d have

 

 

I think I’ve always been on the periphery of the riot grrrl lifestyle

I say periphery, because I spent most of my teenage years hating men, but also not having a word for exactly what it was about men that I hated. Was it aggression? The lack of empathy? The sexualization of girls who were way too fucking young? I didn’t know about the concept of patriarchy or how harmful it was to literally everyone. 

Apocalypse begins.

As I enter my thirties and have become a fairly radical, but also intersectional feminist, I don’t think I “hate men” I think I hate the systems that center and benefit men at the expense of marginalized groups, but like Cher once said, “Men are a luxury, like desert, but I don’t need them to survive.” I like that. 

Unfortunately, my decentering of men wasn’t always an aspect of my womanhood. I did have a phase of being classified with a relatively bad case of  “Pick-Me” syndrome. I hadn’t quite hit my riot grrrl phase, nor was I even close to who I am now. 

The road home is not always straightforward.

In fact, early in my womanhood, I  never even wanted to be a “doll.” My earliest iteration of transness was a god-awful bout of smudged makeup and really ill-fitting clothes. At the time I considered myself a “Weird Girl,” as if to embody the kind of hyperactive, anime-loving, ambiguously queer furries I’d always befriend at Gamestop. The 30+-year-old women wearing cat ears and baggy jeans that would tell me all about their favorite anime as if I was a peer, and not just some little autistic kid desperate to meet anyone else in the fandom. 

I was a mess of smeared eyeliner, shittily straightened hair and striped arm warmers without a stitch of the confidence to even remotely pull off such a ridiculously campy look. I’m still not sure if I was catering to my 13-year-old self and using my adult money to dress like I wanted to as a kid (in 2007), or if I genuinely embodied the weebish weirdo vibe. 

I fully believe It had to be a mixture of the two though, right? Like little me colliding with me who now has the money to buy anime goggles, striped arm warmers, studded belts, and cat ears. It was a band-aid for the skinned knees of my inner child. 

The Journey forward, always forward.

I truly wish my journey had been that easy. A smooth anodyne for my childhood trauma that instantly cured me. I wish I could have remained in bondage pants and heat-damaged hair. Things would’ve been so much easier if I’d just followed stereotypes, and jumped into a twenty-person e-dating polycule full of commiserating and equally dysphoric trans-women.

I wish It could have been easy. I wish it could have instantly “fixed me” but the gods have a sense of humor and I never get off that easy. 

A stigmata of the mind

I had to be, like many a mentally ill woman before me “plagued with visions, as they say” 

My “visions”  were actually just a bout of new-age fueled psychosis where I thought I had woken up in the body of an alternate dimension’s version of me: a butch Lesbian with a nicotine dependency named Stella who introduced me to her vampire girlfriend, Rachael (familiar name if you read my poetry) and then left me with her feelings for her girlfriend. 

Together, the three of us would break free from my mother, an interdimensional witch, in this delusional scenario, and free me from both the financial and emotional control of my extremely fundamentalist parents. At the time, at least as deep as I was into the delusion, Rachel and Stella felt very real. 

Back to a reality, if not this one.

Waking up, I missed Rachael, this tender and cuddly girl who never existed in the first place, and the emotions I felt crushed me. Alas, I am neither in a transdimensional polycule nor is my mother a witch, as far as I know. (I had to get it from somewhere…) 

As an aside: I’m not saying that the multiverse isn’t real, nor am I saying that reality shifting isn’t real, I’m just saying that, like Reiki healing, alien abduction, and Ouija Boards, I have no personal experience in that category, thus I have no personal evidence; however, the whole experience inspired a really cool book that I’ll probably be working on for the rest of my life. 

Coming out of the woods…

I also started hella therapy in the interim and learned that Stella and Rachael, the respective knife and sugar cube archetypes, were aspects of who I am, or rather feel like I have to be, and who I wish I could be. That knowledge hurts–like, a lot–and like with most things I find painful, I shoved them down and created a persona to mitigate the inability to understand my current psyche. Enter: the “Satan Slut,” an amalgamation of Gurlesque (A term I’ve actually come to hate) and Southern Gothic vampire stuff. 

One wrong turn leads to another.

I forced myself to become brash, abrasive and hypersexual, and in the end, I distanced myself from both identities. By trying to become both the sugar cube and the knife, I ended up ripping myself apart with every attempt, every stitch to sew me back together. 

I wanted so badly to be the soft, pudgy, cuddly girl in a poofy dress with long golden coils. Most of me came to loathed the frizzy box-dyed hair, offensive battle jackets, satanic imagery and constant sex jokes. It was a self loathing, I hated myself so much. 

Entropy finally collided with my resolve, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. I had to coalesce. 

It was time make peace with every part of me, even that… part… 

 

The Elephant in the closet.

I was hoping I could get through this semester without talking about being trans. It’s not because I’m ashamed of my transness, though I wish I could say there isn’t a small pang of embarrassment using the women’s bathroom with a little extra flesh between my thighs. Joanne Rowling, it’s barely functioning, I’m just here to take a piss and maybe hit a blinker or two before going back to class. 

Okay, Jesus fucking Christ, Naia, what was that line? I don’t like talking about my transness because for some reason I can’t talk about it without becoming vitriolic and crude. I have this terminally online impulse to assume that every woman I share space with is somehow going to turn on me in some pseudo-radfem rage and accuse me of being some sort of pervert just because I have to pee.  

Does my transness embarrass me?

Maybe there’s something to the disgust I feel whenever another trans woman calls herself a “trap” and talks about humping her Ikea shark. I force this mask of cis-ness on my face, trying desperately to find solidarity among non-trans women, using radical feminist talking points to police my behavior. I am constantly poised with a tongue loaded with therapy-speak bullets aimed at my own chest. At any discretion, I am ready to pull the trigger and “hold space to hold myself accountable.”

No safety among my own.

I need cis women to accept me. As a feminist, I see the misogyny that runs rampant in my own community.

There is an infection of patriarchal ideals of what a woman should be, that are unrealistic. The subtle misogyny of the “Discord Kitten” archetype binds transwomanhood to a standard set by anime.

So then what?

I hold myself to the standard of informing my femininity through riot grrrl bands, and not anime, but that’s literally just because some other girl ran her mouth about how annoying I was. 

I didn’t want to be a “discord kitten” because I felt that stereotype was inherently misogynistic while acting in a way that was also pretty fucking misogynistic, if only to myself. 

“There is an infection of patriarchal ideals of what a woman should be”

Holding myself to extreme standards, e “discord kitten” for things that do not pertain to me at all. Perhaps my problem is that I’m still uncomfortable with my transness, or that it truly is something I should be ashamed of. I wonder if the girls who “liked me more before” weren’t just shitty excuses for friends, and actually had a point. 

I say stuff like that, and then wonder what the queen of riot grrrl Kathleen Hanna would think. Am I really going to cower behind my insecurities? Am I going to let someone else dictate to me what my womanhood even is? To that end what does it mean anyway? Like okay? Maybe I do get an annoying crush every now and then. Maybe I never shut up about it. What if I do still prefer shitty emo boybands rather than the wailings of a jilted sapphic slam poet? Does that even actually matter? 

What is the point of an identity that is static? If my womanhood never evolved, and if I never cried, if I never allowed myself any vulnerability, how does that make me any different from the standards that were foisted upon me as a little boy? If I do not allow myself the grace to be giddy and annoying every once in a while, am I not also following the patriarchy? 

So then who am I?

So then, as we enter the realm of feminist thought we must, unfortunately, ask the stupidest, and frankly most boring question: What is a woman? 

The simple answer is anyone who identifies with, presents as or carries traits of what a society has agreed to be traditionally associated with womanhood; however, gender is not just in presentation, nor is it exactly biology.

Gender is both arbitrary and sewn into everything we are as human beings. I am a woman because I experience womanhood, not just by winged eyeliner and cute skirts, but through the constant reminder that I will never meet the bar set by Michael, Todd, Caleb or Brendan. On an intellectual level, I am deemed far too emotional for the cold and rarely empathetic “Male Rationale” therefore in a male lead classroom, my voice will not be heard over the loud libertarian.

The “Real Man” will always lend his ear to the other man. 

His opinions, his ideology and his every tangent will be met with a furrowed brow and a quiet nod, whereas I, like any other woman, will be met with a smirk, and my own words explained to me as If I’d not just said them. Even having said all of this, I am justifying my own womanhood. The attempt to prove my credentials by how much-crushing misogyny I have experienced in my 30 years–as if having a male professor smirk over my points and talk over me while respectfully listening to the balding 22-year-old who cannot talk under 700db, suddenly proves to my audience that I am a woman. 

I am a woman, but I’ve grown so used to people explaining my womanhood to me, that I’m preemptively justifying my identity before the smirk even comes. 

Then I become brash, crude and offensive. I do this because I have grown accustomed to not being heard unless I burrow myself into the flesh of my audience like a stray bullet. I say the offensive thing because it is both my shield and my sword. It is the thing that guards me, and it is the phallic weapon that levels the playing field between me and the rest of these “great and stoic philosophers.”

 

I do not get the luxury of softness.

I do not get the luxury of being the vampiric wallflower, because a soft voice is never heard, and even fewer times taken seriously. Who I want to be is unobtainable, because she is constantly under the protection of who I have to be. I cannot be safe enough to be soft, and the obvious features of my transness make sure that I will never feel comfortable enough to embody the “who I want to be.” 

My grinding monotone, vocal fry, my nicotine dependency, and the acidic rage that eats through my guts every time I hear a man suggesting a girl should start “intermittent fasting” is a banner of “Fuck You” that keeps me from being the soft, cherubic, human equivalent of a peach-ring. I am not a peach ring, I am a razor blade, and I have been a razor blade for so long that I do not know how to even start–

Until I find myself crying in my partner’s chest. 

I recently bought a nightgown. The anarchist in me is furious that I would succumb to the throes of Capitalism and deign to stoop as low as the dreaded Amazon for an article of clothing, but then it was pretty. It was this pale rosy pink, vintage style, Bridgerton-esque gown with chiffon and lace details and this soft, silky fabric overall. I paired that with lace socks and a ribbon scrunchy I bought from Dollar Tree. 

When I curled up into my partner’s arms I never felt more safe in my life. It was as if every puzzle piece in my entire existence suddenly fell into place. I had never felt more comfortable in my own body as I did lying there. I was unsexualized, or…partially sexualized, but overall just loved. Not as a protector, not as a warrior, but as someone more precious. 

In this state, I felt less objectified than I do when I’m cussing out someone’s shitty boyfriend. That was the realization that made me accept being a “Doll,” because if my anger is the object of desire if my anger is what I and society expect, then the subversion is to blatantly ignore that which makes me angry and rebel by way of being utterly and irreparably doe-eyed. 

Femme, not feminine.

My “rebellion” shifted drastically from offensive battle jackets and middle fingers to pointed applications of lip gloss, dramatic eye rolling and a lot of really vivid makeup. it is not bimboism, it is weaponized femininity. 

I am as much emo furry, as gurlesquish riot grrrl; Doll and tomboy. Like some kind of hystrionic alchave stitched and cobbled together the pure and campy queer Burlesque in both cat ears and six-inch stilettos. I have become so cringey that it’s now cunty. And even if I don’t keep this grand declaration, I don’t have to, because now I’m both a strong, independent woman, and “Literally just a girl”  at the same time. I will cover myself in lace, and strangle shitty men with ribbons pulled from my hair. I am fluidity, a doll and a butch wrapped in one. One day, I will stitch every version of “me” into femininity pure and sharp like a drag queen’s contour.

I’m punk, because I refuse to listen to music made by grunting, straight dudes. The kind of “Punk” that listens to both Britney Spears and Descendants.  I have become so everything now that I am nothing. That “Nothing” though is a conglomeration of everything that defines my womanhood. I can be both a bitch and ateddy bear. I’m allowed to be the razor blade hidden in the sugar cube, as well as the nameless void that doesn’t need a particular “identity.” I give myself permission to exist. I exist, purely because I do. No justification, no explanation. 

Buried, breathing in the scent of my partner, tattooing their voice into my ribcage with every word they speak, I let myself live: breathing, but safe in their arms.