I was maybe seven years old or so, my dad and I went on a road trip. I don't remember much about it at all. I don't know why my mom or my older brother weren't there. I think we were probably in Wisconsin, but I'm not sure. I know we were in my dad's Chevy Cavalier station wagon. It was sort of light blue. I made him put the seats down in the back so I could lie down on them like it was a bed, just two front seats and a bed, flying down the highway. It was winter, and the landscape was bleak and sleepy.

I had a cassette with Pink Floyd's "Learning to Fly" on it, and I didn't want to listen to anything else. I made that poor man listen to this song and nothing else for six or eight hours while I warbled along, not knowing most of the words. I don't know how he felt about it at the time, or if he even remembers it now.

That's the only purely happy memory I have with my dad. It's happy because he permitted me to be myself for a few hours, a few hours in which my mom was not around to criticize either of us. Maybe he enjoyed seeing me be free, I don't know. Maybe he couldn't wait to get back to my mom, who would never have permitted me to listen to any song I liked while I laid on my back in a beat-up station wagon and sang along. Not for five minutes, never mind five or more hours.

From what I understand now, today, my dad is basically playing along with the fact of my gender. Family of mine that are around him more have said that they think he doesn't actually believe I'm a girl, but that I'm just doing all this for attention; that that's the way he is behaving. Which makes sense, since his media diet is just about entirely Fox News, I'm told. I wonder if he worries I'm a danger to anyone. I wonder whether he worries about the danger I'm in; I mean, I really wonder, because I don't think he does. What a tremendously sad thought.

I've read and heard elsewhere that long-term depression can have severe impact on memory. I can't remember where I've read or heard that, though, which I think is hilarious. Anyway, the point is that I'm not exaggerating when I say I remember almost nothing from before I was about 15. Instead of an endless stream of human joys and sorrows to pull from and reflect upon, I have something more like an edited 90-second reel, a trailer that barely makes sense. Some kind of art film that leaves viewers with a sense of disconnected sadness, but no real idea what was happening.

I have a not-purely-happy memory of going somewhere else alone with my dad, on a family vacation to the American Southwest. I was probably about 12. We'd gone to Four Corners and the Grand Canyon and such. One morning, my mom wanted us to all get up before dawn to watch the sunrise before breakfast. It was important to her, so it must therefore be important to us. But what was important to me was sleeping in, and reading more God Emperor of Dune when I woke up. She threatened that I'd get nothing to eat until dinner if I didn't get up, and I refused, so they all left and I stayed in bed. Eventually, I woke up, and I laid there reading until they returned. I felt a little bit grown up, but mostly I felt like a kid who'd finally gotten her way about something, anything. I read more of Hwi Noree's tale, and lost myself in her life, so preferable to mine, even with all the danger and intrigue hers had.

They returned eventually, and my mom went on and on about how I'd really missed out. My dad wanted to go see Pikes Peak, and I was bored of sitting in the hotel room by then, so I asked if I could go with him. My mom and my brother didn't want to go, so they stayed behind, but my mom warned my dad not to buy me anything to eat, and this is probably how I came best to understand the concept of foreshadowing.

We drove up to the summit, and went into the gift shop. I pointed out all the things I wanted or thought were interesting. He bought me a small stuffed animal ram with comically large horns made of corduroy. Just the horns; the rest was ordinary plush. He bought me a little bit of fudge that they made on-site. Thinking I was a terribly clever kid, I named my ram Horny; a joke I was barely old enough to get. I wanted my parents to roll their eyes and laugh about how smart I was to make such a grown-up pun. We drove back to the hotel, and I carried a happiness with me whose fragility I did not understand.

Once my mom learned that my dad had not only allowed me to eat, but had facilitated it, the rest of the day, at least, was ruined. Maybe it was the next several days, I don't know, I don't remember. I remember my mom screaming bloody murder at him for what he'd done. I remember him mumbling, looking at the floor, shuffling his feet. I remember being yelled at for naming my stuffed animal Horny. My clever joke was offensive, but what I didn't understand at the time was that it was really only offensive because my mom was mad that my dad hadn't obeyed her.

When I was in high school, my dad walked through the kitchen early one weekday morning. He was in briefs, and nothing else, which was just how he was in the mornings. He saw me sitting there on a stool at the island (it was more of a peninsula, actually), wrapped in heavy blankets, eating cereal, barely awake. He patted me on the head, and said, "you're kinda weird." Then he went to take his shower and get ready for work.

Much later, during the first block of eight or so years in which I did not speak to my parents, I was back in Michigan for a friend's wedding. My wife at the time, Dimple, sought a rapprochement between my parents and me. The nearest I could bring myself was to drive past their house, my childhood home. I saw my dad riding the lawnmower, staring vacantly into space as he ponderously whirlpooled around the yard. He'd come to some central point about three hours after he started, I estimated. Just like I used to. I missed cutting the grass, that chore I used to hate. He didn't see me. And I never stopped.

21 Things Not to Say to a Trans Person

I found this on my Facebook somewhere. I'm going to actually answer them all right now:

1. "When Did You Decide to Switch Genders?"
I never switched. Therefore, I never decided.

What a person asking this question is usually trying to ask is when someone realized they were not the gender they'd been designated at birth, and/or when they acted on that realization by beginning physiological transition processes. I first began to realize that I'd been incorrectly designated male at birth (DMAB) on August 10, 2014. I began transition more or less immediately.

2. "What's Your Real Name?"
Seranine Elliot. I had it legally changed on September 3, 2014. The "nine" part sounds like the number. Most people just call me "Sera," which basically sounds the same as "Sara" or "Sarah." The full name rhymes with "Caroline" with a schwa for the "o," including stress and inflection.

Keep in mind that a legal name change is not free. Many trans people choose a new name for themselves, but do not necessarily have the resources to get it legally changed at the same time. Many trans people are also reluctant to release their previous name, because it is usually used to harass, abuse, and/or disrespect them.

3. "Can I See a Picture of You Before You Transitioned?"
Sure, here's a whole pile of them. Pre-transition and/or pre-realization pictures show trans people under duress. A picture of someone who is not able to be their authentic self can be painful to even think about, let alone share. I publish mine because I want to shed light on my own process, so cis people can see for themselves how ordinary it all is, how human, and so trans people can see that it can be done, even for someone who didn't realize she'd always been a girl until she was almost 40.



4. "I'm Impressed - You Look Just Like a REAL Woman!"
This is meant to be complimentary, generally, but it necessarily implies that trans women are not actual women, which is false. I haven't personally heard this one to my face, yet, but I imagine that I'd probably reply with a thank-you, followed immediately by an explanation of why that's considered an unkind thing to say to a trans woman.

5. "Have You Had the Operation Yet?"
I suspect that most of the people who ask this sort of question are so overwhelmed by their curiosity about something they are usually completely unfamiliar with that they forget they are asking these questions of another human being. And human beings, broadly speaking, do not enjoy talking details about their genitals with most other human beings.

Fortunately, I am a cat.

I have not had Genital Reconstructive Surgery (GRS) or an orchiectomy (removal of the testes). (UPDATE: I had my orchiectomy on January 22, 2016.) If you really care to know when I have either, the best way to find out, honestly, would be to follow my social media. I'd go with my Facebook Public Figure Page, if I were you, but if you don't care about a by-the-minute level of detail, and just want to read a nice summary of it all whenever I get to writing about it, following this blog will do.

6. "Can You Still Have Orgasms?"
Much like #5 above, this is generally not good acquaintance-conversation fodder. The general rule is that if you wouldn't ask it of anybody else, you should probably not ask it of a trans person, either.

I am, in most arenas, an exception, because I have publicly and repeatedly said that I welcome questions as long as they are civil and respectful. My short answer to this question is, "yes." My long answer is probably another entire blog post, at least.

7. "Do You Take Hormones?"
Like most medical issues, this is usually considered private and personal. I am, again, an exception, because I am deliberately sharing my progress with as wide an audience as possible.

Clockwise from the top: #spironolactone 100 mg, #medroxyprogesterone 2.5 mg, #estradiol 2 mg. My now-stable, twice-daily #HRT regime.

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on May 10, 2015 at 10:45am PDT

My specific drugs, doses, and changes to either are usually not too hard to find. I tend to post about them on my Instagram, and share those posts to my Facebook Page. Right now, my Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) regimen is 2mg estradiol, 200mg spironolactone, and 5mg medroxyprogesterone daily.

8. "Wow, I Actually Find You Kind of Attractive - Great Job!"
I've actually heard this one, or some variant of it, a few times. Like #4, it's meant to be complimentary, but it's not hard to see why it isn't. It's objectifying, for starters, and it also makes a pretty bold assumption about someone's motivations for presenting themselves in whatever way. Whenever I've dressed up and put on makeup, which is most of the time when I leave the house, I've literally never done it with the intent of pleasing anyone else in any way. I do it primarily because it feels right.

It also says that you believe that the trans person you are saying this to is not normally seen as attractive by anyone, so they should be happy to hear that you, at least, find them somewhat attractive, so their future will not be as loveless and bleak as you had imagined it would otherwise be. This is kind of a horrible sentiment to share with anyone, for any reason. Even if someone is conventionally "unattractive," pointing that out to them in this kind of backhanded manner is as cruel as any other way of pointing it out. Chances are, they know how they are seen by society at large.

For myself, yes, there is definitely an element of trying to present to the culture, but since I'm a trans ambassador, I worry less about maintaining that presentation than I imagine most trans women do. I'm also fortunate enough to be slim and have relatively little body hair, on a body that was kind of androgynous to begin with, and is also white enough to be treated as capital-W White. Which means people more readily accept me as a woman, all other things being equal, than a trans woman who is comparably dressed, but darker, or with more body hair, or broader shoulders.

9. "Is It Okay to Still Call You 'He'? Sorry - It's Just Confusing!"
(I adapted this question to me; their version shows a presumably trans man to support the text.)

It's not okay to call me "he," because my gender is not male. I appreciate how it could be confusing for people who were around me before I knew who I was; until August of 2014, I'd never directly questioned the gender I was designated, either, so we all just moved along acting as though I was a guy. If I'd been called "she" then, or some other female pronoun, I would've been upset. That's because people tend to not like being called a gender other than the one they think they are. (Which is not necessarily the one they actually are, and yes, I realize that that opens the door to the idea that a trans person only thinks they are a gender other than the one they were designated at birth. But I basically used to think I was male, whereas I now know that I'm female. I've done the work in challenging and examining my own gender, so I'm no longer operating on an assumption. I'm dealing with an absolute truth.)

If you are a cis male, imagine that everyone, everywhere called you "ma'am," or "miss," and referred to you with she/her/hers, instead of he/him/his. As someone who knows himself to be male, and who understands that to be an absolutely true part of your core identity, that would be immediately distressing. It would feel frustrating and degrading, and if you had no way to get most people, most of the time, to gender you correctly, it could even feel overwhelmingly hopeless. And all of that is the very common trans person's experience.

Some people honestly do not know trans people's pronouns, and are visibly agitated while they try to figure them out. I suggest simply asking someone what their pronouns are. Not what they prefer, but what they are. Just like your pronouns, they are simple fact, not preference. Once they've told you what their pronouns are, do your best to respect them, and apologize if you fuck them up. If you do those things genuinely, it will be enough.

10. "What Does Sex Feel Like for You?"
Just like #6, there is a short answer ("fucking amazing"), and a long answer which is far too complex to dump into a survey-level post like this. It would also require co-authoring, or at least getting an okay to talk about some experience(s) in detail, which is, again, way too much for this particular post.

Rest assured that I am not personally shy about talking about sex and my own sexuality. However, I do want to be respectful to past and present partners, and I am also determined to present a balanced picture of who I am as an entire person, so I am reluctant to focus too intently on these topics before I've delved into plenty of other things that are only related by being parts of me. That is, you will probably see a post about my return to World of Warcraft long before you see the post about what sex feels like for me.

11. "Wait - If I'm Attracted to You, Am I Still Straight?"
If you are a woman, then, probably not. If you are a man, then, probably yes. (This is a much more complex question than it seems like, and it's got an answer even more complex than that. As soon as I've developed or found a better model for explaining it, I'll share, but in the meantime, these are more or less correct responses.) If you are unsure about why this could be considered offensive, then consider the same question posed by a person of the opposite gender to you.

12. "Which Bathroom Do You Use?"
In public, gender-segregated bathroom situations, I use the same bathroom as all the other women. Just like #11, it's easy to see how this question is offensive if you imagine someone asking it to you.

13. "So What Surgeries HAVE You Had?"
Like #5, this is usually considered private, personal information, like any other medical information. And as in other questions here, I'm not generally shy about answering them for myself, while explaining why the question is usually considered offensive. I've had no surgeries yet, per se, although I have been getting electrolysis on an hour-a-week schedule since November 7, 2014. The only major surgeries I intend to definitely get as of now are GRS, and a chondrolaryngoplasty, also known as a "tracheal shave." That reduces the appearance of the Adam's apple.

Just like most of the things I share about my life and my transition, if you want to keep up on details, my Facebook Page is a good place to start. If you want more long-form analytical kinds of pieces and don't care about knowing that I've had GRS the instant I've actually had GRS, then this blog is all you need to track.

14. Using Words Like "Tranny" and "Shemale" (Even Jokingly)
Yeah, these are slurs, which means their primary purpose is to degrade and dehumanize people. You should avoid using them, unless your purpose is to educate, as I'm doing here. I suppose if your goal is to actually degrade and dehumanize someone, then these are appropriate words to use, but if that's your goal, that's kind of awful, to be honest.

15. "What Did Your Family Think? I Mean Really... It's Kind of Selfish."
My immediate family, to my knowledge, is fine with it. I know firsthand that my brother, his wife, and all of their children are very supportive, and have been from the moment I told them. My parents, though I still very rarely speak to them (I've actually only called them once in the last few years, on Mother's Day 2015), are also, at worst, fine with it, as far as I've been able to tell.

My kids know by now, I'm sure, because their mother knows. She found out at some point after I started publishing this blog, since I found out that she found out when she posted an unsurprisingly very-off-topic comment on the latest post at that time. What any of them truly think of it, I don't know. Whenever I'm finally able to actually see my kids again, I will probably write about it here.

There is nothing selfish about being one's authentic self. What is selfish is to demand that someone else deny their very identity so that you can feel more comfortable. The whole idea that it's necessary to "protect the children" from uncommon genders and gender presentations is absurd for two reasons: one, kids don't have trouble wrapping their heads around them until or unless they are programmed to by their adults, and two, cis kids don't need protection from being uncomfortable because someone failed to model empathy and objectivity for them; but trans kids need protecting from misinformation and ignorance about trans people in general, and from violence, whether they do it to themselves, or someone else does it to them. They also need to be able to see healthy, happy, and safe role models. Role models like me.

16. "How Do You Have Sex?"
Just like #6 and #10, there is a short answer ("usually lying down"), and a longer answer which requires other people to be okay with me sharing intimate details, and for me to simultaneously have the time and energy to do so, and for my social media presence to be in general showing a relatively balanced and accurate view of who I am as a whole person, not just as a sexual being. So, I'll probably write about it eventually, but I wouldn't suggest you wait around for it with, dare I say it, bated breath.

17. "Are You Sure You're Not Just Gay?"
Oh, I'm very sure I'm very gay. I mean, I could be gayer. But I'm pretty fucking gay. This isn't a very good question to ask someone who's come out to you as trans for a couple reasons.

One, gender is not sexuality. I've always been predominantly attracted to women, and ever-so-slightly-but-mostly-just-theoretically attracted to men. My sexual preference didn't change. (I had thought it might, but it's shown no real signs of shifting.) All that changed was my understanding of my reference point to it. That is, I'd assumed I was male, so I saw my self as straight, or straight-preference. I've always actually been female, so I've been gay or gay-preference all along.

Two, it presumes that they've not considered this angle themselves. And that's pretty presumptuous.

18. "So, You're Transgender - That's Like Being a Drag Queen, Right?"
No, because drag queens are men who are pretending to be women, because entertainment, while trans women are women who are actually women, because reality. There can be some physical commonalities between some trans women, and your average drag queen, so I don't actually find it to be completely impossible to understand the origins of this question. That said, I hope you can all understand why it is usually going to be hurtful, and is definitely ignorant.

19. "Why Don't You Try Harder? Nobody Can Even Tell You're a Woman!"
(I adapted this question to me; their version shows a presumably trans man to support the text.)

I haven't gotten this question yet. Mostly because I "pass" pretty well when I've shaved and done my makeup and put together a decent outfit, which is most of the time when I leave the house. But also because, at least in fairly liberal western Washington, people tend to realize it's a shitty thing to say.

The first of many #lowkey looks, since my first classes every school day all quarter are arts classes with paints and clay. When Linta started climbing my leg and blapping, I may have lost my composure a bit. #😎 #Everett #Washington #transgender #veteran #student #trans #girl #girlslikeus #selfie #ootd #outfit #outfitoftheday #nomakeup with bonus leg-climbin' #linta #😄 #cats #catsofinstagram #mycats #ihavealotofcats #cat #kitty #kittycat #🐱

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Jun 30, 2015 at 7:00am PDT

I've seen some raised eyebrows as people worked to determine what I was without being told during this current quarter back at the community college. Since two of my three classes each day are arts classes involving paints and clay, I haven't bothered doing makeup or dressing up ever, for the most part. I've also stopped scheduling electrolysis around massive time windows, to allow for me to grow out enough facial hair for my electrologist to actually get ahold of and remove, without being seen in public. But even so, everyone here just seems to get it.

The short answer to why this is a horrible question is best summed up in this Erin McKean quote: "Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female.’" The long answer, which is a much broader concept, but which answers this question, and many others, is the subject of a future blog post on where gender is.

20. "So You're a Transvestite?"
No. As in #18, these are different things, although they can be understandably confusing from the outside. A transvestite is a man who enjoys dressing and presenting in ways most commonly associated with women, and not men. Another term for "transvestite" is "cross-dresser." A woman is a woman who dresses however she dresses.

21. "Stop Trying So Hard - You Look Like a Drag Queen!"
This is definitely disrespectful, and shows a pretty profound lack of empathy. Nobody's said anything like this to me, but it should be easy for anyone to see why this kind of statement is problematic. Just like #19, it gets into society policing appearance to a nearly-codified extent; but gender isn't determined by clothing. Clothing can help you figure out your gender. It does not actually make gender.

You can test this, if you don't believe me. Or if you are bored. If you are a cis man, go put on a dress. If you are still a man, congratulations, you have confirmed that gender is not determined by clothing. If you think you are or might be a woman, congratulations, you're probably trans, and you've got me to talk to about it. If you go change back into "guy clothes" and you feel like a guy again, congratulations, you are probably genderfluid, which is, itself, a gender, and is not determined by clothing, although clothing may influence your perception of which expression is more prevalent to you at any given time.

My best advice in general for approaching a trans person with your curiosity and questions is to ask yourself a few questions, first. Questions like, "would I be okay with someone asking me the same thing?" and "can I probably look these terms up myself, and not bother them with questions they probably get all the time?"

Cameron's First Pride

I never met Cameron Langrell. I never had the chance to. Two months ago, he took his own life, because he'd been so relentlessly bullied about trying to explore and understand his own gender.

The story of his suicide came to me the way that most stories of trans suicides and deaths come to me.  I found it on tumblr. The article it linked to opened, "Just days after Racine, Wis., teen Cameron Langrell announced to friends and classmates online that she identified as a transgender girl, switching her Facebook gender identifier to 'female,' the 15-year-old took her own life at home on May 1." But other articles quoted his mother, Jamie Olender, saying things like, "'He was always bullied for being feminine,' Olender told the Journal Times. 'We told him to be who you are.'" It sounded like this poor child was living in a house very much like another trans child who had killed herself, too, just a few months earlier. These words read like the words of a parent who was out of touch with her daughter, because she was calling her a son.

Almost everybody has heard the name Leelah Alcorn by now, and Leelah's story didn't just include rejection from peers, it included rejection from parents. Leelah had already figured out for herself that she was a girl. She had chosen her own new name. But her parents would not accept that. Her parents rejected the new name, they rejected the correct pronouns, they rejected their daughter. Because they wanted their son. A son that never existed.

So when news reports about Leelah Alcorn's suicide started spreading, themselves with their own conflicting information about the name and gender of this child that had killed him- or herself, one thing that became apparent pretty quickly was that Leelah's own parents had really rejected this completely, and that that had been a driving force in her decision to end her life, in a really gruesome and awful way.

When news of Cameron Langrell's suicide started spreading, because interviews with Cameron's mother, Jamie, included quotes of her referring to her son by gender-appropriate pronouns for the gender he'd been designated at birth, there was a backlash within the trans community. Almost immediately, the commentary condemned her for contributing to her child's decision to kill himself. For refusing to accept and acknowledge the finality of his conclusion about his own gender.

But that was not a conclusion he had reached. It was not a conclusion that he had shared with his mother in the way of telling her, "I would like you now to call me by a different name, I would like you now to refer to me with female pronouns, she, her, and hers, instead of he, him, and his." He had changed his Facebook gender marker to "female." But he hadn't told the mother who had encouraged him to be who he was to treat him any differently.

All of this was there in the news articles I found at the time, I didn't need to hear it from Jamie herself. But what I did need to hear from her was that she knew that there was at least one trans person who'd read enough of the story to know that what she was being accused of by the trans community was completely off-base. Someone who would defend her against these allegations, because they were, to put it as mildly as possible, exceptionally counterproductive.

This is a parent who did exactly what anybody would wish that their parent would do. This is a parent who heard her child come to her and say, "I think my gender might be something else." And she said, "okay." When she found out Cameron was being bullied at school, she approached the school district about it, to make it stop. She gave her child the time, and the space, and the love that he needed to figure out his own answer. And it sounds like she was one of very few people who did that.

In the end, there weren't enough people giving Cameron that time and space, and also the love, the surety of acceptance, no matter what conclusion he reached. And when he looked out on a future like that, where so few people would accept him, where so few people would love him and see him as the person that he was, the person that he'd discovered he was, he couldn't bear the thought of it, and he ended his life.

When Caitlyn Jenner was publicly sorting out her own gender identity, in as much secrecy as one can have when they are constantly surrounded by cameras and rumors, there was a lot of confusion as a result of The Interview with Diane Sawyer that she gave while still identifying as Bruce, and asking to be referred to as male until further notice. Even though he'd expressed that he had always been a woman. This confusion is one of the reasons why I am doing what I'm doing, living as loudly and publicly as I can; to try to unconfuse all of this.

When my very good friend and fellow trans blogger, Ramona, sorted out her own gender, she wrestled for years with what it was, with what to call it, so that other people could know. So that she'd have an answer when she was asked, "what are your pronouns?" "What is your name?"

It's Match Day! Go #CrewSC! #BeMassive #ColumbusTilIDie #LickSaltLake

A photo posted by Ramona P. (@dksb17) on Jun 27, 2015 at 3:35pm PDT

When I discovered I was a girl, I came out to my very closest friends privately, one by one, in person, face-to-face. And almost nobody asked me if they should start using different pronouns, or if I had a different name that I wanted to be called by. But one of my friends, Joe (you might remember Joe from a previous post), asked me — after being almost completely ambivalent to my revelation of being the opposite gender, on the other end of the spectrum from what I'd just been assuming I was, and what everyone else was assuming I was, too — Joe asked me if he should refer to me by female pronouns.

He asked because we played League together a lot back then, and were usually using Skype or Curse Voice while we did. Sometimes strangers from the queue would join our voice chats. But he asked me that, he asked me what my pronouns were, essentially, though it wasn't quite in that perfect distilled language of the trans community. And no one close to me had asked me that.

So when Joe asked me what my pronouns were, I kind of stood there and blinked and felt uncomfortable for a few seconds, and said, "I don't know." And then I stood there and blinked and felt uncomfortable for a few more seconds, and said, "you know what, keep using the same name and pronouns for now, and when it starts to feel weird, I will tell you, I will ask you to change them." And he said, "okay."

And it was that easy. It was that easy because, even though I'm guessing that I was probably one of the first, if not the first, trans person Joe had ever had any real direct contact with in his life, he understood that I was going through some kind of process. That I wasn't coming to him, having reached a goal, saying, "look at this thing that I've done, look at this conclusion I've reached." He understood that I was coming to him saying, "look at this revelation I'm having. Lots of things are going to change." And he asked, "what?" and "when?"

He understood that it was my change, and my process, my transition. He understood that it was my conclusion to draw. So he didn't try to tell me what it was, or what it should be. He just asked. He asked, and whatever answer I had for him, he was fine with it.

When Caitlyn Jenner finally did do the big reveal, after the big interview with Diane Sawyer, she came out, the way that a lot of trans women kind of wish they could come out, minus the paparazzi everywhere for years beforehand, fueling tabloid rumors and bad Photoshopping. I imagine a lot of trans people wish they could just appear, one day, in a body and in a gender presentation that their entire culture accepts completely as being whatever their gender is.

I imagine that a lot of people, not just trans people, also wish that they were worth $100 million. That, to the extent that money can solve problems, they had more than enough to solve all of them. The reality is that very few trans people have access to the smallest percentage of those kinds of resources. The reality is that very few trans women can afford to be Republicans.

The reality is that most trans people go through this transformation over the course of several years in full view of everyone. While they keep going to school, to work, on errands, and back home to their families or friends or roommates. That every minute detail of every embarrassing procedure unfolds in slow-motion all day, every day. It means that the day before electrolysis, if she can even afford to have it done, the trans woman is out without makeup, showing 1/8" of stubble, because she needs to have enough exposed hair for the electrologist to be able to accomplish anything.

right side detail before #electrolysis

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on May 9, 2015 at 11:50am PDT

It means that her makeup might look reliably relentlessly awful while she tries to teach the hands of a 40-year-old man how to apply it. It means that she takes a cocktail of pills a couple times a day in front of whoever is around to see her do it. It means that she might constantly awkwardly reference her own gender, a pulsing drone to remind everyone what pronouns to use, delivered via such unsubtle phrases as "I need to use the little girls' room" literally every single time she has to pee. It means that her breasts will appear smaller or larger as often as she feels she has to stuff her bra more, or less, or not at all.

It means changing rules around the house, that her door that used to almost always be open to the will and traffic of a dozen cats would be now almost always shut and locked, because everyone else in the house was a guy. Because she now needed the privacy to change clothes. She now needed the privacy to observe the changes her body was undergoing with the influence of Hormone Replacement Therapy.

The point is that everyone's transition happens at different speeds, and everyone's transition ends up at a different point on this spectrum, and that the paths each person takes to get there are all as unique as they themselves. And if you can understand that, it becomes very easy to understand corollaries; that many trans women elect not to have vaginoplasty. That some come to terms with their penis, have reached a place in their own mind where it is not triggering for them, where it does not aggravate their dysphoria. That still others have the means, but feel the risk outweighs the reward. That most have no coverage, and lack the resources otherwise, to get the operation done in the first place, and so never even bother seriously debating the question anyway.

But whatever the reason, it's their decision because it's their gender. It's their choice of how to represent themselves in the ways that they suppose will win them the broadest correct interpretation of that gender. The physical changes are not so much for themselves personally and directly as they are for the broader culture that they live in to correctly interpret their gender, and to correctly understand their gender and engage with them appropriately for their gender in the context of their culture.

When I say that it's not specifically for themselves, I don't mean that it's not for them at all, because we internalize our culture. My ideas of what is feminine and what is beautiful are all determined by modern Western beauty standards, because that's what I've been surrounded by, that's what I've grown up with. I don't personally find body hair attractive. I've never found it attractive on anyone, of any gender. I'm going to great lengths to have most of my body hair permanently removed. I'm starting with my face, because that is one of the most common and visible culturally relevant gender markers.

A step I want to take beyond that, to have the leg hair permanently removed, for example, is a combination of my regard for bare, smooth legs as more feminine than not, and the fact that my skin tolerates all methods of hair removal very poorly. Shaving, depilatory creams, tweezing, sugaring, threading, and electrolysis. Waxing irritates my skin very badly, too. But only once a month. Only for a few days.

That's not just some arbitrary decision that I've made because I've just decided out of nowhere without any context that that expresses femininity. It's because my culture views that as a marker for femininity, and I've internalized that. So when I get it done permanently, and while I keep it up with waxing until then, I'm motivated by the culture that I've internalized, rather than truly by myself. It's so that when I look at myself, I see what I want our culture to see, so that it will understand me and interact with me in ways that are appropriate to my gender: as a more-feminine-than-not woman. Because that's who I am.

This past weekend, I went to my first Pride event, in Seattle. It was my first Pride event anywhere, my first Pride event of any kind. Kim (#girlfriend) was excited to take me, and I was excited to go with her. People kept asking me how many I'd been to, or if this was my first one, and I'd say, "this is my first one. When it was on last year, I didn't know any of it applied to me." Pride happens in June. I hadn't figured out that I was a girl until August. And while I had been supportive of LGBT concerns and problems, and fully on their side, I was also miserably depressed, and so the extent of my work as an ally was tabbing out of League every so often to Like a few pictures from the event.

#relaxitsjustlove #seattlepride2015

A photo posted by Kim (@kiminoa_seattle) on Jun 28, 2015 at 6:03pm PDT

When I went this year, my first time, something that really struck me was how completely on-alert everyone was to look out for each other. Everyone. I saw someone drop his phone, and I and maybe 15 people on either side of me in each direction shouted, "PHONE!!!" Before it hit the ground, this guy turned, and looked, and saw it land. He picked it up, and said "thanks!"

I saw a little girl running by the fountain slip and fall and cut her elbow and bang her head pretty good, and stand up and start crying. This guy in shorts, just shorts, near the fountain ran up to her and made sure she was steady on her feet. He had her direct him to her adult, and he stayed with her the whole way, telling them what had happened before taking off back to where he'd come from.

Early on during the event, during the parade portion, Kim and I were not feeling especially well, so we ducked away from the main parade route, and found somewhere to sit down and have some water and a bite to eat. We got out our phones and started scrolling through Facebook. One of the things that I saw was a post from Jamie, who had added me as a Facebook Friend when I'd first contacted her. It was a picture of Cameron.

Jamie posts pictures of Cameron fairly often. As I imagine anyone would who had lost their child so young, so suddenly, in such a horrific way, for such an awful reason. I know I would. To remember who they were, to remember how they were. I saw her comments elsewhere, that it was coming up on two months to the day from the day he'd died. And I realized that he would never go to a parade like this.

And that devastating sense of loss that had connected me to Cameron, the same way it had connected me to Leelah Alcorn and Taylor Alesana, was brought into really sharp relief. Part of what was so crushingly sad about these girls' deaths to me personally was that I thought that something that might have really helped them would have been to see a trans woman like me. My age. To know that there's a life after high school for girls like us. To know that there are ways to survive for girls like us. And to know from firsthand experience that there are entire major cities that will love girls like us. And I started crying, right there on the spot.

My First Pride came very late in life, because I did not know who I was. Cameron's First Pride never came. Because he never had the chance to figure out who he was.

Boneless, Skinless

I had no plans to write anything for today. Honestly, I don't even know why I'm awake. Sleep has not been coming easily for me. I didn't fall asleep until after midnight last night, and I woke up this morning, spontaneously, just before six. What in the actual fuck.

So, I'm very tired, and I have a lot of things that I actually need to do, but for some reason the compulsion to just... just write and sort things out on "paper" is taking priority. Please bear with me while I fumble towards coherence.

I do not like my mom. She is abrasive. She is myopic. She is politically aligned with people who casually legislate the misery of underserved peoples, with racially-driven drug laws, with grossly restrictive abortion laws, with debate about bodies that they do not understand or care about, with actual, "serious" discussion about which bathroom girls like me can use. She ignored me when I was a child, unless it was to abuse me. Usually verbally, emotionally. Sometimes physically.

My mother saw me then (and now, I imagine) as a mistake. She has always had a plan for every aspect of her life, and to the extent that she's made everyone around her miserable, it's been greatly influenced by her inability to adapt and deviate from plans. To try to force reality to match her plans, rather than adjusting her plans to deal with reality. This is why it does not surprise me that she is relatively far to the right, politically. She kind of is the Republican party, or at least their faux-inclusive version of themselves.

My mother would never acknowledge or admit to it, I don't think, but she carries no small amount of self-loathing. She was born and raised in Japan, and emigrated to America to be with my dad after they'd gotten married. I think. I don't actually know the story, I kind of don't care. She both loves and hates her ethnicity. She clings to the happy things she remembers from her childhood, like the yakimo vendors crying in the streets, and rejects the rest. She never taught us Japanese. It was like she came from nowhere. Her father was an alcoholic, a sort of by-the-numbers model of an alcoholic family man in a strictly defined culture. I had the misfortune of meeting him a couple times.

We were visiting Japan once, when I was in fifth grade or so. It was over winter holidays, so I'd been given some money by friends or relatives of that side of my family (I never did learn which). Being about ten years old, with some money, in a country full of really fantastic robot and sci-fi themed toys when I'd been raised and treated like a boy my entire life left me in a pretty happy place, for once. I bought a little die-cast robot figure, a better quality toy from a more interesting program than what I was used to in the US. He saw me playing with it and chastised me for not saving that money for my future. Me, a ten-year-old child who had few friends, for whom play was a vital escape.

Don't get me wrong, it's reasonable advice. Someone gives you money, maybe you should, I don't know, not go spend it all right away on toys. And to be fair, I still struggle with this. But I don't think that I struggled with it much more than your average ten-year-old struggles with it, at the time, because I was fucking ten.

My mother is not a fan of alcohol. She saw her father getting angry, getting drunk, and beating up his family, and thought, "the real problem with this whole process is the part where he drinks." She seemed philosophically okay with the abuse stuff, though. I mean. She rejected the use of alcohol, but was really pretty completely on board with screaming at and hitting her children because of her absolute inability to cope with life in anything approaching a truly adult fashion.

One of my mother's life plans was to have two children. A son, first (check), and a daughter, next (che— wait, what?). Bearing what she thought was a son when she had decided that nothing but a daughter would do put her in the uncomfortable position of reality not acceding to her wishes, a position she found herself in often. One she has never done well in. The irony, of course, is that if she had actually just accepted her child as they were, she would have found a daughter. Not the daughter she deserved but the daughter she needed. Nothing less than a princess. Shining.

My mother grew up somewhat poor, which filled her with a desperate fear of poverty. The relentlessness with which she pursues all things (even very wrong things, sadly) served her very well in this aspect. She is extraordinarily driven. Precise, mechanical. Extremely intelligent, and yet almost laughably ignorant. She has made a lot of money, and knows nothing about how the world actually is. (God, she really is the Republican party, isn't she.) She thinks a great deal, processes massive volumes of numerical data with really pretty remarkable insight. She devours these problems like a combine built to efficiently dismantle them. But she does not understand how to human.

My mother's relationship with my dad, like her relationship with basically the entire world, was (and by all accounts still is) one of grotesque power dynamics, gaslighting, and manipulation. Like all truly great gaslighters, she is a victim of her own distorted vision of reality. She does not convince other people that reality is one thing, while believing it is actually something else. She legitimately believes that reality is what she says it is, and when faced with the fact that it is not, interesting-slash-fucking-awful things happen. She decides a source is trusted because they tell her things she likes to hear, and reinforce her views of reality; and once she's decided that source is trusted, they are infallible, to her. What they say, is. You get one guess what news channel she prefers.

Conflicts between my parents would boil over and explode, constantly, almost always in the same way. My mother would be angry about god-knows-what. Then something unrelated and trivial would set her off. She would start yelling and screaming, maybe throwing things, swinging a belt at her kids, kicking a bit of dog or what-have-you. She punched down, essentially. She surrounded herself with people who were weaker than her (by design, in the case of her children and husband). Everything was, and probably still is, completely black-and-white to her. Either you are some kind of transcendent being who is far above her, or you are garbage and you are wasting her time.

I spent most of my life believing I was garbage. A waste of everyone's time.

Oh, and a guy.

I think the gender revelation thing is part of why I woke up today and felt this bizarre urge to call my mom. I wanted to have a casual chat. I had no idea why in the hell I would wake up and think or feel anything remotely like that, but on further reflection, I realized that this is the first Mother's Day since I realized I was a girl. I don't know if it's the fact of my gender becoming clear to me, or just the base fact that I now know who I am, at last, or maybe even something else that I am not aware of at all, but I felt like reaching out.

I had had myself convinced, up until recently, that what I felt towards my parents now was ambivalence. That I'd finally won, because I no longer hated them. I just didn't care. I did not feel hate, which, it has been argued, is sometimes just an expression of frustrated or misplaced love. I felt nothing. But that was wrong, of course, because it turns out I feel everything.

I still have old, unpaid student loans from the mid-'90s because I felt so terribly wronged by having been compelled to sign for them. I did not want to go to college right after high school. I was not ready. My closest teacher, I was later told by my brother, had advised my parents that sending me straight to college would be disastrous. That I had to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do, and that if they compelled me to go, it would not end well. But my mom viewed him as beneath her. His advice and perspective were meaningless, because she knew best, and I would go to college right after high school, no matter that I did not know who I was (boy, did I not know who I was) or what I wanted to do in life.

I realize that this is self-destructive. I've known that for decades. I know that I'm not hurting my parents by not paying those loans, that they really probably don't even know that I still haven't. But on some level, I'm still waiting for them to notice. I'm still standing here, defiant, angry that they never bothered to learn who their daughter was, that they compelled her do something she was absolutely not equipped to do, stuck her with the bill, and then hid behind the idea that an 18-year-old is an adult who does not answer to their parents in any way, and cannot be meaningfully influenced by them. I don't even want their money, anymore. I mean I do, but it's not the point. I want them to apologize. I want to see that they genuinely regret all of the horrible ways they treated me, which have, to me, come to be symbolized by those old loans. Loans I signed for, so I could fail at trying to be the boy they wanted me to be.

So, I dropped out of college. I met a girl on the internet, which became sort of a sad meme in my life. I guess I did it before it was cool. I mean, I did it really terribly and without any sense of self-awareness, but I did it. A pioneer of awful things.

Anyway, the girl, Tina, was going to school in Los Angeles, while I was enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (no relation). We spent hours and hours on IRC with each other, and physically mailed developed photographs back and forth, because it was literally faster than sending them digitally. DCC file transfers were so dodgy that we'd have to reset the transmission over and over. Mailing was slow, but we knew it would work. The first picture she ever sent me is still inside my guitar.

@theafterlifecoach, this still lives inside my guitar. 😊

A video posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Mar 31, 2016 at 7:37pm PDT

Tina came out to visit me in person, and we spent a week eating shitty instant college foods and fucking our brains out. We were both shell-shocked abuse survivors, and neither of us really understood that, so we tried to be together, and, naturally, it did not work out. But since I desperately needed a feminine presence in my life, I spent hours, days, weeks, months, years... even decades, just searching for any girl who would have me.

And, like most miserable, fear-driven ostriches, I was lying to myself. What I meant by "any girl" was "any girl I find pretty enough." I wonder how much happier I could've been if I'd been able to see people, then, the way that I've started to see them now. Surprise, surprise, when someone who is not a man tries to make themselves into one, and their best guide to masculinity is pop culture, they become a pretty shitty man.

My mother had succeeded. She'd done her job. I saw men as spineless idiots who could not be trusted, who needed to be commanded, not just guided, but commanded, at every turn, by a woman. Men were violent cowards, stupid brutes who needed to be saved from themselves. I set out looking for my commander, hating myself every step of the way, setting fire to everything around me. I hated myself very thoroughly. If there was a metric by which to judge me, I judged myself, and found myself wanting. Her parenting colored everything. It colored everything black and white.

One time, I put some jelly on a piece of bread. Okay, to be fair, I've put jelly on a piece of bread lots of times, but the time I'm talking about here, I was probably... eight? Maybe seven? Four? We were still living in Wisconsin, so I was pretty young. Being a child, I made my own food in comically oversized portions. I had not really considered that an adult-sized serving was proportionally much smaller to an adult than it was to me. So this was a pretty big piece of bread. I couldn't finish it.

My mom, continuing her relentless instruction in how to not waste food, demanded that I eat nothing else until I finished that piece of bread with jelly on it. Literally, nothing. It went into the fridge. Over the next several days, it became less and less appetizing. Mold began to grow on parts of it. But I still had to finish it. I could have water, and I could have that shitty, disgusting piece of rotting food. And I could have nothing else.

Eventually, I took what was left of the sad snack that I'd triumphantly made for myself a little less than a week before, and went, sobbing, to my mother with it. I told her I was sorry that I'd wasted so much food. So much! It was a fucking piece of bread, you miserable cunt. You filled your child with a lifelong disdain for grape jelly because you saw some shit on TV about starving kids in Africa, and somehow decided that if we didn't eat every fucking thing in sight, we were really just ungrateful for our bounty.

Another time, also still in Wisconsin, I microwaved soup. In a metal pot. (I haven't done that lots of times, just the one time.) It threw sparks everywhere, made a terrible racket, and lots of noise and smoke. I stopped the microwave as soon as I saw that it was not operating the way I was used to seeing it operate, and it wasn't permanently damaged, but I did have an $0.88 can of soup base just sitting there being gross in some cold water in a pot that now smelled like burning metal.

Yeah, she made me eat that, too.

These were not important lessons being taught in a loving way to a valued child. This was a hurricane who should have never had children slamming her child into trees until they were pulped and lifeless. This was a mother destroying her child's capacity to stand up for itself. It was contributing to her child's constant misery, to the agony of being alive. I was boneless, skinless. A weak and quivering pile of impotent fury that hated itself and everything around it, because sentience meant only one thing: being aware of how awful it was to live.

My brother once told my parents that he had had a startling revelation. He had realized that there were no adults. There were just older kids. That the myth of life stages had fallen apart when he really examined it, because he had come to understand that he was still basically the same person then, at, I don't know, maybe fifteen? as he had been at five. He was still just trying to make sense of the world, and he knew more than he had known when he was younger, but he had given up on the idea of reaching a certain age, and then just "getting it," and being an adult. Or, more correctly, no longer being a child.

My brother is an incredibly brilliant man. And he has probably not said anything more insightful than this in his life since. My parents are still children. In fact, I'm older than them, now, if we are using age as a metaphor for maturity. My father has always been infantilized by my mother, and once they retired, that only got worse. My formerly liberal-leaning, gentle father is now a die-hard Fox News bobblehead, because of my mother's relentless bullying. He probably thinks he grew up and realized how the world really works, and the Koch Brothers™ of the world could not be happier.

My mother still lives in fear of the world. She lives with the same fear of the world that her father had, and that he put into her when he beat the shit out of her mother, his wife, on a regular basis. She sees the world as being full of men who need to be controlled absolutely, because a man free to become his best and truest self might go astray, and start beating up her mom again.

I do not like my mom. To be fair, I do not like much of anybody. But I've come to realize, recently, much to my boundless joy, that I love really pretty much everybody. I love to different degrees, at different intensities, but whether (and how and when) I engage with someone ends up being a matter of priority as a function of how much I like or do not like them. It's not an expression of caring about their welfare, but rather an expression of enjoying their company. This is hard for some people to understand, and it has caused some discomfort when I've told people whom I do not know very well that I love them, because I was not always clear about what I meant.

To like someone is to prefer their company to that of other people's. To feel at ease and in accord with them, to be comfortable. But comfort truly does breed weakness. It breeds complacency. People we feel uncomfortable around are important to us. They help us find the truth. The fact of my existence makes so many people uncomfortable in so many ways. Suffering without purpose has no value. But suffering is not always without purpose.

I do not want people to be uncomfortable around me, but the solution is not for me to vanish. It's for me to gently assert myself in their spaces until they become accustomed to my existence. Until they get used to who I am. They may not ever be comfortable around me, but they can hopefully become, at least, not uncomfortable around me.

Love is caring about the happiness, health, and safety of someone. It could be your child, your sibling, your parent, your classmate, your friend, your best friend, your lover, your cat, that tree in your backyard, the crickets you pass on your way home every night. It could even be yourself. When people are happy, healthy, safe, they are free. They are free to become the best versions of themselves, and to help others do the same. I sometimes think that I'm free. But then I realize that if I only think that I'm free, and I do not use that understanding to help others also be free, then I am not truly free. Something is holding me back. Something is scaring me.

In the end, I love my mom. I do not like her at all. But I do want her to be happy and healthy and safe. I want that for everyone. I know that she is only a misguided and miserable person because she does not know how to be anything else. I know that she is seeking joy and avoiding pain, like every other living thing. I know that living in denial of the kind of fear that she has allowed to become intrinsic to her being cannot be anything but awful.

I love my mom in the same way that I love the man who groped me on the street last December. They cause injury because they do not understand what they are doing. I do not like either of them, but I cannot help them understand how to be better people unless I reach out to them. Because they will never reach out to me.

You better be home. You actual goddamn cow.

P.S.: Tangentially; if you don't have a mom (or don't feel like you do), I'm your mom, now. Sorry, I don't make the rules. I love you. You matter. Please be safe. Let me know if you need anything.