Why I liken myself to a plant
I’m a very skinny person, I barely have any natural body fat, even after being on a starter dosage of estrogen for over a year now. I have a very active metabolism, my body can process amounts of food that leave me bewildered sometimes. I find myself seeking out energy dense foods, especially after some manual labor or a long walk. My body is a machine that turns nutrients into dense bones and low body fat. I am likely the kind of person that an “archaeologist would call male” as asserted by those who reject my queerness. This was a difficult thing to recon with as I began to finally consider if queerness was a way that works for me. And the trans community on social media made it quite difficult for me to honestly find myself in all of it. Where do I belong? What do I look like?
The winters in my hometown are cold
I can feel the cold right now, seeping into my fingers as I type. We have a very drafty old house, I’ve been told that it was originally built in the 1700’s, around the time that my town was established. I remember vividly, the experience of playing minecraft on my mother’s emachines computer running windows 7 in the living room. After 1-3 hours of play during the summer break, my feet would get so cold that my toes would start to curl in on themselves, my body wicks heat like an actual heat sink. The densest mass is my internal organs, which radiate heat through my blood, and by the time it reaches my fingers on a cold, sub-20F day like today; there is no warmth left, and I get colder. I feel my muscles turn to taffy. I feel my back get tense in reaction to a strong gust of cold wind. The sensory experience of being cold in this body has shaped my perception of winter.
And yet, I’ve always loved winter for what it represents. The undeniable beauty of the snow. Where there is pain, there will also be beauty. Humanity, especially Americans have a bit of a problem with perceiving extremes. We want to see change in our lifetimes, we want to experience being human without our lives being tainted by climate change, authoritarian governments and institutions, we want the children of the future to experience a world without hate, we want to not be cold when it is cold out. But succumbing to despair makes extremism and perfection appealing. We wish to fight for our “side” of things, the grass always seems greener where we are not. But it is the fence that creates the sides entirely. We need to stop asking the question of “which side has the greener grass?” and start asking “why is there a fence at all?”
What do you feel like?
Quite often I hear transfems on social media say something like: “If you feel like a woman, then you are one.” And then in other posts they proceed to paint what “feeling like a woman” feels like. This framework; in my personal opinion is too rigid, not allowing for adaptability and growth, born out of the age of social media, where thinking things through is often discouraged. Either through group tribalism, or through the nature of social media itself. As Marshall McLuhan put it; “The medium is the message.” This cycle of a likely addiction to social media, mixed with assertions about how to think, should leave us with serious pause. Orson Well’s Big Brother is here, and he is in your pocket, right now!! Millions of people talking, and nobody listening; these platforms create ideologies that thrive, not on careful, contemplative logic, reason, and heart, but rather by creating an addiction in it’s victims and asserting the most painful and extreme version of one’s reality back to them. A mirror that hates you. This realization of the state of things left me wanting more, I wanted to learn more about what it means to be queer, who came before me, what they said, how they felt. Although one thing did come from this; I knew that I did not feel like anything at all.
Now, of course, it’s worth pointing out that the extremes these transfems are responding to is also woefully unhelpful. The violence committed against queer people is very real and clearly not okay, but responding with violence, hate, anger, and insults would never contribute to a peaceful world. I’ve noticed this tendency to hide my queerness and only show it to the right people because of this turbulent, chaotic societal conflict. Mayhaps there is some wisdom there, I can imagine that ICE agents in my neighborhood may have me responding differently. But, might I suggest the path that I’ve found away from this violence?
What do I feel like?
This is the first earring I've ever owned. One of them, actually, the copy broke years ago. It's just a simple print onto some thin plastic, with a small bit of putty of some kind to fasten it to the hook. It was quite expensive for such a low quality, cheap earring. I’ve bought earrings made of real clay and metal for the same price or cheaper. But I saw leaves and I bought them without thinking. In the summer of 2020, about half a year into covid lockdown; I got my ears pieced. I still remember that feeling of excitement and euphoria that was walking around in the lawn, wearing these earrings for the first time. I now understand that this was simply a door opening, and the joy of finding inner peace, and self love on the other side. I coulda stopped here, but as my curiosity seemingly has no boundaries, I kept searching. This surely wasn’t everything. It made me feel happy to know that I’d created options for myself. But, how does one turn “options” into a life that one enjoys?
“I” “am” “Nobinary”
These three words are loaded with context and cultural disagreement. I’ve had friends tell me “That’s not what nonbinary means, it means in between a man and a woman!” As if the definition isn't in the name; Non…Binary? Not Binary? ”What else could it possibly mean?”
Unfortunately, coming out to people with the phrase has never failed to be an awkward & absurd process. The disparity between the self and the other and my attempts to bridge that gap left me to wonder if there was an easier way that didn’t leave people distant and confused. I tried my best to help people along, but I found that many people simply refuse to think about it. The medium is the message, after all. Years submerged in a context of boys and girls & men and women leave many people in a mindstate that these archetypes are tangible objects. I’ve found that even many trans people seem to think this way. In that way, I seem to be quite alone in my perspective. The amount of online transfems that have gendered me as a woman, a girl, or a lady is staggering. The gays also do not check the pronouns in the bio, it’s not just you. This led me to create perhaps what an artist would call an “avant garde” poem titled: 'NOT A GIRL' It’s just a string of text repeating the phrase in all caps 158 times. But I wanted to capture how it feels to be surrounded by people who don’t understand you.
Now, obviously, within the context of extremism in our modern digital performance, it can be quite tempting to simplify the idea of nonbinary. “You’re transfem, and you’re not a man, so I have to treat you like a woman.” and I have in fact run towards woman-hood because it was the clearest and fastest road away from masculinity. But after a while of running away from where you don't wanna be, you begin to ask yourself “where do I want to go?” And while I don’t shy away from femininity, I also no longer shy away from masculinity. Not because I “am” both, or either or neither of them, but because learning to embody everything around me -- above and below -- is pragmatic.
The strength of my body in undeniably helpful, my broad shoulders being born of an agrarian family, have suited me well in my context. But my transness, and steps towards femininity have not been unpleasant, I also find the earrings and hair as something I aesthetically enjoy. The effects of the estrogen replacing my testosterone has changed the softness of my skin, my breasts are small, and I’m still on a starter dosage, but I still love these elements for what they represent. I love that I have ever so slightly morphed into something new, something more complex, something unique. Just as the simple ingredients of the periodic table interact to form new, more complex molecules and compounds, I have taken the elements of gender and made a more interesting someone. A “me” who is more “Lewa.”
And I think that this rejection of complexity is what many, or most of the people who would reject my gender think and feel. Perhaps they dislike the idea that their lives become more complicated, that they have to alter their mode of thinking to become inclusive, to allow someone new into their life. And I think the idea of T4T (an exclusively trans relationship) is a rejection of this world view, but in an extreme direction that does away with cis people nearly altogether. I think that to reject simplicity is to reject the environment that created transness. The truth is that we need eachother. If men and women didn’t exist, then I wouldn’t be trans, because I would not have transitioned from one thing to another. I’ll refer you to some imagery of two sticks leaning against one another that Alan Watts often condures;
[1]“you lean two sticks against each other and they stand up, because they support each other. Take one away and the other falls. They interdepend.”
The world is a party, lets make it a good one
My cold fingers, my disillusionment with the self, the existential question of what to do with myself afterwards. It can be easy to succumb to despair when it feels like you’re fighting the current, and you will find violence if you fight the flow of things. It is best, in my opinion; to flow with the forces that surround you. Of course we can’t stick thoughts in other people’s heads easily, like seeds in a garden. Not without the gardener’s consent, not without being kind, not without learning to speak their language, not without love in our open hearts. A safe place where one has the time to consider meaning somberly, and without fear of their survival is a good place to live. I wouldn’t wish to take that away from anyone.
There maybe is no way that I'd be gendered as a woman by 9/10 randoms on the street, but the more I thought about it, the less like a woman I wanted to be. I wanted to be free from the framework of gender entirely. And my answer has been to authentically embody everything; To be Wholistic, to find inner balance. It's the simple and complex, the open-hearted and reserved, it's yin and fucking yang, baby!!! Masculinity and femininity reflect eachother, so too do cis people and nonbinary people. As above, so below. Appealing to extremes only serves to rip us apart, rather than find common ground. Have a funky gender, be an angel, or a forest person, or a wizard or a dog, or a cat, or just… a guy! Fuckin' whatever, just remember to have fun! If you’re not enjoying your life, then something has to change!
Queers use the term "Gender Expression", because everything is expression. Life is a dance and the world is a party and I invited myself... and my nonsensical plant fairy gender, because nonsense is the most sane reaction to being alive.
~ Lewa 💚