The Big Y

Why, in a blogosphere teeming with the experiences and opinions of hundreds if not thousands of people who identify as transgender/transsexual/trans (and more about those distinctions later) would I want to add my thoughts to the virtual landscape? Do I have anything  to add to all the ongoing discussions? Or would voicing my thoughts/feelings/observations (see above about future distinctions) just become so much static on a noisy broadcast?

Honestly, I don't know. (Which should tell you one very important aspect of my blogs - do not expect absolutes here. Mostly opinions and truths. Facts will come complete with references. Which means they will probably be few and far between, but mostly reliable.). Here's what I do know: for personal and therefore political reasons (again, TBA)  I now need a space to talk and think about one of my core identities, a gender identity, of its implications and my expectations. This in the context that I am a Jew, a social justice activist/organizer, a middle-aged undergrad student on the verge of grad school (fingers and toes crossed), and simply and complicatedly, a human.

Now I could just spew autobiographically until you clicked off, fell asleep and finished knitting that sweater made up of the lint you picked from your navel. (Or am I the only one who does that? Awkward!) I think instead I am going to do the 30 Day Trans-Challenge instead. Hopefully it will both answer questions in the present tense while offering some glimpses into my past and allowing me some looking-glass perspective.

So here we go:

When did you realize the term transgender referred to you?
This would have to be in the mid-'90's, when the Internet was just getting up to speed. During some late nights (re: impossibly long soul-searching nights with my monitor's glow as an impromptu nightlight) I went surfing, looking for...well, I wasn't quite sure what. Much like Neo's imperative to search for Morpheus and the answer to the question of what is The Matrix, I was seeking answer to half-formed questions which had followed me since around six years old. Why had I wished to be a girl back then? Why had I wanted to trade in my penis for a woman's body? And as a corollary, why had I been okay with that at such a young age? Why had crossdressing in my mother's clothes felt like some sort of deep, even spiritual, alignment, exciting and peaceful at the same time? Why did my copy of "The Joy of Lesbian Sex", purchased when I was 15, make sense? Why, well into my Thirties, could I open a porn magazine and try to imagine myself in the body of the model? Why did I socialize with women more so than men? Why did my sexual attractions sound more like women's attractions than men's? Why? Why why why?

Before the internet I never shared these questions, although their echoes talk to me if only in urgent whispers. In that vacuum of knowledge and socialization I had become convinced I was crazy, insane. Certainly the hetero-normative, mostly conservative and fundamentally religious circles I was socialized in support the idea of my "insanity". The sex organs you were born with were the ultimate gender markers. They fixed you for life, until death. To think (and more importantly, to feel) differently was akin to believe in unicorns and mermaids.

Then came the internet, that electronic crash of people, experiences, and most importantly, thoughts and language. And in coming upon this cacophony I finally arrived before the word Transgender. It's difficult to accurately describe what that existential moment was like. It was a "click" moment when so many of my question marks finally became periods (well, more like exclamation points.) That alignment I felt back in second grade when I first put on my mother's clothes return in a great rush. Had anyone been listening at my bedroom door during those nights they would have heard great sobs - not of anguish (at least not at first) but of release and relief. The tears came in a sweet deluge, like a storm which finally comes to the parched farmland. And while these revelations would later lead to more questions (and in turn, more anguishes and even further epiphanies), for that one moment it was momentous, it was terrific and terrible and wondrous and amazing and beautiful, all in the same gasping breath.

Transgender. It felt like arriving at the shores of the Jordan after the longest Exodus possible. It felt like I could finally lay down these impossibly heavy burdens I had been hauling (and which no one else could see) for a millennium. 

Transgender. It felt like, finally, coming home.