Reversals

—for June, whom I’ve known for two lifetimes

In the last scene of I Saw the TV Glow, Owen, the protagonist, takes a box cutter to his chest. He spreads his incision, and we see the bright snow of the television lodged within him. The glowing increases, washing out Owen and the men’s restroom he’s standing in.

I should rewind.

Directly before this, Owen screams for help during a child’s birthday at the fun center where he’s been working for the past two decades. And before that, his high school best friend, a transgirl named Maddy, after a decade of absence, attempted to convince him that he is Isabella, a fictional character within their favorite show, The Pink Opaque. He denies this and flees Maddy.

I should rewind.

*

The last track of Croatian Amor’s 2023 album, A Part of You in Everything, ends with a woman’s voice describing meeting a lost friend or lover after some event. Clipped and frantic with joy, she asks, “Oh my god, where have you been?” She describes their embrace, his freckles. She asks this person if she will find someone to love in the way that they were in love. He says to her, “When you find that love, I’m part of it.”

*

I’m in the theatre with Rowen, and our friend, Alexis. She started her transition about a year after I did. Our discussions hover around music, her uncertainties around every aspect of transitioning. We are two planets orbiting femininity’s star. During the previews, I prepare my estradiol injection. I jam the needle into my thigh and squeeze the hormone into my muscle. 

I have been thinking about my body’s weekly cycle. How predictable my needs have become due in part to the regularity of my hormone intake. When I apply the tiny band-aid, I watch it redden with the droplet of blood seeping out of me.

*

Court can be a very dry place. I wait in a small auditorium with half a dozen other people—I’m about to receive my official court order to change my name and sex. I’ve waited for this for a month. I pay the clerk $204.50—this is on top of the $98 to secure this court date. I expect the judge’s pronouncement to be a source of elation, and it is. 

But I leave the court no different than when I entered it. I had been using Rivka socially and professionally for over a year at this point. I still need to apply for a social security card, a new driver’s license, fill out a name change form for my bank, my landlord. Because I am from Missouri, I cannot change my birth certificate without documented evidence of sexual reassignment surgery, which to that state signals a finality to the person I was—son, uncle, brother.

*

A Part of You in Everything begins with “My Brother (is a Star).” The first few minutes are a low-tone swirling common in ambient house. The song’s pulsing surfaces for a brief moment before it fades into “Vigil,” the next track. Below the tracklisting on Bandcamp, the artist talks about how his younger brother died at birth, how his brother’s ghost lived among the stars.

*

In the weeks before I undergo facial feminization surgery, I have several nightmares. I am horribly disfigured in one. In another, my face is a perfect circle, pockmarked like the surface of the moon. In another, my face melts from my skull and congeals into thick globs on my chest. These dreams I can stomach. I wake up. I sigh when I look at my masculine face to put on makeup. I rush to work where I wear glasses that block my brow and cover most of my face.

The only nightmare that eats me is the one in which everything is mundane. I am in the grocery store or a department store. I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflective surface. I look like I looked when I pretended to be a boy. In the dream, I know I am someone else but I don’t know who. I stroll aisle after aisle until I awake. 

*

I Saw the TV Glow ends with the seemingly lucid Owen strolling through the fun center apologizing to various people off screen before the image collapses into a pinkish cloud. Moments before this scene, we see Owen wearing a pink prom dress and walking through the night with Maddy, who claims she is actually Tara, the other protagonist from The Pink Opaque. 

I spent a large portion of my medical transition lamenting the years I lost to presumed boyhood. While watching I Saw the TV Glow, I feel my laments reverse. I can imagine a life in which I never spoke to Seren about gender, never moved to a city full of trans people, a life in which Adamska, my exboyfriend, never asked me why I wasn’t on hormones and why I presented as a man.

This is the most harrowing moment in the film—to watch a girl remain within her masculine shell, to sacrifice euphoria to avoid the struggles inherent to transitioning. I sit in silence as this scene runs its course. I see myself in the months before I accepted myself as a woman—sad, safe, and separated.

*

Before we started dating, before I could recognize myself, Rowen, Adamska, and I went to a film showing at the SIFF theatre in Capital Hill. It was about a girl who hatches an enormous egg. Inside the egg is a horrible bird creature that slowly takes on her features. I sat between Rowen and Adamska. I felt the electric charge run through us, through me. I almost grazed Adamska’s hand with mine. In the dark, I saw them, our hands, how similar they were, how different. 

*

The first time I introduce myself as Rivka, I’m at a gallery opening. One of Rowen’s coworkers is in a small group show within a cramped space in Pioneer Square. We had been to this gallery several times since we moved to Seattle. I should rewind.

Rowen and Adamska had been using my name for a couple months. But no one else knew who I was. Rowen is not in earshot when I say, “You can call me Rivka.” Later, in the car, they ask me how it felt. It happened so quickly, I didn’t think about it. The two syllables came out of me like seconds out of a clock.

*

When I switched to injectable estrogen, it took months to get my doses right. In the first six weeks, I essentially had the hormonal shifts of six, week-long periods. In the throes of these rapid cycles, I kept making the joke that I was trying to catch up on all the periods I missed.

This is a metaphor for trans time. We’re constantly rewinding and fast-forwarding, trying to recreate and experience life events we missed while in hiding. We are in perpetual puberty. We are paused while we wait for insurance approvals, surgical dates, HRT to alter our bodies and minds. When people ask me how long I’ve been medically transitioning, I have to think. In some ways it feels like I have always been transitioning; in others, I feel new to each day.

*

It’s hard to detangle I Saw the TV Glow from its tight nest of allusions. The font used in the credits of The Pink Opaque is reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer—as is one of the pun-slinging heroines, Tara. The images of Owen pacing a fire and tossing in a substance that causes it to burn brighter is taken from Are You Afraid of the Dark? Actors from Buffy and Nickelodeon shows of the past appear in brief cameos. The soundtrack mixes originals and covers indiscriminately.

When Maddy takes Owen to a venue to tell him that they are the characters from The Pink Opaque, the backdrop is the pink room from David Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me. The musical performances underscore this—Julee Cruise is transposed onto Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane while Angelo Badalamenti’s terrifying guitar textures are taken up by King Woman’s performance of Psychic Wound.

The scene ends with Kris Esfandiari in close up screaming into a dark red emptiness.

*

As the date of my FFS nears, I think about my orchiectomy and, embarrassingly, about the first lines of TS Eliot’s Prufrock–”when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.” Whether by surgery, the negligence of the state, bigots who yearn for our lifeless bodies, or our own hands, trans people are always next to death.

More than our bodies, it is what compels chasers—this is what I believe. Who doesn’t want to touch someone who has sipped nectar (the word itself related to nekros, a corpse)? Who is more desirable than the one who knows the life after the life we are born into? 

*

After Owen flees Maddy, he monologues about how he never sees her again. Years pass, his monologue continues. We see him scooping popcorn into a large bag. He says he entertains Maddy’s ideas that they are Isabella and Tara, that he could be someone beautiful and powerful. In the dark, I clutch Alexis’ shoulder. I barely know this woman. We are sisters. We are crying.

*

Years before, I sat in my friend’s apartment with several mutual friends—most of whom have since started transitioning. When I leave, a transmasc person follows me. We sit in my apartment. My eggshell is uncrackable iron. He tells me he identifies as a gay man. I say I often feel like a lesbian.

“That’s because you’re a woman,” he says. 

In the years since, I have forgotten this man’s name, almost everything about him. But this assertion has stayed with me. It reverberates louder and louder and then silence—the silence of bass tone below human hearing, its vibrations taking residence within my ribcage.

*

In the center of A Part of You in Everything, the phrase “All angels meet again” repeats over a track’s aural soup. The voice it’s from is so layered with audio effects that it loses any semblance of humanity. It is a robot asserting a fact in the only way it knows how.

*

My childhood home had a concrete retaining wall. In elementary school, I would stand on it—its eight-foot height dizzying to my developing body. I imagined falling to my death. I played this scenario almost monthly through middle school. I would stick my foot out like I was going to take a step, picture my skull shattering like a ceramic mug, and pull back, always.

These were the first moments of my transition. By this time, I had learned the embarrassment of showing myself to my family. The picture of my sleeping body in an old dress, a hand-me-down from my sister. When flipping through this photo album, my parents would ask, “Why are you wearing that dress?”

Maybe the answer is obvious by now.

*

Despite the legality of my chosen name, I still receive official documents to my deadname. In the surgical waiting room, a nurse forces me to sign my B—-, “to cross all the boxes.” With social transitioning, the thin membrane between who one is and who one was is always permeable.

I think about how with FFS, my chin will be chiseled away, my brow shattered and reattached with titanium plates. When I’m long dead, people will know I’m trans, probably more readily than they do now.

*

Some people I know have always known they’re trans. I facilitate a discussion group for trans youth. Most of them are between the ages of 11 and 16. Our conversations bounce between trans-related topics to the horrors of high school. I feel whiplash—their moments of wisdom punctuated with self-centeredness. 

I don’t believe I knew I was trans for most of my life. I don’t feel like I lived the wrong life, in the wrong body. In my most natural moments at any age, being femme is nearly effortless—not the herculean task of acting masculine. Maybe I could have lived my life as a femmeboy. Maybe I couldn’t.

This is difficult to communicate to cis people. The differences between us—cis and trans—is that my life prior to transitioning was the one that should have been left on the cutting room floor as a potential, a moment within the midnight realm. 

*

After Maddy appears to Owen in a grocery store, after she takes him to the film’s pink room, she answers his pleading question—where has she been for a decade. She ends up in Tucson, Arizona, where she paid a person who works at the mall to bury her alive.

Tucson is a two-hour drive to Scottsdale, the location of a prominent vaginoplasty clinic. This clinic started in Oregon before the leading surgeon moved to Scottsdale around the same time I Saw The TV Glow takes place. In this scene, Maddy’s chin is speckled with the craters common with electrolysis. 

In the theatre, my face is covered with a mask. I have worn masks like this unceasingly since the onset of COVID in 2020. When masked, I am rarely misgendered. I often wonder what motivates me more: care for at-risk populations or the lowered bar for passing.

*

Days before my surgery, I went on a date with a transgirl who fucked my mouth and throat with zeal. Before that, we took a short drive to Alki Beach where we saw a rainbow end at the edge of Seattle. She sent me what her surgeon told her to do to heal from FFS. She told me sometimes she doesn’t feel like she has changed at all. Her voice modulated from wonder to sadness in a way that killed any remaining desire I had to be straight. 

*

The last time I saw Adamska was near my birthday. They took me to a psychic, who told me I belonged with them. I cry as I drive them to their job. Since starting HRT, all I do is cry. When I drop them off, they are furious. They tell me I don’t know how to be a friend. They tell me they are tired of inviting me out and being denied. They leave. I sit in my car. The sky is an endless grey smear. 

*

In the beginning of I Saw The TV Glow, the town’s high school—Void High School (VHS)—is converted to a polling station for an election. Owen’s mother takes him there despite his father, played by Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst, being at home. Alone, Owen wanders the darkened halls of VHS. 

It is a scene that echoes my childhood. My sister has always been athletic. My parents would drag me to her basketball and volleyball tournaments. They would watch her play, and I would wander the schools where the events took place.

In the film, this is when Owen encounters Maddy for the first time. I think back to those weekends. Who was I looking for at the ends of the long and dark hallways? What would have happened if I found another girl who could show me which of my parts had been scooped out and replaced?

*

Croatian Amor also talks about the birth of his son in the liner notes. Due to the slipperiness of pronouns, it is unclear who he dedicates A Part of You in Everything to—his ghost brother or newborn child. The album rocks between lullaby and elegy.

*

My first book of poems contains so many elegies. One of them is for a lover who died by suicide soon after our relationship collapsed. Many more of them are for children. Some of the children are the speaker’s, others are child-versions of the speakers, and others are for someone it doesn’t feel like we know at all. I know now all of them are for me, or for the person I was then. 

This person has died—when my beard would turn my face into a mausoleum, when I would look at myself in the mirror, when I put estrogen inside my muscles, when I fill out several government forms, when I correct my parents who deadname on the phone. 

I should rewind. This person is alive. She is alive because the potential of my life sans transitioning is dead. The fullness of my current self is predicated on this death. This what makes trans people beautiful. No matter what we do, how well we pass, there will always be a corpse prodding us forward.

*

The newest person at my job asks if I’ve seen I Saw the TV Glow yet. At this point, I must have been the only transgirl in Seattle who hadn’t. I ask him what he thought. He loved it. I text a group of trans people, asking if I should tell him he might be an egg.

He’s out sick for the rest of the week. When he returns, we talk awkwardly in a corridor. He says he really enjoyed the film’s aesthetic. Our sentences are clipped. The day before my surgery, I walk by his desk. His slender frame is shrouded by a hot pink polo. As I pass, I watch him in my periphery watch me.

*

A group of queer kids and their adult chaperones were sitting a couple rows below Alexis, Rowen, and me. I noted their presence when we walked in. As the house lights brightened, some of the kids turned around. We made eye contact for a brief moment and then they filed out with their adults.