Author’s note: the following was written 6/19/22, the day before my top surgery with Dr. Rachel Bluebond-Langner at NYU Langone.
I got lucky.
The trouble with storytelling, I find, is deciding what’s important. I’ve written and re-written my followup to that vague opener so many times, only to cut and paste the paragraphs of maudlin sentiment in my little unseen bin of big emotions. Start fresh, bleed out, lather-rinse-repeat.
Do I tell you about the dread pooling cold in my fingertips? Do I show you all the nights out at the bar with my friends, laughing until we go quiet, how I’m sober and always order the same thing (kettle of herbal tea with a side of crackers) and the bartender always nods and says “self care?” How I kiss my friends over and over and over again and try to push everything I can’t say into them through our skin-to-skin contact? Praying they understand.
Maybe I take you back in time, to the days before my birth. My parents didn’t want to know the sex of the child, not through ultrasound, at least. They were forward thinking and already knew they wanted their children to be somewhat sequestered from the overculture, as much as was reasonable. People said the child would be male because of this or that, so when I came out with the genital configuration I had, I went nameless for four days. That feels relevant. Baby Girl, my papers said. Baby Girl Keahna.
I am over six feet tall now. My shoulders are broader than my father’s. I have a crop top my best friend bought me at Plato’s Closet that says “Babygirl” in iridescent purple-green.
No. None of this matters because everything is of equal importance. There is no one I’m trying to convince of my personhood, and I thank every god there is for what I have and who I love.
There were always more women than there were men in my life. The men who were there were gentle and kind. If there were men who weren’t, men who threatened us, the women would hurt them.
The women were shaped all kinds of shapes and no two were ever alike.
There was my Irish grandmother with a flat chest and big scars where her nipples would have been. She never got a boob job and she dressed like a storybook farmer. Every Sunday, she put on a big hat, said she was going to church, and tucked herself into bed to watch the televangelists harp about God Almighty delivering us from evil in the comfort of our own homes.
I’d cuddle up against her soft body and tune out, my ear pressed against her heartbeat. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. Ba-boom. The men on screen gestured wildly, foaming at the mouth. Ba-boom. Her planar chest would cradle me like an ark, swaying. Ba-boom. I’d fall asleep and wake up to the sound of Beethoven or her awful singing voice, breathing in and out until I forced the warmth of these moments into my bones, because I knew if I didn’t, I’d forget it all. When she died, I was eleven, six feet of snow pushing in on our car at all sides, the small, desolate shape of my mother too-far away as she screamed at the sky.
At my grandma’s funeral, all the Indians and the Mennonites sat together and whispered. I don’t remember much else. At that point, too many things had happened to me to make me quiet and bitter. I think I played the fiddle. I think she might have liked it.
Another grandmother, not mine but close, was my first grandmother’s opposite in nearly every way. She was my cousin’s grandma, a short, fat Japanese woman who couldn’t give less of a fuck about whose ego she wounded and when. One day my cousin and I, being small and insane, busted into her and her husband’s bedroom to crawl on top of her for snuggles. She was wearing a full set of black lace and leather lingerie, complete with garters. I’d never seen a woman dressed like that before, and the image burned itself into my retinas as something erotic, aspirational. She turned to holler at us, but we were already gone, giggling, embarrassed, a little inspired.
My second grandmother, the Lakota-Ojibwe woman my papa remarried after his divorce from my first, was my world for a brief period of time. I write about her often, too often to go into detail here. I will say, when I came out to her and my Papa as trans, he immediately accepted me, while she had the funniest rebuttal I think I’ve ever heard: “I don’t know about all that.”
Sometimes I look back on that moment and laugh until I cry. Now she calls me her sweetie pie, her big guy, her handsome girl, her Tweety. When my Papa was still alive, another Native veteran came up to him at a powwow and asked, “You still married to that ole battle-axe?” Grandma finished her pop and said, “Yeah, she’s right here.”
Growing up, my siblings and I were told by our elders that everything we do, we do for women. Women are the life givers. They are sacred. Sometimes people, particularly white trans people, crush this statement like an aluminum can and throw it in with everything else they call “Terfy.” I rebuke this. TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, do not believe women are the life givers. They do not believe women are sacred. Their belief system is rooted in the idea that there are two kinds of humans: predator and prey.
TERFs trap women in a time-loop of violence at the hands of men and each other. Women must correctly perform femininity in order to fulfill their role as prey. If a predator, as defined by TERFs, wears the skin of the prey, then all narrowly defined prey must repeat their oaths to remain victims to the predator, and must do everything they can to kill the wolf in girl’s clothing, to prove their loyalty to the Cisterhood. Never once do they question why this girl is so easily torn apart, or why they themselves seem so content with their repetitive declarations of white female victimhood, their calls for culling.
No, it’s not “terfy” to say women are sacred. In fact, if you find yourself lured by the reactionary headlines claiming these hysterical transsexuals are trying to make “woman” a dirty word, I want you to take a moment and pour yourself a really big glass of water. Take a swig every time I say woman or some variation thereupon. It’s important to stay hydrated. Now swallow, and swallow careful, because I’m planning to say something that’s been said before by people far smarter and cooler than me, but in my opinion, hasn’t been said enough.
Women are everything. Women are the givers of life. Women are god and devil and earth and sky. Women should have all the power. The power to choose everything, from their occasional wombs to their one-day tombs, their breasts or chests, their dicks, pussies, strapless or strap-on. Who they lay with. Who they don’t. Where they go. What they wear. They––we––ought to have the power to choose it all, right down to whether or not we remain women.
When people ask questions about transition––with particular focus on HRT and surgery––there’s a lot of concern about regret. When I say concern, I mean genuine, heartfelt, loving concern, from parents, grandparents, elders, aunties, men and women who don’t yet understand the immensity of gender transformation, and are often getting their information from conflicting sources. I don’t mean the people who feign concern, who hide their knives under gossamer and coy little non-questions meant to trap those they interrogate in a feedback loop.
I won’t invoke or name the opposition beyond this sentence and the one above. There, they’ve been spoken of. We can move on.
No, I want to focus on the moments of gentleness that led me here.
See, I got lucky. I wasn’t the first in my family to transition.
There was another cousin of mine, a few years my senior, who, like me, kept her birth name. She’d known since she was three years old that she was a girl. That she’d always be a girl. Her father supported her, too. My mother remembers asking about her, way back when she was a teenager. Her father, in his gruff, brusque way, gently said, “oh, well, she’s a she now.” And that was that.
My we’enh Renee, yet another woman who raised me, is passionate about all her kids, whatever our genders. She altered her parenting style to fit whoever she took care of. When I was a little girl, she’d come out with a bare face and have me perch on the other side of the table. I’d watch her put her face on, as she called it, and she’d tell me what every tool meant. I was enraptured, and for a time, followed her example. I was gorgeous. She always said so. “My gorgeous girl.”
For most of the women in my life, my switch to boyhood seemed sudden. Even more sudden was my rabid insistence on surgery. It was all I could think about. I went from wearing short skirts and low-cut cleavage baring tops to binding and layering until I was basically shapeless. I’d always had a deep voice, so all my blame for my dysphoria fell to my breasts, which one of my high school best friends described as “porn star titties.”
Depending on what mood I’m in, I tell the story of what caused the switch differently. Sometimes it’s the fact that I briefly attended a predominantly LGBT high school in Minneapolis, where we were encouraged to clearly state our pronouns before every club meeting. I choked when I had to say my birth name followed by “she/her/hers.”
Or I blame the amnesia, how being cored by oral steroids killed the girl I was and conceived the boy I became. When I tell that story, it turns into a defiant tale of pragmatism and wit, rather than chance and circumstance. It’s my favorite for those reasons.
There was another time, summer of 2015, when Red Eagle Soaring hired a child psychologist named Paul to watch out for all us fucked up kids. At the time, I dressed like a rummage sale puked on me while I was trying out for the cabaret. Somehow, Paul picked up on a trans masc vibe from me. “Somehow––” I was a little freak; I’m honestly surprised nobody else picked up on my tboy swag. He asked if he could mess around with my pronouns, and I said yeah, sure, go ahead.
We were playing a game called Hunter/Hunted, where two kids are brought into the middle of a circle of kids, blindfolded, and spun in circles until they lose their sense of place. I was the Hunted. My spinner kept spinning me until Paul yelled out, “Don’t make him sick, now.” Joy exploded from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. I laughed, bright, loud, uncontrollable, and with my eyes shut tight, I saw golds, purples, pinks, and blues filling me up, sudden solar storms remaking my core in their own ecstatic image.
Sometimes I take it all the way back to the Sett, when my grandma spoiled toddler-me with so many girly things, it turned me permanently ill. That version of events is frequently corroborated by my dad, who says I was “the bitterest three-year-old” he’s ever met in his life. That story’s funny, too, because I remember throwing the world’s biggest tantrum about getting the “girl toy” in my McDonald’s kids’ meal. My grandma stood above me, a bemused smile on her face. After I finished my soliloquy, which was no doubt incomprehensible, she said, “Well, now, who bit you in the butt?”
I’m an unreliable narrator, I know. Funny thing, though: every single story is true. That’s the trouble with storytelling. I can’t quite find the throughline. Maybe I’ll leave it up to you.
In any case, I found myself once more perched across from my we’enh. This time her face was on, her ruby red lips slightly pursed, her smoky eyes steady and searching.
“Your cousin,” she said, “she knew she was a girl since she was three.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, and I know it’s sudden, and I know, but…”
“I just want you to be sure,” she said. “Please. Just be sure. Your mama and I both want you to be happy, you know?”
I bit my lip and nodded. My hair was short. I’d stopped wearing makeup. People read me as a boy over fifty percent of the time and I wasn’t even on T yet. Perks of being tall and androgynous, I guess.
“Wait awhile,” she finished. “Wait. For me.”
I nodded again. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll wait.”
So I did. I waited through the summer of 2016, living in Albuquerque with a queer person who’d become a lifelong friend, and a gay man who became an enigma to me. I waited through one sexual assault, then another, one at the hands of a cishet man nearly a decade my senior, one at the hands of a peer. I moved to Seattle and experienced such beautiful things, things I’ll keep to myself. I ran away to Standing Rock (no point in lying about that, it happened, whatever) and found myself consistently gendered male for the first time in my life, held by lovers who called me their man. I ran all the way to Ithaca like a reverse-Odysseus, gods ripping out my hair and burnishing my skin, until I ran to the local Planned Parenthood and breathlessly recounted every moment of euphoria, pain, loss, resentment, and pleasure that led me there.
God bless informed consent.
I went home that day with a shot of testosterone in my thigh and a head full of butterflies.
In those days, I lived with my mom and dad. Now, my mom is different than my mom.
There’s my mom who bore and raised me, the mom who was my dad’s first wife, the mom who had the Irish mother, the mom who messed up bad from time to time and was always called in by her sisters. The mom who apologized. The mom who told me I’d go through a phase in my twenties where I hated her. When I couldn’t forgive her. The mom who forgave me in advance for it. That’s the mom who’s on her way here, now, to New York City. That’s the mom who booked us a hotel so she can take care of me once I get that major surgery she and all those other women worried about for all these years.
Then there’s my mom. My mom who my dad remarried. My mom who assembled my family out of blood and covenant. My mom who fought to reconnect with her Gros Ventre relatives. My mom who gave me my older brother, Smokii, and gave him his name.
You wanna talk about regret?
When I started transitioning, I was living with my mom and dad in Ithaca. They both taught at Cornell University. My mom was tenure track. More importantly, she saved her students’ lives. In a university famous for its suicide rate, she carved out a space for imperfection, messy feelings, being Seen.
It was difficult for her to adjust to my new pronouns. I made it harder for her. At that point in my life, I’d internalized a lot of really violent, volatile attitudes towards my elders from trans people on the internet, particularly teenagers. Whenever I spiral about this, I hear Bobby Singer from Supernatural in my head: “Kids ain’t supposed to be grateful. They’re supposed to eat your food and break your heart.”
Still. I wish I hadn’t. Broken her heart, I mean.
There’s this really unfair level of entitlement proliferated by white trans teens, this idea that your loved ones have to be perfect and never fuck up ever or you oughta cut them off. I know now this comes from the privilege of being able to cut people off. I also know this comes from the cult of stagnation that permeates whiteness. There’s an emphasis on saying the right thing all the time, forever, as opposed to doing the right thing. No room for growth or learning. My mom had trouble saying the right thing. At her funeral, though, I found out she’d been doing the right thing all along.
We were okay near the end. I didn’t say everything I wish I’d said to her. I don’t think we can ever say everything we want to say to people, not without turning into walking memento mori talismans, and as someone who often gives off that vibe, it’s no way to live a good life. Death is sudden and final and everyone, everyone leaves a void, no matter how much this society deludes us into thinking we won’t. We should live anyways. People say the wrong thing all the time. We should love each other anyways.
Lately, I’ve been remembering the rare and precious moments when neither me nor my mom were freaking out. For some reason, these moments were always set the same, her on the leather couch under the window in the living room, me on the spinning pink armchair with my knees drawn up to my chest. I’d been doing research on top surgery again.
Back then, picking at my gender dysphoria would go in cycles. I’d research top surgeons. I’d get overwhelmed. I’d look at top surgery results. I’d fantasize about my own. Before I briefly detransitioned, my titties had shrunk enough to possibly work well with keyhole or peri-areolar top surgery. I brought this up to my mom, and she told me a story about herself that made me want to rip out the jugular of every man she’d ever been with before my dad.
“My operation was keyhole,” Mom finished. “They said it’d let me keep my nipple sensation. It didn’t.”
I stared at the floor, trying to remember what her ex’s face looked like. Trying to imagine him melting into a puddle of wax.
“That’s why I worry about you,” she said. “You know? I love you. I want you to feel good in your body.” She waggled her eyebrows and smiled a mischievous, Cheshire Cat grin. “And I want you to feel good all kinds of ways.”
I stared at her blankly. At the time, I was in a celibate phase. I don’t think I came out of it until about a year and a half after her death.
She died less than three months after that conversation. Fourth of July, 2018. She died, and I became a woman again to fill the void she’d left, and my body softened and curved and filled out in ways bigger than I’d ever imagined, and I waited. I crouched in the sweet fat of my body, my genre of masculinity bristling with frenetic, immense grief, feral eyes darting back and forth as my chest rose and fell. Rage grew in bundles of sage and chrysanthemum. My heart slowed.
What if you regret it?
After all this waiting, I finally have an answer.
So what?
So what if I regret it? I regret so many other, more permanent things than my choice to embody my transness. I regret hurting my parents. All of them. I regret the times I didn’t stick up for a small child. I regret telling Ryan in sophomore year that his art sucked when it didn’t. I regret my choice paralysis and my avoidant personality. God, I regret my commitment issues. All this romantic longing and driving the gifts people give me into the ground. I regret not sticking around after Jasmine’s chair dancing class to tell her I missed her and loved her and I regret the way I couldn’t process her death. How the world got so much worse when she went.
This is being human. I don’t know how much time I have left on this bitter earth. I don’t know if I’ll see you tomorrow. I don’t know if you’re gonna love me back in the way I love you or vice versa. I don’t know if top surgery will bring me closer to some kind of peace, but I do know I’m done waiting. Time to commit to the bit.
And you know? If and when another apocalypse hits. If I fall to my knees and scream at God or gods or the infinite multiverse. If I rip out my hair and pick at my skin. If I stay up until dawn just to cause my body more harm. If I give myself over to madness and spend the rest of my days crying for everything that once was. If everything comes crashing down and I look at myself in the mirror and say, “You know what? I am a woman, after all.”
Even then, I won’t regret the changes I’ve undergone.
Do you know why?
You will never be more or less woman for the way you’re shaped. You will never be less of a woman for your inability to carry a baby, regardless of what gender you were assigned at birth, how you were raised. You are and always will be exactly what you are in this moment, and nobody, no matter how hard they try, can take that away from you.
This will end in tears.
Start anyway.
Thank you for listening.
ᔖᐘᓄᐱᓀᐢ 
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