A Continued Genealogy of Gender
A “response” of sorts to my poem, “A BRIEF HISTORY OF HAIR.”
A strange consequence of keeping a continuous lineage of journals over the past nine years is having occasional opportunity to meet past versions of yourself that you likely don’t even remember anymore. These opportunities only grew more numerous and self-imposed once I started digitizing my physical journals as scanned PDFs (I am fearful of fires and impermanence) and transcribing them into Google Docs, for my own benefit — to help myself decipher my sometimes illegible script at a glance, and to facilitate searching for old entries I want to reference for public-facing pieces (which has happened more than once; I steal from myself readily). Sometimes while reading these entries I will feel a little awe, or pain, at the realization that I ever felt this way before. Or, frustration, if encountering a paragraph from 2019 and seeing that nothing’s changed. More often than not these days, though, the clarity of my transness (and therefore identity) will throw old woes and worries into sharp relief, and make everything make sense with retrospective epiphany.
This type of revelation happens twice as often when you, as I do, put so much of yourself into your public-facing writing as well. Recently I had to re-read my poem about being non-binary, “A BRIEF HISTORY OF HAIR,” to reference certain stanzas for a personal essay I was writing about being transmasculine, which is funny enough in and of itself, but it had a similar effect on me as reading my old journal entries — so many questions I’d posed about my body in the poem, I realized, were answered by my present embodiment. So many past hang-ups about self-image and identity, intense enough to knot myself up into a self-loathing ball on the worst days, were cleared away once I started on T. It was a curious experience. This poem, which meant so much to me at the time I wrote it, and I know still means a lot to others who were kind enough to message me about it, has become a historical artifact. It claims a “history” in its title, and it has historicized itself. Written by me, but also by someone who is not me anymore.
I saw a tweet once that said that trans people shouldn’t be publishing stories/essays about transness early on in their transition, because they’ll find out they were wrong and regret it later on — a sentiment I find plainly ridiculous, not least of all because transition has no endpoint and we continue to discover new things about ourselves every day, but also because this is just how life works, regardless of transness. I can hardly recognize the person who wrote “Sugarloaf” anymore, their verbal tics and flairs and thematic fixations, and that story was written only two years ago. If we approached any type of writing like this, we’d never write at all, and if we have to go back and redact or disavow every past piece we’ve ever published — well, we’d each be here all day.
These stories, poems, essays, whatever, are like time capsules. Gifts for my future self to re-excavate, to remind myself (and my frankly terrible memory) of all the different lives we’ve led. And neither are they ever rendered totally untrue. Right now, I still identify as non-binary, because I still retain a degree of genderqueerness, genderfluidity, and femininity — I just feel more comfortable experiencing all of that in a masculine body. Neither is transmasculinity in contradiction with the poem, because somehow I’ve managed to achieve its stated desire “to be a feminine boy without being a boy,” by becoming a boy. And, most ironic to me, is that I’ve stopped cutting my hair short. The shears have been stayed, in an effort to match “the long tresses of the pretty male leads” in Chinese period dramas, so that I can finally express the kind of androgynous masculinity I’ve always idolized. “I love growing my hair out,” I wrote in a section of the poem that’s dated November 2019. As it turns out, I still do.
The above GIF is from an old short film I made in 2018 — possibly the first real work I ever made about my own gender — called “TRI • FEC • TA.” The title was to connote my experience of being trigender, which is one of those gender things that no longer holds true for me. A particularly fitting example of self-referential laddering, because there’s a stanza about me making the film in “A BRIEF HISTORY OF HAIR.” The breadcrumb trail is coming around full circle, I guess, because “TRI • FEC • TA” is currently being featured in The Hennepin Review’s Spring 2023 issue. You can check it out here.