Today I’m celebrating the hairline no one wanted, the receding corners by my temple greys, the forehead that expands everlastingly… During this quarantine time I’ve been simmering like stew, noticing the cavalcade of feelings surrounding the wide and deep chasm between how I feel and how I’m perceived.

I’ve been fighting since age 7 when I was told to put a shirt on for no other reason than my box-checked [penis/clitoris/glans-head] size. This country wants my body covered in specific ways for the comfort of the patriarchy, for the survival of rape culture, and for the unfair and power-hungry led economy. Though I had no puffy areolas nor breast tissue at the time, my flat undeveloped chest was a ticking timebomb some commander sent troupes to disengage. I was instructed to start minding society. The directive was clear: listen to the songs pointing out differences between “boys” and “me”. Develop an us-and-them narrative, that I might start solidifying my rank within the camp for which I was assigned. Start playing different games, perceiving different things, enjoying/celebrating/existing as/finding pleasure in everything and anything: differently. These pills that I was expected to obediently and unquestioningly swallow from that day forward though, made me angry.

Furious.
Beside myself, grieving.

How dare this community mandate I remove the pleasure of the sun from my back, my chest, and my shoulder blades?!

Many of your values, United States, have never been remotely close to mine, though we also share so many of the same. Your limits upon the civil rights of some were not and still are not about me nor any other marginalized body. They had nothing to do with my little a-gendered physique or budding egalitarian heart and mind. This was true then and is still true today.

30 years later I began hormone replacement therapy (testosterone), and little by little I started to see in the mirror a wonderful vision form: the me I’ve had in my mind for many years, a person inside who most of you had probably never noticed, or even knew how to see. 30 years is a master’s journey in the making…

So many “drag” costumes became my daily clothing in those years. It was characters of mine who taught me how to dress ~ male, female, object, other… for decades my art intuitively shouted louder and more articulately than I knew how to consciously say, especially about how much I wished I could be acknowledged and understood for the me I am inside. My character-acting career had been a pressure release valve I’d installed at the age of 11, and which I hadn’t realized I’d been so deeply, regularly utilizing.

In these past three years on T developing secondary male sex traits (including a gloriously receding hairline), I’ve gotten to stare in awe at an emergent face I thought I’d never get to see without paint and stage lights demanding. They start the kids out so young, you see, swallowing pills, learning lines, playing with toys/games/jobs they’re told are “appropriate”, and giving up the ones they’re told “are not”. It’s common that at some point in life the only accessible image in the mind of who we think we are—who we’re even supposed to be—is one put there artificially.

This is violence to little bodies.
Burden upon tiny hearts.
Stress upon growing minds.
To assimilate.
To unlearn how we perceive even our very own secret and sacred selves inside.
To wave the white flag and succumb to injustice gracefully.

Adolescence comes and we quake in nightly horror at what happens to the body naturally. We learn to control these bodies over anything and everything. We often forget what we dreamed of becoming. We let go of our passions, or they’re stolen from us by a stealthy media-run machine which cares only that we participate in the system and the always-scheming economy—that we keep IT going. “This life is expendable”, we’re told. “It’s just the way things have always been.” “Boys will be boys.” “She asked for it.” “They stepped out of line.” “They wouldn’t participate and so they got what was coming.”…

I’m grateful I’m able to live my best life today, one where when I look in the mirror I see the echoes and lines lifting me up in this life. I can see each of my ancestries iterated behind THIS face and THIS body. I am not the women who came before, and I am not the men, nor am I the few unnamed fence-fuckers for whom I am legacy. I am made up of each of these bloodlines, each of these bodies, each of these ancient voices singing battles, triumphs, fears, struggles, loves, lessons, and meanings for their lives which lead irrevocably to mine.

My face is both and neither: a dish done at least three-ways. My character is viscerally, vulnerably, authentically showing, and for the first time no mask has been donned—they’re off and away.

I am not passing.
How incredibly, joyously, free.

Play On My Friends,
~ Creature

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