Part 1: Building Your Trans Identity and Unpicking the Stitches To Those you Admire.
Part 1 of 3: The Women I Admire
Remember that time your uncle shouted at you for letting the dog into the house during dinner when you were five? Curses for your carelessness on his bolognese-red lips. Or how about the the damp glimmer in your mother’s eyes? Joy and sadness playing tug-o-war over her tear ducts on your first day of school. Or when your best friend was at your side? Both of you silent moody teenagers walking the empty suburban streets at night. It’s 2am and you’ve nowhere to go, nothing to do but wander in the dark together. No words on how to express to each other how deeply adrift you felt.
Each of a us is a conglomeration of every conversation, or absence of one, that we’ve ever had. Every word, every gesture, every moment of human interaction. All those moments of joy, those moments of sadness, and those moments in between, live within you. You are a gestalt, an interconnected mess of experiences. Some you remember, most you do not.
But they are all there, every single one.
It’s hard to know where I stop and where my mother starts. I constantly hear her voice coming out of my mouth. The soulful singing lilt of “traveling around sure gets me down and lonely” echos out of me in her tones when Carol King comes on the radio. I also hear my father’s voice in there too. When my dog, with her single remaining brain-cell, suddenly goes gamboling off across the park, I hear his voice issue from my throat as I bellow after her, “Hey! What are you doing?!”
I’m intertwined with them so completely. My parents, my friends, my wives, my lovers, my work colleagues, all of them are bound up inside me. I’m not capable of unpicking the stitches that bind them to me. I like to think I wouldn’t want to even if I could. That’s a lie, by the way.
Most of them I would keep forever. Not all of them, but most.
These are some of the women I admire. These are the the ones who regularly pop into my mind because I’ve heard their voice issue from my lips, witnessed their guiding actions in my choices. Many wouldn’t even know the depth of their impression they’ve made on me. Nor would they know how much I attempt to emulate them.
Part 1: The Women
I’d a work colleague I affectionately called my “work wife”. Carpooling to the office, we’d chug coffee, bitch and moan about how difficult it all was and galvanize ourselves for the coming onslaught. Sometimes “work spouses” are just like the regular kind. Sometimes the high-stress environment grinds you down. Sometimes you bicker, sometimes you fight. Sometimes you both raise your voices in the open plan office enough so that it also raises some eyebrows. But we always found our affection for each other and our shared love of the work. I admire the passion she brought. She never backed down from advocating for making the work better. She never retreated from fights she’d have better served her career by not fighting. I admire that she picked the hills she wished to die on and bled on them til they ran red.
I admire that ships-that-pass-in-the-night friend. Naked, sprawled on the bed she lamented how so much of her life had already passed for her. So strong was her hunger for wild abandon she grieved for how much of her life had already been “wasted” in that way only a twenty-something can. No amount of gentle middle-aged reassurances that there was decades of life ahead of her, decades of experiences, of travel, of art, of love and sex and friendships would dissuade her. In her world time was already slipping away and she acutely felt the loss of it. I didn’t say it at the time, but she was right, in her own way. I admire how precious every moment was to her, how not a single second should be wasted.
I admire the old friend who sat with me in my time of need and watched a sunset. I’d reached out to her in those weeks after my understanding crystalized into the knowledge that I was transgender. I’d only ever known this person as a woman, having seen nothing of their life pre-transiton. We sat on the bench at the waters edge as the sky turned orange, as people emerged to walk their dogs, play with their children. This remarkable woman told me the truth of what her transition was like. She told me that she “never lost a friend” because of it. Sure, some people stopped talking to her, but that just meant she learned that “if that can’t accept this, then were they really her friends in the first place?” I admire her gentle reassurance. I admire how she found a way to learn something about herself while people she loved were failing her.
I admire that quiet lighting designer. On occasion I’d traveled with her troupe of strange theatre-makers. Snuck into an airport lounge, I sat with her. Typically I’m a bundle of distracted energy, but sitting there, somehow the switch flipped. Turns out when I’m with her, and when I can shut the fuck up for five minutes, I find my brahmaviharas, that serene calm before I give my body over to the physics of being flung into the sky. So, we sat in silence, probably for the first time ever. I registered that I’d so often bombarded her with my presence that I’d never grasped how calming, how reassuring it was to have her near. I admire her for being that presence in my life, the very model of “unflappable”. So much so I now can’t help but think of her whenever I climb the rickety aluminum staircase to a plane. Can’t help but think of her when I need to quell the roiling churn of my amped up nervous system when the jet engines spool up.
Another work colleague, senior management, dropped into a new job in a new town in a new field. Her warm, European politeness never betrayed any shadow of being ill at ease as a fish-out-of-water. She was clearly a talented manager of people and an even more talented operator in her field. I admired the way she asked questions. There was no ego, no begrudgement that an underling might know more on a topic than she did. She wanted to know the details. I admire her for the way she just… asked for the information. I’d grown so used to stroking egos and hedging my words, always fearful of alienating management, I’d forgotten what genuine, un-self-conscious curiosity looked like.
It reminds me of a young graphic designer I met on campus. I’d occasionally guest lectured, back when physical lectures were part of the model for universities. Offering to do one-on-ones with the students, only a handful took me up on it. One in particular came barreling in. Notebook down, laptop open, questions at the ready. “How do I do this?” she pointed at the screen, showing me her final assessment piece and the detail that had been vexing her. No shame, no equivocating, just looking for clarity and going out and getting it. I admired that in her then and I still do.
I admire the psychotic elfin fairy who had the no-nonsense manner to tell me, “I’m not fucking you tonight cause you’ve been in those boots all day and they smell like cat-piss”. God my heart melted at her bluntness. Truly if a hurricane was compressed down under extreme pressure it would coalesce into something akin to this woman. But unlike a hurricane it was a joy to have her breeze through my life, fuck my shit up, and then depart. I admire her chaos, her unrelenting, incomprehensible chaos.
An old friend went from poet to published author. Her terse, confronting prose feels born of every misogynist pig that ever bashed out a novel on a typewriter. I admire the way she took the cannon of these objectively shit, though lionized men, scouring their bones for sustenance. I admire the way she unashamedly co-opted their styles, like an insurgent stealing enemy rifles on the battlefield. I admire the way she turned these chauvinists on their heads and shook them by the ankles so that all the patriarchal bullshit fell from their pockets to clatter to the floor at her feet. I admire the considered weave of her words, taking the old and inventing the new, all while jangling my nerves and turning my stomach. I admire the way it feels like she’s painting with the pigments of my own life in her work. She rarely fails to message when I post an article. I expect a love heart in my inbox from her any second now. Fuck, I admire her.
I admire the backpacker clad in one of my tired old house-dresses. I was happy to donate it as it was a far more appropriate outfit for her leave in than the lingerie she arrived in. She sat vaping, feet on my dining table, regaling me with stories of strange kinks and fetishes. Tales of kneeling on the footpath outside a bondage club, head tilted back, mouth open, waiting for the dommes to ash their cigarettes right onto her tongue. Stories of needles skewering flesh. Of hooks buried in her skin so that she could be hoisted into a tree for the enjoyment of those watching. I was but a stop along the way in her life and quite a vanilla one by comparison. These strange practices were delights to her and anyone’s problem with them were none of her concern. I admire her complete lack of shame, her complete lack of fear. She didn’t give a shit about what people thought of her.
There are women I don’t admire too.
I don’t admire the way a beloved old aunt would ask me to make her a cup of tea. The contrivance of being told that she had heard a rumor that I was excellent at making cups of tea, that I should demonstrate my tea making skills for her. The artifice of it demeaned us both, especially as I’d be happy to make anyone a cup of tea should they just ask. For the record, I admire anyone who’s bold enough to just declare “I’d fucking love a cuppa”, secure in the knowledge that for me this act of service is it’s own reward. You should remember that if you’re in my presence and in need of one.
I don’t admire the lover who saw my devotion as something to be caged. As if my affection was some exotic bird to be lured into the aviary and the door swung shut, the bolt thrown. I wanted to be there, in her arms. I’d have happily come and gone and come back again, but when you block the exits it stops being love by choice. When you hold a person against their will it undoes every good moment that ever existed between you. Those whispered moments of tenderness in the night? The ones that felt as thought they could hold back the ocean? They become meaningless. I don’t admire how they salted the earth so completely. I don’t admire that at all.
This isn’t really about them… But still, they exist in me too.
Yes, there are women that I don’t admire bound up within me, stitched to me, influencing my actions and choices like all the others. I’d like to think their influence is of the “what NOT to do” variety. It’s easy to let them fall to the back of the crowd when you have so many magnificent examples of remarkable women to point to. Some only just at the beginning of their lives and some deep into that stretch of time where they get to wallow in the person they’ve created. There’s a little of each of them in me. Deliberately or inadvertently I’ve often approached the world as they would. I see the way they’ve challenged the expectations of womanhood and been comforted in my own imperfect expression, as instructed by their example.
So many, too many to list.
That bespectacled old theatre-maker? The one with the shock of white hair who smiled at me with grace and wisdom during a performance so as to bring fat tears rolling down my cheeks. The wild-girl from my teenage circle of friends? The one who saunters back into my life, the spark of her magnificence untarnished by the passage of 20 years and raising three kids? My wife? The pages I could fill with descriptions of that blue-haired-menace! One measly paragraph will never do her or any of these women justice.
You’re part of me. Every single one of you, and by god, there’s far more good than bad.
–S