"Thirty seconds after you're born you have a past, and sixty seconds after that you begin to lie to yourself about it.”
This is a selfish piece.
Today is Trans Day of Visibility and I have not shaved. I have slept, a lot, and eaten a bagel, and googled “Megan Fox” and sat in my room with the lights off scrolling through twitter. This is not a day where I want to look at my body, let alone barter with a label’s side effects. I am exhausted by notions of the “problematic transsexual” and irritated by sanitized trans representation. Dysphoria comes in familiar cycles and signifiers. The conceptualization of my own gender cracks endearingly, in motorcycle jackets and twinks and the CGI dolls of Welcome to Marwen. I have been out and on hormones for a little over a year and I am just now settling into whatever this is, this newness, this “clean break.” I can be stubbly and untucked for the day, that’s alright. It’s quarantine.
There’s this one sharp pain that refuses to sort itself into anything actionable, anything mentionable.
I want to be able to give birth.
…I don’t like typing that. I want it to look more elegant, more original. So many traditional markers of femininity, of queerness, have become a trite advertisement for one’s identity, and I resent, naively and ardently, marketable writing about vulnerability. Besides, you already know the adjectives that are coming next: nurture and milk and unseen and chosen family. I could cast it in the transphobic light too; I could say fetish and uterus and stolen and aggressive. It’s easy and explicable in all the ways the actual emotions are not.
My relationship to my own mother is muddy and predictable: We look and act the same: the same hands, the same smile, the same gestures, the same draw towards chaos. We don’t speak. I love her, though, and I love children. I wanted to go to school to become a kindergarten teacher.
Over the past few weeks, this reproductive dysphoria has gone a bit haywire. I offer to read to my friends, or talk them through panic attacks, or send them monster statues in the mail in Animal Crossing. I want to feel like a mother, feel that responsibility over my loved ones as I sit in my room ignoring my less and less manicured body. More than an unhealthy impulse, it’s an unsustainable and impractical one. I’m in somewhat dire financial straits. I’m the one in my friend group who craves being told “You’re so young, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you, you’ll figure it out.” I have to accept care right now to survive, including care from myself; I have to work out, and I have to eat well sometimes, and I have to start going to bed earlier. And my friends have shown up for me in all this, in ways which continue to baffle and humble me. I don’t deserve it, but I’m grateful.
Still, it’s hard to feel like a girl alone in my room. In the fantasies I nurse at 3 AM, pregnancy would give my body a truth, irrefutably accurate and mine. There would be no man in my past to deny the woman in the present. There would be no option not to attend to this body. This is, of course, a lie. It’d feel fraudulent sometimes, too, and the same old cognitive distortions would still wage battles against the baby hormones. Intrusive thoughts and yearning both never learned to be particularly comprehensive.
What told me pregnancy was the peak of womanhood? Was it the privileged liberal feminists of the late aughts? Was it The Umbrellas of Cherbourg? Was it Farrah Abraham?
Countless dull articles have circulated about whether or not it’s ethical to have children “right now,” whose conclusions range from ecofascist eugenics to some optimistic uncertain platitudes. I read them all and obsess over the question and push it away, mark it in my calendar some time far past the two weeks I can see ahead of me.
I have plans put in place for then. I’m on hormones, though that doesn’t erase my fertility entirely. My DNA is in a sperm-bank somewhere upstate. I haven’t had bottom surgery or orchiotomy. I could use a surrogate, or if I wind up with a partner who is willing and able they could carry the child. I have no issues with adoption, and want to apply when I am ready. I offer my alternatives as recompense for a perceived arrogance on this front, or maybe the very obvious fact that this issue is so not pressing. I’ll be able to raise a child when I’m ready, whether or not it comes from my genetic line. And I’m excited, and hopeful, and I think I’ll do a good job, really. But even the solutions proposed don’t answer the question, if that’s what you call it.
I want to carry a child to term - what an ugly, narcissistic urge! I want to sow a donor’s uterus onto my groin. I want cradle a fetus in my stomach acid. I want to carry my womb like a fanny pack and drain my blood into it through the zipper. I want to feel like Samantha Eggar in The Brood, licking clean the blasphemous creations of a body possessed.
Maybe I just want something that feels like it would erase my past, erase any moment before I came out as a woman, and the array of dissociative episodes, self-destructive patterns and harms done to others. Birth would be a beginning in this time between any feasible start or end.
It would give all this waiting a purpose, at least. And a future. And some company.
Love,
Sam
song for the post: Hoàng Oanh - "Lời Ru Của Mẹ"