gender

Orientation

  • Reading time:5 mins read

A thing I didn’t account for about transition is, okay, it’s one thing to have myself figured out more or less. But one forgets, so easily and so quickly—especially with this addled neurology I’m rocking here. Old habits are hard to break, even when they’re clearly wrong. One begins to doubt one’s self, often one’s basic sanity.

Having physical reminders? It’s amazing. It’s so helpful. It takes away such a cognitive, emotional burden to be able to look down and see, oh, right: boobs. Or feel them brush against my arm when I reach across. To mutter to myself, and for my voice to come back… well, closer anyway to how I want, without my thinking or trying. Having a daily routine, maintaining myself, doing my hair and makeup. Getting dressed properly.

All this grounding, it’s like writing a list and realizing, oh, I don’t have to carry all that in my head anymore and work myself up out of fear I’ll drop one of the balls. All this tangible aspect, it offloads so much burden, and at the same time confirms it’s not just imagination. I can relax.

I am so unused to anything in my head mapping to the world around me that I didn’t know what it was like or how much of a fucking relief it is to be able to just have reality taken care of, so I don’t have to hold it every moment of every day, afraid that it may shatter. I am so used to living exclusively in my head because there has been no interface. Now it’s like reality is spilling out of my skull into my waking, sensory world, and it’s so weird and trippy and makes me feel drunk. If this is reality, and it makes sense to me, what was that world I was living in before? This is why I say it’s like I’ve woken up. It really is. It’s everything before that’s now in question, fading into the cobwebs of a decaying dream.

It’s so strange to rewire my sense of being in the world on such a basic level. Like, this is what it feels like to be alert and aware and to feel things and know things and for all this to be confirmed instantly, viscerally. Is this what it’s like for everyone else, always?

I had no idea how much burden I was holding at all times, and how much space and power and resources that ate up. How it left no room for me to just exist, and breathe, and feel, and want, and be an actual human being. I didn’t know what it meant to be alive.

There’s so much overlap among PTSD, ADHD, autism, gender and sexual dysphoria. It’s common for them all to be… I don’t love the term comorbid, but you know. You’re toting around one of these disorientations, the chance you’ve got another one is that much higher than if you didn’t have any. And each one just adds another layer to the yergh.

There’s this sense of carrying around one’s own reality all the time that doesn’t match the models provided, which one has to learn to entertain and navigate while translating all the way. And until the disjunct becomes clear, there’s just this continual knowledge that something, everything is wrong, nothing is working, your ideas never seem to match the physical world, and you don’t know how or why. And it’s such a fuckery. It’s so isolating. Nothing makes sense.

For decades I’ve made the analogy that my waking life, it’s like watching a TV screen. If I fell hard into identifying with videogames as a medium, that’s because that’s basically what life was like. Sitting apart, pushing few limited buttons, hoping they do what’s intended. You want to take these other actions that aren’t pre-programmed in? Step over that police tape, see what’s up that hill, talk to the creature instead of stabbing it? Tough. Those aren’t the rules of this world. Learn to play the game right if you want to get anywhere.

It’s no accident that my reckoning with all of the above pretty much has happened in one rolling wave. It’s all tangled up, intertwined. And letting it out…

There’s also this anger, that I’ve never been allowed to feel. Like, anger is one of the Bad Feelings, right. Except it’s not, of course. Emotions are neutral. They just are what they are. They’re signals. What isn’t neutral is one’s behaviors; how one acts on them. Denying the feelings, that’s basically the first step to major dysfunction.

There’s a lot to be angry about. And it’s fine.

One of the overwhelming narratives of the last month or two is, how dare they keep me from myself? All of them. How dare they. And that’s really what it comes down to. This is what I could have been this whole time. It didn’t have to be the way that it was. I lived through that for no reason.

I barely can wrap my head around what I dealt with, for so long. It’s a lot. There’s so much that I’ve accepted as normal, that’s just… clearly not something a person should have to put up with. But it’s getting better. I’m finally putting together this world that I guess comes pre-assembled for others. Becoming human.

It turns out, reality is intoxicating. And I want to feel it, encourage it, declare and define it as an ongoing work. I need to keep this moving.

We Became Our Fantasy

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Since the spring it feels like I’ve been caught in this material eddy, unable to make any big steps, barely able to maintain the day-to-day. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the things outside my reach, as modest as they may seem. But as much trouble as I have coping with big and small things and ghosts from the past, there are times where perspective clicks and—

  • I’m a girl (sort of)
  • with maybe 40 years of life left
  • living in a small apartment
  • by herself
  • across from a large park
  • close to downtown
  • of a major city
  • in the northeast
  • in the autumn (currently).

It’s just, this is so close to a life that I’ve wished for since I was little, that I knew would never be available to me, that for years only ever seemed to get further and further from reality. In the ’90s I wrote stories with characters in almost exactly this scenario—yes, who were female, and had gender issues.

The main missing piece is an ability to support myself, and in such a way that I have mental reserves to do creative things again. (In the stories, money was always vague but I figured maybe she did computer stuff?) Other than that, it’s all just… continuing. Working on the transition, working on the therapy. maybe even piecing together my own social circle, once the plague dies down. Making this city the home I’ve never had, building a world I want to live in.

But on a basic level, like. I’ve more or less done it—including the parts that seemed, when i was younger, physically impossible. This was the escape I dreamed about, where after high school I would finally sort myself out and become alive… and where I was a girl somehow in these fantasies, which was absurd of course, but whatever.

Hell, with how drawn-out and reluctant my first puberty was, people regularly assumed I was maybe 20 until I was close to 40. It’s catching up a little now, but—it feels like even on a cellular level I was just hibernating; waiting until the moment I could truly live.

Now if only I were able to safely go outside….

Measuring Tape

  • Reading time:5 mins read

This is a lot of words about something stupid. But I’m going through a thing, okay.

The thing about measuring for a bra is, it forced me to recognize what was going on in this empirical way. I think what still stuns me is how they feel like they leapt at me out of nowhere. I was vaguely aware of their development, then all at once I had to address it. While I was otherwise preoccupied, these two separate mounds of flesh slowly began to aggregate. And, you know. When it’s not supported, stuff’s gonna spread out. Shape isn’t gonna be as obvious.

So they progress to the point that one finally turns their attention to these deposits and goes, huh, guess they’re growing a bit; should look into this. And by then… those modest rolling bumps, they consist of so much material. And if you just gather it up, give it a little support? The slightest pressure and suddenly, wait, these are actual breasts. When did that happen? What? Like, just lightly cup your hands underneath and hang on, there’s a shape here. Cleavage appears.

What I’m saying is that physics play into my obliviousness, then my sudden realization. This tissue is malleable, right. It deforms like a Japanese pudding with any pressure, including and especially gravity. (Which is in part why one wears a bra, yes.) And the reason I’m dwelling on this again is that I checked and despite the destruction of our postal service my first bra still seems set for delivery in three days. And, that’s gonna change things. It’s gonna be this leap where suddenly these untamed lumps are collected and contained, and… there’s a lot there.

In just a few days, I’m… my whole profile is going to change. The way I carry weight is going to shift. There’s going to be visible cleavage. This is becoming real, you know.

And it’s just.

Again it’s not even about the breasts, right. Not in and of themselves. The significance here is more symbolic. It’s kind of a landmark in reclaiming myself, healing my damage. Becoming myself, at last. It’s this objective metric, helping me to see the change in me in much the way the measuring tape was an objective metric allowing me to clearly see them.

I am so bad with measurements without an outside guide. I am so bad with intuition and emotion and vague mushy notions about things. Like how despite the blinking neon lights it took someone dragging me aside and pointing to them for me to see my queerness. I just shrug and accept and don’t really know how to quantify the qualia that make up my world. I appreciate every bit of proof I am who I am. The breasts to my sense of self, the measuring tape to the breasts—it’s all measurement of a measurement of a measurement; this existential train dragging me to the acceptance of my own fucking reality.

More and more, the reality keeps crashing in—showing me that I’m right. That I am me, despite everything. Despite all the denial and harm.

At the end of it, it’s just boobs. Like half the people on the planet. Big deal, right. But I’m going through puberty here. If I’m a little juvenile, I think it’s warranted. There’s a lot wrapped up in this. More than I realized until it was impossible to ignore.

I’m sitting here, feeling overcome at just the thought of claiming that piece of ownership over myself. Putting on that bra, shaping my chest, understanding that this is the new normal, we’re really doing this, and a hearty fuck you to everyone who tried to stop me for 30 years. Who accused me of being myself, like it was the most reprehensible thing.

It’s a point of reference.

I’m making progress. Measurable, objective, real, meaningful, visible progress.

I’m so swimmy, all the time. Flailing in the void. But it’s working. I was always right, even when I didn’t know what I was right about.

I’m going to be okay, maybe. I’ve got this. I’m fixing things. It’s not too late.

Things are finally going right.

It just so happens that this landmark is goofy and comical and… sort of neat, in a visceral way. Which in itself complicates an already complicated set of emotions wrapped up in this. I feel so strange for feeling the way I do about something so base and silly.

This all crept up on me. I had no clue what value or significance it might have. I just wrote it off, until there it was. It wasn’t on my agenda at all. But apparently it’s what I needed anyway.

I’m sitting here, crying—but from happiness. Which is itself unfamiliar. Yes, crying from happiness is unfamiliar. But also, just… happiness? That has to be what this is.

I’m starting to realize I may have never felt actual happiness. That has to be that I’m feeling, and this is so novel.

Again, there’s just… a lot going on.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

So much of my life takes a different focus when I understand it’s not my responsibility to convince bigots that I’m human. It doesn’t matter who they are, how they may be related, what leverage they may carry over me. They were always wrong. And I survived, and I’m here now.

It was they who failed me, not the other way around.

Crack in the Cistem

  • Reading time:2 mins read

A thing to remember is that cis people often have a strange and fraught relationship with gender too. There are consequences in failing to adequately perform one’s assigned gender, even if one agrees with it. Achieving Maximum Gender is a big power goal for many cis people, especially neurotypical ones. It’s something more to win at.

When cis people feel undermined or shown up in their gender performance, or are misgendered, it’s a Big Fucking Deal. So if you’re trans and feeling weird about your whole situation, take solace in understanding it’s not you. It’s the concept of gender. Everyone struggles.

Well, not everyone. But anyone. That’s the nature of performance. People are just people, really, the lines we draw are arbitrary, and everyone’s faking this thing to try to meet some external standard. Not everyone picks up the skills or applies them the same way if at all. Some are years behind their peers.

What’s important in the end is just figuring out a way to like yourself. Be the person who you recognize as “me” and can feel feel comfortable inside. That’s it. That’s all. Whether you’re cis or trans. Playing someone else’s game is just a recipe for despair. People are people.

Here we are in the future and it’s dumb.

  • Reading time:1 mins read

Guy in distance: [incomprehensible shouting]

I: [tune it out]

Guy, closer: [more shouting]

I: [ignore it]

Guy, scampering toward me: “Miss! Miss!”

I, turning reluctantly: “Pardon me?”

Guy: “You’re just my size! I said, you’re just my size!”

I: [dumb stare]

Guy: [peers closely] “Whoop!” [turns robotically and walks away]

Later, on my way back, two different cars began to honk energetically, accompanied by more shouting, as I passed.

…

I guess it’s starting.

It was broad daylight. The first guy at least seemed amiable enough, if… a poor judge of how to communicate with people. I was too baffled to feel threatened or anything. But yeah, I guess I knew this was likely to become a thing eventually.

So. Here’s a new annoyance, then.

Today, this was just stupid. But if this is going to be how things go now, I guess I should start to be more careful.

All hail the monkey’s paw.

(Incidentally, this is not what I was feeling a few days ago. This is not the charming part. This is not what I find attractive.)

Random Access Mammary

  • Reading time:3 mins read

Now over six months into HRT, there have been some clear effects. My body has taken well to the regimen, reacting strongly even to low starter doses. It seems obvious this was something my body was starving for. The first thing I noted, within moments of the first pill hitting my bloodstream, was how much clearer my head got. This thick fug that’s always been a part of my mind, it lifted a little. Soon I became able to feel emotions. Like, viscerally, physically. I had always thought of the term “feelings” as poetic, but now there was this burning sensation in my chest. Looking online, it seems like the shittiness I had felt every day since I was maybe eleven, it’s… similar to menopause. It seems like for decades my body was physically waiting and looking for chemicals that it wasn’t getting, and so just made my life hell demanding them. Just mentally, emotionally, this has been a revelation. Is this the way normal people feel, because suddenly I feel like a real person.

The physical side also kicked off quickly. Skin, scent, eyes. What small hair loss was happening in the corners of my scalp turned right around. I am still waiting for some more pronounced fat redistribution, around my face and hips and thighs. As impatient as I am for that, my body has other priorities at the moment, it would seem.

So.

Despite frequent pressing questions from medical staff, I wasn’t really asking for boobs. The notion didn’t factor into my ideas for myself. I’m not a sexual person, right, and that was the frame I used. Now, though, I am struck daily with how cool and validating this is. It’s just this obvious marker that I am who and what I am. That I exist. That my body belongs to me. That this is all really happening. And, it’s just neat.

People are people. Humans are not particularly sexually dimorphic. Any differences between what we arbitrarily define as the two sexes are subtle and inconsistent. As a result, then, any small change makes a big apparent difference. Psychologically, more than physically.

I just wasn’t prepared. It felt weird or pervy to dwell on. But, it matters. So many people have laid claim to me over the years, telling me what I could or couldn’t or must do with my body, most of which just caused me to hate myself more, dissociate further from this tangible thing I was attached to. This body, it belongs to me now. It is an aspect of me. This part of me, this physical form, it’s becoming a thing that I want to inhabit. That I am starting to feel attached to, that has begun to reflect me. I am turning into an actual person, who exists in the world.

With boobs.

Look, boobs are hilarious. And cool. And I get to have them now. Because I am kinda-sorta a girl. So I get the Cracker Jack prize.

I feel like I just went back to complete some certification I was forced to drop several ages ago. Picking up life wherever it was I left off.

I am real, and I am awake. And maybe someday soon I will be able to push through my trauma and take care of myself. Make a home. Build a world that I want to live in, filled with kind and sincere weirdos who just appreciate each other for who they are. I deserve to be a person. And I think I am figuring out how to make that work, bit by bit.

The Longest Yarn

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Every so often I feel like a girl. And my whole body gets warm. The world starts to feel real. Everything begins to make a little sense; I feel connected to some kind of a story. It just comes to me, a realization. A toggle. And there it is, and somehow I’m human. Complete.

I’m not used to feeling like anything. Just this fuzzy ball of consciousness, resenting my humanity. This goes back forever. As far back as memories make sense. I’ve been an abstraction, unable to recognize or tolerate the entity holding my place in this game I cannot understand.

Now there’s this anchor. I’m still a space cadet, and I’ve got a whole host of distractions. But, I have a tether to this body and the world it inhabits, and now I know the truth, and sometimes when I don’t think about it, I find myself back on the ground. And I finally get it.

This is that sense of self it seems that everyone else has by default. They’re worn and damaged and a big old mess that I need to keep toiling away to repair, but they exist, and I like the model and the controls make a kind of sense to me. Sometimes I wake up, and they’re me.

And it’s just… kind of astonishing. There I am. There I’ve always been. What did I wake up from? It’s like that morning haze where you clear away the dream logic and sort out where you are and what day it is and what you need to do this afternoon. Except so much more vivid.

It comes when it comes; brains do what they do. When it does, it may follow my evening meds. It’s not hard to connect those dots. What strikes me, though, is how not just right but transparent it feels: this wave of Self and Reality and Truth. The pills are only a catalyst.

This gender business, I don’t mean to play by anyone else’s rules. I’ve been messed up for far too long, and this is my own scenario to sort. I’m going with whatever seems true and correct. And where I get that wrong, I will adjust. I’m a girl, in the lower-case. I’m just me.

A Comb and a Brush and a Head Full of Mush

  • Reading time:4 mins read

The final class of the summer session, my voice group began to get into nonverbal language, which we’ll explore in more depth this fall. What struck me was, eight out of ten of the signifiers they went over that day were things people have spent a lifetime drilling out of me. One thing after the other, they were all, “Here’s what you might want to try doing,” and it was precisely what I have always been told not to do: “Cut that out. It’s inappropriate. It’s gross. Do this other thing that makes you uncomfortable instead.”

But I’m no good at lies, and I can’t really perform. So I just bottle up, and do nothing. I suppress what I’m told is wrong, and I can’t make myself do what I’m told is right, and I glitch out and get weird.

In Dial M for Murder, you know how the husband dictates everything the wife should say to the police, explaining, “It’s much simpler if that’s how you say it happened; that’s what they expect you to say; it will raise fewer questions”—all of which makes her seem more suspicious? In hindsight, every relationship I’ve been in, they just lied to everyone about me—about who I was, what I did, where they met me, what my background was—and kept updating and feeding me these scripts that I was meant to play along to, to support their lies. If I failed to convincingly play the part or foresee lies they hadn’t provided but expected me to figure out, they grew furious with me for undermining them and raising questions they didn’t want to answer. I was going to ruin everything, by… existing.

I am so used to people being ashamed of me, and terrified that those things will reflect back on them. Of them being so ready to punish me for disgusting them, while telling me they’re helping me, and that I should be grateful. It’s such a thankless job, abusing me day and night. The least I could do was recognize their effort.

There’s all this overlap between ABA and conversion therapy, right. So many of the behaviors that they try to crush in autistic young men to make them seem presentable are traits that are described as overly effeminate. And for others’ comfort and my own safety, I sure have had to learn to mask my neurology. And now, we become aware of this. Now we come to actual, overt gender issues—and for me at least, it’s the exact same breakthrough. This is just like learning what stimming is, and why it is, and why it’s good and neutral and necessary. It’s the same process of seeing all these things I have been trained out of doing, and realizing that, no, this is who I always was. I was supposed to be that way.

It’s the revelation that everyone in my life, they were wrong. It’s that, holy shit, they all knew—and my obvious queerness bothered them so much that they tried to make it go away. And I ate it, because I didn’t know any better. I knew I was wrong, because I was always wrong, and they told me what I needed to do instead.

So much of my transition, it seems, is less a matter of learning some new performance than to learn to stop papering over my own natural behaviors to make other people comfortable. To figure out where things went wrong and how to be myself again.

There’s a reason I am such an awkward, nervous bundle of confusion. And it’s not my fault. It’s the abuse. Everything I get into, everything I unpick, it’s not about making this new thing. It’s archeology, digging down and piecing myself back together. Undoing damage. Rebuilding myself from first principles, with mostly all the same pieces but without someone else striding in every few steps to tell me what shit it all is and what I need to do differently, according to a completely unrelated set of plans that requires pieces I don’t even have.

It’s just. The epiphany of being told step by step the way I might want to try behaving to support my identity are exactly my natural behaviors that I have been abused out of performing because they were wrong and disgusting. I was always right. I was always me.

Fuck y’all.

Full Spectrum Broadcast

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Whoa, fucking yikes. Social overload. Just spent two hours talking to people I don’t know over video conference. I feel so tense right now. Presumably this will get easier? But, the grad student I have been paired with for one-on-one is cool. Aside from voice, she asked about my interest in other kinds of communication and signalling, like body language. And. Yo.

Autistic, right. Nobody ever taught me this for any gender, so I never picked it up. I’ve always felt very strange in face-to-face interaction, and people often feel weird talking to me, because I Do Not Signal in a way that makes sense to neurotypical people. Which sometimes is awkward. Sometimes is absurd. And sometimes it’s dangerous. (E.g., cops, security.)

But, on top of working on the voice: posture, body language, gestures. This is beyond a gender thing. This is a Being-A-Person tutorial that I’ve never had.

She also framed makeup as an element of non-verbal language, that she could help with. And. I’m going to have to steep on this some more, but. Yeah, okay. I hadn’t internalized presentation as communication, with its own grammar and symbology, but of course that’s what it is.

So… we’ll see how this goes.

Lizard Toes

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Though I have no expectations for HRT, and am already getting some of what I hoped in terms of mood stability and energy, I’ve a sense my body as it has developed will put up very little resistance. While I’m starving for estrogen, there is trace evidence of testosterone either.

  • My growth spurt, and voice change, didn’t hit until my late teens.
  • I barely had facial hair until my mid-30s, and it was still patchy until recently.
  • The only body hair I have is on my limbs, and even that’s mostly thin and vellus.
  • I’ve got no upper-body muscle mass at all.
  • My scalp hair has only in the last couple years begun to recede a little above the temples, into that M shape.
  • I’ve never had anything like a libido.

It’s just super clear that any masculine influence in my system has been weak, and slow, and unassertive. It arrives with a shrug. It is clear, based on a laundry list of factors I both have and haven’t mentioned, my biology is not… entirely standard-issue. I’m wondering just how hard it will hit me when my body realizes I finally do have some working hormones to work with.

What i can say is—I have notoriously poor circulation, which makes sense with my historically low heart rate and weak pulse. I’m like a lizard. And my feet are so very far away from my heart, they’re always frozen. I have long found that wearing thick socks can warm my entire body. Now, moments after taking my pill, I start to glow. I can feel my blood. My feet raise to a normal body temperature.

This is one of a million little examples of how I suddenly feel normal and complete and human and confusingly not-like-shit. I have never felt so consistently not-awful as I have since last Tuesday. For maybe an hour after every dose I just feel warm and fuzzy and high, then proceed to feel high-functioning (to my standard) awake for the next eight hours.

I have things to do in the morning, and I feel like at this rate I may just have it in me to keep it together.

Gender Power

  • Reading time:2 mins read

So everything works differently for everyone and placebo sure is a thing, but two pills into this regime I can definitely say they have an immediate mood effect. What I get from estrogen is what it seems like caffeine does to other people. I’m instantly more alert, able to cope. Due presumably to my neurology, caffeine helps me to focus and calms me down. It actually makes me a little tired. It’s like a warn brain shower.

But, I’m… one of my basic daily troubles is feeling capable of… like, anything. It takes me hours to get out of bed, even awake. Doing anything at all, having the energy to get started, feeling like it’s possible for me to engage, is such a struggle. I’m always so drained and discouraged. Halfway through walking home from the supermarket I’ll think, I could just sit down and die here.

And, like. The sudden energy and meed stability I’m getting now with the proper hormones in my system, I don’t have it within me to make this up. I don’t think this is placebo. I think this is correcting a real imbalance. And… I must wonder, do other people feel like this always?

And the effect, it hits so fast. Like my system was starving. I am no longer on my last thread, weak and tired and helpless, where it all could end at any moment.

I could have been doing this the last 25 years, and not been suffering.

Now if I can just medicate this ADHD, we’ll be onto something.

As it is, I’ve had my morning coffee and I am yawning. I was alert until then. But better than going uncaffeinated.

A curious thing is, everyone I interacted with the other day about my medication, from the nurse to the pharmacist, they asked if I had taken it before—and when I said no, they perked up. “Really?! Congratulations!” Like, they genuinely seemed to think it was the coolest thing ever.

One curious effect: blushing. I have not tended to blush, much at all. It’s not a thing that happens to happen. Until now. Every little thing, the last couple days seems to elicit this heat from my cheeks, my temples. It feels pretty weird, let me tell you.

Righting the Balance

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I rarely to never judge others to the extent I judge myself. Things that are completely unacceptable about me, I wouldn’t think of criticizing in another. This is a hard thing for me to get past; just being kind and treating myself with the same compassion as any other person.

With that in mind, getting on HRT has really clicked my transness into reality. It’s obviously not a precondition, but, my head; my own issues, right. All this self-doubt. But this isn’t a phase; I’m not confused or playing around. It’s who I am, and I’m finally acting on it. It’s—I feel this sense of gratitude toward myself, and of relief. Like, finally I’m actually listening. And so much of this reticence, it’s just melted away. I’m not pretending; I’m doing, I’m being. Like, there’s this missing part of me I’m just now finding and unwrapping.

In my case also the HRT was actually a necessary intervention. Beyond any other effects, it’s clear I’ve been working under a chemical imbalance for most of my life that’s been playing havoc with my mood, energy, and cognition. It’s hard to express how fundamentally awful I have always felt. Like, what the baseline normal has been. I’d like to just… hand that to someone chipper for a day, and see how they function.

But, you know. Everyone has different needs. I’m just talking me.

I’ve still got my litany of problems, but. I feel like there’s a major existential issue resolved, pretty much. Fuck doubt! I’m so pleased with myself it’s hard to know what to say. When have I ever taken real care of me? Now I need to just keep listening. But the door is open.

Garnet is Trans

  • Reading time:6 mins read

This being the Internet, I’ve been getting some pushback in the wake of Unleash the Light, and my reference to Demantoid and Pyrope as cis-Garnets, much like Hessonite. 

I mean. Look. I get it, cisters. You’re not used to looking at anything except through a binary cishet lens. But this is a show substantially by non-straight, trans, or gender-diverse creators—from the top on down. It’s got layers and layers of metaphor that it can use in different situations to talk about different things. And one of the things it’s always gone out of its way to talk about is diverse identities. 

Fusion is there to talk about a million and six subjects; some of them broad and universal, some extremely specific and delicate. From a human perspective Stevonnie really should be anyone’s first hint that a fusion of two different people is going to create some existential issues around identity and presentation, but it goes much deeper than them.

Gems don’t have sex or gender the way humans do; they have type. For the purpose of storytelling, Gem type stands in for all manner of social structures: class, race, sex, gender. The dynamics are different—due to different biology (if that term even applies to a Gem) and systems of power—yet familiar. How the metaphor applies, to talk about real-life issues, depends on what the story wants to address at the time.

Cross-Gem fusion is undeniably queer; Ruby and Sapphire’s relationship makes that as clear as possible. They’re queer in human terms because to us they both present female; they’re queer in Gem terms because they’re crossing type boundaries. To be homogeneous is to be straight—following the plan of society and their created intention—and to be heterogenous is to stray from the path. 

There’s way more to unpack just in that parallel, but again the metaphor is multifaceted. When two Gems fuse cross-type, they create a new person—a person who is not defined by a designation or role on emergence, but who finds their own name and identity. As it happens, Gem names and identities are hard to extract from types. So, they pick a new type. We see the thought process in action when Steven and Amethyst first fuse, and the Gem who would be Smoky first comes into being. 

When Ruby and Sapphire chose to permanently fuse, they decided they were a Garnet. Which is totally their choice, and is great and all. The thing is, there are other Garnets. More to the point, there are assigned-at-emergence Garnets, like Hessonites, Pyropes, Demantoids: Garnets who were made to be Garnets from the start. As it happens, our Garnet—CG Garnet—looks a heck of a lot like a “natural” Garnet. She has a similar build, the same general hair. Garnet is a Garnet because she has decided that’s what and who she is, not because she was told that’s what she was. Which is to say, Garnet is trans. 

Up until the Homeworld appendix to season five, the point is fairly subtle. Unless the question of â€œnatural” Garnets leaps into your mind, or you dwell really hard on the implications of Stevonnie, you may not think too hard about what it means to create a whole new gender-of-sorts. You may not even clock different Gem types as partially a matter of gender. You may overlook the color scheme of Cotton Candy Garnet, which in hindsight is… potentially the least subtle symbolism in the entire goddamned show. But I really don’t know how it’s possible to watch â€œTogether Alone” and miss this point.

By the end of the show, it’s not even subtext anymore. It’s just text. It’s just the show, explicitly telling you, Garnet is trans and that makes Homeworld Gems uncomfortable. The point is so on-the-nose that it would be hilarious if it weren’t horrific. 

Yet, in that, it’s also amazing. After five seasons of general tolerance on Earth, our first official visit to Homeworld comes wrapped in scoffing at Garnet’s identity and consistently misgendering Steven. It comes with a story of conversion therapy, centering around Pink Diamond’s original Pearl with whom she so inappropriately dabbled. Even the most irredeemable human, Kevin, stopped short of misgendering Stevonnie, because come on, what kind of a monster would do that? Well, a monster like a Diamond, as it happens.

That is the threat of Homeworld. The “She’s Gone!” segment is, like everything in the show, a complicated and imperfect metaphor, but the surface-level trans allegory is clear enough to have launched a thousand articles, in the mainstream as well as the queer press.

Dialing back, though, we have Garnet.

In a broader sense it is important that Garnet be trans inasmuch as her transness seems to have inspired Rose Quartz to fully accept and commit to her own transness. Except for Rose, it wasn’t even a matter of fusion. Her becoming was a matter of sheer personal will and desire. 

Even if Steven didn’t exist, the â€œShe’s GONE!” scene would still apply. Rose is Rose; she’s not Pink Diamond. Gem types, again, are as much a metaphor for sex and gender as they are race and class. Rose has lived for millennia as a Quartz. Everyone accepts her as a Quartz. As even Blue begins to cotton to around the first act of “Change Your Mind,” Pink was never really a Diamond at all, and every effort to make her behave like one only ever made her miserable.

Low-key, the entire story of Steven Universe is about Rose’s fight to live as the person who she chose to be, not the person she was created to be—and about the unresolved issues she left behind from that struggle, that were beyond her ability to cope with. For all her intentions and all the change she went through, there was still something she lacked—and until she met Greg, she could never quite put a finger on what that was.

To fix all her problems would take an even greater metamorphosis. One that slightly waters down the allegory at the climax of â€œChange Your Mind,” but that contains within it layers of transformation and resolution that can apply to many more aspects of life than any 1:1 representation could achieve.

There are lots of kinds of change we go through. And lots of kinds of change we can make in the world. 

The first brick at Stonewall came from a trans woman, Marsha P. Johnson. As it happens, Garnet was also [to dubious canonicity] there. The same way she was at the moment that Rose’s whole universe changed—the day she realized what she could be.

Mitigation

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I remember when I lived in Oakland, people would invite me out, and I couldn’t go. Part of it was masking exhaustion or poverty or any number of other things. But just as often, I’d have, say, a pimple on my neck, or my hair looked weird, or there was some other minor problem. I’d sit there for days and days, sometimes weeks, until I felt presentable enough that I could tolerate someone looking at me. But I had so many other anxieties I didn’t really know how to process this one in isolation.

Part of it’s a more general problem, but I’m seeing how many of the standards I’ve applied to myself have been gender-related. Like, the things that freaked me out about myself tended to be more masculine. I’m never been very masculine, which maybe makes them stand out more.

The pressure to present masculine was both largely impossible and unwanted. Yet I didn’t feel like I really had another option. I tried to carve out this curated semi-androgynous space that was just me. But it was fragile, and it wasn’t quite right either. On top of that were all the more general repulsive bodily things that nobody is fond of, and that there are so many industries devoted to making an even big deal out of, but that weighed so much harder considering the shaky balance I was treading.

And you know the killer? Almost none of this was entirely conscious, to the extent that I only now pieced together what was going on. It was just some low-level voice whispering in my brain in a code without words: you are gross. If you can’t mitigate, you can’t go out like that.

I did not have a good childhood. My parents were absent and neglectful on a good day, on a day I could relax and enjoy the silence. But the way they had about them when they chose to compliment my appearance, the things they chose to focus on, it skeeved me. Made me feel worse. Like, I don’t know how many times I was sent to tears when they tried to comment on me, only for them to turn to a rage as a result of my response.

I know I’ve talked about how I’ve wound up sort of cloning my early abuse scenario in later life situations. My ex-spouse was hugely controlling, over every aspect of how I presented myself. I got so much shit if I refused to change for them a fourth time before leaving the house. Now that I’m developing a better handle on my gender issues, that dysphoria has moved up through the layers of consciousness so I can get a better grip on it. But it’s not necessarily any quieter just because it’s out in the open, and applying to something I can easily point at.

It’s better to be able to say, okay, I don’t feel in control of the way I’m presenting today and it’s freaking me out than to be crushed by this overwhelming wordless swirl of oh god I am gross everything is wrong what is happening that sends me back under the blankets. But by also coming out of stealth mode, it’s almost scarier in a way. Like, I have this specific daunting thing relating to a much more obvious and visible-to-anyone issue. I can’t mask this like I can mask my autism. Neither of which I should be masking, ideally. But it’s scary.

It’s all masking—the unhealthy side of queerness, of neurodiversity. All about presenting in a way as to make other people comfortable, to avoid standing out, even as it kills you. And once you learn that survival skill, it’s hard to force yourself to stop trying to survive.

It’s a long road to find the courage to simply be and assert who I am, and stop trying to fawn and appease people who either don’t care about me or don’t care about being appeased. I’m… safer, now. In so many ways. I need to get that into my head. I’m gonna be okay. I can let go.

(Now as to how all of this interacts with my aroaceness… cripes, that’s a whole thing. I’m almost reluctant to spell it out, given the nuances that would entail and how easy it is to write off asexuality as a real, valid thing. But, it surely gee-whiz does factor in!)