Authorial personas are for cowards—for Daniel Levis Keltner, at least. I know because I used to be him.
In 2018, the boy published a “YA novel for adults” and “literary mystery” about a group of misfit kids who become inseparable friends while investigating the murder of a girl they love and whose body was found in two pieces in the woods outside of town. The closer the book’s publication date crept, the more I despised Daniel. When an advanced review copy reader rated Goodnight two stars on Goodreads, their only comment “A 14-year old boy learns about the friend-zone for 300 pages,” I laughed until I cried. Because of his name, pronouns, and fuzz-goateed smirk on the inside cover, the book was inconceivable as satire—each character circling the inescapable failure of their individual and collective attempts to do better while in bounds of white cis-hetero patriarchy. The harshest reviews seemed to critique a person that wasn’t me—or was it? The question unraveled the author the way he’d hoped the novel’s flawed as beloved characters would unravel.
Coming out as trans in 2021 buried the book. I moved to St. Louis and bonded with a new, all queer friend group with whom I shared my “little stories” but never mentioned the novel. Goodnight became part of the body of evidence of Daniel/Levis that I methodically deleted from his life, assisted by medical intervention and a name change, including 30 years of photos, our coziest men’s cardigan, his father’s strong hands. Nothing short of a separation, like an ex boyfriend, I needed to not see or hear from him, the person I’d allowed the world to carve me into. After several gender-affirming surgeries and years of counseling, community support, and everyday lessons that helped me to learn and unlearn gender, as well as a non-aggression pact with my bio family—I’m here, finally, unafraid to admit that he and I shared a vessel, are blood-relatives, if not the same person.
A storyteller of trans, polyamorous, and whore praxis, my writing from & into the body is now inseparable from daily life. In the last few years, I’ve written and published two dozen stories that sweat over such pressing questions as “What does a trachea weigh, testicles, a few millimeters of bone?” and “What is a girl who likes dogs?” With each passing HRT anniversary, Why trans? yawns beside a more interesting fabulation: How trans?
When friends found Goodnight in my hands over the holidays and I could admit the book is kin, they were shocked and curious, asking why reread a story I should know well. “Self transvestigation,” I answered sarcastically, but in reading to understand my gender journey, I refused to dissect what’s “female” or “male” in the text of me. Like online conspiracy theorists, using racist sex determination methods to “tranvestigate” celebrities as transgender and to expose an international cabal of demonic inverts seeking world domination, I would commit violence by submitting my writing to a gender exam—and much already has been articulated toward a trans poetics, even if by association. So, why turn back? Yes, I notice what’s changed, but I want to witness how. Guided by trans thinkers and creatives like micha cárdenas and Cameron Awkward Rich, I’m not afraid anymore that the boy might reclaim me, and I’m heartened that revision is a trans practice, initiated by reflection and led by desire toward abolition.
Today, I dare ask: How has my writing changed with transition? If new points of view reorient neurons, and brain shape is behavior, personality, and personhood, then my gender journey might’ve retread new paths to storytelling. How did they/she/Crystal come into being? This essay opens the case. Do you dare walk with me, down into the woods of Daniel’s grim debut, into the desert sun of their debut trans short story, out through shameless dates recollected like memoir in drag, asking whodunit, searching for the body of a girl?
Goodnight :: From a Great Distance
Four years before I would start hormones, Levis Keltner wrote the novel Goodnight. While the book closely follows friendless geek Doug Horolez, the story has no singular protagonist. Inspired by 80s teen friend-group movies and the novels of Virginia Woolf, whose points of view roam between characters in scene, the author wanted to foreground the inter- and intrapersonal, the dream cloud of stakes and (mis)perceptions that all players’ personal and collaborative success would be watered by or drowned.
At the time, to adopt multiple points of view also seemed the result of being unable to strongly identify with any lone character. All were facets of his personality: Doug, the self-deprecating overthinker out of place among boys and girls; E, the bookish kid that must claim her emotional intelligence and slough internalized misogyny to love herself; Greg, my shameless hustle to survive; Josue, the artist most understood through his work; John, the organizer whose aspirations consume others; and Alex, my latent queerness and geekery for Sherlock Holmes.
Rereading the novel today, I find my manner, humor, and self-conviction most mirrored in Tiffany—party girl, former cheerleader, and best friend of the murdered Erika Summerson. The high-femme isn’t adored by the town, but either loathed or fetishized or both. She’s underestimated by peers and parents, maybe by readers too. E perceives her as “[…] the kind of woman [she] worked hard not to be—a person without a complex and mature inner life who cared solely about her looks and the attention of boys.” Tiffany’s character was inspired by young women in my junior and high schools labeled sluts, outcast as diseased and/or untrustworthy for being sexually-active or perceived as such because their bodies were judged overdeveloped and/or because they dressed and/or behaved boldly. Gender policing and whorephobia didn’t stop me from befriending and dating sluts. More than the unapologetic posture toward sexuality, I admired their bravery to be whatever they needed to be even if that meant ostracization from the world of Decency as objects of disgust.
100 pages deep, we first experience Tiffany’s point of view after Doug Horolez anxiously approaches her. They share a pair of yard gloves while shoveling for clues to identify Erika’s killer, when he thinks, “Sharing her sweat, something so intimate, allowed Doug to try on a new fantasy: being one day worthy enough to hold such a girl’s hand.” The scene captures Doug’s boyish creepiness and primary conflict. His admiration of women from a distance enshrines them as objects to relieve his loneliness, as well as foregrounds his own needs and desires over E’s and Tiffany’s. Doug describes his desire for intimacy in terms of worthiness so consistently that sex seems to motivate his actions less than belonging. As he observes, “[…] because of his manner and dress, he was nothing and Tiffany was everything that others wanted or wanted to be.” I consider lines like these potential evidence of trans longing—but because Doug seeks self-confidence through peer acceptance, he can never be Tiffany. The boy is too chickenshit.
The most fearless voice throughout the book, by contrast, Tiffany Dennys is introduced while reflecting on the last time she’d partied with Erika in Bachelor’s Grove:
Maybe it was not knowing what was behind the trees and being almost lost in the middle of nowhere. Tiffany actually kinda liked it. In the middle of nowhere … The last night she’d spent in the woods, she’d repeated the saying, chanted it to feel more lost. […] Better to be gone a long time, maybe forever, and in some new place, outside of time even, to be whatever she was.
While Doug’s character often reads as satire of the failure to understand oneself and others, Tiffany dares to learn experientially. Despite her world’s resistance, she becomes a person who refuses to be misunderstood. Curiosity greater than her fear, Tiffany coaxes other kids toward porousness, realness, and renewal. Her observations, especially about men as predators or as encounters for self-knowledge, make me laugh at how relatable now. “A mosquito landed just above her kneecap. She watched it stick her and suck all it wanted. She thought about tensing her thigh to make his head explode,” Tiffany says. I hear the patriarchy’s desire to eat us, our curiosity and volition. I feel the sting of the HRT needle and feel heard because a girl like me is speaking—but how did she exist before me?
To solve the temporal paradox, I turn to novelist and expert bad girl Elle Nash, who grew up as Tiffany and I might’ve. Though women on different timelines, of different contexts, we share similar arcs against misogyny toward self creation, maybe love. In her essay “The American Bimbo as A Site of Spiritual Struggle,” Nash chronicles sense-making through body modification—disordered eating, beautification—to relieve dissociation from her body and to resolve the crisis of being an intelligent woman who desires to move beyond social and existential constraints by exercising control.
Walking the line between autonomy and self-actualization sucks; there’s no better way to say it. In getting implants I wanted to take a step away from my desire to shrink—to actually, once and for all, accept my body as a feminine thing. Femininity appears to be a place I inhabit and keep coming back to somehow, even if I don’t always feel connected to it. I didn’t get breasts because I wanted people to comment on them, and I would dare say I did not even get them for attention, even if some attention can at times be uplifting. Also, though, I am attracted to women and the female form, and maybe there is something to me becoming more like what I am attracted to—which is also a way of saying I am coming to a place of loving myself by using the tools that money and plastics can bring me.
Nash’s understanding of desire unscrambles the mess of cis chicken or trans egg. Unafraid to admit that she wasn’t complete-at-birth, a pristine thing, and has been and can take many forms, morphing toward harmony between the interior and exterior—Nash teaches that being is a matter of imaginative capacity and action. The kind of person I wanted to embody was one voice among many within me, even if she was a woman, simply latent until I was brave enough to listen to her—the femme, the whore, the coolest kid in school—and dared to like myself, to know pride, despite the consequences. So, when Levis describes the girl “[…] had lost everybody that she would call a friend […] due to being ‘too confident in who she was, or too real,’ or at least too sassy for anyone to handle but Erika, who’d introduced herself by saying that Tiffany was the ‘baddest bitch she’d ever met’ […],” that wasn’t himself or even Crystal—couldn’t be, not until trans people populated my world and gifted me the chance to ask “… or could I be?”
Myth Fest :: Trans Speculation
In 2021, Lev K. published a short story called “Myth Fest,” written from the point of view of a trans girl, ~6 months before I started hormones. They were nonbinary, hadn’t voiced any desire to medically transition, and wouldn’t have dared to call themself a woman. Having lived 30 years as a man, what did they know about womanhood? “Myth Fest” is the story of Page, reunited with her younger sister, a year after their anti-trans mother has kicked Page out of the house for being trans. Helping her sister, Barb, move out to Austin, Texas, they pitstop in Marfa for a music festival.
“Gassing up the jeep,” Page says at the start of the trip, “I watch storm clouds crash over the mountains and cruise the desert. All sunglasses, I’m Mom’s greatest action movie heroine. I recall our final conversation, how inevitable her anti-trans fireball, Judgement Day.”
To me, the story reads as speculative (non)fiction—a premonition of the bodily discomfort and bio family fallout that would wreck the coming years. From navigating a public pool in a one-piece to squaring the contradiction of desperately needing to be a gender that isn’t a monolith and might just be a social construct—all of Page’s fictional trials fell to me. The greatest difference between the character and me is that my younger sibling is a brother who sided with Mom instead—so at the end of the story, when Page dances alone at the festival in an attempt to forget all the ways the world deems her a failure, can you deduce who she’s holding and why I cried typing those lines?
The festival is muddy. Splats harden on my legs, an armor I didn’t know I needed. Barb is in search of Midlife Crisis. Me worry? I’m fest girl. I twirl.
“Excuse you,” says a woman with an identical brimmed hat. Her stare says I’m the copy, as if anyone isn’t.
I consider the politics of mud wrestling her.
“Page!” Barb cries. Barb is crying. In the desert sage beside the portable toilets, she cradles her knees and rocks, high as Mother Moon.
I hold her. I tell her what she needs to hear. I love you. I have you. We’re not giving up.
Trans desire—the desire to dance and gab and fuck however feels good—is a party I arrive late to for good reason. Trans women strut the Western world as pathologized subjects of its medical, moral, and carceral institutions, and like most children of the 80s, TV framed the first stories that I heard about trans life. Talk shows like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones, as well as hit box office movies like Silence of the Lambs, Ace Ventura, and The Crying Game characterized transgender women as disordered—a disease of the imagination potent enough to split a person from their clearly assigned-by-god body—a delusion so potent that deviants would choose their lifestyle over the normative gendered expectations of their loved ones—freaks without intelligible and productive roles in daily life—prostitutes, deceivers, or worse, deranged products of conservative misogyny or liberal media who would stop at nothing to wear a woman’s skin.
If you’re trans femme, likely you’re familiar with these stories, carry them still. For Page and me, the trauma of gender policing manifested as internalized transphobia that, for so many years, made me “[…] play Things Mom Would Say. I don’t make a good mother. I never will.”
Is it any wonder that trans shame from the armchair of psychoanalysis excites me polymorphously? As Mathew Lovett frames in “Lacanian Anxieties: Trans Surgeries, Countertransference, and The Fantasy of the Whole,” trans-ing was foundationally diagnosed as disordered in its futility. These analysts framed gender nonconformity as delusional attempts toward unburdening the intrinsic lack that they believe manhood or womanhood instills. From their vantage, gender deviants appropriate their formal, binary opposite in a fool’s errand to achieve happiness as wholeness (nevermind the same “pursuit of wholeness” fallacy normalized by the wellness industry, pharmaceutical companies, religions, political parties, etc.). Unable to consider their own culturally coerced or intergenerationally impacted gender norms as anything but natural, these “mental health experts” misperceive and misportray the drive to trans as exceptional, non-normative in intention rather than in approach. Simply, psychoanalysis, and so Western culture at-large, has missed that “[…] transition involves the attempt to restructure one’s flesh so that it accords with the way one can desire, whatever form that might take.” Trans desires might be unfulfillable voids, shaped by gender-based trauma like anyone else’s, and likewise, our desires deserve as much autonomy in their pursuit.
Transphobes judge our approach to gender unnatural, and yet—please, pause to allow the concept “flesh” to include any fabric that the self manipulates to define & hold space—our clothes, hair, and makeup; the stories we tell (about) ourselves; our search histories and social media histories; and—and obviously trans individuals continue to live and love and lack like anybody, autonomous as anyone’s culture and means permit … only in gender unassigned by flesh but that which accords in spirit. For me, polyamory serves as a gracious parallel. In a similarly queer approach to relationships, I desire to know and have and be more, and without demanding that a partner conform to a shape they can’t, I honor that person’s journey and the relationship by investigating desires with others and/or by wanting my partners to do the same. Our fulfillment, maybe of lack itself, might prove futile along the way, a flaw of neither queer or trans desire, but of human design. Yet, if the pursuit of happiness is truly fundamental to our humanity, to honor our humanity is love.
Freedom to “fuck around and find out,” the quest(ioning) of our autonomy, might substantiate identify formation, but if we can never playact within new realities until across the thresholds of our dreams, then speculation is requisite. The fantasy recorded in “Myth Fest” bubbles on today as I schedule bottom surgery after 3 years on a waitlist. My choice to be a person with genitalia surgically altered to resemble my girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s is motivated by how I want to be encountered and regarded by myself and others with all its psychosocial weight. Even how I hope to experience sex is less a matter of arousal and more about the fulfillment of a fantasy of personhood, the coming true of a wish for a body that I imagine will allow me to be more psychosomatically present.
Do you believe my desire confirms or foils the antiquated concept of autogynephilia, defined as “a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as female”? Unlike Daniel, my pretransition self, the boy whose arousal meant consuming others as objects of desire, I crave surrender to another’s touch in ways that I and others can’t now except while under spells of trans magic. Not gratification so much as immanence, I want to be the harmony and the instrument of my body, to sing.
If I were to reverse speculate from my bias, how queer-trans subjects have been pathologized, I could could tell a story of discord and characterize cis-hetero sexuality as the fetishization of observable difference, motivated by disgust of one’s own body &/or being, a defense mechanism complicating the route to self-acceptance by thrusting one’s locus of desire beyond the psychosocially defined bounds of the self, to the safe distance of other, who we police to remain unalike and upon whom fulfillment is demanded, homophobia or transphobia manifestations of this stigma against in-group desire—a phobia turned a dominant sexual expression, turned a physics of detachment, this longing for refuge from a self-imposed, self-reflective hell, making a fantasy of love in the shape of wholeness, all projected into the world as normal, natural behavior, which, I might further speculate, engenders binary thinking, maybe human conflict itself?
No. Let’s drop the brittle certainty of knowing for the perpetual grasp of learning-by-doing, and in practice of abolition, refuse ethics that render anybody disposable.
Imagine: Gender diversity valued within a population, relationships regarded as catalysts through contact, sexual norms at-large regarded as an iterative process, each participant vital, a possibility for another somebody, cultures of what could be, thriving. I can’t conceive of curious minds revising in coalition without a commitment to ending the lie of purity without which white supremacy and patriarchy could not be shouted down. Oppression relies on the fiction that someone else’s existence is the obstacle to utopia. Rejecting illusions of an uncontaminated self grants authorship to revise divisive plotlines into stories that we can live with, maybe feel proud of. As the brilliant analysts Avgi Saketopoulou and Ann Pellegrini characterize our psychosocial situationship in Gender Without Identity, caught between trauma and retelling:
If we view gender as a matter of self-theorizing and not some true “core,” it becomes possible to imagine that trauma can inflect gender experience without implying that this amounts to a distortion of an authentic self […] the duress of intergenerational transmission of trauma is not in and of itself sufficient to proclaim pathology: traumatic incursion is always at work in all gender-becoming. As long as the subject is able to modify what was handed down to them intergenerationally, and to forge out of those inheritances their own gender translations, gender is not pathology.
A field of help and harm and how we uniquely react, gender is a playground. As trans, I play non-normatively only by exercising the human capacity of “psychic autonomy.” Trans existence proves the possibility of revision through our decolonial cut, shift, and stitch of the rules. Trans existence also demonstrates the value of gender trouble, to run wild from DSM diagnoses or fixed points on The Gender Unicorn test to yet unfathomable conceptions of being, desirous swirls, the spectrum itself catching light, and beyond again. Part of what makes gender fuckery terrifying is the onus of responsibility it bestows. If we can shape our own realities, we shape others’ Can we be generous enough to ask “What do you want to be when you grow up” and follow through on the promise of support and grace in the work to find out?
“Myth Fest” proves that speculative (non)fiction as a tool of desire got me into gender trouble—and reveals its insufficiency, based on my biases and limited experience. While Page and her sister casually dismiss the pathologies of cisheteropatriarchy, can “[…] agree our bodies owe no man explanation,” the doubt to undo me was written into my psyche too deep to ignore. The plot to dehumanize trans people by demanding us to justify our existence had been internalized and would send me digging for answers, as if some confident babe worthy of love and belonging would be waiting and not a bottomless grave.
Gray Rainbow :: Immaterial Girl
Yet another punchline to the running joke of my life: I haven’t always been thrilled about being trans. To live as Marquis Bey offers, as “‘a genre rather than a gender’ […] a particular subjectivity of disordering and deforming Order and Form, a modality of worldly inhabitation rather than an innate and biologized/sexualized characteristic of an already known and formed being,” exquisitely characterizes the power and threat of trans people existing in public life. How beautiful—an imagination that defies gender constraints so profoundly that resistance and movement defines their being-in-the-world—and more, potentially endemic to the organism, a way of being that troubles all lived practice, like the blurry boundaries of genre in my creative work, for example, of profession in my paid labor, or of labels in my interpersonal relationships.
Yet, as vital and rad as any writer can frame a creature who bleeds “inside, across, / beyond” the boundaries of gender, the everyday reality of haunting a country called the United States in the year 2023—a conventionally rigid and policed nightmare despite the nationalistic rhetoric of freedom—for me, was/is the persistent feeling of being an “AMAB daydream,” a man in drag or the crude strokes of a woman forever.
In 2023, Crystal Odelle published “Gray Rainbow,” a (non)fiction story about a hookup turned dinner date, characterizing my return to online dating real live men for the first time as a surreal woman. When en-genre-ing my work during this period, I started to leave the “non” in porous parenthesis to stress the creative part of creative nonfiction—in acknowledgement of the incomplete dialogue, warped time, vanished or emblazoned events and details, or a mood “[…] different from the way I felt when it all was happening”—true as any memory.
I want to say, “True as any self.” Like, am I alone in looking inward for a consistent, coherent person and finding only an amalgam of experiences, “scattershot but enough that any line might be threaded”? If we’re strings of memory, tales composed from the star-strewn field of experience, make-believed into personhood amazingly as the Big Bang, are we true stories or works of fiction?
Welcome to the existential uncertainty of gender transition.
While granting me access to exciting possibilities of comport and sociality, working for & writing into personhood broke my suspension of disbelief in a cohesive sense of self. An adult who ran the gauntlet of masculinity wobbles on the precipice of girlhood—physically, socially—scrambling for moments past, if not to explain how she got here, then to tether her to a fully-realized woman ahead—except if “woman” isn’t biological destiny, psychologically innate, or a monolith of appearance or performance, where does the impossible-to-ignore desire originate? Why do I fail to meet the mark in others’ eyes, and what am I risking my life to become?
Self-doubt did not help my tenuousness, how: “To be seen in public with this person who believes she’s a woman—I feel ashamed for him, like his mother, or mine.” As described in “Gray Rainbow,” being a high femme in heels, short skirt, and cheeks and chest a-glitter, doesn’t help: “Few women doll like I do, which draws attention but conjures the intended mirage—me. I want to scream. If the game is realness, trying is failure.” In stories like these, I’m newly experiencing the pressure cooker of contradictory expectations imposed by society on women—be liberated but not a whore, be yourself but not extra, be attractive but don’t draw attention, shine but don’t take up space. Trans-ness intensifies the mixed-up messaging. As Jules Gill-Peterson reminds us in A Short History of Trans Misogyny, “Many of the key achievements of liberal feminism, particularly in the West, have relied heavily on minimizing, if not rejecting or trying to transcend, femininity.” Yet unfair to my political and personal allegiances to women against patriarchy, the TERF-y voices in my head demand justification for what it means to be a bio male whose authentic womanness manifests as a heterosexual dude’s fantasy, an offensive caricature, a garishly painted doll.
Underweight, increasingly suicidal, even as I lost faith in epiphany, I wrote daily as if for a cliche turn of my story away from tragedy. Emboldened by the work of memoirist Edgar Gomez, writing from the wound for flashes of clarity within states of pain and confusion—each documented scene jabs, a divine comedy I must laugh through for relief.
“I could eat,” he says. “You?”
I’m okay if he eats me. I’m starving for relief from dysphoria, or I hate my body. I believe the difference matters. What does a trachea weigh, testicles, a few millimeters of bone?
Jake asks about my other partners. Might he run into us at Pride? “My wife is bisexual, and my kid recently came out. She’s trans.”
“Congrats.” What else to say—him fucking trans women will be great for his daughter’s self-esteem?
Dysphoria, disordered eating, femme phobia—the story’s voice and experiences might as well be Page’s from “Myth Fest.” Only their endings diverge. “Gray Rainbow” can’t offer catharsis. The circle of hell the narrator walks is mine.
Holiest :: O Whorey Night
One morning Aisha Sabatini Sloan asks us, blessed students of her summer writing workshop, what it means to write into and/or against the archive. We read and discuss archival grief, colonization’s erasure of oral histories, and the redaction of queer and trans life from public record. Needing queer practices to have existed and therefore queer people—some proof, however flimsy, that aberrance is normal, woven into the fabric of humanity—I exhaust the workshop syllabus and read on, into the work of queer and trans scholars and artists for kinship and lineage, to belong someplace sometime.
A plot point away from tragedy, I find them, the friends and heroes cited throughout this essay.
Yet my attempts to write anything so inspired from history fail. Barely an authority of myself, my imagination casts a weak shadow across contexts that aren’t hers, let alone to project a voice. So, I perform that failure fantastically, gather the mess of me—Instagram rants about my boobs, DMs with femmes who saved my life, psilocybin induced iPhone notes, text message rejections from Mom, psychological evaluation letters from counselors and doctors—evidence of a singular trans existence, compiled into a document that became a story that would become my first chapbook, Trans Studies.
Maybe I too was a compilation, many stories whose“remembering through (non)fiction revises the text of myself(s).” Maybe my journey toward gender and self-love was an answer to the question, “Which tools do I enjoy playing with most to realize my desires?”
In her brilliant analysis of the puta—“the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess”—scholar Juana María Rodríguez compares porn star Vanessa Del Rio’s multimedia-autobiography work to contemporary social media, how, “[…] we understand these biographical fabrications as cultural products mediated and designed to construct a narrative out of the ‘real,’ to give experience the shape of meaning.” Throughout recorded interviews, Del Rio insists on her representation’s realness, the inseparability of the star’s & person’s escapades & desires, revealing who many of us are too afraid to be, a person who is how she lives. Claiming agency over self expression collapses the division that most people assume between art and artist, fantasy and reality.
This movement, an artistic praxis of self realization, continued to manifest writing projects that stitched my gap between one day and today, interior and exterior, him/them/her and me. Storytelling from first-personhood in present-tense, today I am no longer a writer of imagined lives and fabricated epiphanies, once fictionally divided into multiple point-of-views, my existence only imaginable in speculative futures or pages torn from a tear-warped diary. Today’s isn’t a better approach to being. Each is a means to persist, telling in their telling, all together a cycle I might ride again.
“Am I queer?” Mike says.
His eyes plead for comfort they won’t find in my calculations of a variable body & being depending upon various bodies & beings. “Does it feel queer to admit you like something you shouldn’t?” I ask.
Instead, Mike wonders if he’s too old to restart his life. I wonder if the deficit of men compared to women who seek counselors would match if professional help from sex workers counted. Mike isn’t like them, I tell myself. He journals 2 hours a night. He wants to find out. I’m afraid he will.
“It’s normal to be attracted to trans women,” I propose with the addition of a C to the queer alphabet for Chasers, if that’s what it takes for him to claim pride.
“Which clique were you in in high school—nerds or popular kids?” Mike drifts into small talk. His hand drags across my stomach, up my cock, strokes aimlessly. Unlike women and trans folks who query how-to, cis men touch me like themselves. Most can fiddle for hours, if allowed. It feels unfair to say infatuation with my genitals slips comprehension. We both listen to my hips. They buck into his touch, promise us, It’s OK, babe.
Only from this point of view can I turn back to the pages of Goodnight, listen for her in the schoolyard, and find her voice deep in the trees. Can you call the plot twist? Tiffany is still here, telling her lived experience, more real than the boy author on the other side of eight years who speculated her existence.
Our story is simple: I wanted to be proud of myself—so here I am—and I want to be. Unschooled by Gloria Anzaldúa that, “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads,” the embers of a dream caught fire that desire carried outof me—and because “[…] humans are dreams that believe in themselves, like a lot,” being trans is as radical as it is boring. As fabricated as I am real, I’m like anybody. As my counselor Kathryn observes in Trans Studies, “or maybe there is some ‘essential womanhood’ […] but undoing might not be the path to it.” Only now can I accept that womanhood is whatever I & we make by doing.
Even if I’m a line of interrogation that continues “[…] to crest and curl back in on itself, a question without answer that roared (from what point?) for a good while (to what end?),” my self-possession seems to good-trouble others’ certainties about gender & sexuality, about power and pleasure and plentitude, about the tipping point of risk.
A Dom and sub walk into an Irish pub in downtown Fairfax. In starched dress shirt and slacks, my date appears retired and respectable. On his arm, I’m as you imagine. The server spills a pint on our curry fries, visibly sweats over the 20-year age gap that he must smile at or solving the trick question if I’m trans, escort, or vampire. When served no eggplant on my eggplant sandwich, we laugh at how homophobic the kid is or the cheeky message from god: Today we’ve swallowed enough. Over dinner, we highlight reel the 3-hour power reversal—how Master yielded, yearned, a good boy, my slut. I ask and learn: The first trans girl he ever dated is his car mechanic, now friends for a decade. “WHO CHASED WHO?” we pitch the bumper sticker, our differences less and less interesting than the ways our needs are symbiotic until same. Leaving the pub, we pass a young guy video chatting a girlfriend, who says, “Hold up—you gotta see this.” I don’t turn to the camera he points to capture us. I know. Who they see in the image of the man and me holding hands is only their reflection.
Trans-ing continues to nurture possibilities, each encounter between text & life an opportunity to play with and learn from genre & gender. This essay, for example, born of notes from rereading my first novel, expanded into a slideshow after an invite to speak with K. Allison Hammer’s trans studies course, and grew curves here. Public readings encourage me to consider specific audiences in drafting and/or refashioning writing projects, to ask what’s the most impactful delivery of the work, and so to rethink readings as performance. At Poetry & Rage, a St. Louis based poetry reading series centering art & community as resistance, I paused between anecdotes about sex and sex work and asked audience members to sharpie words on my nude body, a kink act of humiliation that participants repurposed to share their insecurities, encouragements, and desires. The book launch event for Trans Studies, which most writers would celebrate with a reading and Q&A, became a 90s-style daytime talk show hosted by a dear friend who fielded audience questions about my “shocking memoir” alongside my counselor, a nice man who likes trans girls, and a mystery guest, all people characterized in the book. Why? To bare, be vulnerable—because Everything tells me humans are most beautiful when we can risk to love each other. The fruit of my desire might be only a handful of good stories, yet I can’t let you forget what you’re holding is my life.
Trans-ing seems only natural, a manifestation of the interrogation of form & content when surrendered wholly to the practice. To return in faith to the text of the body with wonder is church. Over the many weeks drafting this essay, I began service at the Metropolitan Community Church of Greater St. Louis. Crystal Odelle: woman of trans experience, sex worker, churchgoer? A lifelong unbeliever, to weep and clap alongside the faithful seems as nonsensical as predictable. When I say yes to returning for another Sunday, and another, my partners grin, wish me well, accustomed to loving whoever molts out of me every few years, even as I struggle to love myselves. Like, I just signed up to receive daily Advent devotionals—send help?
Attendance to something like god is teaching me many things, not the least of which is to shed my fear of performance, a word that rang in my ears synonymous to falseness or implying acting, positioned at a distance from being. During service, I’m sustained by the words of affirmation, the embracing strangers as friends, the singing, dancing, and tears in commitment to love and justice, to good trouble—the performance of a world I long for. What we do, making god together, might end at the church doors—but if all that I am is performance, and the doing is so good that I can’t stop, then doing is being. In finding that beings (re)make reality, I’m (re)finding myself. Maybe that’s where I exist, am, most fully alive, a world of big trans love. Maybe you are, too?
Trans Studies :: Crystal Crosses
Gracelessly by grace, through storytelling over the last 10 years, I found my beloved subject—a vibrant and irreverent queer woman, a body of work revised with love and performed as spectacle. A paradox in keeping with the magic of trans existence, intentional subjecthood hasn’t closed but opened possibilities of form & content. Today, people mistake me for a novelist and a poet, an educator and a lesbian, and countless other assumptions about my relational orientations. What’s clear: I no longer have a writing life. I have a life to write.
Photos of the boy—scruffy but for his $60 salon fade, in a muscle T and baby’s first diamond earrings, or younger, wedding suit and smile stiff and gray as driftwood—still haunt my timeline. For how many years will I swipe away as if his stony gaze has the power to dispel me? Yet, to wander back into the woods of the novel, lost, and to hear Tiffany laugh, teaching a boy to dance a way out, has taught me that it’s OK to be multi-versed. Movement is life, fundamental to being, and reflective practice will persist, “[…] alternately gazing into the void of space and at the pinpricks of light, back and forth, being with nothingness, until the purple-bellied clouds [lower] like a movie curtain over the view.”
While we’re inconstant, and the liberatory work of gender abolition means playing out of bounds, unruly behavior, the “more and more of experience,”—desire defines us, our will to move. Graciously, to a being who likes being around yet craves purpose, desire isn’t a formless nothing. While I may be too fluid for boxes of sex and gender, the creature is marked by and marks the world, leaves a trail of affirmations and caresses, of shared meals and crucial conversations, braves and maybe makes existence a bit more bearable, tells a few good stories of a life worth living.
I quit essay writing shortly after Goodnight, when a 37-page reflection on Kris Kraus’s use of story truth and direct address as feminist practice in I Love Dick became my most fruitful failure. A trans friend read the draft and posed one question: “Where are you in this essay?” It hurt to listen and revise, to cut away all the intellectualization about others, to dig up words to describe my early gendered experiences and bare a latent queer, buried in a 3-page flash. Form continued to meet content—and my life collapsed how I’ve shared with you here. Storytelling my way back to what got me into gender trouble feels as iterative, the poetry of return, not unlike my childhood neighborhood in Goodnight changed forever by the simple act of growing up.
Unambiguously, my writing & being-in-the-world transed in-hand. Four more gender affirming surgeries ahead, a story collection and a chosen family to assemble—down the long road that I can see, what changes will occur that I can’t imagine yet? One day, might I even lose the woman who fought so hard to exist? The possibility gives me goosebumps, not anxious, but geeked. More than ever, my reality seems a construct inherited, a hallucination shared, a tool reappropriated by desire to invite more peace, joy, and love. In any form, I won’t exist forever—so I choose faith, to be permeable and curious, and from time to time, to pause and ask, “Who will I dream into the future?”
Author of Trans Studies and chapbooks editor at Newfound, Crystal Odelle (they/she) is a storyteller of trans / polyamorous / whore praxis, writing & revising into the desire for something like a life. Their stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Split Lip Magazine, Apogee, manywor(l)ds, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. Crystal was a Lambda Literary fellow and Tin House Scholar, nominated for Best of the Net, and anthologized in We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction. She writes RPGs at Feverdream Games and serves as academic and administrative coordinator for the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at WashU. Find her on Instagram @Crystal_Ography. https://crystalodelle.com/