On Trans Awakening

[skylarkrogers]

This one's not fiction, but rather my own story. All the same, it's deeply tied into my work. Some hefty spoilers for book 1, and a description of some early scenes in book 2.

 

I don't think I ever told you how it was for me.

2016, the Trump election. My mental health a trainwreck as things went further and further off the rails. NaNoWriMo came, and my original plan was yet another rewrite of Weird, a book I'd been working on for years. Spontaneously, I decided to switch tracks, and write a prequel instead. About when Thairn infiltrated the Morleys, and fell in love with Mickey. It would follow after a short story I'd written on a trip abroad, about Thairn and Illa falling into kink together.

At the same time in Jacksonville, Florida, there was a fight over an LGBT rights ordinance. I was deeply involved, the whole thing stressful and traumatic. Bigots kept talking up the idea of "the gay mafia", and I ended up just writing one.

And wouldn't it be cool, maybe, to have a mobster godfather, switched at birth for a fairy godmother? A Tumblr post might have played a part.

I, a "cis woman", wasn't sure how to write trans men, though. Clearly I needed to write him very masculine. I took some input from a trans guy friend and looked up sensitivity matters otherwise.

The more things went wrong in the real world, the more LGBT representation I wanted in the book. I'd make one of the human characters nonbinary, I decided. A major one. Mickey Morley, why not? In the unpublished book he'd sprung from by my friend Kristen Brand, he was playfully flamboyant--tailcoats in one scene, a frilly apron in another.

I wasn't really sure how to write nonbinary, so I looked up sensitivity guidelines. It's honestly barely a blip in that first draft. Mickey confesses to Thairn in a passing joke about Romeo and Juliet. He later also tells Illa. But there were few internal thoughts or feelings for the character to hold, and I described them very vaguely, using language I'd found in sensitivity research.

Things got worse, nationally, locally. I added further layers of queerness to the book. A romance between two ace girls. A happy ending, where before I'd contemplated tragedy. A decision to have Thairn present male in the epilogue, to make the ending gayer.

I remember Thairn being tense about how Mickey would take that shift. Mickey accepted it readily, left Thairn a welcome feeling of relief.

I was, of course, not genderqueer, nor trans, I told my friends online. I wrote this as an ally.

Things were getting worse, nationally, locally. I dove further into my writing. Kept my laptop by my bed, and woke up without an alarm, well before dawn, just to write. I finished the epilogue sometime before the month ended. I kept on writing. At first, just scenes that followed the characters after. Little stories.

One short story began with Mickey rushing into the hotel room on a vacation with Thairn. "Would you mind being in the closet? Literally, I'm afraid." People had come who couldn’t know about their secret love affair. Mickey had to cover things up quickly. Pretend Thairn's luggage was Mickey's own. But what if Thairn had come en femme, and Mickey had to breach his own closet to keep his lover hidden?

Around this same time, I began to have this absolutely overwhelming anxiety. I'd have to look up my old posts to see when it first began, if I could identify it at all, as that whole November was a terror. I remember realizing I did not own a single pair of pants. I remember I was overcome with the urge to own a pair of pinstripe slacks. I went and got them late one night at a thrift store near my home. The whole while talking in my head to Mickey--I do that with my characters. And talking online to a trans guy friend, about how maybe one tiny tiny sliver of me, like 1%, might maybe possibly be male?

I remember putting on those slacks with a button shirt, the feeling all surreal. I wrote it into the next part of the short story, swapped the genders on it to make it Mickey, trying on feminine clothing for the first time, to keep Thairn's presence secret. How things about me would look different, feel different, in flickers.

I went out to a kink club in those clothes, disappointed when I was not read as male, that others did not see the way those clothes changed my reflection.

I was maybe genderqueer, I told my friends online. But perhaps, I fretted, that was some form of appropriation? Though I wouldn't say that to a genderqueer or questioning person…

Truth was, my allyship was my best shield against myself. I could not condone treating myself in ways that I would find transphobic. I had to treat myself at least as well as I treated trans people. I could be no exception to my rules.

I read somewhere--Reddit or a blog post or in research for book 1--about a binder brand that could compress even large chests. I'd tried once to bind down with a corset, on a night when kink friends and I all swapped our gender looks and went out to club at the local gay bar. I'd loved how it looked, though it only did so much. I'd otherwise given up on the idea of binding. I remember being in middle school, reading Tamora Pierce's Lioness books, envious that she was small enough to bind, as my own chest grew in so sudden and large that an acquaintance pulled me aside to declaim me for "stuffing". (An accusation I found bizarre, as I envied smaller chests, even contemplated the idea of needing a mastectomy one day.)

Ordering the binder terrified me. I remember telling my then-spouse not long after. I remember them saying some honestly terrible things, about how they wouldn't be attracted to me if I changed my chest and genitals, how something or other about me wasn't compatible with being a man. They were deeply-closeted nonbinary at the time, had both confessed it to me and denied it to me. I remember worrying I would pursue these feelings, only to suddenly stop having them, as they had told me they had, on their latest venture deeper into the closet.

I got the binder, and for the first time I could see things flat, and it felt so joyous and so right.

Memories came in floods around this time, as if they'd all been sealed away. That obsession with Ranma ½, and constant stories about my Spring of Drowned Boy OC. My love of girl-disguised-as-boy stories, and boy-forced-to-crossdress stories. Remembering frequent conversations with myself, convincing myself that I was cis because I had been assigned female at birth and was fine with being so. Trying to define gender to myself. Of wishing my breasts were smaller or gone, of fantasizing about needing a mastectomy, of wishing I could at least just put them down sometimes. Of how I perceived my voice as more neutral than it was. Of just how much a tomboy I had been when young--oh, I would have been "mistaken" for a trans boy, wouldn't I have been. More memories than that, countless.

Around that time, I convinced myself that I was genderfluid. I tried tracking my internal sense of gender, writing the second book as I did, Mickey mirroring my fluctuations. A cosplayer friend helped me shop for clothes, for all it made me terrified. I wrote a scene with that, too, the characters going to ridiculous-but-welcome lengths to help Mickey make a closeted shopping trip.

I wrote a third book, too, and finished it in January.

I became more strongly open about my fluidity with my friends. I met my biological parents, and when I went to visit them, I deliberately swapped between contrasting presentations. Trying to come out without really coming out to them.

We won the civil rights fight in Jacksonville (not knowing that later, Florida would become a war). Not long after, my spouse got a job in a far-away state, and we left Jacksonville entirely. A relief. Jacksonville's bigotry terrified, and the new place was far friendlier.

My spouse and I were having marital problems, and I whittled my way through the Kink-Aware Professionals Directory until I found a marriage counselor. My insurance listed her as in-network, but she wasn't. We could only afford a session or two.

Months later, I began having attacks of intense anxiety. I'd turn to distraction so constant and continuous that it made it near-impossible to do my job. I contacted the marriage counselor, set an appointment for individual therapy.

She taught me how to sit with my feelings. To personify them and let them speak. To let them tell me things I was too scared to know. One took the form of a messenger, about a promised prince.

I cried. Almost every night, I cried. A pain wrenched overwhelming, one I'd finally ceased to flee.

She sent me on long, long walks. Feeling and being and talking to these feelings one by one. I became aware of the constant pain--physical, emotional--of bearing up my breasts. The burden of feeling in the wrong place in my life in so very many ways.

She encouraged me to experiment without forcing labels onto it. I tried anything that terrified me. Packers hard and soft and STP. Memories unlocked about learning of "penis envy" and thinking "oh, that's what I have". I cosplayed Damion Bloodmarch and went to a con, was seen and it felt right. I tried he/him pronouns at a kink club. Tried cutting short my hair. The things I loved, I kept. (My hair, I grew back out again.)

I KonMari'd through my clothes. I had to learn the way I loved things. Because so much I had was beautiful, and looked good on me, and were my body a doll, I could perhaps have left things there. But I am not a doll, and instead I had to learn the difference, between "this looks good on this reflection" and "this looks like it's me." Even years later, it's still a work in progress.

On one of my long walks, I imagined walking through a portal, to a world where I'd grown up as I was meant to be. My true self there and fully-formed. Bigenitalled and raised neutrally and chosen male when he decided to, straddling the gap between nonbinary and male. Kind and loving and confident and chill. Worked as a photonics engineer--had chosen science back in college--and looked and sounded right.

He left that world of his and joined the real one, to stay with me and help me to become. We swap and meld and talk. And drive ever onwards towards a place where we can be. Sometimes it feels most right to drive to congruence, a single entity. Sometimes it feels most right to be a conversation. A self that's learned to endure the slings and arrows of dysphoria and trauma, and a self who feels more true, but cannot handle being when the body feels too wrong.

There's been more since, endlessly, but as a trans awakening narrative, I think this is a good place to set this down.