Fanfiction
It’s the spring of 2015. I’m 26, and my brother’s getting married today. I’m at the bride’s house, where the groomsmen are getting dressed and getting ready for the events of the day. They look sharp, in tailored suits and matching ties. I’m relaxed, wearing a nice dress and lounging in a cushy chair while the men banter like boys cutting class to do something cooler. I like the way my dress is shaped around my little breasts, and how it shows the beautiful skin curving up toward my neck. I notice the men like it, their eyes lingering on me, and it makes me smile. Then I remember that’s not right. I was wearing the same suit, the same tie, as the rest of them. I didn’t particularly care to show off my body, least of all to myself. That’s the real memory.
It's very difficult to predict exactly what experiences you’ll have during a gender transition. There’s enormous variability in what bodies are like, how they respond to medication and hormones, and how they’re genetically programmed. Add to that the incomprehensibly complex way personal identity is developed and differentiated, and how different everyone is by the time they get to the point where they’re ready to jump off the cliff and go trans their gender, and you get why “your mileage may vary” is one of the standard pieces of advice trans people get.
Knowing that, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time since I began taking my gender seriously reading up on the experiences reported by trans women during and after transition. It’s an interesting mix of funny puberty body stuff, shifts in the way you fit into the world, and most dizzyingly, changes in how you experience your own existence.
Something that seems to be a reasonably common experience is memory glitches. There’s the thing that happened, the raw data that got stored in your memory of what happened to you earlier in life. Then there’s the way you experience it when you recall it. So what happens when the person recalling the memory looks and feels like a different gender than they were when the memory was formed?
It's my last winter in high school. I can’t believe how this day has gone; it’s like a fantasy come to life. My girlfriend is at my parents’ house, and we’re alone in my room kissing. I relish the feeling of my soft face nuzzling her soft face, and the warmth in my legs under my skirt. She smells so wonderful, so perfect, and it makes me so happy I could melt, knowing that’s what I’m like too. Only that’s not how it happened. I hadn’t shaved that day, and stubble poked through the skin of my cheeks and chin. It was stiffness in my jeans and not warmth running through me. I was rough, and I acted rough, a clueless teenage boy who spent half the time we were together imagining what my girlfriend must be feeling.
It's a very strange thing, finding myself noticing these glitches now. I feel how I am now, how comfortable and relaxed I am in my body, and I project that backwards. Then the weight of the memory kicks in, and I know I don’t fit into the old world the way I am now. My focus resharpens, and I realize that I’ve been doing a sort of self-insert fanfiction in my own life.
It’s so strange just to talk about this. For the longest time I bought into the transphobic idea that the weird gender feelings I had were delusional, and not grounded in a real part of my identity. Part of me is uncomfortable talking about the ways my identity is becoming a mosaic of who I was, who I am, and who I’m becoming. But isn’t that true of all of us? The process of transition just places it in front of your eyeballs in high definition. Where before I could ignore how my memories were becoming grainier and more crystallized with age, it’s obvious now, moment to moment how who I am now references and adjusts and recontextualizes who I used to be.
I’m 9 or 10 years old, and my dad’s just bought an airplane. It’s a white Piper Cherokee trimmed with maroon paint and gray sludge sloughed from the engine and brake discs. Its anemic four-cylinder engine will barely be able to get it airborne when Dad and I fly to Las Cruces in a few years, but my family has an airplane, and this is one of the coolest moments that’s happened in my life so far. My brothers and I are walking around it, feeling the aluminum and plexiglass, listening to my dad explain its workings and what it can do. In my head I’m imagining cables and pushrods running between the yoke and the control surfaces as I nudge the ailerons up and down, and I’m endlessly fascinated by what must be happening inside. I look pretty and I know it. The tips of my long brown hair still have the last flecks of baby blonde in them, my big eyes are curious and sweet, and I’m wearing one of my cute dresses despite Mom’s admonishment that I’d get it dirty in the hangar. I look at my brothers and I love them, but thank God I’m the way I am instead. I focus on the memory and that feeling’s gone. I was just like the three of them, and dressed and looked and talked just like my brothers.
And yet, that girl is here now.
