TRIGGER WARNING: THIS BLOG POST CONTAINS MENTIONS OF DOMESTIC AND SEXUAL ABUSE, ALCOHOL DEPENDENCY, SELF-HARM AND DISORDERED EATING
When I’m about twenty years old, I take a subway train with an artist who’s had more of an impact on me than he probably is aware of. I befriend him after he and his brother/co-collaborator resolutely do not cast me in their short tragicomedy, Do More of What Makes You Happy, which is about a chronically ill person and their friends struggling to make ends meet in a hostile world. Three or four days from this moment, I will have overstayed my welcome in their apartment, because my then-boyfriend will have done something violent to me that will leave me unmoored for the next several months. Neither me nor the artist know this now. We are taking the train to Manhattan, if I recall correctly. Somehow we get to talking about something that leads the artist to say this to me:
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about. Whenever I think about you, I think, yeah. Cleo’s okay. Cleo’s got their shit together.”
IT SHOULD BE NOTED THAT I NO LONGER GO BY “CLEO” AND PREFER TO BE CALLED FRANKIE, FRANCIS, VARIOUS NICKNAMES THAT COME FROM THAT, AND/OR SHAAWAN.
It is an assertion so far and away from what my family (at this time I have only one friend, who is in agreement with my family) thinks of me, that I’m lost for words. The sound of the subway becomes the sound of my thoughts, kh-shunk, kh-shunk, kh-shunk, the high keen as it hits the brakes, the whistle of the gas-electric engine, the hiss and the bustle and the worrying of it all. I stare at him. He is not much older than me, but he seems more… established. More here. Here, as in here, as in on this earth and of this world.
From the ages of seventeen to twenty-four, my body does not feel like my own. I take selfies with an obsessive feverishness. Like I need proof-of-life. Like I’m holding myself hostage and threatening my own future. I post all of the selfies and I scroll through the comments about how handsome I am with the dead-eyed, thin-lipped expression of Patrick Bateman. No pleasure to be gleaned from anything. When my then-boyfriend says what he says to me and does what he does, I’m not so self-hating as to think I deserve it—I am just so numb to everything that my sort of doomed, dead-man-walking energy affirms that the violence I face is just a statistical inevitability. Part of the narrative, as it were, or, in more recent memetic terms, a “canon event.”
What I tell people when I explain the arc of my transition is that I cloistered myself. I think I’ve said the sentence “I hermetically sealed myself” more times than I can count. This is both true and reductive. I tried as hard as I could to be like every other trans person I came across on Tumblr—to be “Discord-enough” as one of my friends ungenerously says—and keep my body in a house, keep my mind online. Life found a way, though. Against my will, life happens.
I’ll pause here. I am twenty-five again, going on twenty-six. This might be the ugliest thing I’ve written to date. I still feel like writing it. I still feel like sharing it with you.
So I seal myself away. This is how my first few “relationships” occur. I meet them online and they are terrible people. I still love them worse than I’ve ever loved anyone. I still let them hurt me. At one point, one of my online friends, who is doing the exact same thing I am, says they can’t believe they let a guy in cat ears who never leaves his bedroom destroy their capacity for intimacy. This is a bizarrely common tale, as it happens. Many people who grow up on Tumblr find ourselves utterly obliterated by total losers. When we come of age, much later than our cisgender and heterosexual peers, mind, we tend to avoid looking back at the exploded shells of our past lives. I tried. I tried a couple times. One of my therapists looked at my intake form, which outlined for several paragraphs the part of my love life that coincided with my detransition—when I was catfished or maybe just hallucinated the whole ordeal—and said “I can’t help you with any of this. I’m sorry. I’ll take you on and we can talk about whatever led up to all of that, but this… this is totally outside my wheelhouse.”
Even sealed, I shuttled my vessel around. I was “always on that damn phone” and beholden to people miles or eons away from me who craved the kind of life I led, who wanted to be my partner because I was maybe their ticket out of whatever personal hell their families had built for them. I avoided eye contact with anyone in real life who might have wanted to touch me. I curled up on leather couches and my fingers went fast, fast, fast, against that pane of glass and all the desperate, lonely people who lived inside of it. When I had no choice but to put that phone down, I opened my eyes to art galleries, film festivals, people and places who, against all odds and again, against my will, loved me. Wanted to be a home for me in a similar way the chronically online wanted me to be a home for them.
And I masculinized. My body grew and shifted and changed. Early in my transition, when I was nineteen years old and maybe four or five months on T, I found myself at Toronto International Film Festival. I had been promised small changes over a long period of time, but I was already read as a cis man always, even if I didn’t bind. At one of the mixers, a butch/femme lesbian couple from Israel crossed the sea of pale faces and stood right in front of me. The butch was six inches shorter than I was, and her femme was six inches taller. The femme did not speak, but the butch smirked up at me, eyes cloying and hungry.
“Excuse me,” they said, “are you gay?”
I blinked at them. I was wearing makeup and a button-down shirt with the collar open to my cleavage. I’d been a lesbian for my whole young adulthood, but I had just begun my horrid dalliance with my then-boyfriend, who, only two weeks of DMing in, told me never to leave him.
“I… I guess,” I said.
“I knew it,” said the butch. “I see you and I think, that is far too beautiful to be a straight man.”
Satisfied, the butch and femme left me to my beautiful isolation, and I scanned the faces for someone, anyone, who could keep me here.
An Argentinian woman approached me. She was flanked by two sharply-dressed cis men, who were almost too handsome. I looked down at her and tried not to notice how uncomfortable the men were with my proximity.
“You are the only real person here,” said the Argentinian woman, by way of greeting.
I could say nothing. I glanced up at her men, then back at her. They seemed real enough.
She grabbed one of her men and snapped at him in Spanish. He looked like she’d just slapped him, and scowled down at me.
“You two,” she said, “take care of this boy. Promise me you won’t let anything happen to him.”
The men looked at me. Now that I was a boy and not a gay man, I was less of a threat. The blond one actually smiled. The Argentinian woman squeezed my hands. Her hands were small and hot and soft, like she had never worked a day in her life. She leaned in and smelled me and then walked away. Her men left shortly afterwards, but everywhere I went, I felt their line of sight pierce me. True to her word, nothing happened to me. Well, almost nothing.
I am telling you all of this for one specific reason.
When people push against trans healthcare—indeed, when they push against “the whole transgender thing,” which is to say, our lives, our very existence—many say “it’s not going to make you happy.” “It” could be anything from a change of pronouns to a wardrobe shift, but more often than not, “it” is hormone replacement therapy, gender-affirming surgeries, the whole medical backbone to the transsexual experience. This justification has always baffled me. If something I want won’t make me happy, isn’t that my business? And furthermore, why deny me the freedom of unhappiness? Never mind that the people who say “it’s not going to make you happy” are often, themselves, miserable and proud of it. Never mind that their needless suffering allegedly brings them closer to their God. What about my needless suffering? Isn’t that, by their illogic, also holy?
I have drunk whiskey until I vomited into a sewer grate while a man ten years my senior rubbed my back and cooed “I like you because you’re not like other girls” in my ear. I have filled a bathtub with apple cider vinegar because I heard it rebalances your pussy and I needed that control back. I have broken a boy’s ankles and told him he needs to crawl back because he threatened someone I love. I have run away from beasts in forests I should not have been in with a person I should not have gotten in the car with. I have starved myself. I have cut myself. I have ignored all of my body’s warning signs and let people inside me who have called me a monster and told me they will write my callout post themselves if I abandon them. I am an amnesiac and a survivor and I have hurt people. I’ve dropped out of college and I’ve spread nasty rumors and I’ve apologized profusely for both.
I have been ludicrously unhappy.
You cannot take my transsexuality away for it.
Let me tell you something. Hormones and surgery aren’t going to make you happy, it’s true. Not on their own, they won’t. You’re still entitled to them. That’s right, I said “entitled.” You are entitled to transsexuality. You are entitled to the processes by which your body might look and feel a little bit more manageable. A little less torturous to be in. I don’t care if you’re one of those annoying, self-hating people who like to direct message me from time to time saying I make you feel insecure, because I “pass” and you feel like you never will. You’re still entitled to this shit. You still need to try. You’re going to die. You’re going to grow up and die and rot or burn. This is your only chance to be you. I say this because you might believe in reincarnation, so “YOLO” is out of the question, but the next time around, you’re not you anymore. You’re something else. Be you, now.
Here’s the story of my life and also yours. We are born into a sick world. We do our best. We are often unhappy. Sometimes we have trouble getting out of bed. We laugh a lot. We are loved even when we don’t feel like it. Sometimes we realize years after the fact that we have been loved, that we wasted it, and it stings. It aches. We look in the mirror and we don’t understand how perfect we are because the world we live in has a vested interest in making us aware of our lack. We want. We crave. We need. We get and we give. We make mistakes. We are forgiven. Sometimes we forgive. Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we avenge. We don’t ask enough questions. We aren’t asked enough questions. We try to forge connections. Some stick. The ones that stick make us who we are. We lose the people we love. It hurts. We grieve. We die. We leave.
There are brief and salient moments where everything clarifies. If we’re lucky or we work at it, we get to feel deeply. But even if we never “aspire” to profundity, even if we want the most ordinary, mundane life imaginable, we are suffused with some kind of life-spark. Call it whatever you want. Call it God or your higher self or the unbearable triteness of being. But I’m calling it now—you want to do something to make your life more yours. Your pitiful, beautiful, imperfect, disgusting, wild and heartbreaking life. Your body. Your body. Your body. You’re going to live. We both are. So if you’re looking for a sign, this is it. Take HRT with me. Fuck everyone who says this isn’t going to make you happy. It probably won’t. But it might make it easier to do more of what makes you happy, in the words of that estranged artist and his brother. It might make these old bones of yours feel like good bones. Feel like a house. Maybe even a home.
Coz, see, I’m not looking for people who are far away from me now. When someone looks at me who wants to touch me and I want to touch them, too, I look back. My whole Instagram isn’t selfies anymore, or “lonelys,” as the comedian Sebastian Maniscalco once called them. There’s someone else on the other end of the camera now, and I don’t search comments for affirmation. And it’s not a hundred percent fixed, of course it isn’t. For example, lately my hands haven’t felt like my own. Even now, even as I write this. There’s this weird senseless sensation in them. I see them moving across the keyboard in my peripheral vision. I hear the clack of the scissor-switch keys. I glance down and think these are ostensibly mine, but even my arms are foreign. Long twigs with little mittens attached, like a snowman someone forgot to kick down that is now possessed and coming for the village. And I don’t like growing facial hair, at least not right now. I shave my face every three days and I bought Paco Rabanne’s INVICTUS aftershave a couple weeks ago because I was shaving so much, and it all sort of feels like I’m buying accessories for a character or a doll or something, not myself. Also, I have insomnia.
But I’m here.
I know I’m here in a way I didn’t know it before. I know I’m here for sure. I’m here and so are you.
I do my T shots every Tuesday and my estradiol suppositories Tuesdays and Fridays. Come on in. The water’s fine.
ᔖᐘᓄᐱᓀᐢ 