Manhood

Growing up a transman in a suburban household

Suburbia

Growing up in a suburban culture allowed me to see very little to no diversity. I was the diversity. I was a little black girl in a sea of white. To be different was to be excluded, so I blended in. I “acted white” and acted like all the other girls in my Kindergarten class. If you were to ask me, “I am Christina. I am 5 years old. I like bunnies. And skirts. And pb&js. And the alphabet. And naps. And bunnies. And swings. And princesses. And barrettes. And flowers. And coloring. And barbies. And slides. And bunnies. And bubbles. And cartwheels. And cookies. And butterflies.”

I was run on sentences. And broken breaths between incomplete thoughts. My tangents did not connect. They did not make sense. I did not make a clear picture when connecting my dots. Instead I created the one others wanted to see. Zig zags. Criss crosses. Cross hatching. Differentiating something from nothing. I drew bunnies from race cars using all the same components. I drew bunnies because that is what girls liked. That was a time when is was ok to do what I like as long as it was in the bounds of what was considered girl.

Children learn gender, and the older generation is at fault for teaching the confinements of it. My dreams escaped the limitations of “girl”. In all my dreams I was a boy. What does it mean to dream myself a gender? What does it mean to hold that secret beneath my tongue? Gender is a fragile thing. It is built on specific characteristics that society has deemed either masculine or feminine.

Being a Man In a Woman’s Body

Control is something I do not own. It has been slowly been stripped away from this body I call not my own. There is something lethargic about free falling with someone else’s hand on the rip cord. At the end of the day if I hit the hard pavement it will not have mattered. Her hand chose my fate.

My body is a minefield. While exploring it you take one wrong step and I am not responsible for the havoc that may occur. My body is not my control but my anger. My body is the forgotten piano tucked away in the basement. My body is Gossip girl season 4: unnecessary. My body is not a metaphor. My body is just not a body My body is cage. My body is a shell of my outgrown self left to decay. In this self, I am uncomfortable. Things pressing. Growing. Not growing. It’s hard to find pleasure in anything, when my existence is nothing. It isn’t lost. I did not misplace it. Maybe it was stripped away. Maybe it slowly fell out of me like baby teeth. Maybe they were my baby teeth. Maybe it escaped from my body on first bleed. Maybe it was when I became a “woman”. When I was told that I couldn’t be who I was but who I am supposed to become.

What does it mean to be a man?

To be a man is easy for me. It means to be myself. To describe what being a man means is going down a slippery slope. As children we are taught what being a girl means and what being a boy isn’t. From the young age of 5 alone I knew I did not fit the confines of society’s gender.

Coming out to my parents was complicated. I was 16 years old. I was scraped knees and foul mouth. I was resistance and liberation. They asked me, “Do you know it means to be a man?” To me, man is “flat-chested and low octaves”. Outside of that I did not have an answer. I am not naive enough to start listing off traits of normative masculinity. I am strong, independent, and competitive. However, I have never associated these characteristics with men. These are just human traits society has associated with men.

I can only say that I have never felt like a girl. I feel it in the pronouns. The first time someone identified me as a man was when I was 18. After weeks of arguments with my parents, I had chopped my hair off. That day I walked into a store and was greeted with a, “Hello sir”. Something as simple as that plastered a smile across my face for a full week.

My upbringing was less than ideal. I had very little support from family or friends. But I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. If this seems hard to believe take the diamond for example. Which was once a lump of coal slipped into the stockings of bad primordial children. Diamonds are made of carbon under pressure.

For me, being a man is decomposing and retaining composure. My atoms rearrange themselves when I’m not looking. Looking in the mirror and seeing a boy looking back. My identity is a light bulb. What electricity is heating it? Is my gender a coal mine? If my gender is a coal mine, is my sexuality a nuclear reactor? Has my sexuality ever split like an atom? Could it cause a nuclear reaction?

Coming out to my parents was complicated. I was 16 years old. I was scraped knees and foul mouth. I was resistance and liberation. They said the wrong thing. They should have said, “This is nothing new. You have always been our son.”