Queer Certainty, Lesbian Awakenings and Unexploded Ordnance

Dredge the seafloor of your memory and you'll be surprised at what you find.

I regularly ponder the question of when did I know I was trans? Throughout the course of a day, like anyone else, odd memories come bubbling up from the depths. Maybe they’re long buried treasure, disturbed by unseen currents and risen to be discovered anew, shining and golden. Perhaps they’re a rusting sea mine; unexploded ordnance from the distant past waiting, lurking to be tampered with. Or perhaps, and something that I’m finding infinitely more common, they’re just the flotsam and jetsam of decades of life, fragments of some lost era, barely recognised, scoured of they’re initial meaning like sea glass… pretty rocks that bear no resemblance to what they were. It’s memories like these leave me wondering, “Is this a true memory? Or are my current circumstances just colouring it to have meaning?”

Despite the obvious harm to myself it seems I’m wired to put things in categories.

All those memories of years ago when I used to bully myself into putting on the running shoes and hitting pavement. Those memories of berating, insulting, screaming at myself inside the confines of my skull: “Move it you lazy cunt! You’ll never look how you wanna look if you don’t fucking run, ya sack of shit!”. Yeah, those ones are probably going to be dumped on the do-not-tamper-with-unless-you-have-your-psych-on-speed-dial pile.

Or those times, navigating the world as a young man and being entirely too eager to be dared to wear a dress. “Yeah sure, mate. I’ll do it. For the dare. Doesn’t mean anything. Just doing it for the laugh.” There are a surprising number of photos of me in my partners’ dresses, posing. Silly photos taken while they were out and left on the film roll to be developed as a “joke”. Cringe? Yes. Capable of blowing a hold through the foundations of understanding of myself causing the whole mess to cave in on itself? Maybe not. Let’s not risk it though, yeah? Let's just carefully place that one in the pile of limpid mines and couch-to-5k running apps.

In my youth I literally said the words “I feel like a lesbian trapped in a man’s body ”, but never progressed the thought beyond that. I was just a kid and I was living in a state that didn’t decriminalise homosexuality until ‘91. In fact, nowadays I regularly work across the road from a building in the Valley where the bash-a-fag-in-the-parking-lot-out-back was a regular nighttime activity. This, coupled with the casual brutality of private boys schooling and institutionalised bullying makes me wonder how I actually got a notion into my mind that I was a “type” of queerness wrapped up in the wrong “package”. And then I remember there was a lesbian couple in my friend circle.

Shit. Sea mine.

I was enamoured with them. I cringe at how oblivious I was. I tell myself it was nothing creepy of course, just the sort of youthful puppy love that signposts an era of life that’s full of longing but no actual fucking clue what I was longing for… but it probably was creepy and it probably was off putting… feels like this one is slated for the don’t-fucking-even-think-about-opening-up-this-fucking-depression-inducing- depth-charge pile.

I suppose part of my complete lack of self-awareness can be chalked up to the way in which society tells young cis, straight (as far as I knew), not-quite-yet-men (of which I apparently was as the time) that they should be obsessed with lesbians. Our capacity to self-examine is a fine mesh screen with which we sift out the various parts of us. Sadly for me, that fine mesh of self-examination was yet to be refined enough to sift that particular particulate out. I was yet to understand enough of the world to filter out what was the heteronormative fetishisation of feminine queerness and what was actually a longing to be queer in a particular way.

It’s a shame I never truly examined the yearning associated with these young women. When I push into my memory, when I gaze back to that part of my youth and dig into those awkward teenage years, I’m certain I was unaware of the nature of my queerness. For all the uncertainty I feel I’m certain I’d no fucking clue about my nature at the time. Because when I look back all I can see are glaring signs, neon bright proclaiming, “Hey idiot! Why didn’t you realise you were fucking trans?” and yet I didn’t. 

I had no idea who or what I was. 

Maybe I’m just repainting the flotsam of my teenage naivety, but I still like to think that my admiration of these young women was focused on their bravery, their steadfast surety of who and what they were. I have no idea where they are now or what their lives are like. For me they are now just a few photos in a shoe-box, photos of us shaving our heads at a music festival, of one being my date to my high school formal, them in a cocktail dress and me in a full formal kilt (I told you that I was always finding a way to get into a dress). With none of us even knowing it at the time, they were imprinting upon me the sort of person I longed to be: Brave, bold, certain. Wherever they are I hope their lives are fulfilling.

I think of them and the broader circle of friends. Some have pretty conventional lives, a family, jobs. Some have left this world and some remain. I think of how they were all strange and yet mundane in the ways they were transgressive. I wish I had understood them all better. Their queerness, their nonconformity. Maybe I’d have understood myself better too?

But decades have flowed past us all and there is no time like the present. 

The friends, compatriots and lovers around me now are all discovering themselves too. Some in ways similar to mine, remixing gender and identity and sexuality and others in much simpler ways. Christ, I can’t tell you the number of cisgendered women revealing to me their realisation that they’ve never actually been interested in men and they’ve just been performing the state-sanctioned heterosexuality. All these women realizing that they’ve been consuming the pervasive media of straightness, fitting the expectations forced on them when really they too were longing for something else. Honestly, it’s a delight to see women who’ve been proud bisexuals for years scouring their memories and realising that they too have been oblivious to their own nature. Just like I rummaged through the old filing cabinets of long forgotten memories and made new connections, these women are re-examining too. It’s particularly hilarious when you see the oh-god-I’m-such-an-idiot-why-didn’t-I-realise face they pull when they admit that they have just wanted to love other women all along.

It’s like looking in a mirror.

The idea that there is a moment of “knowing”, like a clear bell ringing in your mind, is in my opinion, a bit of a movie fantasy. It’s a story telling device that doesn’t really match the reality I exist in. How do you articulate decades of confusion or doubt? How do you demonstrate a deep sense of something being “missing”? How do you show the moments of wondering, of tiny instances where a shaft of light shines through but is almost instantly closed up? You can’t. All you can picture is a film-reel montage and discard the flickers of something hiding beneath the surface. We pick a moment when it felt the most clear, and we tell that story as our “moment of knowing”.  

But I believe we are more than our chosen moments of clarity. 

Throughout my years the thoughts may have not had words, or if they did, they had the wrong words (a lesbian trapped in a man’s body) to articulate it. But my body knew it. My feet knew who I really was as I danced around the house to Aretha Franklin. My hands knew it when I held the silken nightdress of an ex-partner, when I was alone and looking for a reason to wear it even if it was only for a joke photograph. My racing heartbeat knew it when I first kissed a girl, its yearning mistaken for lust by my head.

I have always known, and yet I will also never really know.

You think there’s a binary in knowing and not knowing? Not in my world. Knowing is a spectrum. I will never have true “certainty”. I will always wonder if I’m vandalising this body. But I’m certain enough to listen to my feet and my hands and my heart. Certain enough to do something about it. Certain enough to take the pills and get the laser hair removal and yes, some surgery too. Certain enough to change all of my legal documents and tell my family, friends, clients and the occasional stranger on the street, but still, not so certain that there isn’t doubt. But when you have enough glaring neon signs as I’ve had over the years you can’t ignore them forever. I’m a prime example of living an oblivious life. I spent decades too afraid to self-examine lest that treasure turn out to be a trap.

So, if anything in here resonates, if anything feels like it is stirring something in the depths that might be a revelation, hidden in gilded chest waiting to bubble to the surface, I am proof that it is worth taking a peek. It is better to dredge up that memory and be blown to smithereens than to let life slip past you, unexamined, unconsidered and unlived.

And hey, maybe you’ll get lucky? Maybe it will be treasure you find within yourself.

–S