Yesterday marks NINE YEARS since I started this blog. I have posted something almost every Thursday for nine entire years. This is the longest I’ve ever stuck with one particular creative project, and I’m proud and also a bit dismayed that I’ve managed to keep it up.
This blog started out nine years ago primarily to record thoughts, feelings, and experiences around gender transition. For the last many years it’s been more of a general story-of-my-life sort of blog, but today, seeing as we’ve hit a major blogging anniversary, I feel like it’s appropriate to circle back to that original purpose.
Early last week, I had a consultation with an ob-gyn to discuss getting a hysterectomy. I’ve known I wanted to do this since before I knew I was trans. I was nervous going into the appointment, but it went really well.
Since then, I’ve gotten the requisite letters of justification for insurance purposes from my therapist and my primary care doctor, and the surgical orders have been put in; now, I’m just waiting on their scheduler to call me. In a perfect world, I’ll have this done by the end of the year!
It’s wild to think that this thing I’ve wanted to do for well over a decade is immanent to the point that it could be just weeks away. I’m not super looking forward to the recovery, but thankfully I have a great support network here. Mostly, I’m just very excited by the prospect of being done.
In non-transition news, we got almost 6 inches of snow on Tuesday, and Nova is over the moon about it. I’ll leave you with this video of her in her happy place:
Hello, dear readers, and welcome to Thursday. Spring sort of arrived in St. Paul, and with it, my seasonal allergies…and then yesterday there was snow and freezing rain, and the drastic temperature shifts are making my joints pretty unhappy. Getting up for work has been a struggle this week as a result.
But even though that’s made me a little cranky, things are otherwise okay. I know what I’m doing for my final projects for both of my classes, and I shouldn’t have too much trouble getting those done. We only have a couple of weeks left in the semester, which is WILD. I’m so grateful for everything I’ve learned over these last few months and for professors who let me push some boundaries on projects to make them fit my own spiritual practices and methods of theological interpretation better.
It’s Transgender Day of Visibility today, which I feel like I should mention. Last year Tuck Woodstock of the Gender Reveal podcast had the brilliant idea of rebranding the day “Transgender Day of Staying in and Having a Nice Snack” and that is very much the energy I’m feeling today – visibility is exhausting sometimes and doesn’t actually help us on its own. Anyway, I’d encourage y’all (especially if you’re cis) to consider donating to a trans mutual aid fund today. The aforementioned Gender Reveal podcast actually does a great job of this if you’re looking for ideas (there are also links to this on the page linked above)!
I know everyone's being tired of being asked for money on the internet, but we gotta do our spring mutual aid drive during the one week per year that we're visible! 😎
but truly, if any of y'all can donate any amount of support trans people's basic needs, it would mean a lot. pic.twitter.com/8PVImY478g
Buckle up, dear readers, because this week I’m returning to the roots of this blog and talking about my life as a trans person.
This year, at least 28 states are voting on anti-trans legislation. There’s a lot that’s fucked up about this. Just this week in Arkansas, a bill was passed that bans gender-affirming healthcare for minors. The (Republican) governor vetoed the bill, calling it “vast government overreach.” The legislature overruled his veto with a dishearteningly large majority vote. Make no mistake – this bullshit that’s marketed as “protecting children” will actually do devastating harm. Taking away a trans child’s access to affirming healthcare isn’t going to make them not trans. It will just make them miserable. (I will again post this Twitter thread that makes some really good points about all of this.)
Today at work our Pride ERG hosted a half-hour hangout where people could come and sit with each other and with our feelings about what happened in Arkansas. I’m glad I went, and I appreciate the other people who showed up, but even as I felt seen in a way that was validating, I felt…exposed, in a way that was less comfortable. I am the only trans person I know of at my company, and I’m out as nonbinary there. Most people at work respect my pronouns (which are they/them, by the way, which is at least the third time my pronouns have shifted in the last decade, which I am not apologizing for, because identity is fluid and can be complicated) – no one is actively disrespecting my identity, but sometimes people forget. I do my best to educate people and stand up for myself and for the people around me. And it’s exhausting.
Inextricably tied to all of the feelings I’m having about trans identity being up for legislative debate are feelings around bodily autonomy. One of the hardest and most beautiful lessons I have learned in the ten years since I started coming to terms with the fact that I was not, in fact, cisgender, is that my body is my home. It’s a home that I struggled for years and years to relate to, until I realized it was mine to change and mold into a shelter I could feel comfortable in (at least some of the time). This has shown up in big ways – the changes from testosterone, and having gender-affirming top surgery – but it’s also shown up in smaller ways. I can paint my nails. I am currently sporting what feels like a super queer haircut that I love. In the middle space between those extreme examples, I can get tattoos.
I knew I wanted tattoos by the time I was in my teens, if not before. I got my first one eleven years ago this month, just a couple months before I turned 22. It’s a trinity knot on my right forearm. I wanted a reminder that the parts of myself that so often felt fractured – body, mind, and spirit – were all part of the singular being that was me. Four years later, I got three tarot cards tattooed on my left forearm: the Hermit (because I am an introvert and I believe in both finding my own truth and in lighting the way to help other people find theirs), the Ace of Wands (because I am a person with a lot of creative energy who finds joy in making beautiful things), and the Nine of Pentacles (which is my constant reminder that my body is the home that I am creating for myself). A couple of years after that I got a few more, which had less in-depth meanings, in some ways (there’s a leaf on my right ankle that I got because it was pretty; I have a classic Winnie-the-Pooh illustration on my right arm, and an earth/air alchemical symbol that reminds me to stay grounded and breathe under that), but all of them were ways to exercise my bodily autonomy.
On Tuesday, I got my sixth (or eighth, depending on if you count the tarot cards as one tattoo or three) tattoo:
A black and grey tattoo of a small dragon clutching a 20-sided gaming die – we’re adding color in a few weeks!
D&D and other tabletop roleplaying games have been a big part of my life over the past few years – through them I’ve connected with people I might never have met otherwise, and I’ve found so much joy in collaborative storytelling and getting to play with my friends as an adult. Just in the last month I started DMing my first game, and it’s been a blast. I knew that I wanted a D&D-themed tattoo to capture some of that. I told the artist (who has now done the majority of my tattoos) that I wanted “some sort of dragon and dice situation,” and I could not be happier with what she came up with. This little dragon clutching its d20 is better than anything I’d envisioned ahead of time.
As I was chatting with the artist during the tattoo, I mentioned that as a teenager I had sketchbooks full of dragons. I drew them because no one could tell me “that’s not how a dragon looks” – it was one of the things I loved about fantasy. She asked me what drew me to dragons, and I honestly didn’t have an answer at the time, but I’ve continued to think about it since then. I think there’s something about the wildness of them that called to me. In all the fantasy novels I read, there was this sense that you couldn’t really tame a dragon. Even in the ones where dragons and humans got along, it was because the dragons chose to treat the humans gently. There was something about that power that was appealing, for a whole host of reasons I’m sure I could delve into with a little help from my therapist.
Last fall, I wrote an autobiographical song that I kind of set aside after that songwriting session was over, but the chorus has been stuck in my head the past couple of days:
I’m building this wondrous body, creating my home Something more suited to housing my curious soul I dress it up in ink, in wool, and in leather I know this act of creation is a holy endeavor
I don’t know that I have a huge sweeping point in all of this, except to say that trans people (like all people) are sacred, and the act of self-determination and self-discovery is a holy endeavor. I was raised with the idea that humans are created in the image of the Divine, and while I have a lot of complicated feelings about the picture of Divinity I was raised on, I think trans people are every bit as much a reflection of the Divine as anyone else. I am angry and sad and disheartened that there are so many people in power in the world right now who refuse to see that.
Hello, dear readers. We have made it to Thursday. I am not feeling the greatest this morning, for what could be any number of reasons, but I’m here and I’m still strangely hopeful.
Yesterday was Transgender Day of Visibility. I updated a many-years-old post I’d done on a previous TDoV on Facebook and reposed it there yesterday…I’m not on Facebook super often these days, but sometimes it still feels important to say things. Visibility can be exhausting, though. I’m fortunate to have enough mental and emotional bandwidth most days to be okay with being an educator, but every conversation about why they/them pronouns deserve respect (and are grammatically correct, though this should be much further down the priority list than it is) and why cis people should care about the issues faced by trans people takes its toll. There are a bunch of bills in various states right now trying to restrict trans-affirming healthcare for trans youth and to ban them from sports and it’s all incredibly frustrating. (For a great perspective on the healthcare issue, see this Twitter thread.) All that said, it was lovely to see so many of my fellow trans folks celebrating themselves yesterday. We deserve to be seen and celebrated just like everyone else does.
I got my first dose of the Moderna vaccine on Tuesday! (This may be a factor in why I’m feeling a bit under the weather today.) This means I’m about six weeks from being able to hug some people I haven’t been able to hug in a very long time, and I am excited about that.
I feel like I had other things I was going to ramble about this morning, but I have a training to get to in the next couple of minutes, so I think we’ll end here for now. I hope you’re all hanging in there, and getting vaccinated, and still wearing your masks. Keep taking care of yourselves and each other, friends.
This is going to be a short blog, this week – it’s the end of our quarter at work and I have a ton to get done today. But I wanted to share the song that I wrote for my songwriting class this past week.
The assignment was to write our own “deep cut” – the B-side or song from an album that superfans would know but wouldn’t be the one to get tons of radio play. I don’t know if I succeeded in that, but I like what I came up with regardless. I pulled a bunch of old lyrics from a handful of songs written over the past six years or so – this is one of those songs I’ve been trying to write for a long time – and reworked those concepts into something new.
Eternal thanks, as always, to Steve Dawson and my songwriting classmates from the Old Town School of Folk Music for their brilliant suggestions that I tried to incorporate into this draft.
Curious Soul, (c) 2020 by Alyxander James
Here are the lyrics for the curious:
There’s a twirling child in dresses and dance shoes Nose in a book and their head in the clouds They dream about flying and rescuing damsels And magical wardrobes that wait to be found
There’s a lonely child who always sings An empty school playground their favorite stage At home in their room they write songs in a diary Pouring out heartache and joy on the page
I’m building this wondrous body, creating my home Something more suited to housing my curious soul I dress it up in ink, in wool, and in leather I know this act of creation is a holy endeavor
There’s a teenager longing for tattoos and freedom Counting down days to when they’ll spread their wings Fists full of anger and hurt in their eyes Cautiously hopeful they’ll make it to spring
There’s someone awake late at night in their dorm room Afraid that they’re sinful and broken and wrong They reach for their laptop, and type a confession In tears over secrets kept hidden too long
I’m building this wondrous body, creating my home Something more suited to housing my curious soul I dress it up in ink, in wool, and in leather I know this act of creation is a holy endeavor
There are days when I look in the mirror And see fragments of faces that used to be me I thank them for all of the lessons they brought here And hope that they’re proud of who they came to be
I’m building this wondrous body, creating my home Something more suited to housing my curious soul I dress it up in ink, in wool, and in leather I know this act of creation is a holy endeavor
I was so focused on my ER adventure last week that I completely missed the fact that last Thursday was my 6 year HRT anniversary. I’ve been on testosterone for six whole years! Which, incidentally, means this blog will hit its six year anniversary in a couple of weeks. I’ve blogged almost every week for six years, which is mind-boggling to me.
My therapist is constantly reminding me that I need to take time to recognize and celebrate progress. I’m not good at this. So today’s blog will attempt to do a bit of that.
A lot has changed in the past six years. My life has gained a welcome level of stability that wasn’t there before. I’m in a better place mentally than I was then. I had no idea when I started this part of this journey what would happen with my family. It’s been a trip…but I’ve ended up in a largely positive space. So that’s cool.
In addition to those personal anniversaries, there’s another important one coming up: Sunday will mark nine years since my partner and I went on our first date.
NINE YEARS. In two years we’ll have been together for a third of my life. It hasn’t always been easy, but it’s always been worth it.
In therapy this week we talked about how after three or so years in a relationship, we shift from thinking about that person as a new person in our lives to thinking of them as family. That means that unless we consciously work to rewire whatever dysfunctional attachment patterns we developed in our family of origin, we’ll perpetuate those in our family of choice. (On the one hand, breaking those dysfunctional patterns is overwhelming and difficult, but on the other, what a cool opportunity to strike out into new territory!) One of the things I’m working on is letting myself be cared for, even when I feel like I’m inconveniencing the people around me. I’m so grateful that I have a partner who’s so thoughtful and intentional about making sure I’m cared for.
What about you, friends? Any anniversaries, big or small, happening in your lives these days? I’d love to hear about them!
Readers, it’s been a week. I’m wrestling with some sort of upper-respiratory nonsense that I hoped was just allergies but that kept me home with a fever yesterday. I feel pretty gross, and I’m really glad I had a doctor appointment scheduled for today anyway.
But let’s take a step back. I want to tell you about my weekend, when I did not feel like my head was trying to explode.
Friday night, I picked up a rental car. Saturday morning, I got up early, packed my knitting and some snacks, and hit the road to go visit my grandmother in northeast Iowa. I had not seen my grandmother in almost seven years, though we’ve been writing occasional letters back and forth for a year or so. In her last couple of letters, she expressed a desire to sit down and talk with me in person. About a month ago, when I got her last letter, I contacted her and said I would like to come for a visit, and we agreed on this past Saturday as a date.
I started on testosterone five and a half years ago, so a few things had changed since we last saw each other. I had sent her a picture of me a few months ago, so my appearance wouldn’t come as a total shock.
I really had no idea what to expect from this visit going in, but overall it went better than I could have hoped. She greeted me with a hug. We went out to lunch and she caught me up on all the latest family news. When we went back to her apartment, the talk turned more serious – she had a lot of questions about my life, and I tried to answer them honestly. I learned that her little Baptist church had recently done a study on LGBTQ issues, because their pastor recognized that we’re not going away and felt the church should decide how they were going to respond. (She sent the books they studied home with me – I haven’t read them yet, but I do want to know where she’s coming from.)
The big takeaway of the visit was that we love each other and we do want to be in each other’s lives. It was a very long day (ten total hours of driving, plus the four hour visit), but worth it. We’ll see where we go from here!
I completely missed it when I posted last week, but on Friday, Accidental Fudge turned five! For five years I’ve written and posted a blog almost every week. That feels like a pretty big accomplishment.
Accidental Fudge started as a blog to document my gender transition. I had enough weird and amusing anecdotes in my first month on testosterone that I thought it would be fun to share them with the world. And that was great, to start. It quickly became apparent, though, that there wasn’t going to be a “here’s a weird thing I’ve noticed about my gender” moment every single week. The blog pretty steadily evolved into me telling you all about how my weeks were going – a brief newsletter of sorts. That’s also been great.
Every time the blog is another year older, I think it’s worth pausing to reflect on whether this is still something I want to invest my time in. While I often feel like I don’t have anything of value to say, I do still enjoy the challenge of coming up with something each week. And I love hearing from those of you who comment (either here or on Facebook or in person). It reminds me that I’m part of a much larger community than I sometimes realize.
So thanks, Accidental Fudge readers, for your support. Here’s to five years, and here’s to at least one more!
It’s an increasingly terrifying time to be a transgender person in the United States right now.
Over the weekend the New York Times published a leaked memo from the White House proposing that gender be defined on a national, governmental level as binary, immutable, and defined entirely by genital configuration at birth, with disputes to be settled via genetic testing to determine chromosomal configuration. There are so many things wrong with this – it conflates gender and sex, it ignores actual biology, it completely disregards the existence of intersex folks, and on and on. S. Bear Bergman wrote an excellent article about all of this and what it means, and rather than reinvent the wheel, I’m going to point you there. Please read this. The lives of your trans, non-binary, and gender expansive siblings depends on you understanding the seriousness of this.
To my cisgender friends and family: please vote. Please speak up in the face of transphobia. Trans folks can’t do this alone. Silence is complicity.
If you have the means and are looking to donate money somewhere, here are a few good organizations to support (note: I know for some people the first thought is to donate to the Human Rights Campaign, but please consider these organizations first – the HRC does not have a great track record of defending trans folks, whereas these organizations all do):
Hello, dear readers! This blog post is going up late today, because I did not write it yesterday and also because I stayed home from work today to catch up on sleep and fight off the headache I woke up with.
I’m also not really sure what to write about this week. They still haven’t caught the perpetrator of the two shootings in our neighborhood that I talked about last week, so we’re still a bit on edge, trying to figure out how to navigate our neighborhood in a way that feels safe right now. Also, on a national level here in the US, things are pretty overwhelming right now. (If you’re a US citizen and haven’t checked your voter registration or haven’t registered to vote, do so now. We need everyone to show up and vote in November. Voter suppression is a serious reality in a lot of places right now, and voter rolls have been purged in some states as a part of that, so check your registration even if you know you were registered before.)
We did have the lovely experience on Monday of seeing our friend Heather Mae play a show in our neighborhood. We got to spend a while before and after the show catching up with her and hanging out, and that was great. Go check out her music if you’re not familiar with her stuff – she’s fabulous!
Yesterday was World Mental Health Day, and today is National Coming Out Day. So I think to close this blog I’m going to combine the sentiments of those two days and tell you a little bit about myself that you may or may not know:
I am queer. Queer is a label I’ve chosen because it represents so much of who I am. It describes my orientation – I’m attracted to all sorts of people of all sorts of genders. It describes my gender – I was assigned female at birth, but realized in my mid-twenties that that didn’t fit; I’m now living and presenting in such a way that I’m read as male by the world at large, but in my heart of hearts I really don’t identify with binary gender at all. Queer also describes my brain – I have Bipolar II Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder, both of which I was finally diagnosed with 9 years ago, and which I’ve been medicated for ever since. A few months ago, I had to seek out a psychiatrist to get my meds adjusted – I was manic and anxious as hell for a solid month. It was miserable, and I still don’t know how I managed to get anything done during that time. Since getting my meds adjusted, I’m feeling much more capable of handling all of the anxiety that comes from life right now.
I choose to be out and proud about all of these intersections of my identity, but I can make that choice because I live with a great deal of privilege. I have safe, nurturing spaces where I can be myself. Not everyone is so lucky. If you’re struggling with whether or not to come out today, remember that your safety comes first, and that your identity is valid regardless of how public you are with it. I see you; you’re real. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. May we all work toward a world in which “coming out,” whether it’s in regard to sexuality or gender or mental health or anything else, doesn’t carry so much weight and fear with it.
Accidental Fudge 