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  • What’s in a Name?

    What’s in a Name?

    My name is Emily now.

    Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that my name is Emily right now. Not that I’ve any plans to change it, I’m quite enamored of it actually. It makes me feel happy in a real, uncomplicated way. It’s so new I still haven’t fully internalized it yet, but this I know will come with time. And for the time being, this is the name I’m planning on being mine indefinitely.

    It’s just that I’ve learned through experience that assuming anything at all to be immutable and unassailable, unchanging and written in stone forever is not only inaccurate, it’s constricting. Things that you once thought were straightforwardly true start to push at your throat like a tight collar, not ever letting you get a full breath in. Having a preconceived notion that the collar is permanent only makes it that much harder to tear from your throat and breathe freely again.

    Over the past few months or years, I’ve generally grown less and less enamored with discussions of trans identity as an immutable human soul. Why of course you have the soul of a woman, born into a man’s body! O, what a tragedy! Perhaps with the proper support you can suture your body into a facsimile of the one that you should have had all along. Perhaps with the innovations of cutting edge medical science, you can get to 70% of what your soul yearns for. Poor Emily, her body is disfigured and twisted from the way that God intended it. Poor Emily.

    No, the truth is that lately I’ve begun to believe that the only thing that actually matters with any of this shit is if it will make you happy. To make a long story long, I was a pretty happy kid. I had a lot of issues with change, which are certainly interesting to view through the lens of not wanting to grow up into a man, but not being able to fully articulate or even comprehend that fact, but by and large I was perfectly content as a little boy. I was allowed to have long hair, didn’t go to school and didn’t really hang out in any toxic masculine environments, and I didn’t really think about gender as a concept much at all, aside from a couple of very-telling-in-retrospect comments to my female friends about how different I was compelled to act around my male ones.

    I looked very young up into my early teens. I have a picture from when I’m 14 where I could easily have been mistaken for half that age. By the time I turned 15 though, I had noticed the changes. The stubble on my upper lip in particular I felt not only conflicted about, but ashamed. I taught myself to shave in secret. Nobody every mentioned it.

    I went to college in California. In my first year, I developed a very close friendship with a girl from my dorm. I felt closeness to her like I hadn’t experienced in years with another person. Maybe ever. I was also friends with her boyfriend, though we were not as close. It was an unspoken understanding between me and him that she was my friend first, and he respected that. He was a cool guy.

    The next year they broke up and she didn’t tell me. I was hurt. I felt betrayed and didn’t know why, and I pushed her to arms length. We fell out of touch soon afterwards. It wasn’t until almost 8 years later that I realized she’d probably assumed I would take his side in the breakup. That she was viewing me as a male friend, and presuming, consciously or unconsciously, that I would act accordingly. Of course I didn’t understand why this hurt at the time. Of course I didn’t understand the betrayal. I hope she’s doing well.

    Over the next couple of years, I began to feel more and more empty inside. I chocked this up to living in California, where it’s flat and dry and the storms all blow in from the wrong direction. I missed the hills, the trees, and the seasons of my home.

    Or at least I thought I did. I don’t doubt that that played some part in the alienation I was feeling, but in retrospect it was clear there was more going on as well. I made friends, I grew close to other people, but something was still eating me up inside, I was still empty. The solution was obvious.

    I needed a haircut.

    I’d had my long unruly curls since I was around 7 years old, but I figured now it was the relic of a long bygone era. A security blanket that moored me only to the past versions of myself that I no longer wanted anything to do with. I figured I was a pretty good looking guy, right? It was time I let go of the past. To grow up, start dressing right, and get a proper haircut.

    It was time for me to become a man.

    I came out of the barbershop satisfied and optimistic for the future, with a simple but suave short cut. Everybody I knew was astounded that I’d done it, but before long I grew used to it. It was cooler in the summer, much, MUCH faster and easier to wash, I could style it up with pomade when I wanted to get really fancy with it. It was everything I every could’ve hoped and it didn’t make me happy.

    Of course it didn’t, it was a haircut. But it wasn’t just that. It also represented me trying to be more outgoing, to talk to more people, to get more involved in local music. And I did all that! And none of it helped. I was still feeling so empty inside I would curl up on the carpet and scream silently in a pain I didn’t understand. Silently, of course, because I wouldn’t want to bother my roommates.

    I didn’t want to bother anyone, actually. I’ve always been good at putting up a brave face, and at this point in my life, I wasn’t really telling my family back home much of anything at all. I don’t know why, I think I wanted to prove to myself that I didn’t need them, that I could be independent from them and live alone in college, and make it! But I didn’t tell my friends there either. Sure I talked about being lonely, or stressed, or burnt out from classes. But nobody knew how bad it got. And nobody knew why, least of all me.

    2019 was the first time I ever questioned my gender. I was deeply embroiled in reading Cate Wurtz’ seminal webcomic Crow Cillers, a work which I cannot sum up in less space than at least another full length blog post, or perhaps a 2-hour video essay, but suffice it to say that it is “trans as hell.” I wondered earnestly if maybe I could be trans, and I actually have my musings on it written in an old songwriting book from this era. Basically I landed on “I thought about it a lot and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m still a cis man.

    Lol. Lmao.

    After college, I moved back east, got a job, and I cannot stress enough how immediately the Covid-19 shutdown happened. I was suddenly stuck in my house for months at a time, with nobody to talk to, with nothing much to think about besides myself, and my body, and how I move through the world. Us in the transgenderfication community call this “the danger zone.”

    The thing that finally tore it for me was, embarrassingly enough, a tweet.

    I’m about 80% sure this is the tweet. I actually went down a pretty long rabbit hole trying to dig it up, looking through my likes, realizing I hadn’t liked it, so just searching Twitter for what I could remember from the tweet, and this is definitely if not the exact one, very similar in tone and content. And what’s the reaction that this particular tweet arose in me when I first read it, sometime around September of 2020?

    It made me mad.

    What the fuck. How dare you. That’s so flippant and disrespectful. What fucking business is it of yours why I’m afraid to think of myself in a dress? Why the fuck is it any of your affair why I’m so scared to allow myself to think that? To allow myself to…

    Ah shit.

    Fuck.

    After that the jig was just about up for me. I ordered some cheap ass girl clothes on target dot com and tried them on, and of course it felt like nothing I’d ever felt before, the giddy euphoria, the self-doubt, the fear, the relief. It made me happy.

    Ok so what now? What am I? What do I call myself? Surely I am something, and I’ve got to figure out what it is. I spent the following weeks working though my feelings and the queer wiki internet, investigating my own life like a mystery and looking for clues that might reveal the hidden mechanism behind it all. Well I didn’t always feel unhappy being a man, so I can’t be straightforwardly a trans woman, but it really varies from day to day, so I don’t think I’m straightforwardly nonbinary either. What am I? What am I?

    Finally I found it. The perfect answer. The solution to the puzzle that explained everything. I was genderfluid, so sometimes I felt like a boy, and sometimes I felt like a girl! I came out to my friends, my family. I was pleased with it, aside from, for some reason, feeling like tearing my skin off every time my family, loving and accepting as they are, so much as acknowledged my gender identity.

    At this point I also considered HRT, but I was scared. I discussed this in depth in my last post, so go read that if you want to read it, but after some cursory setbacks, I decided I was ok for the time being. I would survive. And I did survive for the next four years, altering my presentation depending on the day, on how I was feeling, on if I had the energy to dress up or not.

    It worked for me until it didn’t. I started to feel like it wasn’t enough anymore. Counterintuitively, as I began to feel ok with presenting as masculine less and less, I actually did present as masculine more and more, because when you’re depressed, shaving is hard, and stubble brings dysphoria, and dysphoria brings depression. I slipped further and further away until I was forced to acknowledge it. The elephant in the room. This wasn’t making me happy anymore.

    Through the haze one day, on a walk, it just occurred to me, almost like dread. I’m just a woman, aren’t I? I pushed it down. I didn’t need this shit right now.

    I’ve already talked in my previous post about how I started to come out of the darkness. The plea. The eclipse. The hormones. I started to feel like a real person again. I started to feel like a real person for the first time in years, maybe ever. And finally I switched to exclusively she/her pronouns, and just a few days ago as of writing this post, my name is Emily.

    So, with that long story out of the way, what does it all add up to? Obviously I was born with the soul of a girl but the body of a boy, and because I wasn’t heavily policed in my gender expression as a kid, I lived without too much friction until puberty, when I started to become distressed, but because I didn’t have the language or communication skills to express it, I hid that distress under further coping mechanisms through into college, when I finally began encountering the full brunt of dysphoria after my haircut, and that, through introspection and consuming trans media, finally led me to figure out I was trans-of-some-description. But I mistook the natural ebbs and flows of dysphoria with my stubble growth as change in gender identity and misidentified myself as genderfluid, which did alleviate some of the distress, but was still unsustainable, and eventually after starting HRT I realized what had been true all along that I was a trans woman.

    Right?

    Maybe.
    But I kind of don’t give a shit.
    The metaphysical reality of my soul matters to me a lot less than the fact that, throughout every stage of this process, I was doing my best to use the tools and knowledge I had to alleviate my distress. I could only know what I knew when I knew it, and I’m not going to beat myself up for getting it “wrong”, or something. When I needed it, I found a label and a practice in my life that worked for me. And I’m much less concerned with whether I picked the wrong one, than with the fact it took me so long to recognize that it was no longer working and to change it.

    That’s the lesson here. Life is fucking hard, and if there’s something you can do to alleviate the pain, be that wearing certain clothes, or calling yourself a new thing, or injecting cross-sex hormones into your body, then do it. Don’t worry about whether you’re “really” whatever, don’t worry about what it means. You can’t always be worrying about whether the thing that you know is going to bring you happiness is a “mistake” in some larger metaphysical sense. Fuck that.

    I was not born in the wrong body. I am building the body that I want to have. And I love it. I don’t give a single solitary fuck about “supposed to be.” All I care about is that hormones make me happy now. Being called she/her, and a woman makes me happy now. Being Emily makes me happy now. And will that still be true, in a week or a year, or 10? Did I pick the wrong name, the wrong identity? Will I need to change it again later?

    Truly and from the bottom of my heart.

    Who gives a shit.

  • The Insomniac’s Manifesto

    The Insomniac’s Manifesto

    Sound is movement. It cannot exist in one state, only in conversation with the states that have come before it, and the states that will follow. This underpins everything. Remember it.

    1. Music is Human.
      “so much of orthodox recording ideology is about capturing a thing perfectly. And I just was never interested by that because it seems like all of the other ways around that perfect sound are much more, you know, – there’s a vast world of possibilities” -Phil Elverum, The Microphones
      It is important to let imperfections live in your work, especially if you record solo. It’s very easy to want to comp everything perfectly and try to achieve a perfect version of everything, but the fewer constraints you have to try and make everything perfect, the more important it is to allow the human element back into the work. What this looks like varies widely between productions, and even songs, but keep your eyes open for the humanity, and be open to it.
    2. There is No Honor in a Recording Studio
      There’s no such thing as cheating when you’re making a record. There is no such thing as a “raw”, “authentic” way to capture a sound source, because everything from the mic you use to where you place it is production, it is a choice, it is a point of view.
      With this, and with the previous point in mind, there is no moral failing in comping a take, or throwing a bit of melodyne on a background vocal to sweeten it up, or in recording piano to midi and then fixing all the mistakes. Recorded music by its very nature is hyperreality, and there is no honor in maintaining authenticity at the expense of quality. Create the best record possible by any means necessary.
    3. An Album is A Continuous Work
      Nobody would make a movie by shooting a bunch of scenes and then arranging them in an order and shipping the project. Similarly, nobody should record an album by recording a bunch of songs and putting them together. Every song should be placed with intention, and an ear to what comes before and what comes after. Every album, even if not a “concept album” is inherently a narrative, a story, and every decision must be made with this in mind. If commercial considerations — e.g. placing the lead single first on the album — clash with the artistic considerations of what works best with the album, serve the album. Always.
    4. Know What You’re Referencing
      There’s no such thing as music that doesn’t inherently rely on other music, so make sure you know the giants upon whose shoulders you stand. This means music theory; that you should at least sort of understand the engine of the entire system that you’re working within, but also genre; that you should be intimately aware of the tropes and conventions of the genres that you’re building upon, so that you can either intentionally invoke these, or intentionally twist or break them. If you’re lifting musical or lyrical ideas from your own or others work, or sampling audio from another place, consider carefully the meaning of that origin, and how that meaning interacts with your work.
    5. Dynamics are Everything
      Why would you make every song on an album sound the same when you could make them sound different? Why should two verses have the exact same instrumentation and chords when you could subtly substitute or layer? Why should the lyrics of a chorus maintain exact continuity when you could subtly shift the meaning on subsequent repetitions? Continuity has its place — to break a pattern without establishing it first means the break has no impact, after all — but at every opportunity, consider seriously if adding more variety, more interest could be the better choice.
    6. Make Music For The People Who Will Love Your Music
      With every decision you make in the production of an album, and when implementing all of the previous points, aim to create a work that will reward repeat listens. Subtle human elements that can be picked up on when listened to with care. The meaning behind the sequencing of certain songs, what story that tells, and how that story changes after having heard the album all the way through. The reference of other pieces, and what that imparts to those familiar with your body of work, or the works you draw from. The subtle dynamic shifts across a song or an album that only present through intense scrutiny and repeat listening. Create a work that assumes the audience is going to be invested, that they are going to listen to your entire discography, that they are going to play a song on repeat and take in every tiny detail, and create a work that rewards that attention to detail. Refuse to be background noise. Refuse to be wallpaper. Trust and respect your audience, and they will trust and respect you in return.

  • New Year, New Me

    New Year, New Me

    I’ve never been one for new years. Yeah I’ve tried to make resolutions before, and like many of you probably, I’ve always dropped them after like one week. Over the course of my life I’ve learned that the best time to start a thing you’ve been putting off is now.

    No, it wasn’t “when you first thought of the idea”, it wasn’t “the first time you really wanted to do it but then thought of an excuse.” The second best time to start is not now, as in the oft repeated aphorism. The best time, is now.

    I started HRT back in July of this year. I’d been playing with the idea, rotating it in my mind, since as far back as 2021. Of course I would want to start hormones. Just… not right now. The smart thing to do would be to wait and see, right? To make sure.

    To make sure of what? This is the question that I never wanted to ask myself, because of course I knew the answer. I wanted to make sure that I was really trans, that I wasn’t making it all up, that it wasn’t just a phase I was going through as I struggled to cope with the loneliness of graduating college and moving across the country twice, and ending up in a global pandemic in a new state, a new job with no friends and nobody I knew within 400 miles of me.

    And maybe that was a legitimate fear. Maybe there’s a world where a parallel cis version of me has a gender crisis and then immediately starts estrogen, and regrets it. But I doubt it. I don’t think he’d have let it get that far, sure, but also among the handful of actual detransitioners I know, none of them actually regret trying, exploring, and coming back to the conclusion that they are cis. Estrogen doesn’t cause permanent changes right away, after all, and surely a cis version of myself would’ve immediately noticed the effects of the wrong hormone coursing through his veins. The fog slowly, almost imperceptibly settling on his entire world. Increasing difficulty seeing himself in the mirror. Executive dysfunction slowly growing to the point of not being able to get simple tasks done for hours at a time, and of course the slow settling of a constant, hellish depersonalization. The horrible feeling that your life isn’t real, that it can’t be, that it cannot be supposed to feel like this as time slips through your fingers like so much water.

    Of course I know how all this would feel for him, because I experienced all of these things in reverse upon starting estrogen six months ago. And let me be clear for a moment, these things were not instantaneous. I’ve heard from many people that the mental effects of estrogen were immediate, and this was very much not the case for me. I noticed the skin softening, the smell of my body changing subtly, even small breast buds beginning to appear before I ever noticed a mental change. For me, the veil did not lift right away, as many have described, and two months into my regimen, I was terrified I was broken. That something even deeper was wrong with me, and perhaps even that I wasn’t trans after all. After all, doesn’t taking the right hormone immediately fix your brain? Can’t you tell at once that you’ve been putting gasoline in your diesel engine, and shouldn’t the difference be obvious and immediate?

    As it turns out, no. It was September when I got COVID. My second time contracting the virus since the beginning of the pandemic, this time from my Uncle, who got it on a plane despite masking for the entire trip. It was a miserable week, but unlike my first tangle with the virus, I was able to burn my remaining vacation for the year and take the entire duration of my illness off. This allowed me to slope around and do absolutely nothing for a week, and this in turn prevented me from suffering any of the long term physical or cognitive side effects that my first encounter with COVID had left me with. By the time I was back home and two weeks had passed, I was basically back to 100%. But also, something else. I wasn’t just better, I suddenly felt like myself for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long. I basically stopped disassociating altogether, I felt more able to regulate my emotions in a healthy way. Everything just felt… better.

    At the beginning of 2024, I started revisiting the concept of HRT again, with more seriousness. I actually had set up care with an affirming GP back in 2021, but she quit seeing patients altogether shortly after our first appointment. I think she moved on to teach or something, which I can’t blame her for, but I do feel an ache in my chest when I think of it, because I had established care with her specifically with the intention of getting on hormones sometime in the future, and this setback cut me off at the knees for years. Having to find a whole new doctor and go through all the emotionally and (worse) logistically challenging steps to set up care, get an initial assessment done, then broach the topic of HRT seemed insurmountable for a long time. As things got worse for trans people in the public discourse, I shrank further and further away from this. Surely it would be best to wait until after the midterms, right? Surely it would be prudent to wait until we see how the next presidential election might go. Surely it would be smartest to not get on hormones until I’m sure they won’t be ripped away by the next administration right? After all, I’ve gone this long without them, what could be the harm in waiting another few months, another year?

    Right?

    Even with this line of thinking, I did establish care with another affirming GP at the beginning of 2024. Just to stay healthy and leave the door open in case I wanted to go on HRT sometime. Y’know. Later.

    Early 2024 was not a good time for me. I don’t remember much of it now, frankly, and I don’t need to. There are flashes. January felt like an age. The mounting death toll in Gaza and the dull dread of knowing that there wouldn’t be a ceasefire, not soon, not ever. More anti trans bills, more anti trans defectors all the time. Dread. Horror. Sick, dull, screaming nothing.

    I don’t remember what month it was, maybe March. I was deflated, dead, at the end of my rope. I made a silent plea to the universe that something, anything would change.

    And it did.

    The next month, April, I traveled to watch the solar eclipse in totality. It was utterly breathtakingly beautiful. Life changingly beautiful.

    The next month, May, my friend Katthew bullied me (positive) into watching I Saw The TV Glow in theaters. It left me shell shocked and walking around downtown like a husk, eyes staring blankly as I tried to go about my business and pick up pizza for dinner. The waitress who served me was trans. I wonder if she could tell.

    The next month, June, I went to Kentucky and attended my first ever pride, and saw Chappell Roan live. I got really really into her music. I stared at myself in the mirror while After Midnight played on repeat. I knew I had to do something.

    After getting home, I went on my doctor’s portal and hammered out a message. Simple, to the point. I’m experiencing gender dysphoria and I would like feminizing HRT to alleviate this. Send.

    I remember a scene vividly from the next morning. I was stuck in my remote daily meeting at work, half-checked out as usual. Then my phone rang. It said healthcare, and I immediately knew who it was, and what it was about. At the exact same time, two things happened simultaneously. My cat Skitty, menace that he is, dropped his mouse toy in my coffee, soaking everything nearby, and it became my turn to talk in the meeting. Frozen, paralyzed, fucking terrified. The phone stopped ringing.

    There was a time, not very long, but maybe an agonizing fifteen minutes, where I really thought I had missed my chance. Where I was convinced that by missing that call, I had squandered my only opportunity to be happy. It was terrifying, soul crushing, but at the same time I knew it couldn’t be true. Of course I would be able to call back, to reach back out and get back to them. I just wasn’t sure I would have the strength.

    As it turns out, I wouldn’t need to. In the doctor portal, they replied to my message with a request for an appointment. We worked out a time to be able to do it, and I went. And it was fine. And the next day I filled my prescription. July 6th, 2024. An utterly unremarkable day. About a week too late to fall on my real birthday, which I would’ve loved for synchronicity reasons. Two days too late to fall on the 4th of July, which I would’ve loved, to have something to celebrate that day that wasn’t the birth of this sick country in which we live. Two months too early for my Tranniversary. I would’ve loved to have the day I started HRT, the day I started remaking myself into the self I want to be, to be some significant day. But it wasn’t.

    Until it was. Because now July 6th is a significant day. Now it is a day to be celebrated. Now it is my birthday, my independence day, my Tranniversary. Now July 6th is everything.

    The best time to start a thing you’ve been putting off is now. It’s New Years. I’m a woman. I love my life. The best time to start a thing you’ve been putting off is now. The only time to start it is now. Start it now.

    Now.

    this post is brought to you by TRY HRT YOU FUCKING IDIOT