A common experience, though not a universal one, is that of the trans masculine person who hinges their femininity on the imagined “male” future. I’m not transitioning to be a man, they say, but to dress “like a woman” again without being called one. We bribe ourselves with makeup, crop tops, and miniskirts, pulling up pictures of animated male characters or John Cena dressed like a schoolgirl. Misgendering the dreaded punishment for our inept performance, we fling ourselves forward, impatient, though more and more our impatience has to be bitten back, pushed down, because that very impatience is weaponized against us by cis people “just asking questions.” Some of us don’t transition at all, these days, curves and round faces a pox upon our genders. All the unspoken fatphobia, racism, and bioessentialism rears its head when we circle this decision to stay in coercive womanhood, to prevent ourselves from “becoming ugly.” I say “our” not because this is true of me, but because it used to be, only I escaped it. I transitioned from female to male two years after the infamous Transgender Tipping Point and two years before Jesse Singal’s controversial article in the Atlantic, four years before Irreversible Damage and nine years prior to now, coughing up a lung in Lexington, Kentucky, ears ringing with tinnitus as I try to parse out the new languages I’m expected to know by virtue of my manhood. Writing this all out, writing to you. Writing our way into a corner.
THE SILICONE MASK
Riding through the too-warm brownish smear of Northwoods between Minneapolis and my hometown, I had phantom boob pain. I kept looking down at my chest, even rubbing it, frightened by the weight that wasn’t there. My brooding went unnoticed—I had been, since the moment we fit all six feet, one inch of me into that skirt and those heels, uncharacteristically quiet. My sibling, Della, filled the dead air for most of the ride. Pushing down my discomfort was easy if I used the abrasive blare of their chipper voice as my fulcrum. Della lurched, though Mom’s new car—their perfect car, the dream car their husband, our stepfather, facilitated access to—wasn’t itself lurching. It was a smooth ride, one of those recent hybrids with iPads on every dashboard. Ornery, overwhelmed, some part of me wanted to interrupt Mom and Della’s trivia game with some poorly-timed snide remark about how I thought we weren’t supposed to text and drive? What’s this big smartphone you’re piloting, then? There’s been a lot of that in me, lately, a lot of useless, toothless fight. Just below the surface, threatening to boil over, some stubborn urge to quarrel or pick apart every little thing like an old man who’s only now come to terms with his continued existence in a world wholly unrecognizable to the idyll of his blurred and indistinct childhood.
In a way, I am. Coming to terms, I mean, not an old man, not by a long shot. It’ll be another thirty years before I’m even within shouting distance of that particular (honor, burden) category. This old quarrel is as familiar to me as the body I have now is not. I used to be snide 24/7. And I had terrible timing. In retrospect, my sarcasm was a manifestation of my gender dysphoria. At the time it earned me the titles of “smartass,” “bitch,” or my least favorite, “feisty.” This wasn’t an inherent trait. It needed practice. More often than not, my girlhood response to any stress or slight on my honor was to seize up, my entire body a clenched fist, my breath slowing down more, more, as vibrations overtook me and my field of vision narrowed to one perfect, dim point. If I did snap, speak up, whatever, it came out trembling, my own voice too deep, with what my fifth-grade bestie Jason called “multisyllabic words” tumbling from my clumsy tongue like writhing caterpillars. Usually these words were repeated in hushed tones by smirking, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girls who wore Pink and Aeropostale—the multi talented athletes who I called “popular” and “preppy” when hanging out with the burnouts, because those were the words the Disney Channel Original Movie protagonists I thought I was used to describe those girls.
At that time, I wouldn’t describe myself as dysphoric. Nor would I have called myself “popular,” despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary. Other teenagers flocked to me for advice and complicated emotions. Della and I threw elaborate parties for everything from Halloween and New Years, sometimes four times a semester. There are photographs to this day: living rooms chock full of wildly different children from otherwise warring high school factions, grinning mischievously at the camera with my goofy, carefree, brightly-lipsticked mouth flung open in a triumphant smile. The person I had in my head, the girl I thought I was, was lonely and ambitious. She was waiting in her tower (third floor custom-redone bedroom with painted ivory walls and royal blue accents) for someone to notice how exceptional, how clever, how gorgeous she was, for some catastrophe only she could solve with her beauty and wit. She was waiting to be discovered and swept away by the discoverer, rescued from a town she didn’t necessarily hate, but convinced herself she had to hate, because all the girls in all the songs her friends liked hated their dying towns with a passion. All the other girls were bigger than their little towns and she wanted, though she knew she wasn’t, to be just like other girls, but better.
She was a pit inside a peach inside a sheer plastic bag. She was a mask wearing a mask. I thought about her when Della and I, on the floor of our parents’ bathroom, smeared foundation over my glued-down, powdered eyebrows, and I had them take a picture of me for this piece, for this process, because deep in my disquiet, all I could think about was you. All I could think about was you and what I wanted to tell you and what might be worth writing down. Sending the picture to my three boyfriends, all at once, one of them replied: why do you look like you’re wearing a silicone mask of your own face. Bingo.
RED
We weren’t doing my makeup in our childhood home. Our childhood home was down the street, still owned by our mother, but rented out to our mother’s friends for way below asking price. We were playing with makeup in the bathroom of the home our mother bought with their husband, a home to grow old and die in. We moved into this house, all of us, my senior year of high school. It became a house defined by my senior-year pharmaceutical psychosis, the thing that turned me from the mean, fishnet-wearing, high-femme prom queen I was to the dreaded, estranged, caustic man I would become. In my psychotic miasma, I flipped from seventeen to eighteen, coming out on the other side with short hair, a deep voice, and a distinctly unfeminine squareness. This is what I mean when I say blurred and indistinct. The pharmaceuticals didn’t just throw me into a psychotic break, they stole my memories. Only recently have these memories returned in a drunken rush of scrambled vignettes or accusations leveled at me by my siblings. One that echoes in my head often came from Della themself, in response to my trying to insinuate our mother was somehow to blame for my transition starting “late.”
“You were constantly fighting with her about how she was somehow ‘denying’ your femininity,” Della said.
Sure enough, this knocked loose another piece of the puzzle. I had, in fact, thrown a fit like that, when our mother told me I wasn’t allowed to wear red nail polish. Red lipstick was permissible, though the one and only day I wore it to high school, a transfer student who sat with the burnouts said, “You’re wearing red lipstick. Are you trying to get someone to kiss you?” And I was, which was embarrassing, so I stopped, but not without shooting her what I hoped was my dirtiest, most withering stare.
HE WAS MY MOTHER
A trans girlfriend of mine, Ava, once said there is a reality of the body. I’d agree with that, but I’m adding on what I’m sure she’ll approve of, which is that the reality of the body is subject to change. What the body wants, what it craves, what it becomes and what it sees itself as capable of becoming morphs over a cosmic cocktail of age, hormonal balance, illness, (dis)ability, relationship status, sexual activity, hunger, thirst, exhaustion or replenishment. This is partly why there’s such a widespread phenomenon of trans people’s eggs cracking while high—or at least, finding the porosity to say what we mean.
The same year we settled into our mom and stepdad’s house, Della and I went out with some boys—a jittering mix of reservation, rural, and townie—to get crossfaded in the woods. It’s a time we agreed to never retell, but it’s also the time when, draped like a pieta across the lap of a much younger hick, I said “I want to be a boy” aloud for the first time. Despite my altered state and amnesia, I remember this flashbulb moment in staggering clarity. The warmth of Tulane’s lap, his big, callused hands—so violent, normally, so cold—and the Pleiades above us, framed by crisscrossed pitch-black thorny branches, stripped from the winter, barely beginning to bud. I was three shots of cheap mint-flavored vodka deep and hotboxed to beat hell. All I could think about was how, subdued by their substances, the boys I avoided at school, the boys who avoided me, were softer, kinder, more affectionate. Pliant.
One of my awful quirks is I listen to a lot of ASMR, particularly highly gendered, trad-leaning ASMR talking about “femininity” and “feminine energy.” Two ASMRtists, Shoshanna and Maria, describe femininity, the successful performance of femininity, as a blend of confidence, nurturance, caring, and softness. As a result, I get a lot of targeted ads encouraging me to buy into women’s wellness pyramid schemes. One recent ad was by a Black woman with gleaming CW waves and red lipstick doing a dance in a stifled mid century luxury hotel bereft of people. It was just her and what looked like a thousand golden candlestick light bulbs, rococo swirls of gilded furniture and red upholstery behind her. The text over her body read “Signs you’re with a feminized man.” Among these signs were “he is misogynist.” The red-mouthed woman later went on to say a “feminized man” exists in a state of imbalance, because feminine energy is “receptive” while masculine energy is “active.” Back to the woods with me, for a moment—
Tulane cradled my head in his hands, slack-jawed and squinting in the dark. After a while, his voice crackled through like dry leaves. “Why do you want to be a boy?”
“No,” I said, slowly. “I don’t think… maybe want is the wrong word. Maybe I am a boy.”
His callused thumbs circled my temples slowly and I melted into his touch. There was nothing romantic or sexual about it. Instead, I felt mothered, the swell of his unformed belly firm on my ear, the earthen, loamy scent of him my anchor as my mind drifted away into the Pleiades. In the world of these women, these women who draw such harsh lines between divine masculine and divine feminine, Tulane was feminine; his buzzcut, oversized grey tee, rhinoceros-textured knees notwithstanding. He received me in my boyhood. He midwifed me. In the morning, we would be enemies again, but that night, in our binary world, he was my mother and I his son.
I’M REALLY GOOD AT IT
One of the strangest things about dysphoria is the sheer ubiquitousness of it. The cis women I listen to to fall asleep often repeat to themselves, “I am feminine. I am feminine,” in quiet, frenzied affirmation, combing their manicured fingers through their straightened hair, a wild gleam in their eyes for a split second. Then, laughing breathily, they say this performance is not for men at all, but for other women. For their brand. For themselves.
When I was a girl, I held a similar view. Our mom wanted me to follow in their footsteps and be a model. My eyebrows were going to be the next big thing, they said. They made me swear not to over pluck them, not even when the other girls at school called me “unibrow” or told me I looked like a boy. Sure enough, they were right, and sitting in gay Tuscarora makeup artist Mikey Elliott’s chair at the inaugural Indigenous Fashion Week, Toronto, years later, people kept coming by to shower those same eyebrows in praise. I bet you get this a lot, they’d say, but I would kill to look like you.
This was the spring of 2018. Mikey cradled my head in his hands, tilting my chin back and forth, admiring his work.
“Have you ever considered drag?” he asked lightly, sharp eyes carefully assessing the bejeweled green arc of my eyelids.
“No,” I said, laughing. “Or, maybe.”
In a single question, I realized I’d made it. I’d reached the mythic benchmark so many other trans masculine people only dreamed of. I was a beautiful boy. I could get away with anything. Of course, ten minutes later, one of the cisgender, heterosexual stylists walked in on me changing, saw my boobs, and ran out telling everyone my open secret. Within the day, everyone was tripping over my pronouns or grilling me on what I’d “started” as. So it goes.
Deep into the pandemic, we were all living together—Dad, Della, Ava, our youngest brother, Misko, and Della’s then-partner, when Della and Ava got into a discussion about gender and gendered performance. At the time, Della still called themself a “girl,” used she/her pronouns, and wanted nothing more than to be a housewife to their partner, a cis man who offered to pay for a house for them so they could focus on their art while he focused on language revitalization. It’s the proverbial Indigenous fantasy—one man, one woman, one decolonial-ass homestead—and for a time, we all believed it was Della’s destiny. Then Della said to Ava, “I’m not necessarily attached to being a woman. It’s just that I’m really good at it. I put on the costume and people like the costume so I keep it up.”
Ava, tilting her head, gently said, “That sounds familiar.”
ONLY FEMMES
On the wormy brown rug of the flesh-tiled bathroom, Della pulled up a YouTube video by TikTok famous drag queen Plastique Tiara, the only professional performer they could think of off the top of their head with my thick eyebrows. She held up a bright purple Elmer’s glue stick in front of her neon backdrop and began to coat the bristles of her black brows with it, quipping at the speed of light. I copied her motions robotically, my heart covered in a layer of bubble wrap as I struggled to understand why I wasn’t happy with this harebrained scheme. Crashing drag brunch was one thing, sneaking me into drag brunch as a “performer” was a whole different kettle of fish. I wanted to pipe up and suggest they just call the venue—it was a Holly Dolly Christmas Party at Roxy’s Cabaret, and while Mom and Della already had their tickets, the website said they were all sold out—but when we Keahna types get an idea in our head, we need to see it through, no matter how chaotic or ridiculous it is.
Gluey brows furrowed, I kept interrogating myself as to why I wasn’t pleased to be in women’s clothing. It had been a new development in my transition, two years after top surgery, almost a decade on T. It used to be I joked I was socially male, professionally nonbinary, because black tie was “boring” and disingenuously claiming they/them opened up a whole world of cozy (read: lazy) formalwear. Since upping my dose from point-two to point-four, however, I found myself staring wistfully at the bright pink, opaque storefront of Christopher Schafer Clothier in Fells Point, imagining hemorrhaging my finances for a three-piece suit to wear on my next red carpet. I wore slacks semi-regularly and had an overwhelming desire to age up my wardrobe the closer I inched to thirty. Even my makeup, which I’d had to rebuy in the summer of ‘23 after a freak viral infection, went largely untouched.
Della’s spidery hands pushed another glob of brown foundation over my face as they tried to maintain our conversation, before they broke in the middle of saying “and,” dissolving into giggles as they spluttered, “You look like the peanut butter baby.”
Just like that, I was back in my body, laughing uncontrollably with them, the bubble wrap ripped from my meaty, raw heart.
You see, Della might be my best friend in the entire world. A few years after the lockdowns lifted, Indigenous Fashion Week rebranded as Indigenous Fashion Arts, and it was Della’s turn to fly out and be misgendered for the sake of decolonial luxury. In my mind, we look almost identical, but people seem to receive us differently regardless, or assume we’re not related at all. That being said, we’re both conscripted into masculinity or femininity depending on where we navigate, who desires us, who we’ve pissed off. A cis-het lover of Della’s once described his attraction as being to “only femmes,” while Della’s current partner, Grant, is unwavering in his description of Della as his “husband.” Sometimes I look at Della and think I can see who I might have been if I never transitioned, but even that’s untrue. Della is Della. They’re their own person. They listen to Dolly Parton religiously and their favorite color is pink. They live in the woods with a shotgun, or out of their car armed with a brick.
As they put the finishing touches on my stubborn face, I pulled a blonde wig over my scalp, then a cowboy hat over that. Seeing my reflection reminded me of the scene in Stone Butch Blues when the drag queens and trans women convince one of the butch men to dress up, too, and Jess muses that they can’t manage to gender him as “she” even in drag, that he just looks like a man in a dress. Disembodied, the girl in the mirror is no kind of girl at all, but a projection of a girl. Ten years ago, in this hallway, bronzer on my cheekbones, grey eyeliner dividing my eyelids like Twiggy, I hyped myself up for my last year of school. Now an adult man, I felt the same kind of falsified bluster, willing bravery as we stepped out into the car, into the bright Northern Christmastime air—
IT’S TIME TO SWIM
In the windowless, smoke-machine pumped darkness of Roxy’s Cabaret, the spotlight finds the three of us, gussied up in our blonde wigs, Mother and Sons representing three distinct Dollies in the Parton arc of human history. The hostess of the Holly Dolly Christmas Show beckons us up on stage. Hundreds of eyes on us, expectant, assessing, a little annoyed. When I stand, my rectangular body tries to sway like a woman, my suede skirt hugging my planar hips as I leave my body and hover above, peering down at my bright white cowboy (girl?) hat, the blonde curls. The hostess asks for our names and I feel we’ve joined the fae.
“Tish.”
“Della.”
“Frankie,” my voice says, but I’m not here. I’m somewhere in the smoke, watching my brother and I stand by our mother as they ham it up.
“You’re Mom?” the hostess asks.
“I’m the mom,” our mother says.
“You’ve got great tits,” the hostess says, and my mother preens. Everyone applauds.
The hostess gives us three copies of Good Lookin’ Cookin’ by Dolly and Rachel Parton. I think about femininity as food, as the home I want to make for my partners and I. I think about my mom and my brother and my brother’s husband, careening through the gendered hall of mirrors we inhabit. I think, especially, about language revitalization, how in Anishinaabemowin, we have no gendered pronouns. There’s just niin (me), giin (you), and wiin (us or them).
Dolly’s relationship to gender is one of excess. It’s perhaps her most famous anecdote, the one about the sex worker she pointed at when she was a child, asking her mother who that lady was.
“Aw, she’s just trash,” her mother had said. And Dolly recounts it, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up. Trash.”
This hierarchical awareness and the decision to move beyond it lays at the root of Dolly’s career. Her sincerity guides her songwriting, whether she’s singing about a little girl and her puppy dying of starvation, a young woman murdered by her lover, or us, the listeners, telling us that all that matters is we be kind and treat each other well. Perhaps that’s what draws drag queens toward her image–there is everything in it. The pretty and the ugly. The monstrous and the divine.
When I strip out of my Dolly costume and return to my slovenly masculine form, walking through the department store sprawl of Loring Park, Minneapolis, I catch the eyes of a redneck who looks a little too much like Tulane. We hold each other there for a moment, his thin mouth quirking up into an uncertain grin. I mirror it, pressing my tongue into one of my canines, before I look away. I don’t like these slats over my eyes, the ones manhood put there, nor do I like the threat of annihilation when I open them. Dolly has something for me, here. She has already written about all of it. She’s lived it, a thousand lives a hundred thousand times, so I don’t have to feel so alone when it’s my turn.
Now I’m back in Kentucky, ignoring Grindr notifications, as the polar vortex closes in around us. There’s a pool in our hotel and I haven’t brought a single swimsuit. The boys went out and bought Juicy Couture booty shorts from the local TJ Maxx before everything closed. Della’s a huge fan of Juicy Couture. Della also has a way about them. They’re able to rope you into just about anything. Since coming out as nonbinary, they carry themselves differently. They sort of cut through the air or buzz in place like a live wire. They’ve laid out the Juicy booty shorts on the bed in a clean, flat row. Maybe femininity is just eighty percent performance and twenty percent your sense of accomplishment at it. I think of the bubble wrap around my heart every time I have to wear something even a little womanly and glance over at where Grant is standing by the window, watching the snow fall.
“How do I end this?” I ask, not really expecting an answer. “It’s the High Femme piece.”
Grant looks at me like a mischievous animal, Della folding clothes at the base of the bed. In Grant’s odd, lilting, childish voice, he says, “You should say Goodbye Femme. And close the laptop. And put on the Juicy. It’s time to swim.”
