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.

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:

1.     he’s kind of cute
2.     he’s kind of a tool
3.     okay he’s trying
4.     he really is kind of cute tho
5.     oh my god that is adorable
6.     ok here are some things i am afraid of
7.     yes thank you
8.     goodnight
9.     if you’re still up, i can’t sleep for some reason
10.     this feels so nice
11.     oh

And I got upset. I mean, I got really upset. I was sitting here crying, feeling like an idiot for ever even responding to him in the first place, trying to imagine what possible scenarios could result in a man who had just been very contentedly flirting with me literally four hours earlier suspending or deleting his account before I woke up the next day. Like... I mean, he said he worked on a tugboat. Who the fuck works on a tugboat? God, I’m such an idiot, sometimes.

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.

#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.

#creampuffcow #cat #cats #catsofinstagram #mycats #ihavealotofcats

A photo posted by Seranine Elliot (@aggressivefrontpocket) on Dec 10, 2014 at 6:16pm PST

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.

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.