Transform Already!

As I write this, I am wearing calfskin boots in an ombre animal print (gift from a glamorous friend), brown corduroys, an ochre top, and a gold locket. I often change clothes while I am writing. When I get stuck, it helps me to get up and move around.

Back in fall I was talking with friends, JB and Rosa—trans people in their 30s—and JB said, “it’s not always so pretty.” They were referring to both the in-between state of gender transition and how a trans person might look later, mostly settled in their body.

I wrote mostly settled instead of settled because we are all, always, changing. What is a time you felt settled in your body, and how long did it last? is a question I want to ask everyone.

Permission

There are people who I have said “settled into their looks,” Diane Keaton for example. Keaton, a woman actor, a public figure, who rejected plastic surgery and lived all her in-betweens for us to see. A lot of people found that unsettling.

When JB said about gender transition, “It’s not always so pretty,” it felt astringent, clarifying, like iodine.

Iodine is a favorite word of mine. This ochre top I am wearing is the color of iodine. I love its crisp, oversize cut, but the color is not working with the corduroys, and it’s bugging me.

I appreciate “It’s not always so pretty” because it burned a permission into me to not see trans people any certain way or say someone looks a way I don’t find them to. Which is not the same as not valuing or protecting trans people.

I feel uncomfortable walking so fine a line here. Really want to get this right.

Proportion

I am still wearing the iodine colored shirt, but I changed out of the cords and into pleated skirt with an intricate blue design. I have on tall, clunky boots instead of the animal print ones. Better contrast and proportion.

At midlife, I am happier with my body than I have ever been, and also shocked by it. I’ve aged during this first year of Trump II. Whose hands are these floating over my keyboard? Half the hair on my forearms is gone. My unsettledness at aging is not the pain of being misgendered. I’m just thinking through in-betweens.

I want to see things as they are. To bend nothing in the world to my will, to prettify nothing, and instead hammer out words into sentences and hold them up to the world. See if they prove true.

I don’t want my seeing—especially of trans people—to be infected with sentimentality. That’s another reason I appreciate JB’s comment. It’s not sentimental. It’s defiant.

But out of context, “it’s not always so pretty” feels dangerous to say about trans people. Politicians dump language into our feeds: trans people are “ugly” or don’t even exist. I don’t want to infect my writing by spreading those lies, even accidentally.

Iodine, antiseptic, prevents infection.

Not ready

I am trying to see my daughter true.

Iodine, a word with two eyes in it.

When Izzy came out, one of the first things I said to her was, let’s go look at prom gowns! I thought I was being accepting. I was excited. “I’m not ready for that,” Izzy said. If she’d said fuck off, that would have been fair.

My father in law Stu right away told my mother in law he’d pay for gender confirmation surgery. Did Izzy even want surgery? He hadn’t asked her.

No one knew yet if Izzy was thinking about surgery as part of her transition. Some of our children do, some don’t.

My father in law was impatient for her to Become, to transform into something he recognized. Let’s hurry past the she that looks like the grandchild you called he because it makes you uncomfortable. Cut to the After of before-and-after.

As if Izzy’s present in-betweenness were not a valid state in itself, worthy of seeing.

A mistake

A trans woman friend who came out in her 50s cautioned me, the week Izzy came out, that she should get on hormones right away. My friend didn’t get to go through her true coming of age as a woman until late; she didn’t want Izzy to miss what she had missed. I get that.

But I was also trying to listen to Izzy, who was operating on her own time.

I realize the problem with the top is that the ochre wasn’t far enough from the brown of the pants. Instead of looking intentional, the difference was too subtle, looked like a mistake.

The larger conversation with JB and Rosa was about the goo stage when a caterpillar is dissolved but not yet grown into a moth or butterfly. A chrysalis is a little rocketship full of liquefacted caterpillar on a voyage from here-to-there. Regarding gender transition, or moth transition, Rosa was saying, isn’t the goo a state of its own? Sometimes the goo is it.

Sometimes the goo is it.

Repeat after me

Last fall, my friend Deborah, who had not seen my daughter since her transition, looked at her with love. In a room full of people, she said, “you are so beautiful.” I was surprised by a strange feeling. Deborah isn’t close to Izzy. What was it like for Izzy to hear that publicly? Did she see herself as beautiful? More to the point, does she have to?

My friend Constance went to a workshop on Reclaiming Your Body after her mastectomy. Repeat after me: I am sexy! said a speaker pacing the stage.

Constance raised her hand and said, “do we have to be?”

Constance’s mastectomy happened right before we adopted Izzy, which reminds me of one more thing. When we took baby Izzy for a checkup in China as part of finalizing the adoption there, the Australian doctor at the clinic weighed her and said, “they are not always so handsome.” A truly weird thing to hear.

I’ll leave the racism behind the white doctor’s assessment for another day. But it does clarify that JB could say what they did because they are on the inside, a trans person talking about gender transition.

Just plain

Now I am wearing the ochre shirt with a cream colored, full skirt with black dots. The dots are huge, but their size is balanced by the fact that they are soft at the edges, like soot.

As a cis woman and a mom, if I don’t end by saying trans people are beautiful, that for instance trans girls can learn they are beautiful at their mothers’ elbows, just like any girl can, which is the truth.... If I don’t have pride outwardly in this way, what message does that send right now in this story and this ugly moment of history.

Izzy is pretty, by the way.

I don’t remember taking off the locket, but it’s not around my neck anymore.

There was nothing special about the locket. Nothing inside it, no curl of hair or tiny photo. It’s just a plain locket that shines perfectly.

— N.R.

Noa Rabinow is a health care worker and an editor at Gender Defiant.

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