Mapping my Godforsaken Transsexual Heart After Two Coffees, One Dunkin’ Donuts Mocha, One Small Matcha Vanilla Oat Milk Latte, No Sleep, and 1,110 Miles

Dread trickles from my head to my heart. Abrasive as it is, the unmapped chambers rend meat from veins until my chest is a raw, bloody, hot mess. Dread builds a thoroughfare out of the massacre and cries peace. It transfigures cleaver to river and convinces me it’s been here this whole time, carving the stone of my bone slow. Canyons. Gorgeous terrain. Dread reaches my hands, my fingers, pools cold and stagnant at my fingertips until the shiver drives me to put my thumb in my mouth and bite.

Lately, I’ve been wondering about the woman I’d be if I’d never gone on T. This is a dangerous thing to wonder for myriad reasons, not least the impending genocide. I feel defeatist typing that. Not defeated, but defeatist. Like calling a spade a spade is me giving consent for you to dig my grave with it.

Anyways. The internet is funny because it’s not real. It is and it isn’t. I go outside. I know how people see me. I know I’m six feet tall. I know my voice is deep and resonant. I know when I’m in bed with someone or I haven’t spoken in awhile it comes out gravelly and sepulchral. I also know I’ll probably always hear a sardonic teenage girl when I talk or read or think. How my voice was already pretty deep for being female, and I soaked it in irony because the boys I so desperately wanted to hang out with would snip and sneer at me if I was as sincere as I am. If I slipped.

I’ve been rereading that last paragraph and remembering what it was like to be fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. That Ruby Rose video. Orange is the New Black. Sleepovers with girls I needed to touch but knew I couldn’t. My heart beating so hard it bled me dry. Trestle bridge. Never making my mark. Knowing the end. The end. The end. Girlhood as crucifixion. Girlhood as gauntlet. Girlhood as something to wear in tatters to the dance.

Girlhood is a place you live until you can’t anymore. There are men and women who go to Girlhood and try to slice you up while you’re there. They want you for their sons. They want you to stop being whole. This is why it’s dangerous for me to ask the world who I would have been if I’d stayed. They take my doubt for proof, my dread for evidence that transness is something unholy, something that must be quashed under their ugly little lace-up shoes or killed by their government.

The Christofascists are at my door, but I don’t live there anymore. So with them fresh on my tongue and their cull on my mind, I ask: who is she?

Imagine a fourteen year old girl who’s really into steampunk. Imagine she falls in love with her body in a very gay way. Imagine she dances with her shadow because she’s so, so lonely, but the sun pushes through her bedroom window just so and her silhouette is alluring to her in a way no other person could ever be. A female Narcissus. An Echo. Imagine she does up her silly little vest with its unmatched buttons. Imagine she cuts her hair short and wears bright red lipstick until one of her dyke friends asks her, “Are you wearing that because you want someone to kiss you?” and the shame of a truth, hitherto unspoken, is so salient, she stops. Who would she become, uninterrupted? Or is that an impossible and useless thought experiment?

I’m in a restaurant in Minneapolis with my mother when I finally admit all of this aloud.

“I am so afraid,” I say. “It’s such a uniting force between the left and the right. They hate us. They hate us.”

My mom pulls a face. She’s always been cartoonish in her expressions, a trait I’ve inherited. This face I call the just ate something gross face, and she does it when she’s getting ready to make her voice shrill, whiny, annoyed and disgruntled.

“I just don’t get it,” she says. There it is. “Who cares?”

She means the fascists, of course. She gets me. She gets my cousins. She gets my siblings. She gets all of us because all there is to “get” is that we loved ourselves enough to make our bodies and the words people use for them feel like home. That we love ourselves every day we wake up how we want to, in the forms we commit to like husbands and wives. Like little household gods with our ritualistic adornments, injections, surgeries, verbiage.

“I know,” I say. “And I know there’s people like you… on both sides. Who love us. Who also don’t understand. But it’s like… your lack of understanding isn’t going to prevent our death. Isn’t going to stop what’s coming. What keeps coming. What I keep…”

I trail off here and stare at my plate. The noodles favor intestines. I have a pressure headache from my flight and I can already tell if I don’t fall asleep the moment my head hits the pillow tonight, I’m in for another insomniac episode. All my memories bubble up at once. My head throbs with lifetimes lived and unfulfilled. Just this morning, I was with someone I deeply care for, who cares for me in return. Then I dreamt of houses slipping into mud, mountains full of teeth and bone, women with eyes on every knuckle and mouths shaped like dolphin snouts, screaming at me to figure it out. To connect the disparate vignettes until I’ve completed the whole film. I woke up twenty minutes past my alarm and hissed at myself to please be kind and patient with my body as I careened around the room, a chicken with its head cut off. Then the Lyft. The flight. The cold. The road.

There’s a lot of fear-mongering when it comes to trans healthcare. I don’t have the energy to dispel all of it right now, not least because this entry is about my own fear, staring down the barrel of a bloody, irradiated future. What I can tell you is that on February 7th, my top surgeon, the honorable Dr. Rachel Bluebond-Langner, slammed open the door to my exam room with her trademark brusque attitude, chirped, “Well-would-ya-look-at-that! Perfectly sculpted! Beautiful chest! Beautiful! Yeah, we don’t have to see you again until your one year followup. Oh, but, hey, if you wanna fix that, uh. Those little haloes of white around your nipple grafts… here—” and here she handed me a square, matte business card for a medical tattoo parlor, “—not that you have to, of course. Are you happy?”

Still reeling from her energy, I stammered, “y-yeah!” and meant it.

“Good! Well, uh, spread the word.”

With that, she was gone. I looked down at my scars. They were two flat, pinkish lines of watercolor across my pale, yellowish chest. I traced them, shocked, as usual, at how quickly my sensation seemed to be returning. I’d gotten top surgery in June of 2022. Dr. Bluebond-Langner had taken about an hour and forty-five minutes in total to remove my sweet rack. While she was short, so short I had to crane my neck to meet her eye, her attending team seemed to mostly clock in at 5’11 and above, which gave my recovery a surreal, cinematic vibe.

I’d carved out the whole summer for my recovery, expecting to be on my ass for at least two months. I walked through Times Square with my drains visibly poking through my shirt just one day post-op. By two weeks, I’d walked two miles from my apartment to a little sushi joint (and two miles back) for a date. I marveled at my body, equal parts terrified and grateful. It took to top surgery like it had taken to testosterone. Immediacy was the name of the game. Not urgent. Immediate. Like flipping a switch.

It is, I’ll admit, a little lonely being what I am. I’m not a transmedicalist by any means. I believe anyone can be trans and be trans any way they’d like. I also know there’s a reality of the body, and that my tall, broad-shouldered frame troubles the mainstream narratives of transsexual manhood, if such a mainstream exists. People have assumed my genitalia so often, my nonexistent natal dick has its own mythos. When I say I’m female—

“You say you’re female?” Mom asks. “For real? You don’t say biologically female or assigned female at birth or female to male? Just ‘female?’”

I shrug. “You remember how I was early in transition.” I put on a mockery of my pre-T voice and sneer. “I’m male! I’m male! I’m a man! Don’t you dare call me trans!” I shrug again and try to take a bite of my sodden noodles. “I guess the moment I realized I’m so unclockable, people actively disbelieve the presence of my vagina, I decided I’d just say ‘female’ all the time to fuck with them. Hell, one time I was… I had to get tested. UTI, again. This was before I went on the estradiol. Anyways. I go in and the nurse, she’s so sweet. Really. She’s telling me all about how I have to do the male… cups. She’s all ‘since you’re male, we do it like this.’ And I have to tell her no, no, I need the girl cups. I need the girl cups because I’m female. And she just looks at me and goes: ‘Are you sure?’”

Testosterone is lovely, though. Also, as luck would have it, I’m allergic to the estrogen my body produces. This vexed my endocrinologist. Not that it had happened—autoimmune estrogen dermatitis, while uncommon, affected 14 out of 23 hormone-sensitive women who were monitored for it in one clinical study—but that it had happened to me. He wasn’t prepared for a patient whose body quite literally medicalized the transition for him, coaxing me into masculinity by jabbing me with spikes all over my body every full moon until I complied. No. I don’t have it in me to dispel the lies about medical transition, but I have it in me to confuse, alarm, and upset. I have it in me to bleed until I can’t bear it any more. I have it in me to transform.

Writing all of this down and putting it out there, in front of God and everybody, shouldn’t make me feel better, but it does. I’m not hubristic enough to believe my little stories can make like my new favorite shirt says and bend the arc of the moral universe, no way. But I do recall putting my fresh scars on my close friends story on Instagram helped some of my acquaintances overcome their fear of trans surgery. I have no intent to cannibalize myself for the panopticon, either. That’s like a fast track to becoming the most annoying person in the room. Some shit should just be for yourself. But this I wanted to share. This I wanted to invite you in for.

Absent of a dimension-hopping time machine, I’ll never know the woman I could have been, and I’ve made my peace with that. In another world, I’m sure she’s having a lovely time with the nerdy butch she’s U-Hauled with, or the two chaotic femmes she’s on-again-off-again with, or the older trans woman she devoted herself to like Artemis and the moon. Right here, right now, I like the man I’m growing up to be. I like his visible veins and his awful dirtbag mustache. I like his singing voice. I like when he gets serious and sounds like a father. Not his father, but a father. I like that he carries Narcan with him. I like that he says “please” and “thank you” and “sir” and “ma’am.” I like how he loves. I like that he’s cool with being wrong. I like that he can apologize. I like that he wants to get better. I’m not a fan of his slacker vibe, but, you know. We’re all just works-in-progress and then we die.

Yeah, I’m still afraid. I’m really, really afraid. Listen, though. Come here. My heart beats faster than most. Like a little rabbit or a trapped bird. Sit here with me for a minute. Tell me: are you scared?