Photo by Claire Bangser
I keep thinking about my gender, here in this quarantine isolation where no one sees me but me. How much brain space it still occupies. How much it matters to me inside myself, for myself only. I’ve been wearing less jewelry recently, and I wondered yesterday if it was because my hair is long now. Before I changed my name, I felt so much internal pressure to present in a more masculine way to counteract the discomfort I felt with my overtly feminine name. Once I was called Bear, I was surprised at the space that opened around me, and how my presentation skewed more femme.
I’ve created a catalog of feminine markers in my mind. One too many throws off the homeostasis. When my hair is short, I wear a lot of lipstick. Now that it’s long, I don’t even want to wear earrings. Crop top plus baggy pants, okay. Put on mascara, okay. Add lipstick and now we’re teetering on the line. Add earrings, and I feel overwhelmed by the wrongness of it. I am always trying to find equilibrium.
I think back to a moment nearly a decade ago, trying to explain to my mom about changing my name in terms that she would understand. “I don’t want to be a man, really, I’m just like, not a regular lady, you know?” “That makes a lot of sense to me,” she answered. “I think that’s always been true about you.” And she’s not wrong. Even as a little kid, I was very particular about what I liked, gravitating towards both clean lines and bright colors. I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what I felt as gender dysphoria, but in retrospect, maybe that’s accurate.
When I was in fourth grade, I needed a new swimsuit, and my mom picked out an armload of frilly, pink, strappy numbers for me to try on. My step-dad scoffed and said, “She won’t like any of those.” He was right. He made one lap around the racks and came back with the perfect suit: plain but bold, cobalt and emerald, sports bra cut on top, boy shorts on the bottom. I felt so seen. My story doesn’t fit the stereotypical trans narrative of “born in the wrong body” or “I’ve always known,” but when I think back on this story, I can see it as about nothing else but gender.
In middle school, my style oscillated between boyish flannel grunge and a kind of 70s, strong-jawed femininity. Maybe you’d call that androgyny, but it’s mixed up on me, because what I’m after is femininity on a masculine palette, and the fact that my palette is decidedly womanly has perhaps confused others, but it has not dissuaded me.
The summer between eighth and ninth grades, I got my first salon haircut. The stylist was a (presumably) gay man named Tm, like Tim but without the “i”. I did not know any gay people at that point, or at least none that I knew were gay. I thought I might be bisexual, but I hadn’t been sexual with anyone yet, so I wasn’t really sure what that meant.
At the hair salon in the department store in the mall, Tm cut my long straight hair into a sharp edged, super short stacked bob that was tres chic circa 1998. It cost $40 worth of babysitting money, plus a tip. He declared me “Fabulous!”
I only went to him that one time, and after that, I started cutting my own hair in the bathroom. My next haircut was a rough-hewn pixie cut I dyed fire engine red, the wildest color I could find in a box at Walgreens.
There was a weird period of years in high school where I was Pentecostal (it’s a long story) and only wore skirts and grew my hair out long. Even then I stayed somehow tomboyish, as masculine as a denim skirt and button down shirt can be. Is Pentecostal dyke aesthetic a thing? I tried to make it a thing.
Imagine a time-lapse of pubescent development: my 17-year-old body spinning in stop-motion, my B cup tangerines hastily swelling to DDD cantaloupes. The melons were a bewilderment, undermining my attempts at androgyny but attracting attention I sometimes relished.
My breasts continue to baffle me. They are a site of pleasure and confusion. I love the way they look in a tight crop top. I love the way they feel in my lover’s hands. I hate the way they look in a button down. I hate how they cannot be flattened by any manner of bra or binder, lumpy and full despite their confinement. I most hate how they give me away as inherently womanly, despite my protests.
I’ve circled the question of top surgery for a decade. Though I support all trans people in making choices about what’s right for them, and I reserve the right to change my mind, for now, my own stubborn logic will not relent: why should I manipulate my untameable corpus to be better understood by a world hellbent on binary gender? Why should my body suffer the consequences of the limitations of our imaginations? I cannot abide.
Changing my name was Sisyphean. It was a groundhog day of coming out, multiple times a day, every day, for about three years, and then less frequently for about five more years after that. A litany of questions that felt like an undressing. Whether it felt like an affectionate disrobing or a hostile strip-search depended on the person doing the asking.
Yes, I changed my name. No, I don’t go by that anymore. Yes, everyone has to call me by my new name. Yes, even you. Yes, it’s about my gender. No, I’m not transitioning otherwise. Every time I saw someone I hadn’t seen in awhile, I had to do the whole song and dance again. It was exhilarating and excruciating in equal measure.
Around that same time (9 years ago now), my housemates had a running game of “describe your gender identity in five words or less” going on the dry erase board that hung beside the refrigerator. “Jewel belly swamp twink” was my first attempt, but I eventually landed on “hot pants femme fag.”
I am a femme fag, and not a fag femme. Per my own definition, a femme fag = a masculine being who presents in a feminine way. Fag femme = a feminine being who presents in a masculine way. It’s like the names of the crayons in my 64-box of Crayolas: yellow-green was greener than green-yellow. Red-orange was reddish orange; orange-red was orangish red. What is it, and what is it mixed with? Switch them around and the meaning is changed. Similar, but not the same, and the subtleties matter.
When I first came out about my gender, I used the word “genderqueer,” but the common parlance has shifted. The kids these days say “non-binary,” which has never felt accurate to me, because my gender isn’t non-anything. My gender is so much. It has everything. It wants everything. A plethora of gender. Similarly, the pronouns they/them have always felt strangely neutered and devoid, a weird grey zone where the sparkle-party of my gender should be. I tried briefly convincing people to use the jazzier, made-up-by-me pronouns “zse” and “zsem” but it didn’t catch on.
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of my life thinking about my gender, and this is how I know I’m trans. Cisgender people don’t think about their gender, at least, not like this. Trans, as I learned it when I was a baby queer, meant someone who was transitioning from the sex assigned to them at birth to the “opposite” sex. This does not describe my experience, so I’d never claimed the words trans.
But “trans” has opened up in meaning in the past decade, and now includes people like me, for whom the binary doesn’t much matter but who are definitely not cisgender. Last summer I was describing to a trans friend how it’s not that the problem is my body itself, it’s that people make assumptions about my body that aren’t congruent with how I feel about my gender. “You know,” she said gently, “there’s a word for that.”
I went home and cried that day my friend so tenderly suggested that I might be trans which, I am told, is another sign confirming my transness. Cis people don’t cry about their gender.
Trying to contain gender within a binary is like picking any two random stars in the sky and drawing a line between them, as though they are the only dots of light in the dark. Queers have always occupied the space between those points. Now we’re pushing beyond the linear spectrum, into dimensional constellations of identity, into galaxies of gender. Some days I feel so at home inside that vastness and sometimes, I feel lost in outer space.