It’s August and my voice is deep auburn honey, sliding across my tongue.  I smell sickly-sweet like my brother’s bedroom in the summer, but I don’t mind it.  The sun reflects off leftover flecks of gold glitter lining the sharpened angle of my jaw.  Hair has grown in patchy and awkward all over my body, but I shampoo and condition each strand so it puffs out soft and proud across my pale skin.   A floral summer dress hugs my tits almost obscenely, but lets loose at my waist into a flowing skirt that the wind brings to life around my thighs. 

“Pinocchio” by Eli Conley

My friend Eli is a pretty bad-ass trans folk artist in the bay.  This song is one of my favorites!

”I am not a real man, I’ll tell you why
It’s not the reason you are thinking of
Lean in close, I’ll share with you a secret
No one is a real man at all

Pinocchio, you are a boy
it doesn’t take no fairy blue
much less a therapist, three doctors and a knife
to cut your flesh and make you real
you are as real as dreams come true
I’m tired of tracing one straight line back through our lives…”  (transcript cont. here)

Teacher: “Explain to me why you use ‘he pronouns.’  Forgive my ignorance.”

Not even like, “will you explain to me?” or “please forgive”.  Just a demand to explain to her, and to forgive her for asking.  Just an overwhelming sense of cis entitlement.  I responded, full of metered sass and without skipping a beat.

Me:  Explain to me why you use ‘she pronouns.’

Teacher: “I… uhm… well… you know… I…”

She stumbled through her words for a good thirty seconds, clearly stunned that I would dare ask her the same invasive question she just asked me, before continuing

Teacher: “Well… because I’m a woman I guess…  [thoughtful pause]  So… uhmm are you saying that most people just take the pronouns that society assigns us because of gender?”

Me:  Something like that.

Teacher: “So then… do you identify as a man?”

Me:  I don’t identify as a man, I am a man.  I use “he pronouns” because that’s what feels right for me.  People of any gender can use any pronouns.

Teacher:  “Hmmm!  This is interesting.  This is all soooo interesting.”

She said with a tone of “don’t you agree?  You are such a fascinating specimen!”



I responded with the exact sense of boredom and irritation I felt with her

Me:  Do you want some resources?

Teacher:  “Oh yes! I love learning about new things!”

Then, since it’s an acting class, we did mindfulness and concentration exercises for the next 30 minutes.  I was left with my own anxiety brain replaying the situation over and over and being acutely aware of how disconnected from people I feel when things like this happen and how disempowered I felt leaving the situation even though I totally handled it like a boss.

All in all, it wasn’t the worst interaction.  Like, she was entitled as fuck, she described me as an ~interesting~ “new thing” and she asked me personal questions instead of googling or.. I don’t know DOING SOME CRITICAL THINKING BY HER GODDAMNED SELF since she was clearly capable of sorting it out on her own within a minute (I hardly even spoke!).  But over all she wanted to learn and she was smiling and whatever.

But as soon as these kinds of things happen, it puts me in a place where I can no longer make a connection with that person, I can no longer feel safe with that person.  Like, we can be acquaintances.  We can be friendly.  We might even hang out now and then.  But I will probably never be able to connect with you on a real, deep and vulnerable level.

It’s painful enough to have to compartmentalize myself to become an educator with people I barely know.  But if I let myself get vulnerable with people who might later put me in that educator position… it just hurts fifty times worse when it happens :/ 

OMG Y’ALL I just finished my first video for my Experimental Video 1 class!  I’m so stoked : D  …and completely drenched in glitter (thanks to all my followers for the awesome suggestions to make the glitter show up on film).

The video is a 2-minute-long static one-shot of a performance art piece I created for the assignment.  The piece is a reflection on femme rituals and femme performativity as a form of resistance to cissexism, self-care, and spiritual healing.

The video is called “Withcraft for Trans Folks” and my friend Hayden (who is also trans) played the offscreen voice reciting cissexist things that people have said to me.  I won’t give away the middle, but it ends with me completely covered in glitter and the ghostly voice of evil cissexist spirits stunned silent in the background. The video uses dark humour as a way to make light of those harmful words.  I played with camp a lot in the performance and ultimately the video is both captivating and repelling, mesmerizing and repulsive, glamorous and nauseating. 

I have so much more to say about it and I feel so awesome and proud and happy.  Above are some screen shots (the silver stubbly stuff is the glitter which ended up looking like a beard by the end of the vid).  I can’t wait until I can upload the video to show y’all!

doe-eyed kitten-prince of the north pole

Hey! I feel you on this for sure.  I have social anxiety, which makes it difficult to navigate social situations, period… let alone a situation where I have to choose between shutting down/disassociating (when I hear the wrong pronouns over and over) or going through the awkward and uncomfortable process of asserting my preferred pronouns (and by default, disclosing my trans status) to someone who may not know anything at all about trans folks (and who isn’t necessarily even someone who I want to know that I’m trans!).

It’s a really lonely place to be and I often just let people sort of steam roll over me with the wrong pronouns until something breaks in me.  And often if I do correct people, I leave the situation feeling vulnerable, unsafe, and embarrassed.

So I’m very much in an ongoing process of figuring out how to deal with these situations, but here are some tools that I use right now to deal with being misgendered and to break through my social anxiety to correct people around pronouns.

• Learning how to ask my friends, my partner, and other allies for support:  I have some great allies in my life that have really been there for me as I struggle with my disabilities, my eating disorder, my healing as a rape survivor, and so much more.  Much like with those things I’ve just listed, dealing with life as a trans person (e.g. harrassment, misgendering, internalized cissexism, etc.) has often been something that I have dealt with and experienced in isolation.  Which is scary for so many reasons, but particularly because isolation is a huge risk factor for suicide for queer and trans folks.  Last year brought me back to a very delicate place in relation to all of that. 
  
  I’m trying to learn that it’s okay to reach out to the people around me for support.  Not only is it okay, but I need to if I want to survive.  Anyway, that was sort of tangential.  When it comes to dealing with being misgendered, I have some really awesome friends and allies in my life who sometimes help support me.  I ask them to support me by having a conversation with me about when (if at all) it would feel comfortable for me to have them correct other people on my pronouns.  We also talk about how they can support me in situations where I don’t feel safe or comfortable being outed as trans or having them correct people on my pronouns. 
  
  For example, my girlfriend knows to hold my hand, make eye contact with me, or check in by text message if we’re in a situation where I am being misgendered but don’t feel safe being outed.  She knows that I need to be reminded I am not alone and that she sees me as who I am.  My best friend knows what situations I’m comfortable with her correcting people in.  And she knows that after I’m misgendered I might need to rant a little bit.  She just gets angry alongside me, and reminds me that she sees me as I am. 
  
  
• Being firm and knowing how much you want to talk about it:  So for me, I know that with most people I just don’t want my correcting their pronouns to be an open door for conversation about my gender.  Some folks might be fine with that, but for me it’s really uncomfortable.  So, for better or for worse, I often move on very quickly after I assert my pronouns.  For example:
  
  Friend:   “I was telling our professor about how you were going to be late for class and I was like ‘She texted me and said that she was in stand-still traffic and——
  
  Me: [firmly, but politely]  “Actually, my preferred gender pronouns are he, him and his.  So what happened next?”
  
  Sometimes this means that it flies over people’s heads and I need to come back to it later, but sometimes it’s enough to remind folks, especially those who already know my pronouns but forgot.  It also can help avoid the awkward dance of them trying to apologize profusely while you comfort them, or them using that as an opportunity to ask you a bunch of stuff about gender. It helps me feel less shy and scared when I have a sort of practiced script that I can just insert quickly into the conversation and move on. 
  
  (Granted I have some serious privilege here with having “he” pronouns.  Though most folks who I correct on pronouns don’t see me as a guy, they at least have heard of my pronouns before.  When I was using “they” or “ze” pronouns it wasn’t as possible to just move on in the conversation because people would stop and be like “UHM WTF IS A ZE?” or something of the like)
  
  
• Writing letters or emails:  Sometimes I find it less stressful to have conversations like this via email.  My first few semesters at school I sent emails to my professors before-hand with my preferred name and pronouns.  Mostly that went well and positive responses from professors made me feel safer entering their classes.  But I have gotten some strange responses. 
  
  (Like, for example, one professor who wrote me back angry that I had assumed she wouldn’t ask pronouns on the first day…. who then never asked about pronouns in class, always wrong pronouned me, and went on to do some bizzare cissexist things in the classroom throughout the semester… but thats a whole nother post!)
  
  Writing emails also give you the chance to link folks to more resources and information about pronouns, or general trans allyship.
  
  
• Taking advantage of name tags and of intros in the classroom:  In the classroom space I always use the day that we go around and introduce ourselves as an opportunity to say “My name is ___ and my preferred gender pronouns are he/him/his.”  In classes or other school situations where we have name tags or placards, I always add my preferred pronouns to the piece of paper.”
  
  
• Asking other folks about their preferred pronouns:  Asking other folks about their preferred pronouns can be really awkward.  It’s something that I want to do for everyone, but I don’t always do it because I get some really uncomfortable responses sometimes.  Make sure you do this in a one-on-one situation.  I often find that if I just straight up ask people their preferred pronouns, things can go ary. 
  
  (Like once, at a college event, I met a new person and asked their preferred pronouns.  They then went on a rant about their sexuality until I, horrified at this miscommunication, stopped them in the middle of their ramblr to make it clear that I wasn’t asking them who they preferred to date but how they preferred to be referred to)
  
  One way you can ask is by saying “My preferred pronouns are _______.  May I ask if you have preferred pronouns, and if so, what they are?”
  
  
• Knowing where to go for support when things don’t go great:  Like I said before, reaching out to any allies you may have is awesome.  I have also used tumblr a lot to deal with this!  Sometimes I just can’t get people to use the right pronouns, or don’t feel safe or comfortable asking them to.  So…. I come rant about it on tumblr! It makes me feel less alone to have other trans folks to commiserate with and to be able to let out my anger, pain, and frustration, in a way that doesn’t impact my relationship with the student, professor, whoever, who is misgendering me. 
  
  

p.s. Just a side-note, I’d love to encourage folks to use language that actually names the pronouns you’re referring to (like “she pronouns” or “ze pronouns”) as opposed to language that suggests that certain pronouns are inherently male or female, or that men and women inherently prefer certain pronouns (like “male pronouns” or “female pronouns”)

p.p.s. I wan’t sure whether or how to add a TW to this?  I briefly mention some kind of rough things I’ve dealt with but they’re in passing and really no more explicit than a TW itself would be.  But please let me know if I’m just totally missing the point and need to add one.

forever taking accidental photos when I’m checking my lipstick… but I’m loving my stache in this shot

So I’ve been searching with limited success to try to find community support around transition.  That’s not to say there isn’t information about transition out there (there’s lots of it!), but I can only listen to the same story (that I don’t relate to) so many times without feeling frustrated.

I know from individual conversations with other trans* folks that many of us have non-normative experiences of transition (or non-transition), and that many of us feel silenced about discussing those experiences.  For some of us, this silence comes from a fear of being invalidated and criticized by people inside and outside of our communities for being “not trans enough”.  I guess I hope that making this online community space could be a way to break that silence and make space for us to be more honest with ourselves and each other about the endless beautiful possibilities of our relationships to our bodies and the world around us.

I drafted a blurb for the blog:

“Queering Transition” is a community blog that aggregates posts about transitional knowledge and experiences that disrupt or subvert the idea that all trans people share a single transitional narrative.  I want this blog to be a space to open up dialogue about the endless possibilities of transition (or non-transition!) that trans* folks explore every day.

There are so so many different kinds of posts that might be included in this blog! Here are some question prompts to get you thinking, but please know that you can definitely still submit if your experience is not invoked by these questions: 

Is your experience of transition woven into your intersecting identities around race, ability, class, spirituality, size, and more?  Have you started and stopped hormones, used lower-than-typical doses, switched between estrogen and testosterone, etc?  Are you happy not “physically” transitioning? Does the concept or language of transition itself make little sense for you? 

Are you “naturally” transitioning?  Have you chosen a surgical route that you rarely see represented in other folks’ transitional narratives?  Have you used body modifications (e.g. piercings, tattoos) as an element of your transition? 

Did your transition allow you to better explore gendered expressions that aren’t generally associated with your gender identity (e.g. being a butch trans woman or femme trans man)?  Is your transitional experience tied into your identity as non-binary, genderqueer, two-spirit, genderfuck, androgyne, neutrois, agender, stud, femme, butch, queen or other identities that cannot be entirely capture by words like “trans woman” and “trans man”? 

To submit:  You can either click the submit button or, alternatively, tag your blog post with “queeringtransition” to let us know that you might like it reblogged.

I’m wide open to feedback and critique on this.  I also don’t know if something like this already exists?  I haven’t found it but I could be looking in the wrong places.

I’d also love if some folks would volunteer to be moderators.  I’m about to start my semester and I sometimes have to step away from tumblr for long chunks of the semester.  I wouldn’t want to start and then abandon this community space.

I’ve got this idea, but I don’t necessarily have the time or energy to fully take charge of it…    soooo I’m tossing the torch out to tumblr!

Home sick and trying to make myself feel like less of a zombie… by dressing up for the internet obvi!

seriously though, the Portland Black Lipstick Co. is fucking awesome (“natural make-up for that unnatural look”).

I’m wearing their black liptick, and also one of the “glitz” on my eyes. 

I don’t know how to make a “read more” cut actually work so… ~bear~ with me?

I’m just sharing these cause I feel really stoked on this project right now and cause this is the first really solid chunk of writing I’ve done for my finals and yeah.  CUZ IT’S MY BLOG.  And I do what I want.

Trigger warning: mention of sexual assault

          “a collection of impossible conversations’ is a body of work that took form much of it’s own accord.  The state of my life right now is one of great isolation; as a trans person and as a person with disabilities whose anxiety sometimes seems to be swallowing all of us whole.  Much of this isolation comes from a sense of the impossibility of community, of connection, of simple conversation.  Every moment of my life is structured by these experiences, such that everything from ordering a cup of tea to seeing my family becomes a potential event; a site at which gender may seep into our interactions like a noxious gas, turning even the most benign conversations into something toxic and unbearable. 

            The conversations embedded in these poems are impossible in a number of different, but interconnected ways.  First are the conversations that feel impossible because of the lens through which other people read my experience.  That is to say that the dominant trans narrative is so deeply pervasive that it often makes it impossible to speak and enact my own truth.  The myth of a single trans experience is so far-reaching that it even climbs into our own communities, turning trans people against each other in some nauseating witch hunt for authenticity.  Pieces like “I’m sorry I am” and “My dearest gender” speak to uncertainty about testosterone (a key element of a dominant trans male narrative).  They speak to what is sometimes unspeakable without risking the a loss of community, or without risking buttressing the claims of cissexists. 

            Second are the conversations that are unspeakable because of shame.  These poems address sexual assault, young queer desire, and the desperate aches of a queen collapsing under normative masculinity.  Poems like “Otherwise,” “Fem/me crisis 2009,” “elbow deep/ We dug our tiny fists,” and “the early days” explore these painful themes and dive into the shame that envelops them. 

            Third are the conversations that are unspeakable because of the cement boundaries between myself and the people around me, particularly my family.  Poems like “Grandpa”, “Big brother”, and “If you miss them” explore what might be said, if it could be said.  Fourth are the conversations with myself.  Trying to address my own desires and histories demands untangling them from the world that has produced me as I am.  But as these messy examinations demonstrate (in poems like “Dear gender”, “after the storm”, “I moved”, “Tight rope”, “This is about” and “Self-Portrait, 2003.  Medium: digital photograph, black and white”) the process of untangling often does little more than to make the tangle worse.
            Yet more poems explore the abyss of depression and anxiety, the hearts and minds of people who cannot understand my transness, and the intimate connection of partners trying to survive chaos together. 

           What makes these conversations all the more impossible is the implication and engagement of the reader.  Every poem is in the second person, using a figurative “you” to force the reader into the poem.  It is only through the reader that these impossible conversations can take place.  Their presence becomes a mechanism through which the poems must travel in order to complete the circuit and become a conversation. Yet it is simultaneously impossible for them to ever truly be a part of these conversations which are likely to be between me and someone else.

          I can only imagine that for an outsider, this is uncomfortable.  To make it through this collection you must read yourself implicated as, to name a few, my partner, my rapists, my grandmother, my gender, my self, my enemies, my grandfather, my brother, my young queer partners, my friends, and my mother.  Further, it is not always clear who the “you” is, making the ambiguity of the reader’s position even more expansive.  I suppose that working through this discomfort is what I am demanding of a reader, in exchange for offering such intimate, vulnerable, and painful work.  I am refusing all voyeurs and only allowing participants who are willing or able to be fully engaged and fully present in each scene of the poems.  I am asking that, in exchange for these poems, the reader help me close the circuit of these impossible conversations.  I am asking for the reader’s help to make the impossible possible. 

STORY TIME.  About a year after I first started identifying as trans and asking for “he” pronouns I started having a crisis.  I had been embodying a pretty normative masculinity, mostly because I felt like that was what I had to do to make myself legible to people.  And because I felt like it was my own fault if other people read my gender wrong.

But I am not normatively masculine.  I am a very very feminine man.  I am a queen, I am a drag queen, I am a fem/me, I am genderfluid, I am a gender non-conforming man.  And I now know that it is never my fault when other people assume my gender.

In 2009 I had what I like to call my first ~femme crisis~.  I moved through my every day life presenting in normatively masculine ways.  But inside, my glorious queen soul was getting no sunlight, no love, no water and it was slowly wilting and dying. 

I would only dress up femme-y in private for my boo, and it felt so liberating.  But some days I felt like if I didn’t go out into the world dressed femmey, if I didn’t stop conforming to what other people thought a man was “supposed to look like”, that I was going to absolutely break down.  I would have gender meltdowns all the time and I just felt terrible.  It seemed like this normative masculinity was collapsing on top of me.

I used to tell my boo about this gorgeous red dress in the window of a plus-size boutique off of MacArthur.  I eyed it for weeks and weeks every morning on the bus ride to school.  I desperately wanted it, but I felt like such a failure of a man for all of my secret desperate queeny desires. 

That year on Valentine’s day she handed my a small gift bag.  I had no idea what it could be, but as soon as I slipped my hand between the tissue paper and felt the silky smooth fabric I knew exactly what it was.  I tugged on one of the halter straps and slowly pulled the dress out of the bag.  It unfolded and bloomed like a big red poppy and I just burst into an ocean of tears right there in her tiny little dorm room. 

In that silent exchange between me and my partner I knew that, for the first time in my life, someone really truly understood my gender.  I knew that she would still call me her boyfriend in this dress.  I know that she would never push me, but always support me, in exploring the ways that I need to express my gender in order to feel liberated, to feel safe, to feel honest.  I knew that she really deeply truly loved every fiber of my being. 

And most of all, I knew i was going to be okay.

(that’s me in the dress on the right, and my friend Tabs on the left)

Me and Tabs at Black and White Ball…. where we were both divas and wore red.

I can’t decide whether this photo makes me happy because our contagious laughter or because we look like we’re gonna eat eachother.

being called “girrrrl/girl/gurl/queen/femme/sister” and similar things DOES NOT FEEL OKAY COMING FROM JUST ANYONE.

It feels good coming from folks who really genuinely get my gender, and are using that language to affirm my identity as a queer femme man and to cement my membership into communities of queens. It feels good when I know that “girrrrl!” doesn’t actually mean “you’re a girl!” But, instead, means “you are a fem/me-as-fuck boy queen and I SEE YOU!”

When that language comes from people who are using that language because they assume they are in a group of women and/or that I am a woman, it feels TERRIBLE and misgendering.  And it’s one of the most awkward things to wiggle out of because I have to feel like an asshole when, after you excitedly call me “GIRL!” or “SISTER!” or “GIRLFRIEND!” I have to be like….

uhmmm.  actually…. no. 

At least not in the way you think.

“(no need to post, I’m just showing appreciation!) When I found your blog this summer it couldn’t have been at a better time. I’m a cis female and at first glance your posts seemed off-putting but the longer I stuck around the more I understood your frustrations. I know you’ve said that you don’t want to have to always be an educator on trans* issues but I’ve learned so much just by reading your thoughts/fears/triggers etc… This is the best anti-oppression workshop anyone could ask for.”

Though this person said there was no need to post, I really want to post this one (even unattached to their name).  This means a lot to me, and messages like this are always a reminder to me that we really do learn more from each other when, instead of demanding that the people we have privilege over “educate us” and “be nice about it”, we actually listen to each other’s stories (anger included) and listen through our own discomfort.