I began to make the medical transition from woman to men on January 23, three days after Donald Trump was inaugurated. I never imagined that this part of my trip would begin, while the most openly anti-trans president is in the White House.
Even before being elected in November, Trump and his party were obsessed with Trans Folx, a demographic group that represents less than 1% of the country’s total population. But, as I have written before, about half of the pro-trump attack ads in the presidential elections carried Anti-Trans messages. Since he assumed the position, Trump has signed several executive orders that seek to deny our existence through bureaucratic and cultural violence.
Even before being elected in November, Trump and his party were obsessed with Trans Folx, a demographic group that represents less than 1% of the country’s total population.
In May, the house controlled by the Republican Party approved a tax bill that would deny attention with gender confirmation that saves lives covered by Medicaid. And last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of denying gender attention of minors confirming the genre.
Reading that news a week after having undergone superior surgery, while I recover and metabolize the depth of medical care with gender confirmation, I experienced a kind of devastation that I had not felt before. It was as if my surgery broke a dam that had previously allowed a certain type of defensive desensitization to the culture of Anti-Trans hatred in this country. Now, that desensitization is more difficult to take advantage of day.
As I anticipate reaching a place where I spend a man, I fear traveling and the complications that can arise from the documents that are incongruous with my presentation: we are currently waiting for the results of a preliminary judicial order in the rule of the Trump administration’s travel document to see if I am allowed to change the gender marker in my travel documents of what they assigned to me at birth.
This moment is imbued with fear, and is designed that way. And not only for trans people. For poor people, queer people, folx non -white, women, immigrants, activists, those with disabilities … Any person who is not a cishet media man, white and without disabilities.
However, bets of this moment are also deeply clarified. It would be easier to delay the transition. But I have understood the chaos of this moment as an invitation to go in. Yes, sometimes it can be terrifying, but the transition has provided a road map for resistance and joy at this time, one that extends far beyond trans experience.
This transition process, with its concomitant lessons, has done, something contrary to intuition, the best year of my life so far. To be clear, this period has had no shortage of anguish, fear and pain. But the internal liberation I have won is immeasurable.
One of the most powerful transition dimensions comes from the organic invitation to repair my breakdown with what Audre Lorde calls “the erotic.” In his famous 1978 speech “Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power”, Lorde describes how oppression depends on this breakup, this disconnection:
There are many types of power, used and not used, recognized or of another. Erotic is a resource within each of us who is in a deeply feminine and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our undertaken or unrecognized feeling. To perpetuate itself, each oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of oppressed that can provide energy for change.
I am not missing that this political moment, rooted in multiple violence designed to terrorize those who defy a vision of the world that privileges and supports the heterosexual patriarchy cystnero, white supremacy and kleptocracy, is built in many ways and is content to deepen this corruption or distortion. (This, of course, in part explains the obsession of the Republican Party with the rarity and suppression of it).
I find my resistance and vitality by focusing my connection with the erotic, in the sense that Lorde wrote, in the cultivation of a daily practice of attending to it, even so many of my identities that cross as a trans Muslim have become the focal point of the political scapegoats and fear. (To be clear, I am also protected by many privileges, as well as the intersectional nature of discrimination and privilege).
Creativity is perhaps one of the most powerful ways to preserve the erotic. And the transition, the creation of a new self in a literal and incarnate sense, allows me to consciously integrate creativity into my life daily.
I have learned that the transition simply highlights the universal experience of what it is to be alive: we are all Transition and constant transition, from the cellular level to our daily moods to the evolution of our ideas and understanding of the world. Nothing is static; Nothing is fixed. And as I get involved in this process of layers and unlearning of the self, they have moved me and surprised by how much a deeply relational task has also been.
When I embarked on this trip, I had the idea that this would be a lonely process; I had not fully understood that to approach one closer to oneself is to approach the world. The two are not separated. Relationships so often provide the necessary containment for creation. The parameters, after all, allow creativity to flourish.
I find miracles in my two friends, male friends who taught me to shave once my stubble began to pass through.
These moments of creation, this practice of creativity, in a climate designed to suffocate, calm, contract and kill, are miraculous. I find miracles in my two friends, male friends who taught me to shave once my stubble began to pass through. I find miracles in my bandmates, who are creating an album with me in which I harmonize with myself as my voice falls. Meeting Milagros on the network of friends and a chosen family who have registered to take turns to make meals and walk my dog for a month while I recover from superior surgery. Meeting miracles in the bell of my voice, which deepens every new week.
I do not offer these miracles to darken or ignore the horrors that surround us at this time. Because there are many. But both can be true. In my experience, hugging these moments is the antidote for horrors.
If we choose it, we are lucky to be consciously in this continuous process of creation and recreation together, and all the wonders that these possibilities give life. Despite the best efforts of those who seek to subjugate others and exercise cryptophastic ideologies, our dignity, our divinity, we can never take away.
