It is March of 2017. You are sitting on a bus on your way back from a trip on Spring Break. Friends of different ages and backgrounds surround you, phones out. They are laughing and trading devices – “This is me in high school with the girl I went to prom with.” “Oh my god, you should see baby Eric when he was like fourteen, he looked like Taylor Lautner.” “Wait wait wait – I wanna see, I wanna see.” “Yeah, I looked so different back then.” “You look like a soccer mom here!”
You crane your neck, accepting the phones when they are passed around and snickering or commenting as appropriate. You don’t offer your own, though. You don’t have any pictures of you in high school; at prom; going through puberty or unfortunate haircuts. You never experienced any of that. Or rather, you did, but not as you. Back then, you were someone else.
This story is mine, but it is not mine alone.
Like many other transgender individuals, I had a whole life before I fully realized the identity I hold today. How does one talk about a past they weren’t present for? The life I lead now is my real life, my correct life, but there’s a gap in it; it only really started six years ago. So how do I talk about the ‘before’?
When I was younger, when I searched myself for what made me ‘me,’ I remember coming up blank. I remember thinking, “Maybe there is nothing inherent to me; I am what I do, or how I appear to others, or whatever way the world defines me.” It didn’t bother me too much; I was busy living my life, draping myself in personality characteristics like whims and flitting from fictional character to fictional character with which to identify. This, perhaps, should have been the first clue: that these icons rarely corresponded with the gender I had been assigned. I favored the androgynous and queerish, including rebellious princes, eternally youthful mavericks, prettyboy criminals, and outcast women who disguised themselves as men. They say you are what you consume, and I feasted upon residents of the gender fringe, though I didn’t know the vocabulary of myself yet—nonbinary, genderqueer, “other (please specify).”
The first transgender person I knew personally was a friend of a friend, as well as a fellow member of our very white, cis, upper-middle class high school Gay-Straight Alliance. They transitioned through several names before settling on the moniker I know them by now—but let’s call them Noah. When Noah came out as a transgender male, there was a moment of shock for me. Not because I had known them particularly well before their transition, but because the idea of being transgender had never really existed in my periphery before. It hadn’t been quite real. I went home that day and sat on the floor of my bedroom, which I’d inherited from my older brother. I looked at myself in the mirror which hung on the back of my closet door, and asked myself, could this be why I don’t fit in the mold, why I’m different from others who are supposed to be my kind? Could this be why I’m at odds with my body, or why I never quite suit the role I’ve been assigned?
But Noah was an instance of only one of many trans narratives, most of which I did not yet know. My experience even then was limited to the idea of binary transition, or what has been called “male-to-female (mtf)” or “female-to-male (ftm)” trans identities. Neither of those fit me. In my brief window of reflection, that much was clear… so I let it go. I wasn’t like Noah. Probably. Maybe. I was just different. I had always been that way, after all. Almost no one perfectly fit the prescribed model of how their gender ‘should’ be, so why should I consider my experience somehow special? The only transgender image I knew, I did not think represented me.
In sophomore year, I started writing a story whose main character hovered between gender presentations. I couldn’t decide between pronouns for them. They went by multiple names and lived in different worlds. I did not think they represented me.
In my senior year, my AP Studio Art portfolio focused on Visual Kei, a genderbending, androgynous Japanese subculture of music and style. I illustrated a work in marker whose perspective hovered behind an individual of indeterminate sex and gender, caught between two bathroom marker signs, one for male and one for female. I did not think they represented me.
This is the problem: I didn’t know. That was Then. This is Now.
It is May of 2012. I have made some new friends in Sacramento in the past few weeks, and am bringing them over to my childhood home, a current halfway residence between my brief time in Los Angeles and my next apartment in the North Bay. I hope they don’t notice the signature scrawled on the canvas in the foyer, a lily painted in greens and whites, acrylic. I hope they don’t read the name printed on the third set of senior photos in the hallway of the east wing, where someone I occupied once poses, airbrushed, smiling. I hope they don’t look too closely at the family photos lining shelves in the living room, picking out the face that was mine before I knew. If they do see, or if they do hear my mother calling that name up the stairs when she arrives home, I hope they forget. I’m not sure I ever will. I still look over my shoulder whenever I hear the name that’s not mine anymore.
It is November of 2015. Rain peppers the thin red fabric of my umbrella, and my cheeks bear stripes of pink, white, and blue. On the campus of my university, a lawn is lined with styrofoam gravestones wearing the names of transgender victims of violence who have died this year. I helped make them, and I wonder if the newspapers in Rio de Janiero, in San Diego, in Athens, in Columbus, call them by the names they gave themselves, or the ones they left behind. How horrible it would be, I think, to be remembered as someone you are not, and never known as someone you ought to have been for much longer. I hope to someone else’s god that the same invisible shroud won’t be draped over my grave; that my parents wouldn’t do this to me.
It is January of 2013. Earlier this week I got ordained as a minister online, mostly just to see if I could. I am at Aaron Brothers, browsing the clearance section for an appropriately gaudy frame to line the certificate I received in the mail yesterday. I can’t wait to nail it to your wall, but before I do, I take a black marker and scribble over the glass to obscure the first half of the name on the paper. No one needs to know that, I think. Not now, anyway.
It is September of 2016. One of the three high school friends I still keep in touch with regales me with news about my old girlfriend—”She’s gone native suburban,” they say. “She actually wants to go to our high school reunion. Why would I want to see any of those people again?” I kind of think it’d be interesting to see where everyone ended up, but I know I can’t go back. The person who attended that school doesn’t exist anymore, and the person I am now is someone none of my former peers have ever met. How do I go back to somewhere the current me has never been before?
And that’s the thing about being transgender. No one really tells everything about the ‘before.’
I am one of the ones who keeps quiet. Many transgender folks, like myself, change their names when they begin to publicly transition. The name we held before, whether it remains on our licenses or birth certificates, dies—almost literally; the colloquial term for a discarded former name in the trans community is a “deadname.” Depending on each individual, a lot of remnants “die” when one takes on a new mantle. E-mails, jobs, school acquaintances, childhood photos, Facebook accounts… If each isn’t carefully and thoroughly updated (or kept meticulously distinct from the reality of a person’s life), it’ll find itself abandoned in the wastescape of a social web that used to be called home.
The transgender narrative featured still rarely today tends to focus on the “trans” aspect itself, following linear and conclusive transition stories. Almost never do we think about the before and after states as things which interact with one another: but they do. Awkwardly, repeatedly, every time you tell a story about ten-year-old you and have to pause before rewriting dialogue in your head, all to avoid verbal markers that would conflict with how you’re known. They do every time you flash your ID at an airport and surreptitiously look away when the over-friendly airline greeter addresses you by a retired name. They do in photo albums that you must choose to share, always somehow prompting a feeling of deceit or shame, or to hide. They do when you don’t get to share your experiences as a “young girl” or “young boy” without lying, misgendering yourself, or both.
In all honesty, the majority of my life (and all of my youth) I never identified as Chain, a genderless being. Despite this, in the past six years I have known this name, this person, this self, to be the most authentic and accurate vision of myself to have ever been. When I see young teens and preteens, preadolescents, children even, learning to accept and call themselves in the way they know to be truest, I feel pangs of envy. What if I could have been me so much earlier? At the same time, I know so many of my trans elders (those who have survived) must look at me and feel the same pangs, having found themselves only at ages thirty, or fourty, or fifty, or more.
It is March of 2017, and at the tender age of twenty-three, I know who I am, and so does everyone who is most important to me. That’s all that matters, really. Nevertheless, every once in a while I am reminded of what I missed, and all the memories that are left behind the curtain of where my current life began. When that time comes, there is a moment in which I look back into the gaps in my past, where I wish I might have known myself. Today is just one of those days, and tomorrow I will again look forward to the rest of my life, knowing that eventually, my years as Chain will outnumber that first stretch of time when I hadn’t yet found myself. In the meantime, I will try to make memories that are certain to be allowed to stay.
