Lean In

Sterling-Elizabeth Arcadia

It’s 4 PM on Sunday, and I’m about halfway done grading papers when it stops raining outside. I get up and take my roommate’s dog, Jojo, outside to pee in the middle of the street and poop on a damp sidewalk. Jojo is 4 years old. He’s blind (and missing one eye), a pit-bull, and very sweet, if somewhat needy. He likes to sit next to me on the couch while I grade, but because he’s blind always needs some encouragement to get off the couch and down the stairs to get outside.

I am a poet, primarily. I’m a TA, a young adult, and disabled. I’m trans. I like a little company while I work. If Jojo’s not available, I’ll scroll a little twitter. 

Outside, I pick up Jojo’s fresh shit, then I pick up a cold, soggy pile that I didn’t have a baggie on hand for this morning. 

This is an essay about how I almost detransitioned.

It’s hard not to start with broad generalizations about the trans experience – especially because this essay is, in part, about those kinds of generalizations. But I want to give you the particulars of it. 

If you take your trans gender as the “right” gender, then your cis gender necessarily becomes a “wrong” gender. Your body becomes a “bad” body. A body to be fixed. Some doctors recommend sterilization as medically necessary. Some states effectively require it to change your birth certificate.

And if medical transition doesn’t make your body right, the logical conclusion is that you’re fucked. The solution was something else, and you just stuck the peanut butter knife into the mayo jar. You can take the knife out, but it will never be just mayonnaise again. 

This is an essay about social media. 

I’m young and lonely. I spend a lot of my free time online. I follow a lot of popular trans women on twitter. The idea that fixing your gender and body makes you happier lodged itself in some soft part of me. The idea that transition resolves depression and anxiety, on top of dysphoria. The idea that transition is inherently healing, intrinsically happy-making.

I’ve made friends on Instagram, on Twitter, but that hasn’t made them good places for me. It’s easy to lose track of who your real friends are. This is as good a place to start as any. 

When I first made a twitter, my freshman year of college, I thought I was cis and straight. I was deeply depressed. I couldn’t figure out the appeal of twitter, and so quickly dropped it. 

I’ve been back on twitter for almost two years now. Several years into my transition, after I started writing seriously, I found it a useful tool to create a sense of community, to try to make connections. I met my friend Fox through literary twitter. They drove from Philly to Baltimore to get pierced with me last year. This summer they bought a set of porch furniture for their new apartment. Sometimes we’ll sit outside in the sun and talk for hours. I wrote a poem suggesting otherwise, but I think Fox is a real friend.

Early in my transition, though, I would often follow hot (read passing) trans women and get really invested in seeing all their tweets or photos, only to later unfollow them in fits of dysphoria and jealousy. Eventually, I got over that pattern, but it’s hard to say truthfully that I went somewhere healthier with it. 

Social media is successful not because it exposes one to diversity but because it allows one to find insularity, comfort. The trans corners of the internet are hardly different.

***

Two pictures. One of a young twenties guy with a scruffy beard and the grayest outfit you’ve ever seen. One of a mid twenties woman with tits to die for and perfect teeth. “See how lifeless I looked before. Look how much happier I am now.” This is the narrative. 

***

Many are happy to say “there is no one way to be trans,” but I would argue that that line is actually part of a series of hegemonic narratives about transness, about transition. 

The one I fell for is that transition fixes things that are wrong.

***

This is an essay about trans joy. 

I’m scared to write it because there’s nothing wrong with trans joy. The people whose generalizations I felt hurt me did not say anything hurtful.

I wanted so badly for transition to fix me. I saw these other women whose lives seemed so beautiful. I wanted that beauty for myself. I believed that if my transition was not like theirs, that if my transition hadn’t fixed me, I might not be trans. That maybe my fixing lay somewhere back in cisness.

Now I know it was unrealistic to expect my transition to resolve my un-wellness (un-wellness being not the opposite of wellness but a kind of it). The disagreements I have with my mind and body are not the kind that conclude. If anything, the wrongness I carried and still carry around inside me was not because I had yet to transition, but because I was already trans. Not because trans begets wrongness, but because of how the world gets ahold of aberrances and squeezes. Chews. 

***

When Elliot Page came out, the idea that transition fixes was everywhere. My therapist had to tell me that was not his only narrative. How often did I think those women I followed were as happy as they described? Did they really never post about experiences with transphobia?

My therapist was poking holes in the narrative. I resisted. I saw it as a binary. Transition had failed to fix me because I wasn’t trans, or transition had failed to fix me because I couldn’t be fixed. Not being trans was the easier answer.

Still something started trickling out. Then faster and faster. The idea began to collapse. The idea was a dam. The reservoir was me. The river was me. Fixing my mind broke. So did fixing my body, my gender. 

***

Interlude in which I reflect on my breasts: I have breasts now, actually. I grew them when I got fat. I can’t divorce those two things in my head – but I wish my fatness was the only thing complicating my breasts. I posted, a few hours before typing this, as a silly goofy little joke, that I’m getting top surgery. 

People have started reading me as AFAB. My mangled masculinity stopped looking like something I was killing and started looking like something I was growing. Other queer people, other trans people, assumed I was “transmasc non-binary,” a shorthand for AFAB. A friend told me I was so nonbinary that they didn’t know what to do with it. (Mainstream images of non-binary people typically center TME people (another shorthand for AFAB)).

For some time I’ve been making offhand comments about cis men being able to be lesbians. Just a joke. I’m not a man, I’m transmasc, and therefore can still be a lesbian. What being AFAB does for a bitch. 

This is an essay about peanut aioli. Top surgery is a joke that’s not. My gender is so fucked up. Top surgery and a phalloplasty minus the phalloplasty. 

I’m a woman. I’m a man. Who’s not a man?