The Trans Rubicon

Hi, it’s been a long time, blog. I do believe this is a better home for my stuff than most venues, and as I start doing real writing more, I expect this place to be more active again. The below was written for an Austin spoken word sexuality confessional performance event. It appears I will likely be fleeing Austin before said event has a chance to put me on stage. The core intent is “wake up cis people”, and to cut through how medicalized and sterile the discussion about something that is really very visceral has become (and I believe this even more strongly after watching 90% of the House floor debate on TX SB 14), but everything below is felt in the bottom of my heart. I am publishing it today, under my true name, Zoë Michelle Schirmer, because having this in the world before I leave is important. I suspect it will be reworked into a call for action to protect trans people in Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and the like at some point after I have removed myself to safety. But for now, here is the original piece, edited for clarity and without word limit constraints.

Hi everyone.  I’m saying all of this to you at an especially critical moment in the lives of trans people, and trans Texans in particular.  This legislative session, we have seen more than 100 bills in Texas alone that are designed to negatively affect the lives of people like me.  Two of the most egregious of them have been sent to the governor’s desk.  We have seen the state that contains my hometown, St. Louis, Missouri, enact a law that functionally bans medical transition for all but a very small number of people.  We are going to discuss who I am, where I came from, and come back around to what this all means for me, and really, for any trans person who has had the emotional vulnerability to speak with me on this.  It’s going to be a bit of a ride, so please be ready.  There will be a trigger warning moment, and I will give advance notice when it comes.

So, let’s begin near the end.  Let’s talk about what actually transitioning felt like.  A typical estrogen transition will start with three months of a testosterone blocker, then followed by the addition of estradiol, the form of estrogen associated with most of the effects we know about.  I opted, instead, to start with the lowest effective dose of estradiol, only.  I was pretty adamant that I wasn’t “trans”, I was “nonbinary”, and that I didn’t want big changes.  I was just going to grow some breast tissue, maybe get a little bit of fat redistribution, maybe slow the signs of male aging that I was starting to see on my face.  

What happened, instead, was exactly the metaphor that the Wachowskis intended when they wrote the red pill metaphor in the Matrix.  The veil that I had been living under was suddenly and irrevocably pulled back.  Within the first week, I was freed from the tyranny of my dick screaming at me for no reason all of the time.  I felt my emotions start to shift and change – anger was the first noticeable one, evolving from an emotion that was grounded in a sudden, furious reactive response, quick to come and quick to leave; into one that built slowly and simmering, but once activated, was lodged into the my brain as a stew of *can’t even*.  Sadness  built several new layers and depths.  Joy, too, seemed to split into graded emotions, the three would mix together in complex ways.  My sense of smell deepened.  Suddenly, different flowers smelled different, rather than just different intensities of “flower.”  My tolerance for an old catbox vanished.

And that’s before we even get into the sexual response and function changes that developed.  From the inside, it really is like one went and installed female firmware everywhere in the system. And while the physical blossoming out happened over months and years and is not done yet, the mental and emotional effects were all the way there in weeks. Want to seduce me? The typical “hey, sex exists” approach you would use with a man is going to fall flat. Want to arouse me? You’re prooooooobably going to have to be slightly better at teasing than simply reaching down my pants and expecting something that is not a dangly noodle at minute one. I have to keep mental presence and concentration to keep everything engaged and building, but hey, when we get there, the upper limits of delight are pretty much limited by my ability to not faint. And like, all of this is me bucking the trend of the transfemme bottom.  Like, I’m an actual vers non-op transfemine person, and not just a bottom.  And still, fucking me is like the above

But, more than anything, the core change during transition is that I suddenly felt, from the very beginning, a sense of grounding with myself, and a sense of harmony with my emotions and my body.  Suddenly, I was not fighting to control my emotions in order to act in a not-maladaptive way.  I was setting better boundaries at work and at home.  Within a year, I had changed my regimen from pills to injections, increased my dose to a full transition dose, and maintained my blood hormone levels at the same levels as a cis woman’s.   So, that’s the first warning – feel free to listen to the siren’s call to the sea, but beware, lest you find out that you were, in fact, a mermaid that had given up her voice all along.

So, let’s zoom back a little bit.  Like 15 years.  I’m in Austin, and I’m spending my first social time with actual trans people.  I’ve long been openly bisexual, and certainly thought that was the bottom of my queerness.  But, looking at these women, there was this intense feeling of being drawn in, but tinged together with a nearly insurmountable distance.  It was absolutely a sense of not daring to fly too close to the sun.  Looking back it’s almost inconceivable that I was unable to recognize that my insides were going “they learned how to girl and so can you!,” and that this push/pull I was feeling had nothing to do with these other people, it was ME.  

By this point, I had been playing nearly every video game I touched as a female character.  My music choices had long ago been nearly totally dominated by lesbian folk music.  In my 85:15 male/female ratio graduate program, i somehow always ended up socializing with all of the women.  And still, if you challenged me on any of this, maybe asking me if I had thought about, “hey, maybe you’re not a boy”, I would have responded with a big long speech about how gender roles are a thing that should be torn down and that we should all dress and act how we want, and gender should die.  I still believe a lot of this, but at the same time, I think what this whole journey has taught me is that, in fact, **gender is so very important, at least to many of us**.  Maybe it makes no sense to wall off the forest from the plains, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t creatures native to both places out there.

And that brings me to my next lesson: if you are looking at me, dear totally cisgender male audience member, and you are like “I can’t believe how they look up there in that corset, how confident, I could never do that,” with a combination of admiration and envy.  I hesitate to say this, and wouldn’t to your face, but it is probably time to go and find a gender therapist or an informed consent gender clinic and to ask them if Titty Skittles™ are right for you.

Ok, now we’re at the point where I”m going to give an extreme trigger warning. We’re going to talk about the worst things that ever happened to me. I’m going to count to ten. Do what you need to do to extract yourselves.  I will raise my fist when we are clear. So, let’s go back some more years, when I was in my early 20s, I was lanky and young and had great skin, and was newly out as bi, and the world definitely saw me  twink than a baby tran.  

At this point, as people in their early 20s are prone to do, and ones with undiagnosed and unconscious gender dysphoria are even more prone to do, I was not one to especially watch out for my safety.  This ended in me being roofied and abducted from a 4^th street (for the unaware, this is where the gay bars in Austin, TX are) establishment. I woke up in a stranger’s bed. I saw the smile on his face as he detailed what he was going to enjoy. I remember dissociating  and staring down at the layout of the room, at his body and mine. I remember, still, the sensations of touch from that awful night and morning, pieced together in patchwork as they came back over the next year. I remember this man’s roommate sitting in the breakfast nook noshing on spaghetti casually looking over at me while I emerged half naked and broken from the next room. I remember sitting in that car going back to the city, and getting dumped off in west campus like nothing had happened.  “Here, kid.  Done with you, have a life.”  And, of course, I remember hitting “refresh”, over and over, on the web browser, waiting for the results of the HIV test to come back.  This was before truvada was widely available, after all.

In many ways, my life cleaves into a before and after of this event. The trauma of this time, plus all of the sublimated dysphoria ended in a pretty severe and escalating alcohol problem.  I made very bad relationship choices.  I lost the ability to set boundaries with partners entirely, really.  My graduate research stuffered.  It was a large pile of problems that stacked on top of each other and caused me to hurt everyone around me.  Jumping back to today, it took so much time and compassion from my current partners to even start to unravel all of the damage from this period, and learn how to self-advocate, before I could even start to dig at the truths below.

In all, take it from me that I am not speaking about this abstractly or flippantly. I’m not some gamergater making a metaphor in the next statement. This is direct, fucking, first-hand knowledge, held in my heart.  <RAISE HAND>

Today, in Texas, we have a wide range of laws about medical transition, some, like sb 1029, basically outright banning it for everyone, others, like sb14, currently on the governor’s desk, are limited to children.  We have also seen our governor and attorney general act in very hostile ways toward trans people in the past, and there is no reason to believe they could not follow Missouri or Florida officials’ lead.  

In the face of this, I’ve been working to find a metaphor strong enough to tell you what staring at forced detransition feels like as I pack up my life to go somewhere safe, and what that feels like for the people that are stuck here.  All I can come up with is saying, if you gave me a contract, and on one hand, you had “one day each year, for the rest of your life, you will have another abduction rape”, and on the other hand, I am offered to live out the rest of my life detransitioned, I would choose the first option without second thought. I don’t think I’d be alone, hearing the way that this is talked about in trans peoples’ private spaces. We can make this as abstract as we want, we can hide the terms in abstract medical language, but for those of us who live in these bodies, it is not some medical curiosity. It. is. Our. Lives. This is the depth of this to me.  To us.  Forced detransition is torture, it is death, it is genocide. And a little bit of that, just until you turn 18, is. The. fucking. Same.  If you know who you are, you know who you are.  And no amount of torture changes that.  We should be helping people know who they are, not putting barriers in front of their actualization.

Thank you for (listening/reading).  Trans rights are human rights.  None of this ends until there is a universal right to bodily autonomy including the right to abortion, the right to transition, the right to informed consent health care, and freedom from sexual assault and domestic violence.