Holli (she/they)
I think of gender in a lot of different levels or resolutions depending on the context:
joyfully and lifegivingly - color and flowers, trans and nonbinary magic;
at a distance or when I don’t have the energy - trans woman; and
politically - Queer, Dyke, Trans, Woman, Fuck You.
My sexuality is gay for gender-complicated people. Sapphic. Mostly T4T. Nonbinary people, trans femmes, trans mascs, cis dykes. Kinky af, switch. White. I understand myself as neuroqueer and autistic, and am more recently working to make sense of how I experience being disabled in navigating through that in the world.
My parents were both pastors, so I grew up very much in the church. It was a very liberal form of Christianity, and my parents were also strongly second wave feminists. Very pro body autonomy, but I just wasn't exposed to a lot of gender non-conforming people. I sort of drifted away from Christianity in part, I think, because of body shame. Which is hard. I think that there are so many great things about liberal Christianity that are supportive of, you know, loving other people and stuff like that. And I grew up in an extremely supportive household. I love my parents, and I don't regret my upbringing. I feel really fortunate to have grown up with such supportive, loving parents. But I think that there is just body shame built into the core of Christianity.
I’ve always loved burlesque. I love the empowered sexuality of it. And owning that. Like it's engaging with the gaze, but it's less about the gaze itself and more about owning it. And there's like playfulness in it, right? I love the playfulness, the teasing nature of it. My burlesque name is Holli Hemlock. I wanted it to have something to do with a flower, but a poisonous flower. That's my vibe, pretty and poisonous. Don't fuck with me. Water hemlock is one of the most poisonous plants in North America, and also it has pretty white flowers.
I thought about it off and on for a long time. I had been on hormones for a while; my body had changed a lot. I had surgery, and I had mostly recovered. I felt so little dysphoria, which was amazing. As I've transitioned more and more, I found more and more access to creativity. Wholeness brings space to be creative. When you're not spending the energy you don't even know you're spending on existing in a box, you have so much more energy for other things. You can love yourself so much that you let go of the boxes that our systems put us in. I think trans people are scary to many because it’s confronting to show people you can love yourself enough to work to shed the messages we’ve been given about how we need to be.
I don't have a lot of memories of being younger.
I think I was pretty dissociated from my body. But also more recently I’ve begun understanding my neurodivergence, and I started to understand that I don't have visual imagery. Aphantasia. So that makes it hard to form memories. It also makes it hard to visualize the future. My dad died over a decade ago, and we were pretty close. I don't really have a lot of vivid memories of him because of that. One of the hardest things about transitioning later in life for me has been that my dad doesn’t get to know me like this at all. It’s a grief that’s like… there's nothing I can do with it except feel it.
What I really mark as the beginning of my transition is a little bit more than five years ago. I went to a Zen Buddhist Center for the first time, and I heard this talk given by a trans person who hadn’t yet figured that out about themselves. I was deeply grieving the loss of my father and seeking some ability to be with that grief. And I had really avoided dealing with it for almost five years. They shared some life changing wisdom that they had gotten from a teacher when asking how to deal with all the stuff that comes up while you’re meditating and is too hard to deal with. Like what do you do with that? And the wisdom provided by the teacher was that you just let your heart break. So that’s the reality I started living into. On the 5th anniversary of that day, I got this tattoo: letting the heart break. And now I have my tranniversary on my calendar as “just let your heart break” day.
I’ve sort of come to understand over time that I've been more on a journey of embodiment than anything else. All of the things that we call “gender transition”, for me, have been side effects. Like, it's like a side effect of this journey of more embodiment and then listening to that intuition in myself. Like actually this thing, whatever it is, that we have marked as a society in a way that is gendered is a thing that will give you more embodiment. In retrospect, now I understand the beginning of my transition sort of as this quest for embodiment.
I made an appointment with Callen Lorde with the intention to try microdosing estrogen. And as soon as I made the decision, the walls cracked.
As soon as I opened my mind to this possibility and decided I wanted to do it, the walls started coming down, and I was like, oh shit, I actually do want to see how estrogen makes my brain feel. I do actually want some of these physical changes. And then it quickly went to like, fuck, I actually have a bunch of physical dysphoria. Actually I want all of these things, absolutely. I don't want to microdose. Give me the full cocktail. And that was over the course of about a week. I felt much better once I started. More whole in a lot of ways. I thought I had a lot of access to my emotions beforehand, but I feel like I found more ability to be present. I started to feel some spaciousness. And my body started changing. It changed shape very quickly. Some of my friends call it chaos magic. I feel like my body had been saying things for a while, and I wasn’t listening. But now it's like, “Girl, finally. Thank you!”
I’ve been really fortunate to work with some wonderful surgeons, who have helped me to be more affirmed and at home in my body. When I went for a consult with one of them, there was a resident or whatever observing the consult. I’m pretty sure she was trans feminine, which was cool. I've gone with people who were getting other gender affirming surgeries and seen the training doctors and people that were going to observe be trans as well. I love that. It makes me so happy that we as a community are learning how to do these things that are so affirming for ourselves, for each other.
Transitioning for me is a lot about euphoria. We talk about dysphoria so much. It's important, I think, for people who think that they might be trans to know that you don't have to have dysphoria to be trans or you don't have to recognize that. I think most of us have dysphoria, but we can't always see it because we have to protect ourselves from it to be able to survive. So I think it's really important to know that dysphoria isn't the thing that makes you trans, especially for people who think they might be trans.
Deciding to transition and following the path has been primarily an intuition thing. I think intuition is really important. One day, that intuitive voice it's like, hey, if you do this, there's more life that way. And I think that’s the most powerful tool for transition: the feeling inside that says there's more life and wholeness if you do this thing. And then the other powerful tool is the ability to let go of the outcome, to not need to understand what will happen next if you take that step. In the archetypes of tarot cards, it’s both the High Priestess’ intuitive self-knowledge and the Fool’s leap of faith. The step off, I think that’s the energy of the Fool. Trusting oneself. Taking a step. Taking a leap without having to understand what’s next.
I think one of the things that is really important to me as a parent in enabling the full unfolding of your children is to show them what it's like to love yourself. To be whole and support them in that too. A lot of the blocks that we have, which are given to us and colonized into our bodies from the messages we get from the world saying that we shouldn't exist, those messages live in us, in our bodies. And we have to create walls to be able to protect ourselves. And I think those walls and those messages that live in our bodies get in the way of seeing possibility. I think what stops a lot of people in their gender journey is that they don't know what will happen, and I think it's hard to know what will happen because of the walls that we have to put up to protect ourselves, and the messages that we've been given block our ability to see a future. And so that's why I think that the intuitive voice that's like, if you do this thing, there's more life there. More wholeness. More embodiment. Every time I follow that, a whole world opens that I couldn't see before.