I’m trying something new this week. Did I tell you I’m writing a book? I’m working on a memoir-esque non-fiction welterweight about masculinity and grief. I hope you enjoy this excerpt, on the house.
When I told my parents I was trans, I had just opened a bottle of Heineken after a 16-hour plane ride back from Australia by way of Fiji. Actually, that’s a lie. A few weeks before, I had opted to come out in the true millennial fashion by posting a status update on Facebook. I typed out this massive secret with my thumbs, acknowledging that yes, my new name does sound like it came straight from a 1920s baseball player, and yes I am, in fact, transgender. As I sat slouched and sweating on the vinyl strap chaise lounge on the third-story balcony, the colorful birds made a cacophony of noises from the trees just beyond the concrete patio of the vacation rental I was staying at in Byron Bay. I was traveling out of the country for the first time in my life at the age of 23, six months into a love affair that had me by the throat.
Afraid that I might back out if I sat with it too long, my eyes quickly scanned over the words I had typed out on my phone. I posted my truth and mindlessly slipped my iPhone 5 into the back pocket of my bleached jeans. I was suddenly grateful that I hadn’t paid the extra $20 for a SIM card with more data. Without my phone tethering me to the opinions of the people I cared about the most halfway across the world, I walked down the beach to watch the seals hurl themselves against the white sand. My steps were lighter, somehow. I felt scared in the way that you do when you know you might be getting free. There was a good chance that my mom would log onto her Facebook on her phone and read what I had written, but she didn’t say anything to me about it. That night I ate kangaroo meat for the first time, and it was so red that I almost cried.
I went to Brisbane a week later and met more trans people than I ever knew existed. This girl Nikki straddled my back during a heatwave and gave me the most painful stick-and-poke tattoo on my back while I watched Legally Blonde out of the corner of my eye in her bedroom in 40-degree heat. I could feel her bulge press against my spine. It was as intimate as it was grueling. She looked like the type who could kill a man in her black denim skirt, singing a dark and vengeful version of Alanis Morisette’s You Oughta Know at the gay karaoke bar.
One person in particular stood out to me. Elliot had a voice made of honey and twinkling blue eyes that looked like glass spit out by the sea. When I saw them, I couldn’t stop staring. Their jet-black hair took a jar of pomade a day. Their chest was smooth and sloped downwards under a plain black t-shirt framed by a loose red flannel. I was fully obsessed with them, but they were the best friend of my crush, so I was trying to play it cool. I didn’t know what was happening, but I couldn’t take my eyes off them.
One morning, Elliot’s blue and purple-haired girlfriend Laura practiced administering a shot of testosterone into a grapefruit. You could tell that she wanted to feel included, to be brought along on this journey that Elliot was walking alone but also beside her. Her hands trembled as she slid the needle into the pink, pulpy flesh and pulled out a syringe full of juice. She squirted it into Elliot’s mouth, and I watched as the juice ran down their chin. I felt a tremendous jealousy that I didn’t admit was jealousy until years later.
One day, I saw them change out of their rash-guard behind a giant eucalyptus tree when we were swimming at the river. I had never seen a binder before. A tight black vest clung to the top half of their torso as they stripped down to the nude. Their shoulders glimmered in the sunlight filtering through the trees. The binder seemed to work like a magician’s tool—a disappearance in plain sight. I looked down at my chest hanging shapelessly in the dykey lifeguard top that my mom had reluctantly bought for me at Swim ’N Things back in the States. I didn’t necessarily feel weird about my chest, but when I saw Elliot in their tight black neoprene top, the flatness of their chest beckoned me. I pushed the thought out of my head, cracked open a Coopers pale on a knot in the tree, and rejoined my temporary friends in the rock pools below.
After my five-week trip was over, I was dreading the reunion with my parents back in Colorado. Me, with freshly bleached hair, an epic tan, and a brand-new gender. Them, with their good intentions, middle-class anxieties, and matching phone cases. I had changed in ways I couldn’t explain. I was in town for one night, a brief stopover before hopping back on another red-eye the next night home to Portland where I had been living ever since I moved out of my parents’ house five years ago.
I watched my mom pace around the pale blue kitchen of the house I grew up in. She was trying her hardest to act like everything was normal. The ceiling fan rotated slowly above us, even though it was the dead of winter in Denver. I took a sip of the beer I had grabbed from the fridge, the green bottle trembling in my hand.
“So I was talking to Megan the other day, you remember Megan from book club, and she told me about this series I should watch called Transparent. Have you heard of it?”
Oh god. Is that how we are going to talk about this? My mouth opened before I could shut it.
“No, I haven’t actually,” I shot back. “I do know that it’s super problematic that Jeffrey Tambor, a cis man, is playing a trans woman. I’m pretty sure he sexually harassed multiple trans women on set while filming the show, so frankly I’m not interested in watching.”
The conversation avalanched from there. This was not going the way I had planned. My mom cried, a lot. She asked me with tears in her eyes if this meant that I was going to get a sex change. I tried to stay calm and explain things to her in a way that she would understand. My head began to throb under the harsh glow of the recessed lights. It seemed like the more I tried to break it down, the more hysterical she became. It was like I was telling her that my body was proof of extraterrestrial life or something equally incomprehensible. Why was this such a big deal?
I didn’t grow up religious or anything like that. My parents were liberal and had voted Democrat in every election. My mom would reminisce about her days burning bras during the Women’s Lib. I had told my parents that I was bisexual when I was seventeen after Mom found a magazine page of Megan Fox taped to the ceiling above my bed. I wanted to take my girlfriend to prom my senior year of high school, so I figured they needed to know. When I broke the news, they just looked at each other and smiled. We know, honey. Just like that. We know.
I couldn’t help but replay that scene over and over again in my head. Now it felt like I was trapped in somebody else’s childhood home in some alternate universe, watching their life play out like a badly acted Lifetime movie. Mom and I went back and forth playing emotional volleyball for what felt like an eternity before I realized my dad was still in the room. He was hunched over at the kitchen table compulsively playing Sudoku. He hadn’t said a single word the entire time.
“Do you have anything that you want to add, Dad?” I asked, my face turning red and hot to the touch.
He took off his glasses and sighed deeply, leaning so far back in his wooden chair that I thought the two front legs might lift off from the floor. He kept rubbing his forehead with one hand as if even being asked the question was causing him physical pain. It took a long time for him to say anything at all.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to see you as anything other than my daughter,” he said flatly.
That’s when I finally lost it. I started crying, uncontrollably hyperventilating while I darted across the room for my phone and a set of keys. My nearly full bottle of Heineken warmed on the kitchen table, losing its fizz in a perfect wet circle. Mom tried to stop me, grabbing me by the shoulders and pleading with me, but I shook her off and stormed out the front door with no jacket on. The cold air manhandled me. I ran out down the porch stairs, across the street, past the stoplight, and the flower gardens, and up to the park where I used to play soccer with my dad when I was a kid. I dialed my best friend, then my lover, then my best friend again. I was incoherent. My words were jagged and heaving as the snow fell peacefully in the hazy yellow glow of the street lamps.
I went from swimming in the warm, shallow blue-green sea of Fiji in nothing but my underwear to sobbing into my cell phone on a snowy park bench in my hometown. 24 hours before, I had been mouth-to-mouth with a hot, Australian I fell for on the dance floor, our sticky bodies glued to one another in the heat of a Mariah Carey moment. Now, I was jet-lagged and suddenly, but surely, losing my family.
Love you.