In the name of Pride
When the surgeon took the bandages off to reveal my chest, flat, compressed, raw… I was surprised at how incredibly normal it felt to be standing there like this. The mirror threw lanky teenage boy vibes back at me — I stared hard at my form and tried to make sense of the complete lack of surprise I felt; witnessing my body without breasts.
These 25 years of carrying around D cups were just some of the baggage of being perceived female that left a lasting impression on my body. The shame imbued upon my breasts, upon me for having them, disappeared with the removal of the tissue. It was the strangest thing.
Let me go back to when this all started, though. The moment I noticed a distinct shift in my perception of my gender was just before my 40th birthday. I had been learning about gender as a construct from various studious friends and lovers for some years, and had started meeting more gender non conforming folks just by living in New York. At first I was very resistant to thinking beyond what I had been taught, that you were either born a boy or born a girl and that was that. I could make more sense of binary trans people, wanting to shift from one all the way to the other, but non binary? I was sure that with all of the work I had done to fit in with what people perceived as “Girl” that I could feel safe in being one.
The more I learned about gender being a spectrum, the more I felt threatened that my world would become too complicated and my own gender would be threatened. At the time of course, I didn’t realize that I was in fact experiencing an awakening, that what I had clung to had never been true. I had never really felt like a girl. In hindsight, I had had felt like an imposter in change-rooms and any segregated space when I was very young. I knew I wasn’t a boy, but I felt the in-between already then. I had pushed myself to be okay with being a girl cause that’s what I was told I was and so I did that. For decades now. I took deportment lessons and learned how to perform female the best I could. I didn’t know there was any other gender I could be.
I wasn’t conscious of anything being off, really- not until I was confronted by an article I came across about Sam Smith coming out as nonbinary. I read it in September 2019 and something in me was triggered- I was mad at Sam immediately. Every condescending judgmental thing I could think of spewed into my mind so rapidly and viscerally that it shocked me. I was so confronted by Sam’s truth that I couldn’t deny what it meant to me. Maybe their truth was more like mine than I knew… my visceral shame felt like evidence. Everything started to spin. Not this TOO!!??? Why do I have to choose the hard path all the time? (so much of my mother’s voice in my head) Am I just trying to do the edgy thing? Is this for attention? Why would I choose this? As if coming out as queer in the 90’s wasn’t hard enough!”
Picture me pacing up and down the length of my apartment in Brooklyn till I came to my senses and did what I always do in these kinds of situations.
I called my sister.
By the time I was on FaceTime I had exited the house and I was pacing around the neighborhood, around the block over and over again, choking back tears.
Half way around the world in Australia my sister sat herself somewhere where she wouldn’t be interrupted by small kids while I struggled to spit it out… there were so many people on the sidewalks all of the sudden… I was crying before I could say… “Trina… I think I’m…. Nonbinary!”
My sister’s big blue eyes looked at me through the pixels…
“…oh… THERE you are!”… came her response.
All at once I knew it was true and that somehow, it would be alright.
In December that year, after a few akward months of trying to tell people my pronouns I posted something declaring my gender and introducing my pronouns as they/them on Facebook; for the sake of efficiency. Somehow I had forgotten how Facebook functions and it became this whole thing.
Thus began my social transition.
Informing people how to refer to me correctly was and continues to be awkward and clunky. Depending on my energy levels and who I’m asking (how much effort and emotional burden it’ll take to explain/advocate depending on their previous exposure to trans people) some people use my pronouns correctly consistently and some don’t. When people call me she or her it feels like they don’t know me. Like they’re talking about someone else. Some days it feels benign. Other days it feels really painful.
When you refer to me as a person and not as a “female” person, it feels like you’re trying to see me. It feels like connection. It’s also really cool when you try and keep it moving when you mess up. We all mess up all the time. Don’t make it weird.
This is usually the part of the story where someone will point out how hard it is to use they/them in a sentence because it’s plural and it’s hard to remember.
I won’t go into how the singular They is correct grammar and how it’s cool to be a considerate person regardless of how uncomfortable it is to learn new things. I’ll just give you this great article that you can read and share with your friends (thanks CNN)
So by March 2020 I was 3 months into my social transition and suddenly we were hit by a pandemic. And I was all alone in New York when we were hit hard by the virus in the very beginning. Talk about an intense opportunity to deep dive into identity and the meaning of life.
We were inside for months, and it was really scary. At the same time, for me the early pandemic months were a pretty intense reckoning with what it could mean for me to live outside of the gender binary.
I made art about it. I wrote about it a lot. I did a ton of research. I wasn’t going to get surgery….. why would I need to…. my body is perfect….it’s just a body and no one can tell me what a non binary body looks like…. I did more research. I followed some trans and non binary people online. I talked to friends who we’re having similar experiences. I found little pockets of community. I talked to doctors.
Then I randomly moved to Rural Oklahoma and had even more time to myself to explore and a whole new culture to explore within. I meditated a lot. I talked to therapists. I wrote music about it. I joined a support group. I watched a lot of videos. The more I learned about people like me, the more I started to understand myself and my feelings a lot better. I started to notice that I didn’t feel completely comfortable in my body. That perhaps I hadn’t since puberty.
By March 2021 I was researching surgery and hormones. I found the surgeon who gets the best aesthetic results. He was also the most expensive so I would have to save up. Friends offered to help me out. I called a lot of other surgeons. I made more art about it. I did a lot more research. I found some great resources. I booked the surgery for 9 months away; the last day in November, and I shaved my head.
I wanted enough time to really confront my decision. I wanted to see what it would feel like to alter my appearance in a way that draws attention, and to see how I would handle it. I tell you what, I didn’t like it. I didn’t like how much it exposed me. I didn’t like it when people were confronted by me and by my more masculine appearing gender. I went to a roadside restroom in Texas one afternoon and had a cluster of women legitimately freak out that I was in the women’s bathroom. They were confused and embarrassed and I felt confronted and ashamed.
That experience taught me a lot. I am so grateful that I am older and secure in who I am to know that their reaction has nothing to do with me. I’m grateful that though I do feel unsafe as a queer person in this world quite regularly, I have resources and a community who loves me. It made me angry for the young people discovering this amazing superpower about themselves who have to be cautious about the world around them, and that there are laws in this country that seeks to control the bodies of young people who seek to feel better about being in the bodies they have. It frustrated me that my own process of self discovery is marred by people’s fear and own sense of self rejection, that they cant accept that there have always been people like me who are somewhere in between.
Gendered bathrooms are stupid, by the way, and I feel unsafe using them. I don’t quite know what to expect in either depending on how someone reads my gender.
I don’t know the solution to it, cause some people desire a segregated space for many reasons- but I’m coming across these more and I love being in big all gender public bathrooms. Getting to the wash station and being with all genders makes me feel more like we’re all just humans.
I feel so much like myself since my top surgery, and even as my body still slowly heals from some periphery injuries that were exacerbated by surgery, I know beyond a doubt that top surgery was the right decision for me. I feel better in my body, I stand up straight and I feel stronger and more open to the world. I feel like I look more like myself and it feels so right that I’m interested in pushing further into that. Now I’m looking into low dose hormones.
Low dose hormones interest me because the more I learn about myself the more I really do want to participate in the world with a more androgynous appearance. This desire is not true for all non binary people, but I’m finding that it’s true for me. Most people assigned female at birth who take low dose Testosterone (small doses over a long period of time creating subtle changes that you can more closely monitor than high dose) can experience a redistribution of muscle mass and fat, a shift in face shape including a squarer jawline and a heavier brow bone, a thickening of the vocal chords and a bunch of other effects. Basically you go through really slow “male” puberty.
It appeals to me to nudge my outward appearance to a place where strangers may not assume that I’m female. I’d honestly rather confuse people than get misgendered female as often as I do. Plus I personally think androgyny is super hot.
These days, I feel squarely comfortable in how my gender feels within my identity. I feel confused when I’m forced to label myself as female or male. I’m confronted with that confusion each time I have to go to a public restroom, fill out a government form or book an airline ticket. I’m made to think about my gender way more often than cisgender people, because gender non conforming individuals have largely not been considered in society.
I figure If I’m going to have to work to survive outside of the confines of society, I want to be as visible as possible while doing it so I can’t be ignored.
I want to be visible for those who have come before me and for those who are stepping into their truth from here on out. Every day trans people are under attack and I’m scared, I’m not going to lie. I watch the news. I hear and read people’s opinions all the time. The fact that trans bodies are so politicized means that a lot of people I have never met have something to say about my existence. It’s a lot to process, and it makes me want to hide, a lot.
But I can’t expect change if I’m not proud of who I am. I used to feel ashamed of the “living out loud” nature of Pride. But now I get it. The more I understand who I am and how much I’ve had to fight for who I am, how much we’ve all had to fight for it, how much we’re going to have to keep fighting, the more visible I want to become. If nothing else, for the triumph of existing despite all odds.
Since my surgery, the way that I conduct myself and move through the world has changed. My relationship to the way I perform my gender has changed. My relationship to how I perform on stage has changed. With my new chest I gained the physicality that really belonged to me. I learned that I used to over perform my masculinity through moments of aggressive language and weird play-bullying, especially when I’m around men I want to connect to. These days I do it much less often and I care a little less if I feel outwardly feminine. I have accepted my masculinity more openly. Things that I felt were just strange behaviors for a girl now feel more like my own. I enjoy the things that I associate with my masculinity and femininity with much more of a sense of play and authenticity.
Ultimately, I feel lighter and happier in my skin.
These are changes that I may have found without surgery over time, maybe… but I doubt it. The ease I feel suggests otherwise. I also love it that my boobs aren’t the first thing that enter the room anymore. it is a marked difference to not have to contend with my chest being objectified before my mind is considered.
Why is it important that I’m telling you all this? Cause it’s pride and pride is complicated. I’ve lived with my own internalized homophobia my whole adult life. However there is so much I am thankful for, my community, my mentors, the young people who are on the front lines of this fight, for the black trans women who threw the first bricks at stonewall and black and brown women, trans women and gender non conforming people of color who are disproportionately in danger as more and more laws seeking to control our bodies come to pass, who ultimately show up and fight before everyone else to bring the change we need to live safely.
So much is at stake for our bodily autonomy in America right now, and I’m one of the really fortunate ones who has the space to share my story. Hopefully I can offer a little insight into the ongoing process of discovering one’s place in the world. Perhaps I can help you to believe trans and gender non conforming people when they’re telling you their story.
The revolutionary act of going deeper into who we are and how we can show up for each other is a huge part of the solution for a lot of the world’s problems right now, I believe it with my whole being.
Let’s come together and be curious about each other my friends.
Big love to you.
