Life Harvester #12: A Year of Newsletters, Switching Genders, Paul takes the form of a normal girl
IT’S BEEN A WHOLE YEAR
Writing this newsletter has been such a fulfilling experience and some thanks are in order to the people that have made it possible. This newsletter would be hot garbaggio if it weren’t for Becca Giordano’s editing. She helps me think through and clarify ideas, tells me to cut jokes that don’t land, keeps me focused. Now that we’re a few months into it, I’ve also been able to self-edit a bit. My writing is sharper overall. There’s less to cut. This is the kind of generative creative relationship I’ve always thrived off of, and I’m especially grateful to have it with my girlfriend.
I also owe a debt to Aaron Cometbus. I initially conceived of this newsletter last December as a strictly digital endeavor. I wanted a monthly deadline, an excuse to write. In January of this year I was in New York walking with Aaron through Prospect Park when I told him I’d signed him up for it. “I’m not gonna read it on a computer, Colin. Just print it out and mail it to me. Mail me ten. I’ll give it out in the book store.” I must have looked a bit wounded because his tone became mollifying. “Look, how long have we known each other? You knew I would say this. Have we ever taken a walk where I haven’t tried to convince you to do another zine?”
Later that week I went to get coffee with Yusuke Okada, a dear friend and an artist whose work I adore. I told him about my new newsletter and asked if he’d give me some pictures to run as caption contests. Less than 24 hours later he’d emailed me a sheaf of drawings. The first 8 months of illustrations are actually an 8-panel comic he sent me, line them all up and you’ll see! There will be more of Yusuke’s art in the future, but I wanted to give him a little break.
Huge thanks as well to everyone else who let me print a drawing: Marissa Paternoster, Ally Orlando, Gabby Schulz, & Grace Ambrose. And a big shout out to reader Ruth Davie in Bloomington, IN who was the first cap con winner and who’s submission let me know that there were actual strangers reading! And remember, if you’re reading this, you can submit to the caption contest by writing me an email with the subject “CAPTION CONTEST,” and visit the website to see previous winners.
Lastly, I want to thank you, the reader. Without you none of this would be possible. JK! Lastly, I want to thank Jacob Berendes, who’s long-running monthly newspaper Mother’s News was a huge inspiration to me and whose contributions to the U.S. Freak Scene have been unparalleled. May you obtain every M.U.S.C.L.E. figurine. Amen.
SWITCHING GENDERS
My trans elders, many of whom are younger than me, have uniformly informed me that no matter how much I want to, I should absolutely not do an interview with a cis journalist about being trans until I have been out for a few years. This is harder than you’d expect, as trans academic Grace Lavery elegantly (and forgivingly) writes in her blog The Stage Mirror, “having spent time in the closet, one necessarily feels a desire to speak all that which one has chosen not to speak…. In a sense, we all come to this party too late, and until we can imagine a time where the closet has been eradicated, we are all of us going to have more to say than words to say it.”
I mention this because it’s constantly on my mind as I write about my own transition in this newsletter. Namely, I’m considering what subject matter should be the exclusive purview of intra-community discussion amongst my fellow transes, and what is appropriate to share with the civilian world. I’m building the framework as I go along, but generally speaking the standards are that speaking very precisely about my own experience is acceptable, making sweeping generalizations about The Trans Experience™ based on my years trapped in the closet vs. months out & proud is not.
So, what is my trans identity? How far back does it go? I’m not one of those people who can say that I’ve always felt like I was in the wrong body, though there are ample pictures of me dressed in girl’s clothes, which I called “drag,” from the ages of 10 to 14. At some point during adolescence, I internalized the notion that dressing in drag would elicit opprobrium and that I should avoid it. I never felt like it was wrong myself, just that other people thought so and it wasn’t worth the hassle or risk to my safety to pursue. There are many tiny instances where this notion was reified, but the one that stands out the most is at my grandparents’ 50th anniversary in the basement of Sammy’s Roumanian, a gauchely decorated Eastern European steakhouse on the Lower East Side that has been serving New York Jews chewy steaks with shmaltz since 1975. There was an ancient man standing behind an entry-level Casio keyboard playing polka covers of popular songs. I was 12-years-old, wearing a Freshjive bowling shirt and chinos—not drag. I had braces with black rubberbands, and hair down to my shoulders. At one point an elderly server called me “young lady,” and I told my dad, laughing that an old person thought I was a girl. My dad looked at me sternly and let me know in no uncertain terms that there was nothing funny about someone thinking I was a girl. I don’t remember the exact language he used, but I left the interaction with the understanding that I should be legibly masculine at all times.
I continued to dress in “drag” on occasion until I was 14, culminating in my “dressing like a girl” to go to school on Halloween in 8th grade, the most vulnerable public appearance I had made until that point. I was met with little fanfare, as it was Halloween, and besides which, I don’t think anyone was surprised. My nickname at school had been Gay Bar since I had done a [A+] Powerpoint presentation on the Stonewall Rebellion in 7th grade computer class.
After that my memory gets foggy, but my understanding is that I just either successfully suppressed it or else temporarily grew out of it. There were moments in high school—laying on the floor listening to my Bikini Kill CD of the First Two Records thinking about how, even though I knew my life would be harder if I were a girl, it would somehow make more sense—but those were interludes in an earnest teenage boyhood. I enjoyed the freedom of being a boy, liked being part of a homosocial group I could refer to as “the boys.” I sensed my queerness, and explored it in the only way my limited imagination would allow, by kissing other boys. But kissing boys just never really did it for me and so some time in my early 20s I stopped trying.
I came to realize I was trans the same way so many other white punk girls of my micro-generation did: reading Imogen Binnie’s now-classic transgender roadtrip novel, Nevada. I bought it because I liked her MRR column, and then it turned me into a lesbian. For a handful of reasons I’d rather not get into here, I took the knowledge that I was trans and I shoved it as deep down inside myself as I could, and aside from telling a few close friends, I didn’t talk about it for a couple of years. By 2015 when Becca and I had our first date, I had begun to discuss my transition as a possible future occurrence, but hadn’t fully committed. Our relationship gave me the sense of emotional stability I needed to even consider transition in real terms. I talked a lot to my friends Shannon and Kale, who run trans punk label Nervous Nelly. Living in the same town as them increased my sense that there was a community to buttress me. Still, I continually felt like I had climbed a very high ladder and was standing at the edge of a diving board but was scared to jump off.
In April of this year, Lavery posted on twitter that she would answer questions from closeted women considering transition. Grace and I do not know each other. I’d be shocked if we didn’t have some friends in common, but for all intents and purposes we are strangers. And maybe that’s why I wrote her a long, rambling email explaining everything I had considered about transition and everything that was holding me back, mentioning in the end that I’d learned in AA that “asking strangers for help can sometimes be more meaningful than I could’ve imagined.”
Grace wrote me back a very kind response, asked some questions, assured me I could take things at my own pace, and mentioned in passing that she had “used the 12 steps of AA to explore [her] own transition.” She didn’t elaborate on it any further, but it turns out that was what I needed to hear. That was the final piece. I re-wrote the 12 steps for myself to think about transition, breaking it down into manageable parts with the end goal of starting hormones and coming out publicly as a trans woman. Six months later I finally began a process I had been agonizing about for six years.
For the sake of space, I won’t reprint the canonical 12 steps for you to reference, they’re easy enough to find. But in case you or someone you know is struggling with this, here are the steps I took which I suggest as a framework for transition: 1. I admitted I was trans, that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. 2. I realized that I needed to explore medical transition. 3. I made a doctor’s appointment. 4. I thought about what I wanted from my transition (grow some tits, live as a woman, etc). 5. I told the doctor what I wanted. 6. I prepared for the fact that I was about to do something huuuuuge. 7. I started hormones! 8. I made a list of people I felt like I wanted to personally inform about my transition, rather than have them find out from an announcement on the internet. 9. I told them all. (This step was very scary and took a while.) 10. I came out publicly! And I haven’t figured out what, if anything, steps 11 and 12 are because I’m still in early transition, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.
PAUL TAKES THE FORM OF A MORTAL GIRL
I read Andrea Lawlor’s Paul takes the form of a mortal girl in May, but for reasons that will soon be clear, I had to wait until I came out to review it. Lawlor’s beautiful novel—a queer 90s period piece bildungsroman—is about Paul/Polly, a shapeshifter who can seamlessly morph his* body between genders. Much of the book is an exploration of the intricacies of queer life for men and women, probed deftly through the use of a single character experiencing it all. There are echoes of queer touchstones: Stone Butch Blues in the almost ethnographic journey into lesbian culture, Dancer from the Dance in the depictions of gay male cruising, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit in the fairytale-style interludes, and The Left Hand of Darkness in it’s overall conceit. At no point does the reader learn exactly why or how Paul’s body is able to shift in such a way. But those questions are superfluous to me. I’ve long dreamed of what it would be like if I could simply will my body to change, and Lawlor’s imagined universe of Provincetown dungeons and Women’s Separatist festivals is like a perfect daydream.
The book also cast a glamour over me. I read it in just two or three days, and on the last night, I was laying on the bench on my front porch reading the final chapters. It was a temperate May evening, and Becca was out of town, so I was alone in the house and had been for a week. I was getting ready to come inside and finish the book in bed when I heard these wasted men stumbling down the street jocularly ribbing each other. I decided to stay outside and watch them walk by. I miss being wasted because I miss the camaraderie. I like to see drunk people the same way some of my friends that quit smoking like to sit next to me when I have a cigarette.
They were two white men. One big and bald in a white tall t, the other short and stocky wearing a black t-shirt depicting the Marvel pantheon. The bald guy was complaining that he didn’t want to walk anymore. The short guy was like, “I got you. You know I always got you. Sit on that step right there.” The bald guy sat right on my stoop with his head in his hands. The short guy sat next to him, comforting him. I kept reading, occasionally glancing over the top of the book to check on them, until the short guy heard the sound of the page turning. He looked shook when he noticed me on the porch. Turned to his friend in a stage whisper, “there’s a lady on the porch. We gotta go.” That moment of (mis)recognition felt so good.
The bald guy looked squarely at me and I thought for sure the spell was broken. “I’m sorry ma’am. Can I sit on your step? I need to rest.” The short guy started rummaging in his pockets. He was also looking me square in the face. “I can pay you some money, darling.” At this point I didn’t know what was going on. The porch was well lit, I hadn’t shaved. No normal person would ID me as a woman. My face showed my confusion and the short guy was kind enough to explain. “I’ll pay you some money to sit on your step. We don’t want to bother a nice lady reading.”
I didn’t want to speak for fear my deep voice would give me away. I tried to savor the few seconds before I opened my mouth and ruined everything. “You don’t gotta pay money to sit on my stoop,” I called out. I heard my baritone echo off the concrete, tried not to think about how mortified I’d feel when these men apologized to me.
“Thanks, babe,” said the bald guy, and put his head back in his hands. The short guy beamed. “He’s Irish and I’m Italian, but we’re best friends.” His confidence grew as he spoke, he puffed out his chest, “we got eight felonies between the two of us.” The bald guy looked up, “I don’t got any felonies.” His short friend corrected, “I got eight felonies between the two of us.” He looked at my book. “You’ll read my book when I write one, right lady?” I nodded. Short guy was jubilant. “I think we rested enough. Let’s let this nice lady get back to her book.” He helped up his bald friend, who muttered “thanks, babe” again, and they ambled off.
When I initially told Becca this story, elated at having been recognized, she expressed a reasonable degree of excitement for me before pointing out that this experience would’ve never happened to her. “Right, you would’ve gone inside when you heard the men down that block,” I told her, eager to show that I knew what she was talking about. “No,” she replied, “I wouldn’t have been reading on our front stoop that late at night in the first place.” I think it’s fair to say that the only mildly conflicted teenage boyhood and wild 20s I had contributes, not just to the lack of my own fear of violence in that particular situation, but also to my initial inability to comprehend the extent of Becca’s when we reflected on the moment together. There’s a lot to unpack there, and I don’t think I can do that conversation justice right now, but it doesn’t feel right not to mention.
*Though other characters refer to him as “Polly” and with she pronouns in dialogue when in the form of a girl, he is always referred to as “Paul” and with he pronouns in the narrative text.