Begin Again As You Mean To Go On

Or: How To Sweep Up the Ruins of a Dead Life and Refashion Them Into Something New

It is no secret that I’ve had an execrable past few months. I’ve complained long and hard about them through these pages, but I’ve been frustratingly short on ideas as to how to lift myself up from this malaise. To be sure, I have been wallowing. The task of actually building a life I enjoy seemingly too far beyond my imaginary powers, as though they had been tapped dry simply through the daily act of manifesting myself as Chloe. There just wasn’t enough left over for me to find a path forward.

Fortunately, though in this case it is very unfortunate, I received a shock to my system last week in the form of a long letter from a woman who has been one of the biggest influences and inspirations in my life essentially disavowing that I am trans, disowning her relationship with me, and framing my transition as trying to be too much like her (what astounding ego!) and a fetishization of noxious cultural stereotypes about femininity. Though I had a clue that she had thought this, her silence over the past few months since I’d told her speaking volumes, I hadn’t ever expected her to ever state her revulsion so explicitly. It hurt beyond measure and had me doubting, for the first time since I started, whether this whole endeavor was worth it.

Then on Saturday morning the gray skies returned and with it my memory of how I best cope with these assaults upon my existence. I did a lot of good work last winter, learned a lot about how I deal with stresses and put in place a lot of redundant systems to keep me focused. Lover of chaos though I be, I am a person who needs to make plans, who has always needed to make plans, if I’m to accomplish anything. Nothing has ever come without fighting for it.

So with the rains returned and my will replenished, I am redoubling my efforts. I still don’t know how I’m going to find solutions to any of the problems on my plate any time soon, but as long as I can stay focused on my plan I have faith that solutions will reveal themselves. The problems are many- the necessity of moving out of my place, the crippling loneliness and disconnection I feel from nearly everyone, the necessity of paying off at least half of my $17,000 in debt before I can leave my abusive job, the necessity of finding a new job, the near-overwhelming push of my wanderlust to throw in the towel on Portland and find a new city to make a home in- and only the first has a ready solution.

Yet, just as the Chloe Coping Mechanisms discovered last winter helped me keep my head during the first months of transition, so too will they help me flesh out the finer points of restructuring my personality into something a *smidge* less self-destructive. If I remain focused on self-care and not on accommodating the doubts of people still grappling with the thought that I’m a woman I should be able to make it through this winter a better woman.

So this is how I found myself back at the gym Saturday morning, cursing the sluggish bourbon still oozing its way through my circulatory system, and willing my feet to keep climbing that interminable stairway, images of the Inca Trail flashing before my eyes as I imagined summiting Dead Woman’s Pass again. Step 1 of my self-care must always be physicality. Keep the blood pumping, get the skin sweating, let the mind check out from its ceaseless analyzing. Do this daily and watch your spirits improve beyond measure. Step 2 is the hard one- don’t drink from depression. Drink for celebration or as reward. Find more positive outlets for disaffection than in the bottom of a barrel. Drink to remember, not to forget.

Which is a clear corollary to Step 3- keep your mental breakdowns private. It is inevitable that the stresses of daily existence will grow to be overwhelming from time to time and I will want to make a public play for sympathy. Never forget how shitty these make you feel after the fact. Keep your shit together until you can find someone you feel comfortable venting it to. I don’t really have anyone like that right now. I try with various people but the voice I hear most is my own, “Shut the fuck up, Chloe. No one cares about the stresses of an employed white trans girl when there are hundreds of girls out there who can’t get access to healthcare, can’t get jobs, have no hope of housing, and are daily victims of violence.” I am unquestionably privileged. The worst violence I regularly face is the self-inflicted kind. Voicing my issues in a public sphere just wraps me in so much self-loathing, realizing just how inconsequential my troubles are. So keep that shit here in a private arena and attempt to maintain societal focus on those trans women who lack any sort of personal or economic safety.

Finally, keep writing. The more you do it, the easier it gets. Eventually you will find something worthwhile to say, eventually you will legitimize this idea you’ve had for your whole life that you’re a writer. All you need to do is keep at it. Look at the posts from the start of this blog versus the book reviews you’ve turned in lately. Recognize that, though they are still so very dissatisfying, they’re better. Stop letting the ingrained inferiority of not being a part of the lettered classes stop you from even trying to make words. Realize that for the classist trap that it is and that most of your favorite authors are of the self-educated sort and that, while this lack of experience in the halls of academia leaves you at a severe disadvantage when it comes to attaining work as a writer and you don’t know how to politick in worlds like that, the internet is a vast refuge of alternatives. A girl can get published if she’s willing to run her head against the obstinate wall of editors enough times. You know all about failure, what are a few more?

So that’s the plan. It always looks so pat when it’s on paper, it’s the application that is the actual hard part. But I’ve found just having my goals and rationales written some place that I can readily return to, like, say, on this blog, does wonders for re-entrenching myself in moments of doubt. This is the plan as of today. Things will get better, because they really can not get worse. All that can be lost has, and now we enter into the far more exciting stage of “what now?”

I am a pastiche of every woman I’ve ever loved

I got to work this morning, went to the restroom and caught a look of myself in the mirror. Brown cardigan, maroon striped tee, blue jeans. I am dressed exactly like my ex-wife. FML

Hooked on Feeling

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Scrolling back through my most recent posts it looks as though I’ve not updated anything since right before coming out at work and going full-time. Though that’s a mere two months ago, so much has happened since then that it seems like another lifetime. If you check this space regularly you may have noticed that all the posts disappeared for a while. That was intentional. I became very self conscious of just how personal some of the things I’ve written were and set them all to private until recently. So what brings me back here after so long? Why return these late night ramblings and confessions to the voyeuristic internet?

Put simply, I need this space. I arrogantly presumed that, with coming out on Facebook and going full-time, the hardest struggles were behind me and the long sleepless nights of charting the woodgrain on my walls were ended. I could be Chloe everywhere so what struggles remained? Never let it be said that I don’t make stupid decisions. Nothing is ever finished, not really. No sooner had I shuttered these pages than I found myself taking to Facebook again and again to bleat my lonely cries of anguish and loss across friend’s newsfeeds. I know it may not seem that way, given my tendency to over share personal thoughts, but I’m a pretty private person. I am fairly selective about who I open up to and who I feel comfortable knowing certain things about me and telegraphing my slow motion mental collapse across Facebook, even as heavily filtered as I keep my friends feed, let far too many people in on aspects of myself that I prefer to keep contained as best as I can. I’d like to maintain at least one scrap of dignity during this long descent.

So the rationale now is that I’ll put those thoughts here and avoid needlessly concerning people who I’m not particularly close to and save myself the added embarrassment of another public meltdown as I figure out how to best express this wellspring of new emotions I find whirling within me. Because it is very much a learning experience.

For most of my life I’ve stood at a remove from most of the events in my life. While I feel very strongly about things on a larger political scale, fight and argue very loudly against oppressive policies and language and struggle in every way possible to tear down disparate power structures and seek to empower people to realize their own internal power and abilities, I’ve never really felt things at a personal level. Things that should cause me a lot of hurt and anguish have slid right off me, I’ve dealt with loss and betrayal from a logical and rational survival point of view- sever the offending party from my life and just keep moving forward. Pragmatism in lieu of sentimentality. It was useful, it has helped me keep my head in more tricky situations than I can count and given me a solid reputation as a level-headed problem solver, but it also kept me from ever feeling as though I were a part of anything, from being a participant in a shared moment of empathy. It’s not that I feel sociopathic, I am very acutely aware of when the friends I have are in distress and in need of care. It’s more that their distress didn’t make me feel anything. I could go through the motions learned through watching others, mutter sympathetic words (there there, this too will pass), but at the end of it all I didn’t feel closer to this person from having been taken into their confidence, I felt as though I had gone through a checklist of how a healthy and compassionate person responds to friends in crisis, but through it all I never felt myself personally involved in the matter. This ate at me for years, made me question my sanity, and made me fear that I was psychopathic. The realization that I wasn’t feeling or connecting with people like everyone else did, like I very much desired to, was a major deciding factor for me in deciding to pursue transition.

Fast forward to now, four months after starting on hormones, and this situation has utterly reversed itself. I am a quivering exposed nerve, sucking up sensations at a rate I am utterly unprepared for processing. I feel so very aware of every feeling coursing through me at every moment that I don’t know how to cope with this influx of emotion. Harsh words hit so much harder now, they stick and eat away like so much corrosive acid. Those rare occasions in which someone evinces romantic interest in me, I swoon, awash in joy and triumph. When the brief flame of attraction is smothered under economic concerns that cause them to leave town, I am gutted, this new absence bringing up every preceding abandonment in my life (birth parents, adoptive parents, first boyfriend, first girlfriend, roommates, friends beyond counting who refuse my calls, my ex-wife) and just leaves me battered and destroyed. A quivering wreck of despair who has no clue as to how to deal with these new feelings in a non-destructive way. So I find myself, again and again, bellying back up to my bar for the amber tinctures that sooth me for a time and venting my spleen across social media sites.

This is not progress. This is exchanging one failed way of experiencing emotions with its converse. I need to find the happy middle between not feeling and feeling far too much. I can’t be retreating to the bathroom at work every time the patriarchal fuck in the cafeteria misgenders me, or screaming my despair into the void every time I come into conflict with my ex. So for the time being, until I learn how to deal with things in real time, I’ll put that shit here. I don’t want this space to be about my maudlin adventures as a newly divorced 30+ trans woman in the depression capital of the US, though.

I wanted, with all of the egoism inherent with such a desire, to be able to say something important or add something relevant to the ways in which western culture interprets gender identity or shine a light on the misogyny that underlies the dominant culture’s reaction to trans women as read through my experiences trying to live the life I had built for myself before transitioning. A life that is increasingly fragmented and isolated, so far from what I thought would happen when I first began pursuing transition back in January. I’ve lost so much of what I had then, and it’s really easy for me to get hung up on that at every given opportunity. But I do not want to lose sight of what I’ve gained- the ability to experience my own emotions, to feel at home in the skin I inhabit, the sheer relief I feel when I get read as my true gender and treated as such. That makes it worth it. In spite of all the tears and all the breakdowns and the soul crushing loneliness, it is worth it. I am still Chloe and I am never going to go away again.

Required Reading: Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Earlier this year, when I first started to try to get people to understand what I meant when I said that I was transgender, I searched high and low for any texts that I could give people to describe the dissociation from my body, the self-loathing I carried with me everywhere, the complete sense of helpless panic mixed with the certainty that I needed to do something. I wanted to find just one text that could express all of that and help others understand why I’d undertaken, why I had very much needed to undertake, such a drastic process. I had a lot more optimism then. These days I don’t really care if people understand me so long as they respect my wishes and don’t call me by my old name, male pronouns, or “it.” Real world interactions with people almost always lead me to lower my expectations.

So imagine my delight when people on the message boards I belong to started talking about a new book that finally “got” it. Words written from the heart of an eloquent trans woman who was able to finally express all of the things we’d been struggling to get across to people, words that helped this subculture of which I’m a part begin to define ourselves in language we all understand rather than relying upon clinicians and sociologists to observe us and make notes, like so many books on being trans have done already (I’m looking at you True Selves and My Brother, My Sister).

Instead, here was a fiery punk rock girl revealing the full tumult of living as a trans woman. Not just the before-and-after fixation that so much of the press likes to focus on, but the messy little details that are nearly always overlooked- like how do begin to navigate the world as a single woman, how do you begin try to work past being being physically present but mentally absent from nearly every social situation, how do you ever leave behind the pain and hurt of all those years fighting against yourself and manage to live a more open life? And to do so with whip-smart prose and a style that crackles with intensity and wit is all the more appreciated. Imogen Binnie is no mere niche author of a subculture only beginning to create its own culture, but a writer of superb skill (seriously you all should read some of the articles she’s written for Maximum Rock ‘n Roll) who I hope will become a household name as she continues writing.

Nevada is the story of Maria Griffiths, a trans woman living in Brooklyn who has just been simultaneously dumped and fired and is feeling quite adrift from her life and has no idea how to move forward and so steals her girlfriend’s car for an impromptu roadtrip to the Pacific. Along the way she meets James, a boy working in a small town Wal-Mart somewhere near Reno and realizes that he’s like she was at 20- lost, trying to present as a man but failing at it, stuck in a relationship he kind of just fell into, and hiding it all under a thick haze of marijuana. As she helps James face the specter of his own dysphoria and take those first painfully hard steps of admitting that he’s maybe/possibly/probably trans, she also gets a chance to process through the ruins of her own life and realize the things that she’s also been avoiding.

I wanted to write this review without falling into the mire of autobiographical reflections and over-sharing of very intimate details of my life because I feel as though I’ve done too much of that far too publicly this year and I’m kind of feeling pretty self-conscious about broadcasting it like I did and kind of really tired of thinking about myself on a constant basis. Yet the more of the book I read, the more I realized that it’s impossible to extricate myself from this review because, more than anything, reading Nevada was an exercise in finding parallels with my own life. Barely a page went by where I didn’t find myself nodding along with a thought a character has, wincing in shared dismay at an unfortunate event, and finding my eyes grow moist with tender recognition when the action moves out of Brooklyn and into the barren wastes of Nevada and we meet James, whose entire storyline reads as a fictionalised retelling of the three long and dark years I spent living in Tucson.

That’s a big part of the value of this book for me. Until recently I didn’t know many trans women and none well enough to where I felt comfortable asking about the very personal aspects of living that fill our days, so questions like “am I the only one who has to pretend that they’re not having sex with another person in order to get off” or “how is it that I can argue vehemently for the rights and freedom of others but find it impossible to vocalize anything about my own personal wants and needs” or “why does this misogynistic porn seem to be one of the few things I find enticing” (btw: this book is worth reading if only for the chapter in which Binnie conclusively kills off the dated and oppressive concept of autogynophilia) were all just big question marks that I chalked up to “I’m crazy” instead of “I’m trans.” Reading Nevada, though, really brought home to me just how similar my own road to accepting that I’m a trans woman is to nearly every other trans woman I’ve come to know. I may not be a beautiful and unique snowflake of dysfunction but I am also not alone. Which, when you’ve spent so many years fearing and hating yourself for things you can’t wish, smoke, or drink away, is an incredibly relieving thing to find out.

For example, I spent most of my adult life thinking that I couldn’t be trans because I didn’t fit the constrained and narrow view of what I thought, of what society tells us, that trans girls are. By which I mean the outdated and discredited Harry Benjamin Standards of Care that dictate that all trans women always present as super femme, always sit down to pee, and if they find women’s bodies attractive well, they couldn’t be lesbians, they’re just perverted men. I could never fit into that definition and lacked any other examples as to how I could approach my own femininity so could never make the mental leap from seeing others being fulfilled by properly experiencing and expressing their gender to imagining myself so fulfilled and it tore me apart whenever I’d think about it, which was pretty much constantly. To avoid having to think about it I would just shut down and not process. I drank whiskey like water, smoked enough weed to fund an entire Mexican drug war, and hid in my apartment obsessively reading pretty much anything that fell into my lap (hence my Goodreads account being the social media site I’ve belonged to the longest), hating everything, and dissociating from my every day existence as a boy. Yet here it turns out that all of the fucked up weird shit that I did to cope or to process or to deny is pretty much a checklist that nearly every other trans woman I have come to know has done as well.

Which explains why every trans woman I know who has read it says that if you want to know about being trans, read Nevada. This is an important book, for me personally, for trans women as a group, and for a society raised on caricatures of trans women like Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill or the sexually predatory trans woman who wants nothing more than to trick a man or a lesbian into sex (seriously, how do people not understand just how very sexually dysfunctional most of us are?) that has no idea how to consider us as complex multi-faceted people.

One Day More

By this time tomorrow it will have ended. I will have been forced to wear boy clothes for the last time and will be free to be me, to be Chloe, in all walks of my life forever. My managers and HR are briefed and ready and tomorrow morning at ten o’clock we will assemble the staff in a conference room and tell them about me. This still scares the hell out of me, all my other coming out experiences were to people who at least knew what a transgender person was even if they didn’t personally know any. This environment is decidedly conservative, though, both in its politics (I mean what did you expect? It’s a bank) and in its personnel (most of my coworkers were born and raised in Troutdale, a decidedly redneck outlying suburb of Portland). But since I know this and already have no respect for them, I am not worried in the least what they think.

For once the law is on my side and you can be damn sure I know how and am willing to use it to the best of my advantage to protect my employment and teach some much-needed lessons in basic human tolerance. I’ve still stocked up on some anti-anxiety meds just in case my bravado fails me in the moment, though. I’m an eagle scout to my core, I guess, and being prepared a bone deep tenet of mine. This is why I’ve also clung onto this very basic primer on trans identity that the friend I first came out to messaged to me way back in January (my gmail account is a collection of links like this that I save for any necessary occasion). I think it’s a pretty decent resource for coworkers who may be unfamiliar with people in transition and I plan on pointing people who want more information to that post first.

Can we just pause for a moment to reflect on how far I’ve come since my first terrified blog post back in January? I went back and read some of my first entries and what strikes me the most is the uncertainty I felt about the path I was walking and the fear of what I would lose for doing so. Most of those fears have been realized now and, while I still find myself mourning those losses and wishing it could have gone differently, I feel enormously better in my own skin and empowered to be the woman I’ve always known myself to be. From the personal realm to the political I am pursuing things that satisfy all parts of me and nearly every day I find myself more confident and capable of standing up for myself. I have faced the hardest struggle of my life and succeeded, for the most part. That is a decidedly empowering feeling. Sure, there is so much farther to go. So many hurdles I haven’t even conceptualized yet. But to be able to exist in this world as Chloe and to face these challenges as myself is a feat I feel is worth celebrating. I think I just may have to have a bonfire and purge my boy clothes once and for all.

It’s Oh So Quiet

I’ve written a bit here before about how insubstantial I feel. How, though I think I am moving through the world and interacting with people and being heard and understood, more often the things I say go sailing past people unheard or, if heard, unresponded to. Yet events of the past couple days have really brought home to me the reality of my ghostlike existence and how very far from basic human connection I really am. And believe me when I say that this is in no way a feeling I would ever wish on anyone.

This basic disconnection from other people is nothing new to me, I’ve felt it to varying degrees my entire life. Yet it wasn’t until I reached out and actually tried to express to several people just how lonely I am and how desperately I need someone to listen and commiserate with the maelstrom of emotions that are battering me about that I realized the extent of how alone I am. Because people don’t listen to me. Ever. And it really really hurts, but when I explain that to people they either think my words don’t apply to them or they just flat out don’t hear me because of whatever it is in me that makes people tune me out the moment I open my mouth.

I was at a friend’s house yesterday evening, a friend who has stated multiple times that she’s interested and wants to hear what is happening with me, and I told her flat out that “I feel as though I’m on the brink of a complete mental breakdown.” What did I get in reply? Testimony about her newfound sexual awakening and the triumphs and pitfalls of picking up lesbians on OK Cupid. Which is cool. I’m glad she’s discovering things about herself. Maybe I’m crazy (hell, there are no maybes about it), but if a person you say is your friend says they’re about to have a breakdown wouldn’t you ask a followup question? Wouldn’t you feign even the remotest interest in it instead of redirecting everything back onto yourself? I choose my words carefully and do not exaggerate about things like my mental state because it’s an incredibly important thing to be specific on.

If you do not hear me when I reveal my fragility then it not only feeds that internal turmoil but guarantees that I won’t try to share with you again. It takes a lot for me to try to discuss my emotional state and if I feel that the other party is confused, hostile, ambivalent, or just not listening, I shut down. I try to fight it, I’ve been trying to fight it for years, but the logic runs “why should I fight for you to hear me if you’re not interested in what I have to say?” How can I believe the lies I tell myself that my existence matters if the people I try to express my alienation to steadfastly do not listen? I can’t force people to care about me, they have to choose to on their own.

That interaction by itself wouldn’t have been to send me slithering to my blog had it not been almost immediately compounded by meeting up with two friends of mine from high school to catch up and chat. One of my best friends, the girl I used to make stop-motion bouillon cube films with way-back-when happened to be in town with her wife for one night and wanted to meet up. I was thrilled. We met for desserts with another friend who lives in PDX and played catch up. I heard all about her new teaching position, the stresses of hunting for apartments in Manhattan and Pennsylvania at the same time, the quirks of coming out to her Mormon family, and the circumstances around her wedding. My local friend caught us up on her dating adventures and her blogging thereof.

Yet when it came my turn to play catch-up, I got skipped. The topic changed to the deserts on the table and high school misadventures. I don’t even know how it happened. I wasn’t even going to be maudlin, I was going to put the best face on a bad situation and talk about the trans women’s group I’ve been working with and the open mic night we’ve been organizing. If they were really interested I was prepared to talk about the girl I have been semi-seeing. But no one cared. I attempted to steer the conversation back to me once or twice but every time there was just so much palpable discomfort in their eyes that it was easier for me to sit there and stir my berries into my ice cream and count the minutes until I could politely take my leave.

I don’t want to have to fight to be heard. My words are not so important that I have to demand the floor in an aggressive manner. Most often I can sit quietly and wait because inevitably someone will say what I’m thinking. But when I’m in a social situation in which we’re sharing aspects of our lives, I would like to be listened to without having to fight for space. I want to be peaceful, more than anything. I want to save my anger for worthwhile targets- bigots, racists, oppressors of every stripe.

I’ve been having a very hard time lately trying to keep things going. My daily duel with dysphoria has grown more intense in recent days, I very rarely feel like I’m living in the skin I supposedly inhabit. This was compounded by an act of aggressive and unapologetic misgendering by an activist at a rally last week that was observed and unremarked upon by several white cis male comrades who were very emphatic about the need for men to check each other on patriarchal behaviors in the wake of the Patriarchy in the Movement panel but whose silence shows the hollowness of their advocacy. So I’m left being unable to feel safe in activist spaces. That was my last refuge. The very last place I thought I could keep access to when all of my other havens have disappeared. I had to leave a rally against the Trayvon murder early on Sunday because being in the crowd brought on a panic attack.

There are still two venues where I can talk, but both of them involve paying money, so I know that their ear is lent because of the coin I place in their pockets and not solely out of genuine concern. Money cheapens everything. One of them, my therapist, is on vacation for the next two weeks. The other, the strip club near my house where I first felt comfortable enough to come out and which remains my safe space for when trying to pretend like everything is fine no longer works, is a location I am loathe to be maudlin in, though I did tell the bartender about my panic attack and she very kindly split her anti-anxiety meds with me.

I don’t know where else to turn. I don’t feel comfortable talking with the trans women I meet with each weekend, partly because I crave their acceptance and respect and so want to be a girl that they can count on, partly because of the afore-mentioned “I find it very hard to open up emotionally to people” and partly because they’re far past this daily struggle with dysphoria and I’ve found them get very uncomfortable when reminded of where they once were. I don’t want my own pain to be the trigger that brings on someone else’s attack. That just starts a feedback loop.  But I need something. I need to talk about how pissed off I still am about what happened on Friday night. I need to talk about how utterly terrified I am about coming out at work this Friday, a place that counts as a hostile environment if ever there was one. Sure, Oregon law says I can’t be fired for my gender identity, but that does little for the inevitable sidelong glances and microaggressions that will follow my announcement. I work in the belly of the beast and I am about to offer up my throat and become vulnerable here.

I don’t want my head to get to where it was last Spring ever again. That very much scared me and provided the spur I needed to finally transition. I need to feel grounded and real and a part of something. I need to find something that ties me to this world and the people in it other than the relentless anger I have at this culture of death we live in. I’ve long maintained that as long as I can find beauty in one thing each day I can keep going, but I’m also realizing that alone is not enough. I need to be a part of the world. I can not be this living ghost.

Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby

“Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.”
-Herbert Otto

Time has a way of slipping out of one’s grasp. You get wrapped up in the daily struggle of living and the next thing you know it has advanced inexorably forward and you’re left standing agog in a future you’d not been expecting for some time. Such was my surprise when I looked at my calendar this morning and realized that it’s officially been two months since I placed that first ovoid blue pill under my tongue with all the reverence of a child at her first communion and kicked off the long delayed physical aspect of transition. For how recently this occurred the memory is already growing sepia-tinged and faded, written over with the accumulated weight of all the experiences of the past two months.

What a great two months it has been too! I know it may be hard to tell, seeing as how I seem to be consistently on the verge of a complete and utter mental breakdown, but I am by far the most content I’ve been with my life since long before puberty began to work its wicked warp upon me. It is tumultuous as hell and causes me a lot of personal distress, but that is what happens when you undertake to seriously examine not only your past and future but the bedrock assumptions that have been guiding your way and adjudging what use they are and whether they have been serving a purpose that is existentially protective or whether they are manifestations of fear holding me back from being the fullest expression of Chloe that I could be. I am experiencing the birth pangs of a self long denied and while that scares the hell out of me and often makes me feel completely cut adrift from everything that once kept me grounded, I am also reveling in the freedom of allowing myself to take risks.

The foremost place in which this has been occurring recently is the one that utterly terrifies me the most: the sexual arena. I’ve identified as a lot of different things through the years- straight, bi, gay, poly, monogamous, but mostly asexual. It has just been far easier for me to not even tread the dark waters of desire than it has been to face the dysphoria of opening my nightmare of a body to another. It’s not that I fear criticism or think people will run screaming, but rather that they’ll confirm once more the inescapable reality- that this chassis I’m riding in is a male form, with all the stock equipment that entails. So for years now it has been easier for me to just eschew physical contact and blame it on being too high or too drunk or too tired to perform. (Apologies to my endlessly patient ex for that.)

The fact of the matter is, though, that I do want to be touched, very badly. I feel so ephemeral, so insubstantial, so very much like a living ghost, that at times I feel as though I’m not actually present to others. The overly polite scan me with their eyes but don’t even pause, whether because they don’t want to be caught staring or because they can’t bear seeing me is a matter of some internal debate. People move to avoid brushing against me lest they become infected with my malady, whereas before I was bumped into without thought. All of these things, whether real or imagined, serve to intensify my always present self-loathing and make me feel as though I don’t really exist. I am a disembodied collection of thoughts.

Thankfully, though, someone saw me. Someone saw me, talked with me, flirted with me, and then made out with me in a city park. Someone made me feel real and then she made me feel desired. Desired not as an anomaly or some perverted fetish but desired as a woman, which is the greatest kindness of all. Through the entire affair she has been nothing but sweet or understanding, acceding to my no-go area without complaint or question and willing to be as gentle or patient as I need. Truly, she has been an ideal partner as we both discover what this body of mine can do and how I can not only give pleasure but allow myself to be vulnerable enough to receive it as well. The lift this has provided to my abysmal self-esteem has been of immeasurable worth.

I don’t know where it is going, or even if there’s enough there to even call it and “it.” I’m not going to question it, though. For the time being we are mutually interested in exploring one another and learning just what works for us both. Of incredible use in this regard has been a zine I discovered called Fucking Trans Women. 80 magnificent pages detailing a myriad of ways in which to interact with a non-op trans woman body with equal parts scientific detachment, autobiographical humor, and useful pictograms. It has opened up enormous vistas of possibility and made me very curious to see just what works for me. I’m very much hoping that there will be future issues of FTW that will address various other aspects of trans womanhood, for those women who have had SRS already or which addresses the sexual aspects of voyeurism and what have you. I crave narratives of other trans women, both because of how much less freakish they help me feel and because of how they open up to me far-reaching vistas of what possibilities lie ahead.

A Note on Privacy

I feel I need to state this clearly and unequivocally: please do not share this blog’s address with others.  If you have this site’s address it is specifically because I trust you, your opinions, and your discretion.  I know that this is the internet and that I should not have any expectation of privacy but I very much need a space in which I can sort through a lot of the mental debris that I’ve accumulated and figure out who I want to be and how I want to progress.  The reason I do that here instead of scribbling in a diary is because a) I have a dramatically overinflated sense of my own worth and b) because it is through the conversations that I have with you lovely readers in other (both virtual and meat) spaces that I am able to reflect on things written here and grow from them.  If I become aware of too many people reading this page then I fear that I’ll start holding back and self-censoring in order to put forward the most socially-palatable version of myself.  I don’t want that.  I want to be as viscerally honest as possible in order to truly examine my motives and behaviors and become the best possible version of myself that I can be.  I can’t do it in a vacuum but neither can I do it in a public arena.

Thanks for understanding.  If you came to this page other than through a direct invitation, please don’t let me know.  I’m all right if you keep reading, but please don’t spread it any further. If you feel as though any of the insanity I’ve dribbled over this page the past few months could be of use to someone also struggling, send me a message and ASK ME if it’s okay to share. I didn’t think this needed to be stated explicitly, but apparently it does. Please allow me the illusion of speaking privately with trusted friends.

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

If I’ve been unnaturally slow in updating things over here at The Project, I must apologize. It’s not that I don’t absolutely need this little slice of freedom from the prying eyes of the world where I can flagellate myself whilst searching for the various threads of my scattershot identity. I very much do. It’s just that… well… I’ve been seeing other people. You’d like them, trust me, they’re coming from a very similar place as I am.

Maybe it’d be better if I backed up and started from the top. See, when I first launched myself into the ether in search of any and all things I could find on transitioning and coming out, I stumbled into a really friendly and inclusive spot on the web known as Susan’s. From that place I culled a basic understanding of the steps involved, the challenges ahead, and the options available for a trans* girl just getting her legs under her. More than anything the “Before & After” thread collecting years worth of women’s transition pics from pre-HRT to several years in were enormously useful in diminishing those fears I had of ever being able to pass as fem. I saw some of the butchest looking men I can imagine transformed into people I would never doubt as cisfems. If it could work for them, why not for a far less traditionally masculine person like me? Sure, I’d been carrying a lot of satyr blood in me and my pelt reflected that, but Pan is a lover as well as a trickster and how could they look askance at my attempts to subvert conventionality in the name of personal gratification? That’s right in his wheelhouse.

So I found a lot of encouragement there, though there was often a glaring silence when I mentioned any sort of involvement in political organizing. These people were not like the militant queers I grew up with, or like the passionate friends whose resistance had awoken my own slumbering conscience. I could recognize that most of them were transitioning late in life and had adopted reactive politics as a means of blending in, but I always figured it was skin-deep, like how I volunteered for Obama even though I’ve never voted or agreed with the Democrats just so I could see McCain lose his own state (yes, I’m a very petty girl). I tried hard to bite my tongue, I really did. After years of not talking about just how fucked this culture is and how very harmful it is to the minds and bodies of all living things, I was admirably restrained. I went on no anti-civ rants. I went on no pro-vegan rants.  Granted, I’m not a vegan (pry my cheese from my cold dead hands, you damn dirty apes) but when people start chortling about frying up bacon-wrapped pork loin or turducken while in another thread decrying their ability to lose any weight or pass as femme, it becomes hard to bite back criticisms.

So imagine my surprise when a thread titled “political activism- how do you give back” was what led to my expulsion from this group, after months of biting my tongue on some ENORMOUSLY problematic things that these trans* people were saying. The thread was so inocuous too. I listed only the barest and most legal thing I was involved with- foreclosure resistance in North Portland. I explained how (now defunct) PLOC had organized to take back Alicia Jackson’s illegally foreclosed house on May Day of 2012 and how activists had been keeping the house occupied ever since then on rotating shifts and how the rapid-reponse network was meant to call out neighborhood members and activists should the bank’s cops show up to evict us. This is nothing major. Taking a shift there is really the bare minimum that people can do and still say that they’re involved in social justice. But apparently this was too much for that group. I got a message from one of the moderators copying a line from the Terms of Service stating that those who share or advocate illegal activity will face a warning or a subsequent ban. I wrote back stating that a)the actions of the bank-owned government were the more illegal actions, b)that the only duty of a real citizen is to stand up in the face of unjust laws and c)a society that has been corrupted to view the very basic Maslovian needs of its  citizens as a too-heavy burden doesn’t deserve to exist. I was nice. I didn’t rip out any heavy anarchist dogma about the tyranny of the state or the power of the people. I simply stated that it was more criminal for people to be forced to sleep outdoors when statistics show there are 12 empty houses for every houseless person and that a society that allows such a callous regard for life has some seriously misplaced priorities.

I got no reply back, just a notice the next time I tried to log in that my account had been blocked due to TOS violations. Fuck. Them. Fuck their passive-aggressive little never-wanting-to-call-people on their fucked up racist and classist shit. Fuck them for promoting this site as a resource for trans*people when it is very clearly only for assimilationist trans*people who don’t harbor a grudge against a society that has spent years beating us with the message that the gender binary is sacrosanct and must be protected and who responds with revulsion against people who challenge that idea. These people may be queer, but they are not comrades.

So imagine my delight when a friend added me to a facebook group specifically for trans*women. I thrilled to read the searingly honest posts from women all over the western world delineating their experiences existing in a cis world. So many women with years more experience as the proper gender, so much further along, these baby steps I’ve been taking so far in the past as to be faint recollections. This is what I had been looking for. Radical queers who were seeking to create a space for trans*women of every stage to feel comfortable and to build a community outside of the mainstream LGB community that so many of these women have stories of being used and tokenized within, a community of trans*women where we wouldn’t have to fight for inclusion. There was even a thread of pics showing the beauty of trans* women’s bodies that reached several hundred replies, each one a candid self portrait of these women standing openly and fearlessly, belonging to their forms in ways I had never even dreamt of feeling comfortable enough to try, though after reading through even hellishly-body conscious Chloe got in on the act. So, yeah, there are now nudes of me on the internet. Never thought I’d say that.

Every honeymoon must end, though, and every group reaches a nadir where the friction caused by so many different people interacting for the first time starts to cause conflict. I have seen this happen in every single group I’ve ever been a part of and this experience informs a lot of my faith in anarchism. As has been the case far too many times, the split was caused by racism. Someone tossed out a slur in a post and got called out on it by several people. Rather than owning up to their racism and attempting to learn from it and make amends, they got defensive and dug their grave deeper and deeper before she was finally banned. There was a lot of great dialogue about the intersectionality of oppressions and how various oppressed groups fight to keep each other down, and a lot of politically naive people grew a lot from them, but the damage had been done. The “safer” space was shattered (note to self: really need to write something on why that term needs to be more specific for it to have any worth) and the trans* women of color were fleeing for the exits. Those women who had attempted to keep the peace and address the racist posts head-on grew overwhelmed at the task and “stepped back from the group to focus on self-care.” I can’t blame them, it is really exhausting to bash your head against ignorant racist comments again and again.

But I hate that it happened. Those women who left are my comrades, even though they have no idea who I am. They are the people I want to listen to and grow from, their politics are well-informed and their lives are rich and varied. They are the radicals I had hoped to find in Susans. The group still exists, and there is still a lot of great dialogue happening but it’s not the same place of hope and solidarity it existed as for that brief luminous moment.

There are a significant number of Portland trans*women who are members and we’ve organized meet-ups at the Red & Black for the past few weekends to talk and connect, and this has really helped me with the crippling loneliness that is nestled in my gut like some malformed teratoma. I find it hard to ask individuals if they want to hang out (who am I to make demands on another’s time?) which is why I’ve always been so reliant on having sociable roommates to force me into interacting with people. I’m a different sort of shut-in than most in that I will leave the house for nearly any reason and plan all sorts of activities to fill my time, but find it very hard to ask others if they’d like to be a part of them (because in my experience the answer is inevitably no).

But I digress, I was explaining why I’ve been so silent here. Frankly, I’ve been too busy posting in the group to formulate a thoughtful post here. There’s certainly no lack of subject matter. I have posted a very long and very drawn out recollection of how coming out to my family went, but it’s far too self-pitying and delves into far too much familial baggage for me to leave public. It was very edifying to write, though. I’d never really sorted through any of my feelings on my family before and it put a lot of things in perspective for me. Regardless, watch this space, I hope to be posting here a bit more regularly in the coming days.

I Can’t Do That Any More

To everyone who keeps asking me to understand what they’re going through right now. Fuck off. To everyone who asks me to be more patient about people’s understanding. I can’t. To anyone who thinks that their heartache and loss is in any way more important than the daily fucking struggle to not fucking kill myself, I am done. You have had time to come to grips. You are either my comrade or you are not. I can not make any more fucking excuses for your self-centered behavior. If you truly loved me as a boy, you can truly love me as Chloe, or I have no more fucking time for you. I do not have the emotional capacity to carry my own struggles and losses as well as yours any more. Time to buck up, buttercup. Stand with me and support me or get the fuck out of my life. I can’t carry any more wishy-washy fucks who think this makes the least bit of difference in how I relate to the world. All I have ever sought was to bring my outer flesh into congruence with how I feel inside. If you’ve ever felt that I loved you, you were being loved by a woman. Deal with it or get out of my life. I will not argue about this ever again.