Jackie Curtis In Reverse: A Story About Language and Dysphoria.

I’ve never been able to really describe my gender. I know it’s there, but I can’t describe it in the words that people want.

The problem, in the end, is my assigned sex.

Being assigned female isn’t a problem to me in the way that it would be for a trans man; I know this because my best friend is a trans man, and I’ve borne witness to his transition in the years that we’ve known each other. I know the ways in which our experiences of gender and sex diverge, and I know that his problem and my problem are very different.

I very rarely get physical dysphoria. I’m for the most part fine with having breasts, and have no problems at all with the downstairs bits (though, I think, there is a single improvement that they could do with). My body isn’t the problem, and it never has been.

But, if I present my gender the way I want to — if I dress how I want, if I wear or don’t wear makeup, etc. — people will, invariably, read me as female. Most of the time, I can ignore this, because my gender can sit separate from the rest of me for a while. But sometimes?

Sometimes, it $%^@ing sucks.

I wish, sometimes, that I could “look trans.” I know that that’s not the “right” feeling to have, but I wish, sometimes, that I were assigned male, just so that I would look the way I want to.

My gender presentation idols have always been the avant garde dudes of the seventies glam scene, and the trans women and queens of the sixties — especially the girls who ran with Andy Warhol. I live for the looks served by their successors, and I’ve, at times, described my gender as “Jackie Curtis, in reverse.”

Jackie, for a long time, has been the one figure I can look at and see myself in. Her big red hair and torn stockings; his James Dean period; her brilliant rise and fall and the fluid nature of his gender presentation.

I think about the red glitter on her grave, the absurdity of her poetry and plays. Her genius is what I aspire to, and her failings are what I try hardest to avoid.

The difference is that, to be seen, she never had to transition medically. Jackie was Jackie, and the scene loved Jackie. Lou Reed put her, Holly, and Candy in a song, because they were superstars whether or not they took hormones.

I don’t think I have that option.

But what’s the point in transitioning hormonally, if afterward, I turn right around and try to look femme? What’s the point in getting rid of my social dysphoria, if it’s only going to lead to physical dysphoria and potential physical danger?

I’m trapped; not in my body, but in the liminal space that society still hems me into. Transmasc doesn’t feel right, and I don’t fit in as a butch, either. I can’t wear my chest unbound with an open shirt, because society says my breasts are invariably sexual. I will look like a woman for the rest of my life, if I don’t take testosterone, and I don’t want to look like the man I’ll probably resemble if I do.

The words, categories, “treatments,” and transitions we have all fail me.

So all I can do is describe myself. I’ve been Jackie in reverse; I’ve been lines from “Lola” and “All the Young Dudes;” I’ve used the letter X; I’ve been a thousand fictional characters, played a million roles, wished the words made sense to other people.

I don’t want a “sex change;” I want the world to change its attitudes about my sex, so that my gender becomes visible.

When the dysphoria is at its worst, it feels like it never will, or won’t in my lifetime. I feel powerless, too, and alone. I can only seek refuge in Jackie and her contemporaries, or try and write my truth out into the world.

Trying to do that, though, is just as difficult. How do you describe something the world doesn’t have the words for?

I’ve seen people try and invent words, and I’m all for that, in theory. But in practice? For myself? I don’t have the courage. I’ve seen the way people react when you invent or introduce a new word for a gender, and I don’t want to bring that on myself.

And besides, I wouldn’t even know how to say it, what the word would be. Glam butch? Butch has connections to lesbianism that, in avoiding womanhood, I don’t really want to court. I use it, often, because it’s the closest descriptor, but it doesn’t feel right. Spacequeer? It might work, but it feels flighty, superficial.

My gender lives somewhere in between cherry cola champagne, the metallic silver garments of the Kryptonians in the original Superman: the Movie, and the idea that Mystique was right when she said “we shouldn’t have to” fit in in X2: X-Men United. It speaks in metaphors, not a pithy one or two words. It seeks validation from a history that I’m not entirely sure I have a real right to claim. My gender has glitter and wings and warfare in it, and I wish I could share it.

I’ve read a lot of poetry. I know a lot of the things women use to describe womanhood, their metaphors and storms and “eat[ing] men like air.” The words are moving, and I find myself envious.

To have a tradition of understanding like that! To know that millions of women before you felt the same metaphor burning in your bones! To be able to find a home inside it!

I don’t have that. I only have myself, and the idea that maybe, if I write enough, if I speak the words as often as I can, I might be able to find another person who knows them the way I do, who feels the same pull away from that which we’ve been pushed toward, who lives outside looking in.

How do you make your gender visible? Is it even possible, if your gender is so small, so localized?

Am I, like Jackie, simply singular?

And is that something to mourn? Or to celebrate?

I still don’t know.