When I first transitioned, although I did feel more ‘embodied’, I also felt like I had been scammed. This body had feathers but would never fly. It was rubble. A write-off. Not an angel, not a boy, but a very old man. A wet, grey, crumbling man.
In an episode ‘Finding a Home Within Yourself’ on the Spotify podcast The On Being Project, hosted by theologian Krista Tippet, Ladin says, ‘I would call up friends. I’d feel constantly like I was disappearing’ referring to the years of quasi-transition, when she’d walk, talk, dress as a stereotypical male. When she’d only embody her femininity in secret. ‘… I would say, ‘Do I sound like myself? I feel like I don’t remember what I sound like, is this me? Do I seem real to you? Do I exist?’
I know what it feels like to disappear. Disappearing is incumbent, it is not freely elected. In the poem ‘It is Important to be Something’ transfemme poet Joshua Jennifer Espinoza writes ‘There is a checklist of things you need to do to be a person. I don’t want to be a person but there isn’t a choice’. This ‘checklist’, the ways we must perform or conceal gender, are a kind of hygienic regimen. A sanitary imperative. Cleanliness, godliness.
I remember wearing the same claustrophobic shoes to church every Sunday, when I slipped them on, I also disappeared. They had no grip at all and were the exact color of a newborn who’s been toweled down but not rinsed. I took every opportunity to abandon them – in the sandpit, at the pool, at sleepovers. My father knew I hated them, but over and over he came to their rescue, not mine. So, I wore them for as long as I could bear to. I never really believed I could convert to cis – if cis even exists – but I thought I could delay the inevitable, hold on to my deadname a little longer.
Espinoza’s poem continues, ‘so I work my way down and kiss the feet. I work my way up and lick the knee,’ ‘I give you my skull to do with whatever you please.’ Here, we watch her shrink below the waist of this superior, flattering and fawning- In the most literal sense, she yields to societal expectations. And despite this disturbing symbolism, a brazenness is implied. A sense that her oppressor is the one under duress, must watch in horror. That Espinoza asserts her freedom of choice by choosing to play along. The poem ends with three sharp decisive sentences in which Espinoza declares that she exists entirely independent of fashion and biology. ‘I wear my clothes. I wear my body. I walk out in the grass and turn red at the sight of everything’.
I checked my list, put on lipstick, curled my lovely girly lashes. But I was lawless too.
Left alone, I wore my father’s work shirts and cologne. I sat at his laptop stroking my chin, sipping his whiskey, crunching his numbers. Worse, I took sick joy in vandalising those church shoes. A childlike tactile joy. Every time I dunked them in cowpats, stepped in vomit, or kicked an ashtray, there’d be a stronger bleach, a longer soak ahead of them. It was uplifting, spiritually awakening. I brought them into alignment with me, with violent abjection. I checked my list, walked out in the grass and bled until everything was red.
On one promising churchy morning, I found every blowfly outside obsessed with me, contending for the most intimate glimpses inside my ears and mouth, up my pleated skirt, and down my turtleneck. That was the first portent of doom. Then there was the smell. The spiky, metallic smell. It caused so much upset in my pew, they delayed the service so people could whinge. ‘I’ve checked her nappy, she’s dry’ a young woman said defensively, lifting her sleeping baby out of the pram and showing us all its bum. ‘Must be a dead mouse or something, can everyone please check under their bench?’
‘There’s some blood on the floor I think’ the woman next to me said, showing me a red smudge on her palm. ‘It must be those stray cats – it’s just savage! What they do to each other’.
As she continued on her search, grumbling to herself, I felt something tickling my inner thigh and began to swat and shoo, but the itch remained. Assuming this was just one tenacious fly, I reached under my skirt to put an end to our affair, and caught a drip … and then another drip. I withdrew my hand, slick. My worst fears were confirmed. I clutched my crotch, clenched my buttocks and dashed towards the closest exit, shoving past people who were all on their hands and knees until I reached the aisle. The shoes. The shoes I could not flee from. They clickety-clacked, blood squirting and battering them, until stone was grass.
