#same rhetoric that scares people off from taking testosterone | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

campgender · 4 years

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hey, would you mind talking about your most recent poem? I really resonated with the vibes it was giving off, but I don’t really understand the specifics. obviously it’s okay if it’s personal and you don’t want to explain, but I thought i’d just ask.

oh my god i would Love To, i appreciate any reason to ramble about my writing lol. & thank you for asking so kindly! honestly i’m gonna use this opportunity for all it’s worth and take it line by line because i’m excited ☺️ the poem is here (link) for anyone who’s curious

“closer to 22 than anything else, i’m still thinking about that professor / who said she wished everyone could transition. ma’am, i don’t see you / picking up a needle. stop making my body nothing more than a metaphor.” so the whole piece is about HRT and cis people’s various expectations about and reactions to it, & the disconnect between the narratives they try to force on my transition and my own narrative/concept of it.

i took a women’s and gender studies class a little over two years ago, long before i started HRT, and there was a lot of transphobia in it, made even worse by how i wasn’t braced for it the way i am in engineering classes. my prof was kinda super dehumanizing in the way she talked about medical transition, but under a progressive veneer, like “oh i wish everyone could have that process of introspection and changing, and knowing what it’s like to live as both genders,” which, yikes. i’m like, that’s rich when you’re saying that but i’m the one actually doing it, paying & bleeding for it, yk?

and like, this is my body. it doesn’t exist to teach people some deep truth about themselves or be cis women’s savior in destroying the gender binary. i don’t exist to represent someone else’s experiences; i exist, full stop.

“a cis friend calls me after the diagnosis & i say i know it isn’t the same, / but he doesn’t let me put that kind of distance between our bodies.” a friend was recently diagnosed with testicular cancer and underwent procedures that mean he’ll be on testosterone injections for the rest of his life. because his circumstances aren’t very common, he asked if he could talk to me about my experience with hormones, & i was really surprised when he didn’t treat our experiences as totally disparate. like yeah, they’re definitely different, but it meant a lot that he wasn’t uncomfortable comparing himself to a trans person—he handled it really respectfully, treated HRT like it was normal, not some strange and otherworldly process the way my prof did.

“(neither would the boy, if he was here.)” i’ve gotta slip a little t4t content in lol so here’s a reference to the (trans) guy i like

“so here it goes: / yeah, i still hesitate, but i don’t flinch. print that out & tape it / to her office door. burn that goddamn book” the hesitate but don’t flinch part is directly about giving myself injections, but it’s also about my increased willingness to point out and dismantle transphobic rhetoric in the past couple years. doing painful things anyway even though they’re difficult, and being used to the pain of it, coping with it.

the book referenced is a memoir we read in that prof’s class which included a trans guy being misgendered, outed for shock value, and having his abusive behavior connected to his transness. his transition was a source of fetishizing curiosity and fascination for the author, and i’m still disgusted by it.

“& say into the phone / yes. just to be safe.” directly about when the cis guy friend asked if i aspirate when doing injections, but safety is something i’ve been thinking about a lot lately. it’s complicated; being visibly trans makes me less safe, but my mental health improved so much after starting HRT, which is its own safety. i want so badly just to be safe, but that often isn’t an option, or it’s not worth the consequences.

“i’ve touched more alcohol swabs in the past 11 months / than ever before—that’s the kind of thing i think about, not whatever kind of / evolution you’re expecting. you & i, with all undue respect, / are the same fucking species,” going back to the way a lot of cis people treat medical transition as something Serious and Deep and Heavy that you have to have equally serious, deep, heavy thoughts about or make serious, deep, heavy art about. & as i allude to earlier, there are certainly serious aspects, and every trans person feels differently about it, but overall for me it’s just a thing that’s happening to my body. it’s so normal.

& then i couldn’t resist a play on words with evolution to reiterate that medical transition doesn’t separate me from cis people in general & that professor in particular the way they act like it does. we’re more similar than they think, and that scares them.

“& when i say yes to my mentor’s for the rest of / your life? she winces, but i beam.” the third and final cis person who had a totally different attitude about HRT than i did: my mentor, who i love dearly & who was so happy for me when i told her i was starting testosterone, and who was (understandably, imo) upset that i’d have to inject myself once a week for the rest of my life. but as much as i get why she reacted that way, it’s not how i feel about it—the thought of injecting myself for the rest of my life is exciting, not dismaying, because it means i’ll be able to exist in & with my body the way i want to.

#thank you again so much for this ask! i’m really glad the poem resonated with you in whatever way it did 💓#mac writes #asks #transition #needles tw #cancer tw #ask to tag

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