ninaherenorthere.com

Mr. Homo Girly Man

I thought there was a distinct chance that testosterone would make me gay, but it never occurred to me that testosterone would make everyone think I’m gay. As a child, I was a tomboy; as a teenager, I walked with the dyke swagger; as a dyke, I was sporty and jockey. I was always a tiny bit masculine, stereotypically speaking, so it’s somewhat of an surprise to come off like a pansy.

Some of the shift probably has to do with personal choices–I’m now comfortable pulling my hair into a half-pony, throwing on a purple shirt and grabbing a hula hoop. Some of it probably has to do with my socialization as a woman–I’ve always talked with a mild valley girl lilt, and maybe some if it even has to do with me being little for a guy. But what this shift in perception shows me is how fundamental and deep the male=masculine and the female=feminine goes in our culture. Swap out my shell and different traits bang up against the container, new characteristics are brought into relief. In the end, all this queer can say is a flaming, faggoty, “hallelujah!”

My First Dance

A couple weeks ago, I went to the monthly dyke party that I used to go to in my early twenties and have rarely been to since. While some queer spaces like the Lexington Club have changed to accommodate the changing clientele, this monthly party hadn’t changed at all. It was FULL of women. At one point, I searched the crowd for least one person who might identify as boi/boy, genderqueer, trans-masculine, or even use the pronoun “they.” Nada. I didn’t care. It was a sunny afternoon and I wanted to dance (tequila was involved).

I joined a friend dancing with a woman with shoulder-length hair, a newsboy cap, a black sweater vest, a decent-sized chest that didn’t seem to be contained by sports bra nor binder–in short, a soft butch, or me eight years ago. Back then, I never would’ve danced with this woman same as I wouldn’t have fucked my mirror. But next thing I knew, I was grinding up against this woman, my packer pressed into her crotch. I guess I expected her to turn away or run, but she smiled. She probably thought I was gay. Maybe she knew I was trans. Regardless, she didn’t care. It was awesome, the first time I ever really danced with a lesbian, or maybe the first time I felt included by one without having to be one.

Hello Ladies…

After exchanging several emails with a friend to decide on a specific date for a dinner party, she sent a mass invite to the larger group with the opening line, “Hello Ladies.” I wasn’t quite offended as much as I didn’t want to be part of an event that would in any way be defined or organized around gender, especially one that didn’t include me. Plus, having exchanged emails with my friend that morning, I wondered how she failed to notice the slip up.

But when we spoke about the incident later, her explanation made sense to me. She said she uses “hey girls” or “hey ladies” the way someone (including me) would say “hey guys”–a phrase that many people no longer think of as gendered, problematic, of course, because the only reason that male words (like guys) or words that contain male parts (like human) are gender-neutral is because of the history of patriarchy. So yeah, “hey ladies” is one hell of a trigger phrase for me, but I couldn’t argue with a woman subsuming men under her gendered term for a collective when the opposite has been going on forever.

The bottom line is neither “guys” nor “ladies” cuts it anymore. I received an email from a friend a few days later addressed to “Lesbian separatists and their boyfriends” and I knew she was talking directly to me and all my friends.

Cocks are like snowflakes

I was discussing gay porn the other day, trying to express to my friend Derek the vast and remarkable diversity of dicks, something that he knew but that I’ve only recently discovered, and he said, yeah dude, “Cocks are like snowflakes.”

My Final Hurrah 

Last Monday, I went into the women’s locker-room at my gym. I did my typical head down, hair in my face, wrap my towel around my neck for extra coverage thing, and perhaps this finally made me look suspicious because everyone stared at me. Everyone.

I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, or rather I’d come up with a response to the “What are you doing in here?” question. I even practiced my answer. In my sweetest voice I’d say,”I’m transgender and I feel more comfortable in here.” But that was months ago, before my sweet voice had gone baritone, before the hard angles had settled into my jaw. Never did I think I would last so long in there. I lasted so long, I may have convinced myself I could stay forever.

There was one woman in particular who must have stared at me for a full five minutes. She was quiet a bit older, and as I waited for her to question my presence, I knew I would never utter my practiced line. In my head, it had actually mutated into a whine, complete with some fist banging on my thighs, an “I don’t wanna use the men’s locker-room, goddamnit! I just don’t wanna.” I almost stopped going to the gym entirely, but the only thing worse than acting like a victim of my situation is acting like a big old baby.

Have I mentioned this thing I have at work I like to call “tranny privilege”?

You see, I have my own private bathroom with shower. Well, it’s two private bathrooms actually, ever since I asked HR to replace the “men’s” and “women’s” shower signs with “unisex” since both rooms are the same. When I changed my name and pronouns at work, to save everyone some discomfort, I’d requested use of these bathrooms, even though they’re only supposed to be used when showering. Recently, a co-worker asked me if she could use them, because no one wants to take a dump in the stall next to their boss, and I said, “Nope. There’s a sign inside that says ‘no exceptions.’ Unless you’re me. Sucker.” So yeah, I can shit, jerk off and shower in privacy at work–tranny privilege.

Back to the big baby thing. With the shower at work, I didn’t even actually need to shower at the gym. It’s just that I didn’t want to be there all sweaty, have to change into street clothes, walk back to work, then shower there, especially since I liked to pretend nobody knows I disappear from my cube to run at lunch, even though my co-workers often ask how my run was? Yeah, I know, woe is me. I didn’t want to change my routine. I was scared of the uncertainty. Who knew what I’d find behind the men’s locker-room door.

A New Beginning

Last Thursday, I decided to check it the men’s side, starting slow with a simple investigation in the late afternoon, an uncrowded time. It turned out the “gang” showers that intimidated me weren’t of the “drop your soap and get nailed by an offensive lineman (WR or RB if it’s a fantasy) kind. They were just shower stalls without doors; one even appeared to be in a corner. And though I kept my head down inside, it wasn’t for my previous reasons–fear of being caught–it was more like don’t invite what you can’t deliver (though I’m told this gym location isn’t known for “activity.”)

Overall, it was a bit uneventful, though I will say there’s a huge difference between a men’s restroom and men’s lockerroom. One has urinals, the other has naked men. Everywhere. It was the closest I’d ever been to such pervasive male nudity and although most of the guys needed some extra time on the treadmill, while I was washing my hands, I noticed the ridiculously ripped super sexy guy standing next to me in a towel. I’m pretty sure that switching to this locker-room immediately made me gay-ish-er.

I showered back at work that day, a rather pleasant experience, but the next time I went into the men’s lockerroom, I showered in one of the doorless stalls, just how I sometimes did on the other side when the lines for the private ones were too long. From the backside, I could be any gender with a hairy ass, and I figure if anyone catches a glance at my front, my dilemma is obvious—I only have two choices.

The locker-room I use doesn’t define my gender. It’s just a locker-room. And using the men’s side doesn’t make me a man. I could say I made the switch because it was time to accept a responsibility for what I look like, to respect the widespread system of binary categories even if don’t believe in it. And maybe that is what I’m saying, but I’d rather phrase it differently. I’d rather say it’s because I’m a person, and I just don’t want to be the kind of person who scares little old ladies in the locker-room.

I knew that once I made the switch, I wouldn’t be able to go back to the women’s side. I’d used every toilet, showered in every stall, had probably used half the lockers in there. I kinda wish I could’ve weighed myself one last time, or looked at my reflection in the mirror against a backdrop of female flesh. It may have only been a smelly, nasty locker-room, but I can’t help but think something inside deserved a proper goodbye.

***Part I: Obstacles***

There are thoughts that always seem to spring up during my yoga practice:

“I bet I look ridiculous right now, like a monkey doing an arabesque”; “I was pretty good at basketball, and soccer. Tennis, too. Boy, those were the days”; “Why, oh why, is my right hip so tight? What is in there? Daddy, are you in there? I know you’re in there. Get out of my hip!”; “How thankful am I to have a body that works. Okay, fine, how thankful I should be to have this body. I am thankful for my body, right?”; “If only I was still with that last girl, or the one before that, then I could think about hot sex while stuck in this stupid room balancing on one foot with my legs and arms crossed”; “That second paragraph in chapter six, maybe I should use ‘patio’ instead of ‘deck.’ No, no, deck. Or patio. Deck. Fuck!”

I expected those thoughts and so was truly surprised when the one I hadn’t anticipated trumped them all, lodged itself into a huge ball in my forebrain: I am transgender. I am DIFFERENT.

I guess I don’t have to think about that as much in San Francisco, or in the Castro where even if I’m the only trans person in my yoga class, my ego is at least comforted by the knowledge that in the distance between my studio to my home, I have received both a girl’s phone number and a guy’s tongue in my mouth.

But the second I arrived in Guatemala, I felt my difference: I laughed uncomfortably when the hotel concierge said, “That’s not your real name right, you don’t strike me as a Nina,” and I quaked in my zip-off pants when a uniformed officer with a gun said, “Good afternoon, sir” while staring at my open passport with the big letter “F,” and I panicked for a moment at a bar in San Pedro when I was directed to the “bathroom,” a cement hole with only a bare bones partition blocking it off from the center of a crowded courtyard.

And the second I arrived on my retreat, I felt my difference: When I met my new roommate, who was upset to have been matched with a guy, me, I took on the burden of the situation, as if I had solely caused the problem, as if my being was an irreconcilable problem. And when I removed my shirt, I realized that even though top surgery was without a doubt the best thing that has ever happened to me, I still felt stigmatized, a tiny bit ugly, when my scars were acknowledged: The mom who asked, “Are you okay?”; The child who asked, “What are those lines?”; The massage therapist who asked, “Are those tribal markings?” And every time I heard someone address the woman named “Mina,” I felt my entire stomach drop before I’d realize that nobody knew my birth name, that the present incarnation of myself was safe.

At this point in my life, I find it easier to out myself instead of biting my tongue when I’m about to tell a girl I used to play sports against her all-girls school, or explicate that I played in the Sydney Gay Games as a dyke not a gay dude, even though I’m at least kinda gay-ish now. It’s also easy to out myself because I’m writing a transgender memoir and since writing is what I’m most passionate, it’s often the first thing I want to share with new friends.

Within the first few days, I’d told several folks I was trans (although I always said the full “transgender” and tried not to wonder if they had any sense of what I meant by a word that I believe holds a great deal of diversity). If I didn’t tell someone, I assumed they either heard or figured it out, and then, once everyone knew, I developed it into a new worry: I am only a Trans Person, that’s all I do, all I am, all I have to offer.

Different may have been the word I used to describe myself initially, but separation, isolation, and loneliness were the blocks that I turned it into inside my head.

*** Part II: Intention ***

On Tuesday, when I had settled into the retreat enough and still knew I’d have enough time to relax when done, I pulled out my manuscript. It took me a day-and-a-half to get through, and I read it as planned, in a hammock without a pen in my hand and without an eye towards revision. But I also read it with an intention I would not have considered had I not had a brief exchange at breakfast with my teacher who framed my upcoming task as a “nod to the work done.”

Four years of my life, a great deal of pain and triumph, and hundreds of hours writing, revising, writing and revising went into those pages. Some of those paragraphs had been sentences that became chapters that became words that moved from chapter 3 to chapter 5 before finally finding a home. I nodded in acknowledgment, in awe really, of the journey my words had taken. When I bumped into my teacher later, she said I looked clear. She wasn’t aware that I’d read my manuscript, and that after four years, I believed, for the very first time, that I may actually have a book on my hands.

But perhaps the clarity came from the experience of reading a story about a narrator who just happens to have been me, and the new perspective this gave me. For I’d just read a “book” that at its core is a queer coming out story about a person afraid of becoming an outsider, of not being “normal.” And there I was now, a person so comfortable in the Castro as a queer and outsider that “normal” people scared me. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself, at the circularity of my course.

***Part III: Yoga***

We practiced yoga every morning and every afternoon, except for the one morning when a few folks climbed a volcano, an adventure I didn’t even consider after focusing on this concept of intention and setting my own for the week: not to go anywhere or do anything; to banish “should” from my head, to let go of any notion of achieving anything.

Yoga can be a complicated endeavor. It can be about trying to get my leg behind my head (I’m not even close). It can be about learning that my pelvis has a floor and if I can just convince it to feel like its holding onto a tampon for dear life, I might be able to do a handstand. It can be about discovering that there are words like kapalabhati and uddiyana bandha that I cannot physically understand, nor even pronounce.

Yoga can also be profoundly simple. It can be about being compassion to oneself and being compassionate to others. It can be about learning what happens when a handful of people who do not know each other take off work, leave behind children and husbands, drop some cash, shed their defenses, and connect. It can be about discovering that my experiences, my story, may be different from that of others, but that a good story, a real story, is universal—that we all experience joy, worry, pain, sadness, anxiety, passion, loss, grief, pressure, fear, loneliness, and if we’re lucky, some gratitude.

***Part IV:Transformation***

In the end, I didn’t leave the retreat property for six days. I’d wanted to see what would happen if I stopped moving, what would move inside of me if I stayed still. I’m not sure when it happened, or how it did, but I visualized the change in a ritual, an image, my separation going up in flames, and in the experience of diving into the icy volcanic lake every morning and sloughing off my coat of isolation

What took its place shocked me: the words of a friend who said I seem “really happy” and another who said I’m “magnetic” and exude the sense of someone who knows it; a friend on the mat by my side, stabilizing me with her steady strong breath; the pale blue eyes of a friend locking her drishti onto my heart every time I opened my mouth; the ease of skinny-dipping in the womb-warm watsu pool under a swollen moon; the cohesiveness of a circle, undulating, and the flickers of light that powered us from our center.

***Part V: Return***

I went to yoga class on Monday night, the first day I was back. I’d told myself I didn’t *have* to go, but after practicing daily, it seemed easier to go than not to, to stick with a good habit rather than force myself into a bad one. And besides, it was less than a five minute walk to the studio from my house, only a few minutes longer than the walk from my retreat room to the yoga palapa. I’d just spent a week with people who flew to Guatemala from NY, Minnesota, and Colorado to practice with my teacher, and now, back in San Francisco, the distance to her seemed even shorter.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that she was happy to see me, for she is human and not immune to the retreat withdrawal I was experiencing; she too had to let go of the community we’d created; she too had to acclimate back into the urban chaos.

After class, she was excited, telling me that she could see it, that my practice had shifted. Although I downplayed it, as I do, I would agree. I’m a little stronger, a little less self-conscious, a little more aware of my body, able to breath a little deeper. But it is off the the mat where I’ve noticed the shift the most. I waited for the panic to hit when my travel plans went awry after I left the retreat property, and I waited for my job annoyance to hit when I went back to work, and I waited for the overwhelm to hit when I got back to my manuscript and realized I have less than five months to finalize this book. But nothing hit, at least not as hard as it used to, not hard enough to knock me over.

I know they were all out because it was, or certainly felt like, the first weekend of spring. They were everywhere in the Castro and Mission, and all over Dolores Park. Every street and corner, every bar and cafe. I’m sure they were always there. The dykes and lesbians that is. I’d just never seen them so clearly before, never noticed them from the outside.

Some trans guys talk about feeling or becoming “invisible” once they transition, mostly surrounding the  loss of lesbian community and the loss of blatant queerness. I’ve been waiting for this to strike me now that the physical differences between me and women have widened.

I sat in front of Harvest on Market St, eating sweet potato soup and thinking about this late yesterday, just watching all the dykes go by. I saw ponytails and dreadlocks and short styley hair, basketball jerseys and soccer shorts and softball uniforms. I saw women who certainly didn’t need and most likely didn’t want boobs as large as they had, and super boyish looking women who were probably pretty stoked about this. I felt like I was watching my entire twenties walk by. I didn’t feel invisible. I felt old. When I got up to leave, I caught my reflection in the glass. It surprised me a little, the young man staring back at me. How goddamn handsome you are, I thought. Then the loneliness hit. For the loss of what once was.

“I just tell people they’re shark bites,” he said.

My first response, a testament to either my ridiculousness or literalness, was that my chest scars are too symmetrical to be shark bites. Or, maybe it was a testament to how ignorant (and I mean that in a mostly friendly way) I believe most people are about trans folk. But headed to Guatemala on a yoga retreat at the end of next week, I realized I may want to have a story or two in my back pocket, whether it’s about precancerous tissue removed from chest, or my passport.

Because I didn’t want to start the long arduous process of changing my name/gender, especially when I’m not sure I ever want to change my gender (mostly for health insurance fears but also because M and F as designations are beyond meaningless to me), I’ll be traveling under a passport with an “F” and the name “Nina.” My picture is pre-testosterone, but it looks enough like me now that I figure most people won’t notice my name or gender. However, I am having some awkward moment worst case scenarios like having to acknowledge that the F is a mistake and that Nina is a boy’s name in Russian–both almost as believable as the shark bite thing.

Then there’s the retreat itself, which I imagine will consist of a handful of people from San Francisco, as well as people who work there, and of course, all of the people who fall into the “unforseen” circumstances category. I am expecting/hoping I feel safe enough to be trans without any explanation for my scars, and walk around in just shorts, because, well, I’ve waited fifteen fucking years to be comfortable in a bathing suit.

As far as my testosterone, I’m on a ten-day shot cycle and my trip is about ten days. When I booked the trip, I looked at a calendar and realized that if, leading up to my departure, I pushed off a few of my shot cycles by one day, then I could line up my trip and a cycle perfectly. It wasn’t entirely necessary; I could bring my vial, a syringe and needles, but I’d prefer not to. I’d prefer not to deal with any of these things, I guess, but these things are my life as I know it.

There was a time, about a few years, when I spent most of my mental energy trying to reconcile what seemed to be a whole lot of no-win choices. Breasts or scars. My happiness or the happiness of others. Traveling as a woman or never traveling again as a trans person. I wondered how much I’d have to give up for what in the end felt less like decisions and more like instinctual mandates.

So, here I am, about to go on first trip abroad as a transboy. And the truth is, I haven’t been too worried about it. Sometimes I forget that for being so neurotic and anxious, traveling calms me down. I’m good at planning, managing situations. I fixed this trip as sort of a training wheels, a place to test how comfortable I feel with my “F” passport and how safe I feel alone for a couple days at the beginning and end of the retreat. Part of my decision to go on a destination specific trip as opposed to a backpacking  trip, even stay someplace “resorty”–something I’ve never done before–was so that I could settle into being myself around the same people, build them into a comfort zone.

And I’d be an idiot to think traveling as a trans person is any more dangerous than half the shit I pulled traveling alone as a woman. I’m also crazy if I think being trans is going be the hardest part of my trip. Because it’s entirely clear to me that the yoga is what is going to kill me.

This weekend I interviewed a trans artist friend of mine. We spoke about his music, dance, writing, as well as my writing, about our identities, trans experience, activism, being “out” in the public eye, and the intersection of it all. Before we met, I’d found myself oddly interested in a fact about him and his work for a reason I couldn’t explain. He’d recorded a song, “Little Girl,” that for the first time in music history had a transman sing alongside his former voice.

I understood that the song was groundbreaking, but when I heard him speak so emotionally about how personally definitive this song was, it got my thinking about something that was already on my mind a lot, the working title of my manuscript in-progress (or the “book” or “memoir,” as I also call it, though those words are really too far ahead of where I am).

My manuscript is tentatively titled, “Nina Here Nor There,” a phrase I don’t say aloud very often though I type and read the phrase all the time, consider its unspokenness between me and new friends who discover my blog and now know my former name. So, it felt a bit weird when I actually said the title during the interview, as if I were breaking the seal on something I could potentially see for the rest of my life. Some of my trepidation comes from that, the title of my first book is simply, in and of itself, a huge deal, but there’s also the concern over making my birth name so visible.

I recently read S. Bear Bergman’s collection of essays, “The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You“–most of them about being a former dyke, queer, Jewish, tranny with faggy tendencies. Let’s just say I had a love/hate relationship with the book, as can only be the case when faced with a writer and person so similar and yet so so so so different from me. (I also had complete respect and admiration for hir and hir work.) Bear, who prefers gender neutral pronouns, is very open in hir essay, “What’s in a Name?” about stating hir birth name. Ze makes it clear that certainly family members, airline personnel, and other people with special privileges, can refer to hir birth name.

Reading the essay as a trans person, I completely understood the underlying message, or at least my interpretation of it: There’s a time and a place for given, birth or legal names. This doesn’t make them real names (that’s Bear’s main point) or names to be used at the discretion of others (that’s my point). After Bear published the book, ze pointed out on hir blog that the media included hir given name in reviews–as if it would be remiss to forget this “fact” the “real” truth. I wondered how these reviewers had missed the whole point of that crucial essay.

Ever since then, I’d been profoundly afraid of what the media, the greater public, will do with my former name on my book, how they will abuse it. Until recently, I’d been saying one of my reasons for wanting “Nina” on the cover of my book was to commemorate it, memorialize it, give it a sort of gravestone. In my book, the characters refer to the narrator as “Nina” a handful of times, and each time I write those moments, I hold this name close to my heart.

The reality is, I see “Nina” more often than others probably realize, almost daily. It’s on mail, my taxes, my driver’s license, passport and any piece of important paperwork. I hear it at the doctor, dentist, library, and occasionally the gym. It’s on the bottom, my signage, of very old strings of emails at work, and on all my travel bookings. The super cute woman who cleans our house (and whom I have a crush on) says, “Hello, Nina” when she calls once a month. It took me six months to figure out why I couldn’t tell her my new name. I love the way she says “Nina.” It’s so beautiful. Too beautiful to tell her the truth and have it disappear from her mouth.

Sometimes, I miss “Nina.” Not as my name, but as the name that was once mine. Sometimes, when I meet new people, when I get over my fear that they’re not  seeing me in a way resonates with how I see myself–the trauma of a many years being seen as a woman–I want to pull them aside, whisper in their ear, “For thirty years of my life, my name was Nina. Thirty years of my life. That was me. How I was known. Nina.” Sometimes, when I’m with trans folk and we don’t have to protect ourselves so fiercely, we drop our guards and remind each other, again and again, to mourn.

This weekend, when my trans friend spoke about the combination of his voices on one track, he captured the fear he felt on the cusp of potentially losing his voice (or whatever the uncertain results would be to his vocal chords), the fear of losing everything, of letting it all go. Another thing he said, one of the many that I’m sure I’ll be thinking on for days, was how trans stories are really human stories, striking at something that’s often hard to see in the shock-and-awe factor of gender transition–the universality of the trans experience, of the way people change. My book, while also being an alternative transgender narrative, is, in more general terms, a story about a person finding the courage to let go of who she was.

Hearing my friend speak of his definitive song made me think, at least for the time being, it would be cathartic, empowering, triumphant to have both my names on the cover of my book. How often do any of us get to hold who we once we were and who we are in one place, or have such a defining way to mark the journey, both the fear and the reward. For him, it was through music, his voice. For me, a writer, it is through my words.

Nina. Nick.

There’s a lifetime between those words. Or at least a book.

Forgive me for combining holidays here–but it’s only at Valentine’s Day that I’m able to reflect with the type of retrospective so common at the turn of the New Year. I’ve always been slow, thoughtful, deliberate, late. Though taking the two holidays  together makes more sense in context. For 2009 was the year of love, or almost love, or not really love at all, or self-love perhaps. It was the first year of my life as Nick, and the first year my gender and body were no longer impassable obstacles to my becoming involved physically and emotionally with others. It’s no surprise that I spent the year in relationships, four of them to be exact, though “relationships” is a term I’m using in its broadest sense to include engagement with another in a serial (and for me) monogamous (though unintentional) fashion.

I met the first girl at the start of 2009, literally, midnight-ish on New Years. Re-met would be a more appropriate term since she used to hang out at my house years ago, flirt with my back in the day when I’d run away scared of anyone who wanted my clothes off. When I re-met this girl and she saw my room, she shook her head in disappointment. All I had was one map of the world. For the three years I’d lived there, it was the only thing that made me feel comfortable, a map with its millions of escape routes. I didn’t have a home. Home was something I couldn’t create inside my body and it was something I couldn’t create in my surroundings.

Shortly after we started hanging out, I asked this girl to make a decoration suggestion. “Curtains for your bay windows and a comfortable reading chair,” she replied. The chair is where I’m sitting as I write this, my windows framed by my handsome blue and gold curtains.

I didn’t get to ask the second person for room advice. We never spent an entire night together. But he showed me boundaries, the beauty of the queerest of bodies, helped landscape my internal home. The third suggested a duvet cover for my bed, and how her of her to have the perfect one, to give it to me and make a home for me to rest. The fourth picked out a plant, bringing life into my home.

I’m still feeling the fourth, enough to know it’s time to regroup, time to be alone inside this home I’ve created, time to watch the leaves on my new plant, the hair on my new body grow. I’m feeling her enough to know that today would be a special challenge, and oh, how I love challenges.

I had decided Rusty would be my Valentine long ago, looked forward to yoga today for all that I knew it would be and all that I didn’t. There’s something about his tone, part pleading, wisdom and command, the way he says, “Don’t miss this moment,” so that even if my legs are trembling, and I’m so uncomfortable I want to call it pain, I cannot help but think, “Do not miss this moment,” and that when I’m so beat I can’t see through the sweat in my eyes and he says, “I want this to be the most challenging part of your day. I want this to be the most challenging part of your week,” I know that I can hold sadness, loneliness, loss, and even more, that I don’t want to miss the moment.

The hardest part was towards the end, a two-minute meditation, stillness. Rusty challenged us here too, offered us a couple mantras and goaded us to try them. “I dare you,” he said. “For two minutes, I dare you to repeat to yourself: I am worthy of love. I am worthy of love.” I certainly believe it and I certainly tried, but let’s just say my mind wandered a little. How easy it is to give love to others, and how easy it is to receive love, but  how very very hard it is for me to sit with my own love.

He ended class with words he’s said a lot since he opened his new studio though the meanings are infinite. “Welcome home,” he said

“Welcome home,” I said to myself.

James Earl Jones

My voice is deep. Like super deep. It’s all anyone can say despite knowing that this is exactly what was supposed to happen. Last week, a trans guy asked me if the men in my family had especially deep voices, like I might be genetically predisposed to a bass. If I call my bank, or my cable company, they’ll start the conversation using my legal (account-holding) name, only to fall into Mr. Krieger within seconds. Unlike muscles and the tiny weeny, a deep voice wasn’t one of the things that I was especially looking forward to, so I’m surprised by how much pleasure I’m taking in it. I call people I could easily email, and I sing aloud to songs, privately of course. But the best is hearing myself “Om” in yoga. The vibration is finally primordial, eternal, resonant.

Cry Baby

I can still cry. The first time I cried, a month or so ago, I wondered if it was a fluke. But these past couple weeks, I’ve been getting it out, a few trickles and one big bawl. About ninety percent of the trans guys I know say they have a hard time crying, or can’t at all, even when they need to. Sure, I’m not crying nearly as much as I was before T, but I feel significantly more in touch with my emotions. I trust them. And I don’t necessarily think it’s a man/woman thing. It’s more like I feel solid now, whereas before I was fuzzy—my shadow kinda askew, my doppelganger trailing me by a millisecond, something slightly off. I’m not entirely sure how this ties into crying, but I think I’m trying to debunk the myth of the “no crying, unemotional, irritable, aggressive T-infused trans guy.” The reality is I’m peaceful and softer inside, a more emotional version of myself. I’m coalescing in such a way that when I cry, it’s not just something my body is doing. It’s an experience that I actually feel deeply connected to.

The Pleasures of Gay Porn for a Pansexual Who Still, Thankfully, Loves Women

I have to admit that my ability to cry sometimes makes me think I’m not taking enough testosterone. (Although there’s significant debate on the subject of dosing, I take three-quarters of what some consider a “full dose.”) But then I pull something out from my expanding gay porn collection, and I know there’s plenty of T in my system. It’s simple–I used to *like* dude-on-dude action, and now I watch more of it than I ever thought was humanly possible. This is somewhat standard for trans guys, so I won’t go too much into my obsession. It’s also somewhat standard, or at least a possibility, that trans dudes on T go full-on gay. When I started T, there was a lot of speculation from those close to me, and a certain level of concern on my part, that I might no longer be attracted to women. At this point, I think I’m in the clear on this one; I’m still very very much into women, even if I’d prefer not to see them in porn.

When I was in high school, I was a sex educator with this group called HITOPS and one day we had the GLBT council from the local Jersey universities come talk to us. I remember the “bi” girl talking about how cool her sexual orientation was because it meant she had twice the chance of getting a date. Straight at the time, I was jealous; I held onto her comment, kinda dreamed of being like her some day. Now I am. Going out is just so much more interesting when I know there’s the chance that I’ll find anyone and everyone attractive. That said, I know enough to keep my head down and avoid eye-contact when I walk home through the Castro.

Growing Up

I recently saw a trans friend who left San Francisco about a year ago, around the time he started T. I’d bumped into him six months ago, and he definitely looked different, but when I saw him a couple weeks ago, I didn’t recognize him at first. It was partially the complete beard, the button down shirt and vest, the chic glasses. It was also his calmness, a confidence and ease I’d never before seen in him. And it was all wrapped up in his maturity, the movement from child to adult, from boy to man.

When I saw him, I saw the reason I started taking T, or the instinct I had the awareness to follow, a desire to grow up. It  used to frustrate me that I couldn’t see my future. Now I realize it was that, from where I was before, I didn’t have a future. I was aging in a holding pattern. I think there are a million ways to mature, a plethora of experiences that can shape and inform us, teach us how to take care of ourselves, take care of others, but until recently, I’d never had the opportunity to witness my own physical maturity in my reflection, to be proud of the little boy who’s finally growing up.

Confession

I’m still occasionally, absentmindedly, doodling my old name.

Carded Anew

I’m carded almost anytime I get near alcohol. Once I pass over my driver’s license–the photo is over a decade old–the bartender, bouncer, whoever will inevitably quiz me on my zip code or date of birth, or will say, “There’s really no way you’re 5′7″.” Explaining that I used to play basketball, thus padding a few inches, doesn’t always help and backup ID is required. But the other day I got a new test. The bartender held up my ID and said, “Let me see you smile.” I laughed, knew exactly what he wanted, and busted out a smile that nearly revealed my wisdom teeth. “You can’t fake that,” he said, before pouring my drink. I’ve always held onto my eyes as the one physical trait that won’t change on T, and I point this out to those fearful that I may stop being familiar to them. Until I was carded at the bar, I hadn’t thought of the smile, how little that changes. I carry a picture of my brother from around age 4 in my wallet. He has a blond bowl cut; now he has a brown Jewfro. He looks nothing like that childhood picture, except for that crooked lady-killer smirk, and I’m pretty sure that’s why I carry it around. Because some things never change.

Passing vs. Being Seen

I was explaining to a new queer friend that I was “passing” more often lately, using the word “passing” out of laziness, knowing that in our shared lexicon she’d understand this to mean I was being recognized as a guy. “But do you feel like you’re being seen?” she asked. I often tire of identity discussions, of queer polemics that have become their own thoughtless cliches, like “nobody passes.” But my response to her question felt new.

When I’m amongst my friends and my community, those who have known me for years, or those who recognize the infinite possibilities within genders or perhaps recognize the transgender in all of us, I feel fully seen. When strangers or acquaintances or new hires at work recognize me as a man, I don’t feel seen in my entirety; I am actually “passing,” occasionally feeling like an impostor or a fraud, words that although partially accurate hit too close to the transphobic vitriol of the past fifty years. A tourist passing as a local is more appropriate, and the point that I’m attempting to make is that while “being seen” is liberating and allows me to connect with people in a way that had never been possible before, “passing” has its place too.

Passing is new and scary, dangerously exciting; it allows for an exploration from the inside, a cultural education, seamless learning, an induction. I don’t feel fully seen but therein lies the beauty, being in a position where I can shed my history, my baggage of womanhood, absorb all that I’m only now able to because men may look at me and think, You’re one of us–as wrong and right and complicated as that may be.

Mother and Child Reunion

I saw my mother this past weekend for the first time since she was out in San Francisco for my surgery almost a year ago. I was nervous–my chest is flatter than it ever was with a binder; I’ve gained about five pounds, almost all in the muscles in my pecs, shoulders, and arms; my face is more angular; my neck is thicker; I have zits that my friends say I cannot call acne yet; I smell different; I shave my face; my voice is definitely deeper. But then again, it’s me, so I notice everything. My mom, although conceding that my voice sounds “hoarse,” and that maybe my face is bigger, says I don’t appear different to her.

I am torn between feeling a great sense of relief that my mom finds me familiar and frustrated that she cannot see the physical changes that mean so much to me. At one point at the end of the trip, she said, “I just don’t see you as a man. I’m sorry, I don’t.” I wasn’t angry with her, because even if she couldn’t see it, she spent two days acting as if she could (barring her complete inability to remember to call me Nick), referring to me as “mister” instead of “lady,” or pointing me to the men’s room instead of the women’s room. But part of me did want to shout in my mom’s face, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE ME AS A DUDE? What part of my body, chest, face, anything is reminiscent of female to you?

Her comment made me see that maybe she hasn’t thought of me as having a gender for years. Sure, she placed me on the woman side as a matter of procedure–my birth certificate, biology, and recognition by society said so. But my mom, much like me, sees women as being able to do all the same things men can. And maybe the physical attributes, the change in my chest and face and body don’t signify anything about gender to her. Maybe to her I am genderless. And in that respect, I will never change.

*I’m not the biggest fan of the term “transition” in gender-speak; it implies starting somewhere and arriving somewhere else, of moving from female to male. I don’t see it that way. I have made decisions, and continue to make decisions, and they are, in a sense, separate.

*I am passing as a dude more lately. All of my feelings surrounding this are complex. Sometimes, when I’m in a group, I feel a new and unusual uncertainty about what to say and not say about my history, my age, my daily experiences because I have no idea how I’m being perceived. I also know that someday, perhaps, maybe, I might pass as a guy all the time, and for me the impending loss is so profound it makes me want to stop time. But mostly I feel a swell of pride when someone acknowledges me as dude; that shit is downright euphoric. My favorite passing moment (and some version of this happens surprisingly often) is when a bouncer or voting booth attendant says, “hey man,” then looks at my uber-girly picture ID or asks for my legal name, and then says, “thanks man.”

*I shaved my face for the first time, and it was AWEsome. It turns out that men’s shaving cream smells way better on my face than it ever did on my legs. My friend Derek *taught* me how while my other friend filmed us, and turning the experience into a big event that could be shared and captured was the best part. When I consider the things I’ve dealt with in my gender journey–knives, needles, pain, sadness, discomfort, fear, the constant phobia of public bathrooms–shaving was one of the only truly fun things. Plus, I love the way my fresh face looks, and now I get peach fuzz stubble, which is more exciting than peach fuzz.

*I am feeling some unease about publishing a book, and maintaining this blog, with my former name in the title. While it means my old name will be accessible to the general public forever, something I do think I’m okay with, it also means that when I meet new people, mention and eventually promote my book, my old name is one of the first things they will learn about me. This is not upsetting as much as it feels weird. I don’t have any interest in the given names of trans guys I meet, and prefer not to know, which makes me think that others might prefer not to know mine. I once thought that having my given name on a book cover would memorialize it, but now I’m wondering if it might instead transmute ”Nina” from my former name into a title, and perhaps I should just let it rest in peace.

*Confession: I still use the women’s locker room at the gym. I often workout during the day at lunch and need to shower before I return to the office. The women’s room has single stall showers. The men’s room has open gang showers. The situation makes me alternately frustrated and enraged. And although I keep my head down, eyes focused on the floor, and do not speak to anyone in the women’s locker room, I know it’s only a matter of time before someone asks me what I’m doing in there. I don’t want to be in there. But it is easier. More comfortable for me. At least for now. When provoked, I wonder if I’ll have the balls to say that I’m transgender and this side is safer. Or if I’ll start bringing a bathing suit to the other side to hide the fact that I don’t have balls.