fair

So I want you to imagine something. It's going to be pretty awful, and it's probably going to be a trigger for some people. If that's a risk you don't feel up for, take care of yourself and stop now.


The first thing you need to understand is that masculinity, maleness, is inculcated and enforced with violence. It's either actual violence, or the threat of violence, or the implied threat of violence. Constantly. It's how men and boys are taught to train each other into maleness. This is true even at a very, very young age; go to a kindergarten playground, and you will see little boys shaping each others' masculinity, according to the rules they're taught by older boys and by grown men, with violence. It starts very early.

Take a little girl and throw her into that group of boys. Leave her with them and only the instruction, "Do whatever you want with her. Shape her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence." Just sit with that for a minute. The image of handing a little girl who doesn't understand the world yet to a group of boys who are given carte blanche to use violence to shape her into whatever they think is appropriate.

It's a horrifying image. It's hideous and disturbing and wrong and it makes my flesh crawl thinking about it. And that's the way we, as a society, ought to react; if something like this scenario went public, there would be newspaper headlines.

It happens every day. Every hour. But while decent people automatically find this scenario a yawning, shocking evil when the little girl we envision is cissexual, this is considered the normal and proper way to treat a little girl who's trans. I knew I was a girl that early; I was kicked out of preschool for refusing to admit that I was a boy. And then they handed that little girl to the boys for the next fifteen years and said, "Do what you want with her. We will look the other way or cheer you on as you turn her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence. It's only proper if she screams."

This is a horrifying story. This is the kind of story that, when you really look at it, represents the kind of abuse that the average person would respond to with, "Lock that sick bastard away and throw away the key." If it's a cissexual little girl. If she's trans, it's things running as they ought to be. There is no censure. There is applause.

This is one of the revealed, naked faces of oppression: if it were done to the privileged person, it would be considered abuse. If it's done to the marginalized person, it's the status quo. But it's not only that. It's not only about oppression; it's about how and why we internalize oppression.

This is a horrifying story. It's the kind of story that threatens to break your mind if it's your story. And you have to protect yourself somehow. You have to hold yourself together. You have to make it make sense. Because a world where that can be done to a little child who never did anything to anyone, who's not even old enough to understand why she's being hurt this way even by her parents until nowhere is ever safe, that's not an okay world. That's not a world I think a lot of us, including me, are strong enough to hold as true. So we defend ourselves by believing what it tells us.

I let the world tell me lies. I let myself believe that I was so bad and wrong and monstrous that I deserved what I got, that I even let someone rape me just because I was so desperately craving to be touched at all, because even abuse was more closeness than I felt I deserved. I let myself absorb the idea that I was completely delusional, and that all my knowledge about myself was false twitchings of a sick mind, because the alternative to that painful lie, the lie that I was a monster living in a fantasy world who was inherently freakish and unlovable? The alternative was worse. The alternative was that I didn't deserve it, I wasn't disgusting and unworthy of love, that I was a child put in an abusive situation and forced to stay there for no good reason. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true, as a child. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a teenager who couldn't sleep, who worked out on a punching bag every day after school until her hands bled, who spent every day thinking of newer, cleaner exits from living. I wasn't strong enough to let that be true as a college student who was fetishized and mocked and treated as a contaminated, essentially pornographic animate sex toy unworthy of any kind of closeness that didn't have the tinge of "dirty" and "perverted" seeping into it, who couldn't hug people or say "I love you" without fear that it would be considered creepy.

I wasn't strong enough to accept the truth of how strong I was. Acknowledging and owning my vast strength meant acknowledging that I was holding up something very heavy all the time, that I had been through hardship and not just normal life, the natural order of things. What I wasn't strong enough to accept was that I was a good kid, a strong kid, a brave kid, because that meant admitting that I was going through something that required virtue, strength, and courage, something that would make an inspiring TV movie about human resilience if it were happening to a person considered real by her society. Accepting that I was okay, that I was even beautiful, meant admitting that what I went through at school and at home, rather than being normal and good, was a horrorshow.

So I bought the lie instead. I let them convince me for a large swath of my adolescence that I was, really, a boy. The idea disgusted and horrified me, but not as much as the truth, that I was right, that I was trustworthy to myself, that it wasn't my fault. It was better to live in a world where I was a boy--or even a boy who wanted to be a woman someday--and had lived a normal life, than a world where I was a girl who was systematically stripped of her sense of self, subjective reality, and personhood, subjected to near-constant violence or its threat, and treated as a contaminated, dirty thing. The lie--even the lie of "boy who wants to be a girl" or "woman in a man's body," as though my body was someone else's--as skin-crawlingly painful as it was, was nowhere near as painful as the truth of being a girl trying to find her way to womanhood and living through this on the way.

This is how we internalize the lies. This is how we accept the yoke of oppression. By living in a world where the truth that we are beautiful and worthy and lovable is even more painful to accept than the lie that we are none of these things, because all sense of fairness or order vanishes when you look the truth in the eye. If we are beautiful, we are in a world that does not care about our beauty, and even grinds it in the mud. If we are strong, we are living in a world so heavy that it saps our strength until we are tired all the time. If we are ourselves, we are living in a world that systematically strips away our selfhood like roast chicken scraped from the bone.

Until we are strong enough to look this in the eye and fight it, to stand up and fight and make the part of the world we stand on more okay no matter how hard it is or what it takes--until we are so very strong that we remember we are strong, and beautiful, and true, worthy of no end of love, no matter what--it's just too much to bear. So we accept false stories instead, about how we're dirty and ugly and weak and unlovable. We have to. I had to.

I am writing this down because I know that in an hour, or a day, or a week, I will be listening to the lies again for a while. How else do you live? How do you go on in the world without accepting that the injustice is just, or not your problem, just a little, just for now? How can you walk in a world where the truth is true instead of breaking down and crying? So we internalize the lies for a while in order to let things make enough sense to get through the day. Gravity pulls comfortingly down. The alternative, the raw, vulnerable, pulsing truth can only be taken in doses, even if they're bigger doses every day. It's so hard to just let it be real. How can you let it be real? How can you really pull off the lid and look down into that darkness and let the truth--that you live in a world where you're not considered fully real, fully human, and that if you were considered real, what was done to you would be considered unacceptable, retch-inducing, but you're not and it isn't?

You have to tell yourself the stories. Just for now. Just until you're strong enough to bear the weight of the truth and see with clear eyes, if you ever get that strong. Just until you are so full of overwhelming bravery and power that you can finally insist that you are lovable and loved, that you deserve it in every cell of you, that beauty shines through you as a conflagration of glory. When you stand there, blazing in your awful wonder, you can move the whole world. You just have to get through the pain of knowing that you are true, that you know, that you are everything you will ever need to be.

It hurts to say this and it hurts to hear: you are lovable. So am I. The chasm between that truth and the world we allow ourselves to live in every day is deep and dark, but it is still the truth and always will be.

You are everything you ever hoped you would be, and I love you. When you are strong enough, please, shine.

no regrets no looking back and no goodbyes

I get so homesick.

I'm a country girl. We know this. And I ache sometimes for the hot breeze and tobacco-colored rimrock cliffs, sitting on my dusty car's hood looking up at a sky bigger than anything, somewhere on a potholed back road out at the edge of the big pines. For soaking in the river and baking on a boulder till dry, scrambling over the jumbled basalt with skinned elbows and a big pocketknife in sturdy jeans. For walking up logging roads and past split-rail ranch fences, sometimes with an eye to where I might park with a girl once the moon came up. I knew every flower by name, could tell you which bird just by its silhouette.

Back home, past the rusted-out stacks of the empty mill, you can see the Milky Way oozing glitter across the arch of everything. The train tracks go forever and so does the horizon, except where stretching calderas come up, a great cradling hand, to hold the boundaries of the knowable.

There's a soda fountain that makes its own chocolates and milkshakes, down there, and you can smell their caramel corn all the way down the street at the little restaurant we all went with our prom dates. Both of the old florists continued to not hire me every summer.

I don't get to go back. Maybe ever. I'm gone from there. I kicked the dust from my boots, packed everything in a station wagon, and ran. As far as most anyone knows, I might be dead.
And I might be, if I did go back. You never know. I did famously at cutting and running, and sometimes that cuts back.

The river cuts through everything there, and everything leads down to it. You just look for the green. We used to jump off a bridge in the summer , where two X's had been scratched into the rail to tell you where was deep enough, and crawl back up through the rocks and shady wild mint patches for another go. You just shucked your shoes and jeans and went, though I was always a big chicken about it.

Quaking aspen and knobby juniper tell you where you are, out there. We don't get those where I live now.

I say awful things about my hometown, bitter, narrow-eyed. Fair enough. It hurt me, bad. But some days, it's just to get away from loving it, from feeling rootless with my feet on all this cement, grasping at bluegrass music and "ain't" and typing inside to stay out of the weather.

I used to dangle my feet over a clifftop, rolled-up jacket for a pillow, and make sketches of every growing thing. I knew what time of year the dragonflies would have their highspeed aerial junctioned relations. Sitting up on my parents' roof in the snow, I'd watch the first melt sigh and plop off the branches. I'd shoo the deer from the summer garden, see if the coyote'd come by, and head down the road to town, singing.

They hurt me, and I ran, and I can never go back. But I can't honestly say there's nothing for me there.

I live in a city with art museums and film festivals and statuary. There's a queer community, and your choice of Thai restaurants, and roses everywhere. There are actual other Filipinas. There's opera. There's my little creaking house with its overstuffed bookshelves and ancient stove. There's the woman I'm marrying.

But I've never yet seen an osprey stoop for a steelhead trout here. It's been years since I've pulled off the road, sat up on the hood of my truck, and named constellations like old friends.

Maybe I'm just not a teenager any more, and don't notice these things. Maybe, in a world that seems a little grimmer and more complicated, I've just let my sense of wonder slip, let the sky get a little less big. But maybe I'm just homesick for a home that didn't want me, an old lover that'll never take me back.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous. I've made a new home and a new life, with plenty of joy in it. The riotous wealth of subcultures and body-mods, the sidewalks that don't roll up at seven, the new places to go that don't run out, the people, all matter. I get giddy at the press and smells and close-in messy human wonderfulness at Pike Place Market, grin affectionately at the ornate Victorian houses Southeast Portland has long since rented out for duplexes to college kids and station-wagon dykes raising kids. I can rent Bollywood movies, for Gods' sakes. There's colors here I never knew existed, before. Besides, nobody pretends that my hometown is still what it used to be, anyway.

Nostalgia is foolish and dangerous, and I have the scars to prove it. Life goes on, often into something richer, fuller, more honest, more whole. But a leopard can't change her spots sometimes, and for everything that's changed, some things never do, and I can't shake the feeling, some days, that I'm in exile.



(This post had a soundtrack, on the train when I wrote it. It's Kim Richey's "A Place Called Home," for the record.)