Messy Queers (Patreon)

I am lying on my floor-mattress scrolling through my phone, half-drunk on a weeknight from one too many rum and cokes, still wearing my breast forms and the remnants of my tacky drugstore makeup with my chintzy Amazon maid outfit lying nearby on my office chair. I am reading some sort of horrible website that cites Ray Blanchard’s writings on autogynephilia and “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and “late” transitioners and men who wear women’s clothing and what it means to be one of them. I am reading, and then I realize it means me, and I am crying.

The realization that this website is talking about me, still lying here half in my crossdressing clothes, and not only do I have to live through the pain of being trans but I am also doing it wrong, washes over me in a wave of pure horror.

...

That was 2016. I transitioned in 2020. It took living through the constant paranoia of sudden, COVID-induced death to commit to transition; the idea of dying as a man was scarier than living as a woman, and I used that to fuel me. In the four years in between the realization that I was transgender and finally transitioning, I lived under various shadows - doubt, anxiety, ignorance - all things I used to try to tell myself that I shouldn’t do it.

I read endless trauma porn to scare myself to stay in the closet, and those stories were supremely easy to find. We mold ourselves, we suffer, we die; that is the main arc of every story I read in those years. They were and are written primarily for cis eyes, as ways to induce empathy for people who are typically incapable of feeling any for those whose lives are so different than their own. Pity the transsexuals, for their lives are all difficult and their demises certain! It was easy to convince myself that to take a single tablet of estradiol was to condemn myself to a certain and ignominious demise.

But there was more to it than self-centered worries about throwing my life away; I began to worry about the impact I would have on the community I had grown to care about. I don’t know if I ever had a shot at having a eureka moment about my gender at a young age, but regardless, I never did. There was no sudden clarity of asking for a dress at Walmart as a child or trying on my mother’s stockings. I played with Hot Wheels and LEGOs and model trains. Only when I moved out, and began to take selfies in a repurposed Inuysha cosplay wig and Rite Aid lipstick did I wonder if, perhaps, I wasn’t as cis as I thought. But all of these other women I admired - the ones who took the plunge and headlined most discussion - knew their whole lives. And some of them had less than kind things to say about the autogynephilic, perverted way I had discovered who I was.

In the post-AIDS vacuum of queer literature, I never found stories about the blurring of the line between sexual self and everyday self as a process of discovery or realization. There are lots of stories about sadness, and lots of stories about transitioning ‘properly’ with traditional benchmarks of realization and awareness. Experiences like mine - silly experimentation that belied deeper truths, playing on the boundaries of gender in the only ways that felt even remotely acceptable, feeling attractive when I was a woman - seemed relegated to cis-male-focused pornography that only furthered my belief that I was fucked up.

I led myself to believe I was simply an unfortunate crossdresser who was overly confused; I did not have the pureness of heart or the clarity of intent of the “true” trans women who knew their identity since those early ages of childhood. If I transitioned, I would be doing it wrong, I would be a negative for the community, I could not ruin this for the people who are doing it right. They were transgender, and I was some unfortunate autogynephilic freak who wore a maid dress and thought myself pretty for it.

...

Of course, now, I am as trans as any other person who is trans; if there is a “correct” way to discover who you are, I don’t know of it. This is still unreflected in the telling of our stories, though, and this is why it bothers me deeply that some within the queer community try to powerwash away experiences that cis people may look down upon. The stories that conflict with the born-this-way narrative seem to be stomped out under the guise of trauma or disgust or some other visceral reaction.

As an example, one of the first stories I’d ever read that felt realistic to me, that resonated with me because it was messy and I am a mess, was I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall. I would link to it, but it has been scrubbed from the internet at the request of its author. It is not a comfortable story, as the controversial name implies. Isabel adeptly explored the roles we all play on the battlefield of gender and what the trans community stands to lose by giving into bioessentialism and co-option of identity. It is phenomenal and should have been the beginning of an incredible career, and instead was received with a slew of hatred by both the trans community and its “allies” for its unflinching focus on tackling difficult themes.

In response to this, Isabel killed off her career, and checked into a psychiatric institution. She was convinced by her critics who told her she sounded “too much like a man” were right, and so she abandoned transition. And while she was hounded off the entire internet despite her immense talent for storytelling and deconstructing the concept of gender, empty, meaningless work has continued to proliferate. I’m not above it. I’ve written some. It’s enjoyable to write.

It’s comfortable for me as a writer to engage with my queerness on a level I can make palatable for cis readers, to know that my critics will come solely from the set of people who will never accept my existence. I can handle that, as can any trans writer; it’s par for the course of existence in the public sphere. But the idea of being attacked by my own community as a pariah touching the messy third rail is something that genuinely terrifies me, and I suspect I am not alone.

And yet the trans community desperately needs less manicured writing and a more truthful, painful body of work. It is our duty - it is my duty - as a queer growing up after AIDs as we rebuild the literary body of work about our lives in the modern era to tell all of our experiences, even the ones that are uncomfortable and prickly and do not endear us to the cishet world. We have to accept that there will be stories we do not like. Our existence is not always pleasantly textbook. To force our literature to be is a failure to the trans community itself.