I Don’t Think That I Need to Sit Here With You Fucking Dildos Any More
Autobiography of a Trans Punk in 2000 Words
1985 or 1986. I learn about shame through Jem and the Holograms, a cartoon about an all-woman band led by a singer with pink hair. Ostensibly a boy, I know I’m not supposed to want to watch this, so I have vague and sporadic memories of being completely enraptured by the colors and the outfit and the keytars and stuff, but only when nobody else was around, which was almost never. Vague and sporadic, of course, because a bad memory is a powerful coping skill for dealing with ongoing trauma, and at age six or seven, wanting something that feels so big while fully understanding and believing that you shouldn’t want it, without skills to parse or resist that contradiction—not just in the context of a goofy cartoon designed to sell knock off Barbies, you understand, Jem and the Holograms are the tip of this iceberg—functions as ongoing trauma. In other words, you don’t have to know the word “trans” for it to fuck you up.
1988. I have a babysitter named Denise. She’s babysitting the night I have to make covers out of brown paper bags for my third grade textbooks. Across one book cover she writes all the cool bands she’s into, the best ones in a different color than the others. I feel cool for knowing about bands. Knowing stuff about bands doesn’t make you cool, though. It doesn’t make you anything. Poison seed: planted.
1993. I’m book smart so it doesn’t blow anybody’s mind when I qualify for the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth nerd camp program early in middle school, but it’s hard to commit to anything when you can’t commit to a self, so I half-ass pretty much everything and it takes a couple years till I decide to go, summer after freshman year of high school. It’s a three week program in Creative Writing or English or The Essay or something at Franklin & Marshall in Pennsylvania. I get in with the nerd camp cool kids and have my first girlfriend. There’s also this kid, Jason, and I have a crush on him, but, still not having committed to a self, I don’t really know how to do anything unexpected, so I don’t recognize it as a crush. He’s from Long Island and sometimes he wears the old Bouncing Souls shirt with the poster from Pretty In Pink except it says “Bouncing Souls” instead of “Pretty In Pink.” He knows all about punk stuff and makes me a list of all the bands I should check out, with the ones that play in New Jersey (where I live) a lot in a different color. This is before the internet. You can’t look stuff up on YouTube so mostly I just get into the Bouncing Souls. I’ll go on to see them a bunch of times every year for the next, like, decade and a half.
1994. The thing about CTY (Center for Touching Yourself) is that one of its underlying missions is a social experiment: what if you take away the normal kids and leave the smart kids to develop socially, free from their natural predators, normal kids? Rad shit, is what. My second year at nerd camp I have a relationship with this girl Jenny as well as that kid Jason. Years and years later I’ll realize it was my first queer poly relationship. I’m 15.
1996. I start to run with a crew: Jen wears leopard prints and takes drugs, Jay wears bondage pants, Nick wears a Kangol and goes to the Warped Tour. Actually they all take drugs. Actually, we all take drugs. I’m in love with Jen. She has a redneck boyfriend. We play Gorilla Biscuits songs in their basement.
1997. I DI with Jen in her dorm room at Montclair. I still don’t really have a self. It doesn’t go well.
1997-2001. I go to college. I spend four of my five college years in a relationship.
A couple months ago, in 2019, I was in the grocery store looking for arugula. There was no arugula, so I took a picture of the whole fucking produce department on my phone in case I needed to prove to my current partner that there was no arugula. There was literally no chance that she would ask for this proof. It was all left over guilt and shame from that college relationship that I still carry around with me twenty years later.
Anyway, I’m in college. That girlfriend goes to another school and I’m pretty sure she cheats on me, but also, I’m not even really a person, so it’s not like I’m holding up my end of the relationship. One time we climb a fence to explore a construction site, then when we leave, she tears her jeans and punches me in the head. There might be other times she hit me. I don’t remember. We only see each other on weekends, so I stay up till sunrise pretty much every day of the week, half-assing classes (is there a clearer image representing “privileged and unaware” than going to college, half-assing it, and graduating with a C average), reading trans people’s blogs, obsessing over indefensible trans erotica, and generally doing everything I can to figure out that I’m trans—without any real awareness that that’s what I’m doing.
1999 is not 2019. There is not a lot of good information.
2001. We break up. Soon after, I admit to myself that I’m trans. It’s less like a bolt from the sky and more like a calmness slipping in underneath my anxiety, pieces fitting together: ohhh, I’m probably the kind of person who needs to transition to be a person.
2001-2004. A new relationship comes with endorphins, but trying to figure out how to transition does not, so I stumble into a new three year relationship as a fucking person-shaped hole. I think this is around when I start reading MRR. Theoretically I’ve been aligning myself politically with punk stuff since I was a teenager, but in practice I’m really just a shitty indie rock asshole. Like, in my heart, I’m a mess of anxiety and shame around my re-closeted gender stuff, but in Marxist materialist terms—where the rubber hits the road—I’m literally not doing anything punk. Ever. I spend all my free time in the apartment making abrasive electronic music on pirated programs that take like nine CD-Rs to install. Because it sucks to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t do anything except dissociate and make abrasive electronic music, my girlfriend breaks up with me and moves out. Soon I start going to trans support groups at the Gay Center.
2004-2007. I bounce around rooms and apartments in New York, working at the Strand, which does not pay enough to live in New York. Evan Kennedy, who will go on to be a notable poet, invites me to be in a band he’s starting, I think because he has a crush on me. I play bass and I also play referee between him and the other main songwriter, a straight guy. They basically hate each other. How’s that for a dumb metaphor for where I was at in my life.
I guess one punk thing I did at this time was, every time we’re working on a song, I say “I think we should play it faster.” Except one time I say, “What if we play it super slow?”
We play shows then eventually that band breaks up. Soon I join another band, an incompetent goth/scene band that does an AFI cover. I come out to the rest of the band—and to everybody else in my life—and then use that band as an excuse to wear thrift store prom dresses onstage. For a while I wear a lot of fake blood on my face when we play, too, although eventually I think through the difference between being a dude onstage with fake blood on his face and being a woman onstage with fake blood on her face and quit it.
2006. I meet the partner I’ll be with for thirteen years (and counting!) at Camp Trans while I’m on mushrooms. She invites me back to her tent “to play dress up.”
2007-2010. She and I move to Oakland. I put an ad on craigslist and start a band with Sonya and Alicia, stoners who have been a couple since forever. Sonya is an incredible drummer, Alicia is a terrible bassist. I sing. I’m a terrible singer but I have pink hair and it’s an all woman band. I also write the first few drafts of a novel. I continue to align myself with punk stuff but even though I’m in the bay I don’t really get involved with MRR except for, like, hanging out with Emma and Francesca a few times. I work really hard at building community among trans women. Practically speaking, though, I am still full of shit and don’t know anything.
2011. We move to Portland, Maine. I have a couple shitty experiences with trans guys and realize that I don’t just automatically trust the queer community. I frame it as a breakup: I know I’ll see the community around at shows and stuff, but I just don’t trust it the way I did when we first got together. An important thing: I realize that I’d just sort of expected queer communities to be waiting for me, automatically and unproblematically, when I came out, but why the fuck did I feel entitled to being supported and protected by a community that I had no hand in creating? Brutal but liberating. The moment when you realize that you’re going to need to roll up your sleeves and do this shit yourself—whatever this shit is—is the generally the moment you become accountable in a concrete way, and also the moment you become free to live your life and do your shit. That’s what this punk shit is. Until then, I’d sort of been waiting until somehow I became a rock star and never had to work again; suddenly I realized all the rest of the things were work, so I might as well learn to appreciate that work.
I was in my fucking thirties. Trauma arrests development and not being able to be trans, when you’re trans, is fucking trauma. This is when I start to move through it and become an adult.
Also, at a going away party for a friend, Emily, Lee and I decide to start Correspondences. I’ve been playing guitar and I’m stoked to get back to bass; Emily is great at cello, like literally studied it in school; Lee has been stoked to play drums, and has a kit, but doesn’t have a lot of experience. No prob: let’s play doom metal so she can play it super slow. It’s the best band I’ve ever been in and also the most fun. We go on tour. I bring my dog. Playing basements, touring with friends, meeting people doing this stuff in their own houses—photographers, artists, musicians, queer and trans people, stoners, weirdos—this is when I finally stop effectively being an indie rock piece of shit and actually start to understand what this punk shit really is. It’s work. Like a lot of things, until you’re there, you just don’t know what it’s like. This is what I figured out: punk is not a thing you align yourself with or believe in, it’s a thing you do.
Or don’t.
Hey you: start a band.
I also start a column for MRR. You can basically watch me become a person over the course of that column’s six years.
2013. That novel I wrote finally comes out. People like it. It’s humbling. I tour on it for a year. It opens a bunch of doors. I start on a second novel. It’s not done yet but I’m a bunch of drafts deep. Among other things, it’s about the inarguable fact that Kurt Cobain was trans.
2015. I see the Jem and the Holograms live action reboot movie in the theater on the only weekend it is actually in theaters. I see it with somebody I’d been dating for four years (who I’m still dating in 2019) and a couple trans friends in Olympia. Every film critic is wrong. It’s incredible.
2018. We have a kid. I am not on mushrooms. I stop being able to even get a monthly column together.
2019. MRR is ending? Weak.
ENDNOTE
1. The Thou/Ragana split on An/Out was AOTY 2018.