J & C & D

J. I learned powerful habits of hiding, drifted away from connection, light and love. Told by nearly everyone if I got too close to what I was and what I wanted, it would cost all of these. So I grew believing I would deserve to lose them. False beliefs shaped me into reflexive hiding dressed up as truth, protective misdirection, sheltering distance. I learned to safely remove myself from others because to know me was to be harmed by some wrongness. But I love truth telling! Thrilled and joyful to be honest, I celebrate clarity and transparency, adore how speaking truths stiffens my spine! Declarations and unashamed directness gives me courage, and best of all I love how reality and honesty uplift other people. These contradictions needed resolution, because trying to hold them could harm even more people. I grieve sometimes, thinking about how brave I wasn’t. How I could say I was bisexual but not live it, how I could celebrate my children’s transitions while putting off my own. But after decades and tiny repeated efforts, I’ve built a practice of being myself. This had a cost: heartbreaks, material losses, discomfort, and a life mission to spend the rest being honest and direct without fail. The reward has been not just joy beyond measure, but access to all my feelings: sorrow, grief, confidence, love. I grew up in a time and place when queerness was forbidden, unspeakable, wholly other. I live now with ferocity and certainty, outspoken, wholly connected. It’s been family who lit my way: my partners, my chosen families, and most of all my children. They stepped into their queer trans lives with a courage and certainty that makes me sure we’ve broken the silence forevermore and I can’t wait to live the rest of our lives being exactly who we are. C. There’s no amount of my transness that can be separated from my family. Our identities feel intertwined, that in some capacity I would not be growing into the woman I am without them, even more so than I might be influenced in a more “standard” family. My transition would not be the same had I not seen the man my brother was becoming, the way that he came into his own and found himself is something that I will always look up to. My transition would not be the same if I didn’t have my father uplifting me onto her shoulders, sharing in my experience and helping me press onwards through it. My transition would not be the same if I didn’t have my mother to help me through hardship and pain, and if she did not similarly raise me higher as I found the footing of who I am. They’re fundamentally wired into who I am as a trans woman, to look at their impact on me in any other way feels disingenuous. I think that’s what trans joy is to me first and foremost. I’m extraordinary lucky to be given this life of unending support and care from everyone around me. It’s a constant reminder of what I’m fighting for when I act to try and be seen, and I hope to let that fire carry me on in life as I come to support others.