Once upon a time I dreamed a dream that we were free.
I can’t imagine not being trans. It is woven into every stitch and fiber of my being. It is the tapestry from which my existence is founded. There was one time in therapy, early on in my transition, where I said that I wished that I had been born cis. It would have made life so much easier, and made my own journey of existence so much simpler, and saved me money on doctor visits and monthly hormone treatment bills. But I can’t end the sentence there. I love being trans, and it is honestly a gift to be in a position to be choosing who I want to be.
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Being trans is not new, even if the word “trans” is. Being creative and expressive with gender is something intrinsic to being a human. Chances are, if you are a human like me, then you have partaken in some sort of act which crosses the lines of what it means to be a man or a woman. You don’t have to be trans to do this. Maybe you have worn something from the “mens” section as a woman, or maybe as a man you’ve painted your nails. Perhaps you’ve been a woman in a “mans” high-up position in a company, or a stay at home dad. These lines are crossed by people all the time, but the gender binary still gets enforced by many of these same people.
Even if you haven’t and you are just cut and dry, plain old and simple, cisgender sticking to only the men’s aisle or the women’s, chances are even higher that you have questioned why your body doesn’t look as “man” or as “woman” as you want it to.
Gender dysphoria.
Maybe we all experience a little bit of it to a certain degree. We live in a society that routinely culturally reinforces the ideals of what a man should look like and be and what a woman should look like and be. These constructions get wrapped up in biological frameworks that reduce gender merely to its reproductive roles. For example, in our patriarchal gender-binary society, man gets reduced to emotionless, stiff, and unwavering, while woman gets reduced to her ability to have children and to take care of them. Of course, pushing the notion that men should suppress their emotions leads to high levels of mental illness and the fact that women should only be childbirthers and nurturers pushes feelings of inadequacy for women that either can’t or don’t want to have children (and diminishes the many life purposes for those that do). These are just a few ways that the gender binary and how we expound sex and gender actually hurts us all.
My existence as a trans woman will always challenge this idea of what a woman should be because I cannot have a child. My reproductive system does not so neatly fit into what we have decided womanhood ought to be. This is why being a trans woman is so powerful because I, and others, are saying that womanhood and femininity has a much greater essence that is not founded in simply having a uterus.
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One of the words that has been used against us, to cast us as dangerous to society, is by calling us “monsters”. What I find about this word interesting is not only its reclamation by trans communities, but also its origins. Historically speaking, a monster was always an omen, or warning, trying to communicate something to those around it. Lexically, it comes from the Spanish and French verbs “mostrar” and “montrer”, respectively, which both mean “to show”. We are showing to the world a plethora of things. First and foremost, we are templating what it means to be free. We physically embody an omen that shows to the world that it is choked up, with hands on everyone's necks, sucking life out of souls. We are dangerous because we are threatening a power system that does not serve human life whatsoever.
Additionally, we are embodying the idea that sex can be changed, transformed, and reimagined. In this sense, trans people get paralleled with Frankenstein’s monster, like we are a bunch of fake parts all thrown together on a body. Again, this idea of the monster gets pushed because we are challenging, and presenting danger, to a system that sees sex as completely rigid, unchangeable, and impermeable. Some people might say that gender is fine to be played around with, but that changing sex is taking it too far, and that you should try to make peace with your “god-given” body. However, cisgender people are actually the primary consumers of body modifications. If I am a Frankenstein monster for taking hormones, then people like the Kardashians are even more monstrous for the amount of body modifications that they have received.
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Once upon a time we were revered.
Recently, I heard a sound bite of Laverne Cox saying that “we must reclaim and take up our sacred space” as trans people. She noted how in many pre-colonial societies, we were uplifted as having a very special gift. For example, “in South Asian cultures including India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, hijras are persons who are assigned male at birth who adopt feminine gender identity, women's clothing, and other feminine gender roles”1. Despite the fact that hijras were criminalized during the British colonial period, it has traditionally been deemed good luck to have hijras bless your child upon birth.
Also, in the Lakota nation in what is now South Dakota, winkte are “born male but live as women and assume many traditional women's roles, such as cooking and caring for children, as well as assuming key roles in rituals and serving as the keeper of the tribe's oral traditions.”2 With settler colonialism being the structure that the United States was founded on and which creates and upholds the gender binary, winkte often face homophobia and transphobia. In this sense, the gender binary is also a racial construct because of how white colonial rule typically is what seeks to erase existing non-binary frameworks of gender that existed, and continue to exist, in racialized nations and communities.
Another word that they call us is “new”. This is to say that we are not. We are as old as the bones of civilization. As long as humans exist, we will always be.
So yes, we are sacred beings with an intrinsic message which we embody. That being said, every day is everything and nothing at all. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, how each day is a step towards living authentically and who we want to be, but also it is just one day amidst thousands of other days that you and others are living. The other day I just missed a train and had to wait 10 minutes for the next one, almost making me late for work. The other evening I saw a cockroach in the bathtub. This morning, I had run out of bananas and couldn’t make my morning smoothie quite the same as I usually do. So yes, I can write from a perspective which advocates for our rights, reclamation of holiness, and our deep-seeded message for the world, but at the end of the day I am also a human being with boring everyday human being problems just like everyone else.
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Every single day a trans person is harassed, deadnamed, denied healthcare, or killed. However, on all of those same days, a trans person comes out and/or begins their individualized process of transition. So for every one of us that they try to erase, there is at least one other that becomes. This is to say that we are not going anywhere. We are here… forever. We will show and we will tell and we will embody and we will fight – we will be monstrous and dangerous because we seek love in a world that manufactures hate. But we too will burn our toast and stub our toes and forget our keys at home. We will change the world even if we don’t lift a finger.
So, I dreamed a dream. One day we would eat sugar plums and only half of them would be ripe. Our fingers would bleed because we will have woven ourselves into every stitch and fiber of this world's being. However, we already are the frayed ends on the one that has been beaten dry and left out in the sun to die. We are the ones holding it all together at the margins. Without life, there is no us. Without us, there is no life.
“World Gender Customs Map.” Google my maps. Accessed July 27, 2024. https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?ll=35.64952112612974%2C-89.4737932342041&z=4&mid=1zDWxhBN5aOofwpE-FkZWQsiFDlE.
Ibid
“Every single day a trans person is harassed, deadnamed, denied healthcare, or killed. However, on all of those same days, a trans person comes out and/or begins their individualized process of transition. So for every one of us that they try to erase, there is at least one other that becomes. This is to say that we are not going anywhere. We are here… forever.” ❤️😭
This was a beautiful and insightful read and I thank you for sharing it! I found what you said about how most of us experiment at some time interesting… especially as you said “I dreamed a dream.” That’s a song from my favourite musical Les Miserables - and when I was young I dressed up as the little boy from the show ALL the time. The show had two little girls - but I always wanted to be the little boy!
I’m cisgender - but that experience stuck with me. I also had to have a hysterectomy at 24 so have lost my womb (and with it my ability to bear children)… and it was strange thinking about how that changed things for me and my femininity.
You’ve given me so much to think about - thank you!