gender

Gratitude

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A friend of mine nominated me on Saturday via Facebook to come up with three moments of gratitude a day for five days. Well, that was about five days ago, and I haven’t done it yet, but that seemed like a good direction for the blog this week. So Amanda, here’s my list; thanks for the inspiration.

  1. A partner who will join me on silly, spontaneous adventures. Last Thursday, I had the wild idea that we should rent a car over the weekend and drive to Cedar Falls, IA to catch Joe Stevens in concert. The conversation went something like this:

    A: We should go on a road trip and see Joe Stevens!
    E: But it’s Iowa.
    A: But concert!
    E: But IOWA.

    I acknowledged it was a pretty ridiculous idea, but I was a little sad…until I got off work and was greeted by a text to the effect of, “So, about that concert…”

  2. Friends with whom I can escape reality for a while. Saturday was Dungeons & Dragons & Knitting, which is the monthly Pathfinder game with some folks in our knitting circle (the original idea was to play D&D, but Pathfinder ended up happening instead…we just never changed the name). Four of us have an adventure in group storytelling while our partners hang out in the other room and knit and make fun of us. It’s consistently one of the highlights of every month.
  3. Open spaces. We did end up renting a car this weekend and going on a road trip into Iowa, taking a detour on our way to Cedar Falls so that I could show Ethan some of the northeast corner of the state, which is not entirely flat and very, very pretty. The farther we got from Chicago, the more I relaxed. Don’t get me wrong: I love living in Chicago. But wide open spaces do wonders for my soul.
  4. People who choose to love me because of who I am, not in spite of it. The reason I know that there is a pretty part of Iowa (the aforementioned northeast corner) is that my grandparents live there, on a farm in a valley surrounded by trees and bluffs and wildlife and gardens. I remain convinced at age 26 that their farm is one of the most beautiful places on the planet. We were close enough on Sunday that, had I so chosen, we could have stopped by for a surprise visit. But I didn’t. I love my grandparents very much. They love their grandchildren very much. But when I came out to them as Alyx in a letter two years ago, their response (also in a letter) was that they would never call me Alyx, because Alyx was “an imaginary person.” I am almost entirely certain that they don’t know that I started any sort of physical transition. I haven’t seen them in over two years, and I haven’t been on their farm in at least three, and I don’t know when (or if) either of those things will happen again, which is heart-wrenching whenever I think of it. But it also reminds me that I have a whole bunch of people in my life who not only accept that I am Alyx but actually celebrate my life with me, and that is a great comfort.
  5. Those moments of recognition by others in our communities. Visibility is such a huge thing, both for those of us who are still frequently misgendered, and those in our community who pass so well that no one believes they’re trans. There were a handful of those moments this weekend.
  6. Approachable heroes. Meeting Joe Stevens was great: he’s one of our songwriting idols, and is just a fantastic person. But even better than meeting Joe was the fact that we got to actually talk with him. By the end of the night, we were giving each other hugs goodbye. We’re now friends on Facebook. This is still blowing my mind.
  7. Adventures that lead to more adventures. When we got to Cedar Falls and started talking with Joe (and River Glen, who’s touring the Midwest with him), we mentioned we’d road tripped it from Chicago, at which point they told us they were actually going to be playing a house concert in Chicago on Monday night. Throughout the night they told us several times that we should come. We got in touch on Facebook and got the details, and despite the fact that my partner had only slept about 45 minutes and had worked a full day, and the fact that we’d returned the rental car and weren’t entire sure how we were going to get home after transit stopped running, Monday night we found ourselves in the very humid basement of a hippie couple we’d never met, sweating with strangers (and new friends, and someone we met at a karaoke bar three-and-a-half years ago), enjoying more music.
  8. Music that inspires me to create more music. I felt two things in regard to the music at both shows: first, that my songwriting is totally inadequate, and second, that I want to write more songs. There are times when I get the first feeling but not the second one; this was one of the beautiful moments where my feelings of inadequacy were outweighed by inspiration.
  9. New friends. We met some awesome people on Sunday and Monday.
  10. Thinking about the future. My partner and I have been doing a lot of talking about our future together, and it’s really wonderful not only to have a partner I want to have a future with, but to be able to think about the future at all. There was a long time when I could barely see past tomorrow. I’m learning to dream again.
  11. Air conditioning. This is a silly one, but it’s been ridiculously humid in Chicago this week. We don’t have AC at home, but I have it at the office, and I’m grateful for the times I can spend in places where everything does not feel soggy.
  12. Comfort in my skin. This isn’t a constant, but I’ve been feeling fairly centered and okay within myself this week. I was able to go to both concerts without feeling more than momentary social anxiety, and a lot of that had to do with being comfortable being myself. I spent a lot of years stuck in self-loathing, and while I’m not my biggest fan, I’ve at least reached the point where I feel a sort of benevolent indifference toward myself, which is unbelievably better for my mental health.
  13. Fresh perspective. I’m not sure exactly how to explain this one, because it’s been a largely internal thing. Mostly, there have been tiny things happening in the past few weeks that have helped me to look at the world in new (or old but forgotten) ways, and it’s been refreshing.
  14. A (mostly) calm brain. There have been a lot of storms here in the past week. My brain tends to get really uncomfortable when the weather is shifting back and forth rapidly. I’ve felt surprisingly stable in the midst of all of it.
  15. Concrete future plans. I alluded to this in last week’s post, and now that I’ve told my family, I can announce it to all of you: at the end of September I will be filing the requisite paperwork for a court date to legally change my name. By the end of the year I will legally be Alyxander James! There aren’t enough exclamation points in the world to express how excited I am.

On the Validity of Self-Definition

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

A well-meaning coworker asked me several months ago if she could give my contact information to a young person she knew who had recently come out as transmasculine. I handed over my email, but I never heard anything from the kid. Yesterday, after coming into my office for a brief reprieve in the middle of her day, my coworker asked if I’d ever heard from them, and then proceeded to tell me,

She’s just confused. You know what she did for gay pride? She wore boxer shorts, and a…a…well, you know, a thing. But then she had no shirt, and suspenders and pasties. I mean, people who want to be boys, they’re not going to show their breasts! That’s the last thing they’d want to do. Right? She just doesn’t know what she wants.

She then emphasized her point by explaining that they all still called this kid by their given name, and they never said anything (though I can clearly recall her saying that they were really upset by the use of their given name over their taken name several months ago), so clearly, they’re not trans. They’re just confused.

And because it was in my workplace (which is not especially unsafe, but is still not a place I feel I can be particularly vocal about identity politics), I smiled a tight smile, and shrugged noncommittally, and muttered something about that being a hard age for everyone, and she finally left, with one last, “She’s just confused.”

Once it was over, my office, which I have worked so hard to turn into a place of calm and safety (for myself and for my coworkers), felt toxic. I felt physically sick. And I felt like a traitor, both to this kid that I don’t know, and to the trans community at large. Because implied in my coworker’s statement was the idea that I behave the way she thinks a trans person is supposed to act. And I hate that, because I feel like I’ve been assimilated into this toxic culture of gender essentialism that I don’t want to join, but to dismantle.

It’s probably true that the majority of transmasculine people aren’t super into showing their breasts off (in public or elsewhere). But though that may be the prevalent narrative of what transmasculinity looks like, it’s not the whole story (or even any of the story) for all transmasculine people. Who knows? For this kid, who probably can’t afford surgery and who maybe doesn’t have the strongest support system, walking around shirtless at pride might have been a way for them to feel empowered, to reclaim their body as their own. Or maybe they’re genderqueer or otherwise nonbinary, and wanted to express their own gender fluidity by contrasting boxers and a packer with pasties. The fact is that I don’t know what this kid’s motivations were, and neither does my coworker. But whatever the motivation, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter. Their body is their own, and no one else gets to decide for them what is or is not the “right” way to exist in that body.

There is not one right way to be a trans person, no matter what the media tells us, no matter what cis- and heteronormative culture tells us…no matter what we tell each other. Each one of us is the sole expert on our own lives, on our own hearts and minds and motivations. Anyone else who tries to define those things for us is doing a disservice both to trans people in general and to themselves, because those of us who have learned to define our own lives have a lot to teach the rest of the world, if only they’d stop trying to categorize us into nonexistence long enough to listen.

Little Soul

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

This is a rough recording of the song I wrote for my songwriting class this past week. I’ve made a couple of minor changes since class on Tuesday, but it’s mostly here.

I am inordinately proud of this song. First of all, I did some cool things with chords, and I feel like I exercised a lot of what I’ve been learning in my songwriting classes. But aside from that…I love how my voice sounds. I have never, in all my life, been so pleased with a recording of my singing voice. My voice in this recording sounds like I want my voice to sound in my head. While I have dreams of being a baritone, I’m quite pleased with this solidly tenor sweet spot I’ve settled into for the moment. And so I’m sharing this sound clip with you, because while I’m not really using this blog to document my transition process anymore, this is a pretty big personal milestone.

(A funny story about this song: on Sunday, our neighbor’s cat escaped and wound up darting into our apartment as we were headed out the door. Since I hadn’t yet written my assignment for my Tuesday class, my partner jokingly suggested I write a song about the cat. So this song may sound like it has some depth, but really, it’s a pretty song about a cat who got loose.)

Weekend Reflections

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

One of the perks of working for a Jewish social service organization is that I wind up with extra paid days off for religious holidays that I don’t observe. This past week, we had Monday and Tuesday off for the last two days of Passover. I decided to take the opportunity afforded by a long weekend and take a little road trip up to Minnesota, mostly to meet my new nephew. My partner wasn’t able to join me for the trip, so I had a lot of hours of solo driving in the car to do some reflecting on what I was heading toward and, later, what I was coming home from.

The trip was full of excitement of varying sorts (my dad had an emergency appendectomy the evening I got into town, for one thing), but there are just a couple of things I really want to get into.

First, today (April 24, 2014) is the three-year anniversary of my grandfather’s death. He passed away Easter Sunday, ten days after his 90th birthday. Since his grave is in Rochester, MN (an under-two-hour drive from the Twin Cities) and I happened to be in town over Easter, I decided to get up early that morning and drive down to pay him a visit.

photo 4

I think a lot about my grandpa. He was a man of deep faith and quiet love, and to this day I respect him immensely. I found out five months after he died that my dad had told him that I was queer; I never knew that he knew, and it is one of my few major regrets in life that I never shared that part of myself with him. I was too afraid, and I thought I was doing what was expected of me.

I think because my grandpa never treated me any differently, I have sort of built him up in my head as being this paragon of tolerance, a rarity in my family. I’m not entirely sure that this is fair to his memory, though. I know that, ultimately, he loved me, and that was the most important thing. But I also know that he probably struggled with the idea of having a granddaughter who liked both boys and girls. About six months after he died, I adopted the name Alyx, and started walking a bit more boldly down the road of gender variant identity. As I stood by his grave (and in the car on my way back to St. Paul), I wondered how he would have handled the knowledge of my decision to start on testosterone.

I don’t have an answer. In the end, I don’t know that it matters. I have hope that the view from where he is now offers a greater sense of perspective, and that he’s able to be happy that I am happy. I hope that he is still proud of me, even though I know I am not the person he imagined his grandchild would be.

Being with my family this weekend was challenging. My mother very pointedly avoided using any names or pronouns in reference to me, though there were ample opportunities for both. My brother called me Alyx when talking to my nephew, but addressed me by my given name at dinner and apparently never gave it a second thought (he also called me “she” a lot). My dad is clearly trying, but it’s still hard.

But it was worth it for the handful of minutes I got to hold my nephew.

photo 3

I was crazy about this kid before he was born; I’m even crazier about him now. He is absolutely adorable, and I realized as I held him that there is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep this child safe. While it’s still frustrating that my brother has declared that I’m not allowed to be his child’s uncle (ommer is the title we’ve settled on for the time being), it’s something I’m willing to put up with if it means I get to be involved in the kid’s life in any way.

My strongest enduring memory of my grandpa is of the fact that every time we said goodbye, he’d give me a hug and say, quietly and earnestly, “You’re special.” As I said goodbye to my nephew on Sunday, I found myself saying the same thing to him. I hope that if I have any influence in this child’s life, it’s to teach him that he’s special and loved, no matter who he grows up to be.

photo 1

My Brain in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

I promise there will be a longer, much more detailed blog next Thursday. In the meantime, here’s another five-item list of what’s been on my mind this week:

  1. My Grandpa. My grandfather’s birthday was Monday. He would have been 93 years old. He passed away on Easter Sunday three years ago (on the 24th, which is one of the reasons next Thursday’s blog will be bigger). I still think of my grandpa often, but his memory is particularly close at this time of year.
  2. My nephew. This weekend, I’m heading up to Minnesota all by myself (my partner has to work, sadly) to meet the tiniest member of my family. I am the proudest of uncles ommers (ah, the joys of language in relation to non-normative gender identity), and I’m so excited to meet the little one, and to deliver the sweater I finished knitting today, which I hope will fit for at least a little while.
  3. My biological family in general. I don’t have the very best relationship with my biological family, for a lot of reasons. Things have been improving with my parents, but they’re far from comfortable. My brother and I don’t really talk, except (in the last six weeks since the baby’s arrival) about his kid, and I have zero confidence that he will ever consistently call me Alyx. (My relationship with extended family is essentially nonexistent at this point: my grandparents have said they will never call me Alyx, “because Alyx is an imaginary person,” and to the best of my knowledge are completely in the dark about the fact that I’ve taken any steps by way of medical transition. One of my aunts congratulated me on new-aunthood on Facebook after my nephew was born, and when I corrected her language, thanked me for the correction and called me by my given name in the same sentence, despite the fact that I have been Alyx (on Facebook and elsewhere) for almost two-and-a-half years.) Needless to say, there’s a lot of anxiety that builds up anytime I am going to be seeing my family, and so I’m feeling pretty tense at the thought of multiple days in a row with them. I’ll be seeing other people while I’m in Minnesota (some chosen family and my partner’s family, who are also chosen family, now that I think of it), but there will be more time spent with my family than there has been in a long while.
  4. Knitting. I tend to come at knitting in spurts. I’ve been in a dry spell for a while, but the pressure of finishing the aforementioned baby sweater before this trip has gotten me working on things again. Aside from the sweater, I’ve recently cast on for the second of a pair of socks, the first of which I knit in about two weeks at the beginning of December. I forget, when I don’t work on them, how much I enjoy knitting socks. Once I finish this one (I’m just starting the heel, and because I have small feet, the end of the heel marks approximately halfway through the sock), I’ve got another pair I started ages ago that I need to pick back up, and I keep looking at patterns and getting excited about possibilities, which has been fun.
  5. Finding ways to feel healthier better in my body. “Health” is such a nebulous concept, and being built as I am (short and stocky and round), I have no expectation that I will ever achieve someone else’s standard of what “healthy” looks like. I’m generally relatively comfortable being the size that I am, but I’ve noticed lately that I’m feeling less okay being in my body (in ways completely separate from dysphoria, which is thankfully not something that haunts me too consistently). I’m increasingly aware that I’m slower on my feet than the people around me. It’s harder for me to keep up than I’d like. I worry a lot about loss of mobility, between some issues with chronic pain and a history of back and knee problems. So I’ve been thinking a bit about steps I can take to do better. I haven’t been back to the gym since the whole misgendering fiasco, and I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can’t make myself go back, and that maybe a traditional gym setting isn’t ideal for me. So I’ve started looking around at other options, and have come back to an idea that pops up now and again, which is taking up Aikido. There’s an Aikido center here in Chicago that has a four-week introductory course that they say is appropriate for all body types and fitness levels, and there’s a session starting in July that I think I can work into my schedule. I’ve wanted to take up some sort of martial art for a long time, and Aikido’s lack of competitive spirit and focus on the safety of both the self and one’s opponent is really appealing to me. I’ve also started walking home from work (about 2.25mi) on days when the weather isn’t awful, and I’m finding even the handful of times I’ve done that have made a big difference in how I feel in my body. Admittedly, a lot of this processing is still very much just that: processing and thinking about change, and not a lot of actively making changes. But it feels like it’s paving the way for movement in a positive direction, and for right now, that’s enough.

Facing Fears

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a long winter. I’ve had an on-again, off-again, annoying-as-fucking-hell cold for most of it. It’s never been more than an extreme annoyance, but it’s been there almost constantly for the past several months. Late last week I scheduled an appointment with my doctor for mid-April (the earliest she could see me), and crossed my fingers hoping that I could hold on that long.

And then, this past weekend, it happened: I went from mild discomfort to abject misery in a matter of hours. Saturday and Sunday I mostly stayed at home, fighting off fevers and hoping that if I could just lay low I’d be fine to go to work Monday.

No such luck. I woke up around 5am Monday morning knowing two things with absolute certainty: one, that I had less than a snowball’s chance in hell of making it through a day of work, and two, that if I wanted to make it to any other days of work this week, I needed pharmaceutical assistance ASAP. I was a kid with allergies: I know what a sinus infection feels like, and I know they don’t go away on their own.

Only…I don’t like doctors’ offices at the best of times. Part of that comes from the fact that I worked in a hospital for nearly five years and became very disillusioned with medical institutions in general. Part of it comes from the fact that I am trans and my legal name doesn’t match my presentation. When I’m sick, I like the thought of going to the doctor even less: I don’t have the energy to advocate for myself. It’s scary.

But there was no getting around it. I was getting worse, not better, and I knew I didn’t have enough sick time or PTO to cover more than the one day off from work. So I poked around on the internet and found a Minute Clinic near home, emailed my bosses to tell them I’d be out for the day, and tried to get a bit more sleep before facing my fears.

I dragged myself out the door and onto the train before I really had time to process what I was doing. By the time I got to the sign-in kiosk at the clinic, I was feeling pretty delirious. I grimaced as I typed in my legal name and gender, wishing I was at my usual clinic where I don’t need to deal with those questions anymore. I tried to smile when the nurse practitioner came out and called my back, thankful there was no one else around to hear her call my name.

She asked about prescriptions. I listed my psych meds, and left off the hormones. And then she asked about when I had my last menstrual period, and I realized I couldn’t dodge that bullet, so I backpedaled and disclosed the fact that I am transitioning and on testosterone. To my surprise, the nurse said she wondered, but didn’t want to say anything because she didn’t want to offend me either way.

The exam itself was painless enough, and quick; she concluded that yes, I did have a sinus infection, and wrote me a prescription for antibiotics. And then she asked if I had a different name that I went by, added a note to my file saying I used the name Alyx, and then told me that if I ever come back, I can check in under whatever name I want and just tell whoever’s working that I’m in the system under a different name. While I don’t know if her coworkers are as understanding, I was impressed and grateful.

(A side note: the pharmacist was not so understanding, and more or less shouted my legal first name when my prescription was ready, which was totally unnecessary as I was sitting RIGHT THERE. But oh well. Clearly, I can’t win them all.)

It made me think about the fact that so many trans people (including, at times, myself) go without medical care rather than dealing with the pain and shame and frustration that we often find attached to medical settings, and how lucky I was that things went well. Of course, this mostly just made me angry, because I shouldn’t have to think about how lucky I am that I was treated like a human being. That shouldn’t make me lucky. That should be commonplace. I’m all for gratitude, but I shouldn’t be overwhelmed by it simply because a medical professional treated me humanely: this is something I should be able to expect. I don’t know how to make the medical community a safer space for my trans siblings. I am encouraged by the progress I’ve seen, but it’s not enough. The entire healthcare system in the US is broken, and as we work to fix it, this is something we need to be aware of and work toward.

(To end on a happy note: the antibiotics are working, and I feel much more human now. Hopefully I’m done being sick for a very long time.)

One Rule

/ Alyxander James / 2 Comments

Technology is a fascinating thing. Thanks to the power of the internet, I’m not only able to put part of my life out in words for public scrutiny on a weekly basis, but I’m able to see who my audience is — at least, I can see what countries/states you’re coming from. It’s a regular reminder for me that the world is both vast and yet small enough to be this interconnected.

A couple of days ago I had a website stats first: I was able to see the search terms someone put in that led them to my little corner of the interwebs. The query? What do I do if I’m transmasculine. Well, honey, I don’t know if what you found here was helpful, or if you’ll ever be back, and that is a loaded and nuanced question if I ever saw one, but I’m going to give you the simplest answer I have:

You do what you need to do to stay alive.

If that means staying in the closet because you’re not in a safe space, then that’s okay. If it means tearing down the walls and being out and loud and proud, that’s okay, too. Educate yourself. Find your options. Find ways to be more comfortable in your skin and your brain. But mostly, stay alive. (Are you familiar with Kate Bornstein? She is fabulous, really into this idea of staying alive, has written some wonderful things about ways to do it, and has started a #stayalive hashtag movement on Twitter.)

Whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you might believe about yourself, know that I believe that your life has value. And maybe in the grand scheme of things that doesn’t make a difference to you. But maybe it does, and that’s reason enough to say it. You, yes, you, my friend, are valuable. Your mere existence is revolutionary. People will try to tell you otherwise, but I promise they’re wrong.

I don’t believe that the “it gets better” rhetoric is actually helpful at all. Because sometimes, it doesn’t ever really get better to the extent that we want it to. But someday, even if things aren’t the best you can imagine, they might be better than they are now. And sometimes that hope makes holding on a little easier.

Hang in there, kiddo.

The Naked I: Insides Out

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

Assuming that things go roughly according to plan, but the time this posts, my partner and I will be very nearly to Minnesota, where we are headed for a long weekend to spend time with family and friends…

…and to celebrate the opening weekend of a show that I have a piece in!

So I’m going to take a break from life updates and plug the show: The Naked I: Insides Out.

The show has been created and is being produced by 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities, a wonderful theatre company that focuses specifically on work by women and transgender artists. The following is the show description from the 20% Theatre Company website:

20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is thrilled to present the world premiere of THE NAKED I: INSIDES OUT – the 3rd in a series of NAKED I plays that explore queer and trans* experiences through monologues, short scenes, and spoken word poems. This production will take place at Intermedia Arts February 13-23, 2014 and will feature the work of over 100 LGBTQ artists and allies – including contributing writers, directors, performers, designers, technicians, and more! This show will include 25 pieces chosen out of 119 submissions! 

There are an infinite number of stories to be told, and as a company focused on social change, human rights, and the voice of queer and trans* artists, 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities is determined to tell as many of these stories as we can – thus creating/producing a new NAKED I show every few years.

The first Naked I production, The Naked I: Monologues from Beyond the Binary, by Tobias K. Davis, was produced by 20% in 2009. In 2011, 20% put out a call for submissions for a second Naked I production: The Naked I: Wide Open. My partner and I both had pieces in that show, and I ended up doing the layout work for getting the script into a publishable book format. It was an incredible experience, not just for us, but for everyone involved and everyone who came to see the show (which sold out two runs, was in the Minnesota Fringe Festival, and toured around the country a bit in 2012).

Last year, when the call for submissions for the next iteration of the Naked I went out, I submitted a handful of pieces, and one of them wound up in the show. (I did the book layout for this script, as well.) The Naked I: Insides Out is every bit as beautiful and important as its predecessors. If you are in/near/able to get to the Twin Cities in the next couple of weekends, I strongly encourage you to check it out. The first couple of performances have sold out already, and I’m sure the others will as well, so if you’re interested, be sure to grab your tickets (sliding scale $5-$25) at that first link I posted. (If you can’t catch the show, all of those links attached to the titles up there will take you to Amazon, where you can pick up a copy of the script. It’s powerful stuff, and well worth the read. Also, I made it look extra pretty.)

We’re going with a bunch of wonderful friends to the sold-out performance this Saturday, and I am so excited. I had a little bit of contact with the director of my piece, but I really wanted to just let go of this rare piece of work that I’m actually pretty proud of and see what happened to it in the hands of the director and actor who are taking it on. I have every confidence that it will be amazing. I am thrilled and humbled and honored to be a part of something so important and poignant and hard and lovely. While a part of me will always be terrified waiting for the reaction of the audience to the words I’ve written, I still can’t wait to share this with the world. It’s an immense privilege to be able to tell my stories, and, as an extension, the stories of the other people like me, and it’s a privilege I hope I never take lightly. Stories have the power to change the world, and this production is full of world-changing stories.

It’s Starting

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

In the weirdness of this week (my office was closed Monday and Tuesday due to dangerously cold temperatures), I completely forgot that today was Thursday, so I didn’t have a post prepared for this morning. My apologies to all! But, here I am. Better late than never, right?

It’s just as well that I didn’t have anything written up earlier, because I was having a hell of a time coming up with a story for you all until today, anyway.

Some folks in my office are still pretty clueless about the fact that I identify as transmasculine. I get “girl” and “lady” still, sometimes, and while it’s irritating, generally people mean well, and I try not to get too upset about it. It’s not like I’m particularly assertive or good at standing up for myself, so unless someone around the office who’s figured it out (or been told directly) lets it slip, how are they going to know? My facial hair is still peach fuzz, and since they see me every day, my voice change isn’t all that noticeable.

Our power went out at the office today, and during the half hour that I spent wandering around, feeling lost (I work in IT: no power means I really have nothing to do), a coworker and I were collectively referred to as “ladies.” It didn’t get too far under my skin, but it added to the general blah-ness of my day. Once the power came back on, I got back to work and tried to forget about it.

Sometime later, my phone rang.

“This is Alyx.”

“Hello, my name is [name]. How are you today, sir?”

It turned out the call was a solicitor from HP who had wanted to talk to my department head about servers, but, failing to reach anything but his voicemail, had been directed to me by the operator. Since I am but a lowly administrative assistant, it was a short conversation.

But I was ecstatic.

Never, not once, in my whole life, have I ever been “sirred” solely on the sound of my voice. In fact, in the past, if people had initially called me “sir,” they backpedalled as soon as I opened my mouth. When I worked the drive thru at a coffee shop, I loathed hearing my voice over the headset, cringing at the inevitable responses that included the word “ma’am.”

Until today.

Whether the person on the other end of the line changed their mind about my gender after I stammered a reply, I don’t know. And I don’t really care. All that really matters to me is that the first impression someone had, based solely on my voice, was that I was a masculine individual.

I’m still smiling.

Bipolar Adventures in Transition

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

So I’m Bipolar. Specifically, I am diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder, which means I deal cyclically with highs and lows, but not quite to the extreme that someone with Bipolar I would deal with. I take an anti-depressant to help the lows from getting unbearable and a mood stabilizer to keep the highs from getting dangerous, but the meds do not erase the highs and lows completely. They’re still there; they’re just more manageable: it’s still a challenge to function during the lows, but function is possible, and it’s hard to hang onto money during the highs, but again, it’s possible.

One of my personal Bipolar quirks is that sometimes, my brain will be plodding along, and I’ll think I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on — after all, I’m a pretty introspective and self-aware person. But then I’ll hit a particularly intense bout of mania, and my brain speeds up, and suddenly all of these things that were just vague notions and disconnected pieces before click together all at once into something much more concrete (and often overwhelming).

Specifically, this has a tendency to happen with thoughts related to my gender identity.

At first, I refused to trust these thoughts. After all, mania has a way of making absurd, unwise, and/or otherwise misguided ideas seem like great ones. But I’ve noticed in the past several years that there is a difference between my harebrained manic schemes and these moments of introspective epiphany.

It happened when I decided to try out the name Alyx. I was idly pondering what I would change my name to if I ever transitioned (which was a pretty big “if” at the time, as it was so impractical that I didn’t even consider it as a possibility). Alexander James was the name that immediately popped into my head, and before I knew it I found myself asking my partner if ze thought Alyx could be a reasonable nickname/derivative of my given name. I never had that period of adjustment where I didn’t always respond right away to my new name. My brain had made the shift before I even realized it was happening.

It happened when I decided to start on testosterone. I came to the conclusion that I needed to make a change before I even realized that I was really thinking about it. I held back. I waited and thought and was much more mindful about what was going on in my head, and I conferred with my partner and with friends. I didn’t trust that gut impulse that I got when everything suddenly shifted into place. But in the end, it was right.

And over this past weekend, it happened again. Once again, my identity is shifting, not in a totally different direction, but in a more focused one. My single greatest hesitation with physical transition was the fact that I am convinced that the world does not need another white man running around. It’s been hard to reconcile this with the fact that I am profoundly uncomfortable being read as a woman. I can’t get around it: I am becoming a man. Whether I identify as a man to my core doesn’t really matter: this is how the world is going to start to see me. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I really do identify as solidly masculine, and that I can be a man without being a “Men’s Rights Activist”, that being a man doesn’t have to mean being oblivious to my privilege but can actually be a place from which I can (I hope) use what privilege I have to try to make other dudes aware of their privilege.

And as all of that clicked into place, I started pondering pronouns. My team at work (and a handful of other folks in the office who have caught on) refer to me with he, him and his. Friends generally refer to me using singular they, which I’ve been claiming as my preference for a couple of years now. It’s equal parts hard and terrifying and exciting, but I’m realizing that the more I hear myself called “he”, the more I like it. It’s increasingly comfortable, and while I certainly prefer “they” over “she” (and, truly, don’t mind the gender neutral variants), I’m realizing that my preferences are changing.

I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever have a truly stable identity. I’m fairly certain that the only part of my identity that’s remained consistent over the past four years is the part that claims “queer” as a label. In the past five years, I have been many things: a straight, cisgender woman; a queer, cisgender woman; a queer, genderqueer individual; and now, a queer, transmasculine dude…a trans man. My current identity doesn’t invalidate any of my previous identities. Who I am now is real; who I was then was real, too. And I think this is the hardest thing for people to grasp: it would be so much simpler if my identity was black and white, or even greyscale. But it’s not. It’s an entire fucking rainbow of nuances and experiences and even if that makes it harder to understand, I wouldn’t have it any other way.