KP (they/them)
My relationship with my body is full of gratitude and appreciation. It took a while to get here, after years of forcing it to conform to others’ desires, or others’ expectations.
There were an awful lot of rules I was told it had to abide by, and I just never questioned them–rules like “clean shaven”, “under X number of pounds” (or was it “taking up less than X amount of space”), “smooth”, “firm”, “clear” or “unmarked”.
In retrospect, I can remember signs that my body was telling me these rules were causing it pain, that these were not things that it wanted for itself–I would retreat, withdraw, get angry, fight. But everything around me continued to reinforce the rules: “More toast? Don’t carbo-load”, “Your uncle just wants a kiss”, “Don’t get tattoos, you’ll never get cast”, “Stop picking”...and then puberty hit. My initial responses weren’t enough; and when the pressure amounted to the equivalent of not just tolerating the rules but accepting or even enjoying them, I turned to alcohol. I treated my body like my surroundings were treating me: I told it to calm down, stop pushing back, and follow the rules. In the summer of 2020, I very distinctly remember hitting my lowest point, where I recognized that if I didn’t work toward sobriety, I would be firmly on the path to drinking myself to a bitter end. That was, I think, my body giving me one last chance to listen.
And I did. I listened–and I think, in that moment, I chose love. I saw that pain was an inherent part of love, and I needed to address the pain I’d ignored for so long. Then came remembering moments of my childhood where queerness was lambasted and othered, where my explicit curiosity for anything gay was given eyerolls, where my afternoons to myself singing at the piano were quickly locked up and put away as soon as I heard the garage door open announcing someone’s arrival back home. I let these moments guide me to do so many of the things I wished I could have done as a child: I ate better–I ate MORE!–I let the hair grow, I tattooed myself to wit’s end, I started hormones (because, alas, my thirties were a bit too late for puberty blockers), I underwent my first surgical procedure in my lifetime to procure a chest I can finally walk around in day-to-day without feeling so dreadfully uncomfortable.
My body, thankfully, has forgiven me. It is learning more and more every day to tell me what it wants and needs, and I honor it. I move toward what it likes, even if I don’t fully understand it yet; and away from what it hesitates at. We both know now, my body and I, that the rules were all made up, and that we can make our own decisions now–and that’s what’s best for us.
I don’t know that I actually feel gender, specifically. My gender–if I have one at all–could absolutely be categorized as having a -fluid suffix, but I don’t think I wish to find any verbiage for it right now. I’m not a woman, I’m not a man. I joke that if I had a gender identity, it would be somewhere between Newsie, busker, and Jellicle cat: and there are aspects of those things that do align with a massive part of who I am–that is, someone who embraces the tenderness and softness of masculinity–but is that gender in and of itself? I’m not sure. For all the aspects of gender that there are, and for all the times they flow one way or another (or a super-secret third option), why does any combination have to amount to a singular identity? It’s too static for me. I don’t want to be defined: I want to be listened to, and encouraged to change if that’s what I need. I was always covering my chest up. I was really into sports bras when I was 10. It was like, how can I compress, compress, compress? And part of me thought, oh, it's just my anxiety, and I need a thunder sweater. But I didn't know top surgery was a thing I could do.
And that's so much of what it is. We don't know what we don't know. There is also a lot of rhetoric in terms of the body positivity movement, like, “love yourself as you are”. It's like, OK, sure. But also you're also allowed to do to your body what you want. And if it makes this intense existential pain go away, I now know, oh, I should pursue that. What I do know is that the day I took my first testosterone injection, it felt like I was experiencing falling in love. I didn’t know bodies could have that feeling all on their own; it was magic. And so I did something that I wasn’t accustomed to doing after that moment: I chased more of it.
Okay...so maybe it feels like love. Like magic.
The journey of exploring my gender has been made up of several instances of “never say never”!
As an example: I haven’t fully rejected femininity by any means–nor have I fully embraced masculinity–but I have found myself re-learning what I enjoy all over again, and finding that those things can always change, and that that’s OK. I’m also more willing to try new things and take risks, because what I learn from trying has been far more valuable to me in my exploration, regardless of whether I like it or not.
We can hate social media all we want, but honestly, the one thing the Internet is great for is that the kids now are seeing people like me, at this age. Like this, happy, gray hair. And so you know, that was how I was able to explore gender, like seeing myself and seeing people that I wanted to look like. And I was like, what if I started trying things? So as it was coming out of me, I was like, my pronouns are she/they now. And I did a devised play over Zoom where there was like a little bit of experimenting and different kinds of clothing. And then a couple months after that, it was like, what if I cut my hair? I found a barber – shoutout to Sydney at Hairrari! And that’s what it is – this is community. I wouldn't be here without any of these people. I wouldn't be here without like, from Marsha P. Johnson, all the way forward. Without my trainer, who helped me get ready for top surgery and helped me recover afterwards. Everybody, we help each other grow. And it's not like they make us queer. And you know, people will say, oh, you're going to influence people – as if that's bad. But like, what it is, more than anything else, is that I walked into a room and was not judged for what I wanted or what made me happy when I didn't hurt anybody else. And that's what cishet, Judeo-Christian purism culture does, we judge each other. And it's like, cool. I mean, if you want to be unhappy, go be unhappy. Imma be over here.
I’m more willing to defend what’s right and wrong for me personally, and in standing up for myself I’m learning who is more and less willing to respect my agency and my boundaries, and I’m more willing to take action regardless of others’ reactions or opinions. (Recovering people-pleasers will understand!) I have learned how to better look out for myself and my needs, and speak up when I need to. And I’ve gained a deeper understanding of what it means to be responsible for my actions alone: that is, I can’t control anybody else’s behavior or their reactions.
I’ve felt more secure in myself than I ever have, and more confident in myself than I ever have (even confident in my fears that I know I still have and may never get rid of). I’m becoming more fluent in “yes”.
When I was a junior in college, one of my favorite people was holding auditions for the school’s diversity play–I had wanted to audition anyway, but knowing they were the director really upped both the ante and my excitement.
In one of the auditions, we were asked to stand in the room as if the physical space were a spectrum, and given descriptors for each wall that would help us decide where we belonged. When the director said “How masculine or feminine do you feel?”, having pointed to the right wall being one and the left being the other, I very quickly and decidedly darted toward the middle of the room: front and center. Gender was never anything I thought about at that point, and I definitely hadn’t heard of being nonbinary then, at 21 years old–but my body told me to move there. And I got to look my friend right in the face, proudly, in that moment, as if to say “this is where I live”. To come out without coming out.
Later that summer, in working on the play itself, I had confessed to them that I wished I was a gay man; that I more closely identified with that than with anything else I’d known at the time. We laughed it off a little, but I think we both knew the sincerity of the statement. “You’d make a really great gay man,” they told me. They would come out and update their pronouns not long after, but unfortunately they didn’t stay with us long enough to observe me change mine. I do hope they know, if they can know things wherever they are, that these moments I had with them (along with so many others we had together) resonate in my mind with a gentle fondness every day, and that they taught me more than I ever realized at the time–and I’m so sorry to them that I couldn’t thank them before they were gone.
I have lost too many queer friends too young. [shows tattoos] This is Cris. The color of their Mazda, as an amethyst for pride. And this is my coworker Zoe, who was driving out of Florida to come back to New York and got in a car accident. The last text message she sent me, there was a blue butterfly in it. And we were making fun of transfemme and transmasc stereotypes. And yeah, she got in a car accident on her way up here, escaping Florida. And she also, like me, had kind of discovered herself during lockdown. So I actually have two more to put on here. They were all 36 or younger. I have been to more funerals for people younger than I am now, than, you know, the septuagenarians or octogenarians. And that is so fucking wrong. So when I think about that, and I think about the fire that their passings have lit under my ass, I said to myself, I go down fighting. Marsha threw a brick. Marsha, Jesus Christ. Marsha threw a brick for me. I’m gonna fight for the next kids. And how that manifested is, I'm not going down in anybody's documentation as female, I will not.
Last year, I had to update my passport and my driver's license, and I decided I'm putting the X gender marker on both of them. In Pennsylvania, where I was born, there is no option to do that for the birth certificate. So all my shit’s updated to the best of its ability. I guess I can like petition the court in New York or something? And there's, like, a big thing about the X gender marker, and putting that on your documentation because what if you end up on the list? What if you end up a target? And I have seen others say, “I wanna say safe and keeping my assigned gender, or I'm putting what I appear closest to”, to be whatever that means for each individual. And everybody has a right to do exactly what they want to do.
I have hormones in my body now. One of my “keep-myself-occupied-during-lockdown” projects was, how can I do full-body pushups? I could barely do three half-body push-ups. And now I can do like 20-25 no problem. T is helping with this a lot. I'm not going to go looking for fights. But if I have to protect somebody else from dying too young, I'm going to do that. And in my own way, just being who I am now, like this, is at least encouraging other young queer kids to hopefully be who they are.
I occasionally musically direct, and one of the opportunities I had two years ago now was composing for college kids. And a lot of them are exploring pronouns and trying new names, and some of them have already been on hormones and were exploring surgery and all these things. So for them to see me in a leadership role – you know, hearing an 18-year-old call you an elder when you're 34...but like I am! Because I think 35 is the average life expectancy of a trans person. Trans women and transfemmes, significantly on the lower end, and I think transmascs on the higher end. And I just...I want them to get there sooner, you know? I want them to have as much joy as they can. 'Cause I love them. And you know, I'm not a person who wants children. But I always said, like, if I could buy a house and, like, take all the little chickens, like come in here, my gay chickens, and say, “you can live here until you find another place to go.” That's the kind of parent I would be to humans.
If you think about gender for a long-enough period of time, it will all fall apart.
It’s made up. And you can buck the rules too, if you feel that’s what’s right for you. Yes, it will be scary. Yes, you will lose friends. But also yes, you will gain support and community, and they will be the most honest family you’ve ever had. You’ll realize what we mean when we say it has nothing to do with you. You’ll see what a huge deal it is, and how simultaneously it’s also not a big deal at all. You might also see that trying to categorize it is pointless–or that categorizing it is helpful...until it’s not anymore.
You will have a whole new appreciation for the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” That pronouns, gender expression, gender roles, hormones, sex organs, and all of those other things we have learned, falsely, as binary don’t have to align to just “masculine”, “feminine”, or “neutral”. Be a nonbinary lesbian who uses he/xir/fae pronouns, who has a beard and wears makeup, who wears a suit jacket and tie with a skirt and stilettos. Crash the cistem. You will, after exploring what feels right to you, feel the freest you’ve ever felt because you took the time to honor yourself and become that much more secure in who you are, whoever that may be.
You also might be angry or sad that you didn’t do it sooner. But if the best time to do it has passed, the second-best time is now.