Legally Blond: T-Girl Gets an Education.
Well how’s about that? After all these years I’ve finally done it!
My right index finger hovered above the red submit button.
Eye-blink. Sent. Eye-blink.
A burst of digitised balloons and streamers announced the fact that I had now submitted my thesis for the M.A. in Women’s Studies at University College Cork, Ireland.
My head was creaking from the socialising of the night before, sans alcool. I squinted through the cracked floorboards of my skull with a stunned wonderment.
Well fuck me, after all this time, I’d finally done it.
Would it be possible, I thought to myself, at the matronly age of 46, for me to process the enormity of this moment and let it in? That through the months of toiling away within thunderstorms of cogitation, cigarettes and coffee, I had been an illustration of agency in action? That I had developed the skill and discipline to be a worthy scholar? That I could now aim my arrows higher than ever before?
Don’t ask me when I started to write this mutha.
I’m suffering from momnesia.
I’d carried it lovingly to term, yet its birth, though profound, still reeks of the anticlimax.
Somehow, I managed to transmute my transsexual life story into the objective, dispassionate and rational prose required to theorise eloquently about my own ontology, if you please. I can go up to the grown-up table now and hobnob with the often prolix discourses that attempt to define us trans*folks.
No more the purple prose that expressed the joys and agonies of an identity taking control of its own formation. I was able to show the intricacies that re-authorship of one’s life plot entails, the creation of space for such things in a world that doesn’t understand such feats of self-preservation. I went into this academic project, much like I did transition itself, a cowed neophyte, unsure of the steps I was taking, but guided all the while by a warmth in my viscera, the long absent gut feeling, that I was growing in the right direction. I felt it in my core, flickering like a compass needle. And I’ve emerged from the voyage into myself empowered and embodied.
All that research.
So much knowledge it felt it would cripple my mind. Glazed lines rippled in front of me with a meaning I couldn’t glean from them. Then the dysphoric dips in self worth when I couldn’t understand them. Then suddenly, the seamless emergence of experiences I had undergone internally in the past, burst out of these lines of scholarship like small epiphanies, moulding my understanding of the what, where, when and why? of my life’s decision to Be.
For that’s what it all boils down to. Human beings, when their backs are placed against the wall, will do whatever it takes to stay alive. Transition, for me, was to learn the art of healing on a grand scale. It was high time. No-one can possibly know, when I appear in my role of shop girl at till #21, effusively helpful with my ‘Would you like a bag?’ badinage, the sheer effort of will such nonchalance entails behind the scenes. I devised the mathematics of my being and breathed my life force into the equations. That’s something to be celebrated goddammit.
I deserve my saxophone solo in words.
My Life in Theory: The Importance of Narrativity to the Formation, Development and Sustainment of the Trans* Identity in a Predominately Cisnormative Society.
It makes more sense when read than spoken. It sounds like a great big bamboozling bitch of a thing when it lumbers off my tongue. It stops people’s mental traffic, including my own. But it signifies the period where I de-pathologised myself to myself. That beneath all the new clothes and the budding secondary sex characteristics lies a story of a human being taking control of their own life path. That’s some feat, let me tell you. I polished and gleamed up the geometry of my being, making its coordinates clearer to me in the process. Such knowledge made me clearer to myself, and I could finally watch the numb clouds of long term trauma lift a little and let me make sense of myself.
I established that Fiona Leigh had a long history, hiding in an attic behind the compromised formation that was my male identity. When one has been invisibilized it’s hard to give oneself credit with the fact that one exists. I’m tired of mentally proffering myself on a platter to strangers’ eyes, hoping my transformation will be read and appreciated. I’m tired of waking every morning and polishing myself up, to see me gradually rusting as the day enfolds, a victim of my own narratives of low self-esteem.
I've created an oil well in my being. It’s time to develop the pumpjack to bring my potential gushing to the surface.