One Year on Testosterone: Time, Spirituality, and the (Un)Gendering of Blackness

A year has now passed since I started hormone replacement therapy, one year on testosterone should be a call for celebrations and indeed in some ways I am celebrating. Celebrating my commitment to self, celebrating my choosing life, celebrating the burgeoning fluff on my cheeks and my chin. So much has changed in the space of a year, yet in the openings of change and through the process of transitions, the growth cycles one has to experience are not always pleasant or easy. I always feel plagued with a sense of differentness, I say plagued because I am still trying to integrate this sense of idiosyncrasy into my life so as to feel peace and wholeness within it. When you feel such a deep sense of distinctiveness, it is often difficult to find your way or even know what a true home or community looks and feels like. There comes a point in your life that you realise you may have to create home for yourself, and for some time you may be the only resident. So, today I want to share with you just some glimpses into my personal place of residence and refuge.

One key lesson I have learnt this year, after reading Octavia Butler’s (1993) Parable of the Sower, is that indeed “the only lasting truth is change” (p.3), as my body changes I too must be willing to change with it. Octavia repeatedly writes throughout this novel that God is Change, and I think of this in relation to the biblical concept: God is Love. What is the relationship between change and love? I think that it is one that suggests an interdependent relationship between the two concepts, if we are to truly love we must be willing to change. That my process of transition and change in my body, is an act of love in itself for myself. With that, comes the vision of expanding masculinity that bell hooks delivered to us in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love in which she argued that we all must be willing to change in order to be able to truly experience love. The role masculinity plays in my life has sharply changed throughout this year and it is my responsibility to stay abreast to this transformation and continually change, expand, hold myself accountable, and grow as a result of it — building on ideas I developed just over a year ago when I wrote about reimagining masculinity. How do I show up better in the world? How do I simultaneously heal? How do I extend love and gratitude in all of my ways of living? These are questions I contemplate every single day. They are questions I expect will shape a large part of my life, the need to imagine new terrains of being, of self, and of masculinity. Related to this change and love is an unshakable need to allow my vision of this world too to change and transform beyond all bounds of possibility, let me explain.

I have spent a lot of time over the past year, especially the past few months (even pre-quarantine) with my own thoughts and feelings about these things. Questioning myself about who I am, and who I truly want to be in this world. Asking myself, what my truth is and how do I consistently live it out. Black feminist thought is always a lifeline for me, a reason to continue living and imagining more than I am. A space of deep compassion and love, both in the friendships with Black women in my life, and in the beautiful writings of both the living and the ancestral women who chose to expand this world. Opening my world to Black feminist speculative fiction has particularly opened so many worlds of possibility to me. What does it mean to live your life as speculative fiction? To wake up every day and continue to engage in the praxis of creating your own gender, creating a vision of truth and of liberation within your body, spirit, and soul. To engage in a deep praxis of imagining, and in radical commitments to hope for the wider world. To even construct and create my own iteration of gender that defies the bounds of time, of the body, and of the current perception of trans validity.

In order to access my hormones a year ago I had to deliver “the trans narrative” to a gender specialist. This is the narrative that I knew I was trans circa the age 5 and that I essentially only resonate with maleness in my mind and in my body. Whilst I have always felt a strong level of differentness, this narrative doesn’t speak my truth, though had I approached the appointment in any other way I may have been denied access to life saving hormones. The Trans narrative is held for a number of reasons — one being that it is very true for a lot of trans people and I deeply respect that — these are the Trans people that have often paved the way and fought the fight for all of us to have access to life saving treatment. Though the assault on trans rights and trans humanity call for homogeneity in the community to assert ourselves as valid, thus I do believe it a radical act to push against this false essentialism of our community. Whilst calling for this, I equally acknowledge my privilege in being able to imagine that trans feminine people may not always have given their identities exist at such a place of vitriol from TERFs and beyond. Still, what a radical space we all may cultivate wherein we do not exist to validate our identities for science, for TERFs, for cis-people in general — and only for ourselves, whatever the construction of that identity may be. I want to have visionary spaces with my trans sisters and siblings in which we all feel safe and able to explore the bounds and the boundlessness of our gender(s). Asé.

For me, to understand my Transness and identity I have realised I must allow myself to live in a constant space of liminality. This often makes me wonder what I am asking of the world to understand of me — that I may look to them as a woman or a man but that I am truly asking of everyone I ever encounter to traverse these categories. To engage in deep imagination with me, to skywalk and transmute any existing perceptions of gender. When understood as only a woman, and, when understood as only a man I feel a certain level of soul death. As if an entire part of me is being erased and I have no say or power in the process. That is why ‘non-binary’ is the identity that comes closest (in the English language) to explaining my physical experience in this world. Though through this year I have been able to explore the ways that my gender is to me a spiritual and soul level experience. I have been able to connect with Orisha’s and deities for whom gender was either non-existent, or an experience in which they embodied all dimensions of the gender spectrum. To be mother, father, both, and neither — even child and parent within one body is the terrains I want to explore. I have learnt many histories of my people across Africa living prior to colonial rule in which gender functioned in ways that most of us would struggle to even conceptualise today.

There is also a question of time at play here. To me, my transition is a both a fugitive rupture within, and a reclamation of, time. What does it mean for me to be able to sculpt my own genealogy of self, to not be told that I must exist at one binary side of a spectrum to be valid? I have chosen, in a queer black radical act of self-definition, to personally divest from the narratives of complete ‘death’ of self that undergird the medical model of transition. I choose to not leave all parts of myself behind, to reclaim my inner child in all of her fullness and give her all of the love and care she deserved. To assert that integrating my past in to my present and my future no less validates who I am, and, who I was. I spoke to a friend this morning about death/birth processes and the deep depression one may often feel within these processes. She spoke to the need for soul-retrieval, that when we experience death processes in life, our souls can become fragmented and if we do not retrieve the parts of our self that we need we may feel lost and broken. I know what parts of myself my soul needs to feel whole and embodied; I choose to claim those parts of self in this process regardless of whether that may be understood by others.

Sometimes, I think about the location and experience of dark-skinned black womanhood. That this was not an experience I could ever divest from, nor can ever divest from, given the relationship between being astutely aware of self, and survival. I have not fully developed my thinking around this yet, it is something I will sit with for longer and extrapolate deeper. Though I must make clear that centring the expansiveness of transness is my aim, and that my experience must not be put at odds or used to discredit anyone else within the community — multiple experiences must be able to exist at once. Let us not limit the vastness of our imaginations or, more importantly, the expansive ways that black womanhood exists and can exist in bodies that take every single form.

Still, I stand in the Wake of my former self; I grieve her not because she has died but because I am too oft told I must leave her behind. That is why I am committed to living my life as spiritual speculative fiction — as so many black people that have come before me have done to survive — and to live. To imagine something in my mind and spirit that does not exist in the current mass imagination, but something that has existed in my ancestors — freedom. I think of Hortense Spillers conception of the ungendering of black flesh, I think of C. Riley Snorton’s (2017) examination of ungendering and trans capability as a sight of fugitivity and a mechanism for Black people to gain their freedom in the antebellum South, (p.59):

The ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive manoeuvres wherein the dichotomized and collapsed designations of male-man-masculine and female-woman-feminine remained open — that is fungible — and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow… being in a world where gender — though biologized — was not fixed but fungible, which is to say, revisable within blackness, as a condition of possibility

To think of gendering and ungendering as a category of possibility and transformation is the work and the life I commit to living. To draw on the knowledge, power, and vision of our collective ancestors to find the ability to imagine and traverse reality. This is the Wake Work Christine Sharpe (2016) spoke of, a wake being a “ritual through which we enact grief and memory…a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives” (p.16–18). That whilst I stand in the Wake of my former self, I use this as a portal of (un)gendered imagination and of inspiration — an act of grief but also of memory of how I have lived in this life and how I may have lived in many others. To even approach this work viewing my body and soul as a sight through which my ancestors have inscribed many truths and many memories that I can access, not through literature or artefacts, but through spiritual rituals and connection that support my understanding of self.

Christina asks of us that “we must be undiscipled” (p.13), Saidiya Hartmann (2019) allows us to imagine our own lives as “beautiful experiments”, to engage in her conceptualisation of the wayward or waywardness as “insurgent grounds that enables new possibilities and new vocabularies… it is a queer resource of black survival”. She writes, (p.227–228):

Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones created by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life… an ongoing exploration of what might be… it is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive.

How much of ourselves do we allow to become silenced, to remain asleep or unconscious to the world? How deeply are we committed to the material and possible, that we neglect the immaterial and impossible? Giving ourselves the purest right to imagine, the right to reject and revolutionise the worlds that we live in and ourselves from the inside out. To engage in wayward beautiful experiments, to dance and imagine with our ancestors in the present and the future, to unchain and unfix ourselves from the bounds of time and of material ‘reality’. What a beautiful possibility.

So, I have nothing more to leave you with than a reminder that this is just a fraction of the thoughts and feelings I have experienced over this past year on testosterone. Sometimes, I get sad that my beard is yet to connect (L), or that my body still engages in the monthly shedding of the lining of my uterus. Though I have become thankful for this body that carries me, and thankful for the pace at which my transition is going — it reminds me not to hold on to time too dearly. That my body is my body and the ways that it changes and moulds slowly into what I ask it to be is a blessed process that I am lucky enough to be the closest observer of. Love is the word and principle that underwrites all that I have explored here, love in the most expansive form of the word. I am learning new ways to love myself every day and new ways to engage in love with my community, and both my chosen and familial family. I am eternally thankful for this process that I am on, and today, just like every other day I will continue to ask myself how I can grow, how I can better love, and how I can change.