Feeling the Air

It’s been a couple of months since I wrote anything here. I started a couple of posts, but they were all along the lines of “hey, everything sucks”, and I didn’t feel very strongly about them and scrapped them before really getting anything down.

Everything does suck, by the way.

I probably don’t have to tell you all the ways in which the new Trump administration has been making life impossible for trans people, from bathroom bills to healthcare restrictions. It is a subject that I truthfully can’t think about too long or the unimaginable cruelty will overwhelm me, and I’ll want to start posting things on the internet that would get me a door knock from the secret service. Suffice it to say that if you have $10 to give a trans person, do it. Do it now. Do it on a recurring basis if you can.

With that out of the way, I’m still basically the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, which is a deeply surreal feeling. Even with all of the above unimpeachably true, I still would not give up being trans for the world. Not for anything or anybody, and I don’t have to consider that for a second.

There’s a post, from the bluesky user Sage (@trans.bsky.social) that I think about all the time. It reads thusly;

“The more I let myself breathe again, the more air I wanted” has bounced around my head for a long time for. It’s absolutely true.

Last time I posted, I had just decided on a new name for myself. At that time, I’d come out to basically nobody about this, just my partner, but now, in the months since, I’m Emily to my friends, my close and extended family, the internet, the people I go to shows with, the people I went to college with, the baristas at my coffee shop. The only significant place my old self still lingers is at work, and that feels like a weight tied around my chest, but everywhere else in my life, I’m free. I’m her. I’m me.

And it’s intoxicating.

Being trans isn’t just a way I am, it’s also a practice. Every day I wake up and I put on a little winged eyeliner look. Not just because it makes me look cute (which it does), but because it’s a skill that I want to become second nature, and the best way to do that is to do it every day. Similarly, most every day that I can find the time, I practice my voice just a little bit. I’m not perfect, or even close, but compared to 3 months ago, I have the ability to soften my tone and adjust my resonance in ways I may not have even thought possible when I began.

I not only am trans in a passive sense, I am doing trans as a verb. I’m trying to become a little closer to the self that I want to be every day, and it’s fucking great. I can’t get enough of the air. I love breathing deeply, and there isn’t anything or anybody who can take that from me.

The unspoken part of “death before detransition” is, and has always been “…because if I’m detransitioned, then I’ll be dead already, whether my heart is beating or not.”

I could no more detransition than I could stop breathing from the moment I took my first breath.

And I don’t ever intend to stop breathing ever again.