I began medically transitioning from female to male on Jan. 23 — three days after Donald Trump was inaugurated. I never imagined that I would begin this part of my journey while the most openly anti-trans president in history sits in the White House.
Even before he was elected in November, Trump and his party were obsessed with trans folx — a demographic that accounts for less than 1% of the country’s total population. But, as I’ve written before, close to half of the pro-Trump attack ads in the presidential election carried anti-trans messaging. Since he took office, Trump has signed several executive orders seeking to deny our existence via bureaucratic and cultural violence.
Even before he was elected in November, Trump and his party were obsessed with trans folx — a demographic that accounts for less than 1% of the country’s total population.
In May, the GOP-controlled House passed a tax bill that would deny lifesaving gender-confirming care covered by Medicaid. And last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of denying minors gender-confirming care.
Reading that news one week after having undergone top surgery, as I recover and metabolize the profundity of gender-confirming medical care, I experienced a kind of devastation I hadn’t felt before. It was as though my surgery broke a dam that had previously allowed for a certain kind of defensive desensitization to the culture of anti-trans hate in this country. Now, that desensitization is getting harder to tap into by the day.
As I anticipate getting to a place where I pass as male, I fear traveling and the complications that may arise from documents that are incongruous with my presentation: We’re currently waiting for the results of a preliminary injunction on the Trump administration’s travel document rule to see whether I will be allowed to change the gender marker on my travel documents from what I was assigned at birth.
This moment is imbued with fear, and it is designed that way. And not just for trans people. For poor people, queer people, nonwhite folx, women, immigrants, activists, those with disabilities … anyone who is not a cishet, white, nondisabled man of means.
Yet, the stakes of this moment are also deeply clarifying. It would, in so many ways, be easier to delay transitioning. But I have understood the chaos of this moment as an invitation to go inward. Yes, it can be terrifying at times, but transitioning has provided a road map for resistance and joy in this moment, one that extends far beyond the trans experience.
This process of transitioning, with its concomitant lessons, has, somewhat counterintuitively, made this the best year of my life thus far. To be clear, this period has had no shortage of heartache and fear and grief. But the internal liberation I have gained is immeasurable.
One of the most powerful dimensions of transitioning has come from the organic invitation to repair my rupture with what Audre Lorde calls “the erotic.” In her famed 1978 speech “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Lorde describes how oppression is contingent on this rupture, this disconnection:
There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.
It is not lost on me that this political moment — rooted in multifarious violences designed to terrorize those who challenge a worldview that privileges and supports cisgender heterosexual patriarchy, white supremacy and kleptocracy — is in many ways constructed around and contingent upon deepening this corruption or distortion. (This, of course, in part explains the GOP’s obsession with queerness and the suppression thereof.)
I find my resistance and vitality in centering my connection to the erotic, in the sense that Lorde wrote, in cultivating a daily practice of tending to it, even as many of my intersecting identities as a trans Muslim have become the focal point of political scapegoating and fearmongering. (To be clear, I am also protected by many privileges, as is the intersectional nature of discrimination and privilege.)
Creativity is perhaps one of the most potent ways to preserve the erotic. And transitioning, the creation of a new self in a literal and embodied sense, allows me to consciously integrate creativity into my life on a daily basis.
I’ve learned that transitioning simply foregrounds the universal experience of what it is to be alive: We are all constantly transitioning and transforming, from the cellular level to our daily moods to the evolution of our ideas and understanding of the world. Nothing is static; nothing is fixed. And as I engage in this process of layering and unlayering of the self, I have been moved and surprised by how much this has been a deeply relational undertaking, too.
When I embarked on this journey, I had an idea that this would be a solitary process; I had not fully grasped that to move closer toward oneself is to move closer toward the world. The two are not separate. Relationships so often provide the containment necessary for creation. Parameters, after all, allow creativity to flourish.
I find miracles in my two cis, male friends who taught me how to shave once my stubble started to earnestly poke through.
These moments of creation, this practice of creativity, in a climate designed to stifle, quell, constrict, and kill, are nothing short of miraculous. I find miracles in my two cis, male friends who taught me how to shave once my stubble started to earnestly poke through. I find miracles in my bandmates, who are creating an album with me in which I harmonize with myself as my voice drops. I find miracles in the web of friends and chosen family who have signed up to take turns making meals and walking my dog for a month as I recover from top surgery. I find miracles in the timbre of my voice, which deepens each new week.
I do not offer these miracles to obscure or spiritually bypass the horrors that surround us right now. Because there are many. But both things can be true. In my experience, embracing these moments is the antidote to the horrors.
If we so choose, we are lucky enough to consciously be in this continual process of creation and re-creation together, and all the wonder these possibilities bring to life. Despite the best efforts of those who seek to subjugate others and wield cryptofascistic ideologies, our dignity — our divinity — can never be taken from us.
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