I wrote a post about transphobia which lead to the lovely Lea Mason commenting on my Medium post, thanking me but also educating me on the struggle of trans men as well as trans women. Thankfully, this lead to more conversation and Lea found she could share her story with me. I then asked her if it was okay for me to share it with you, too.
So here it is, some of Lea’s thoughts and feelings along her trans journey (which is still on-going and painful).
Lea’s Story
But in many ways, after living for so long with a repressed and dissociated sense of identity, I am also refreshingly young and exploring my world more fully as my true self. In many ways I need to reclaim my own coming of age – learning to be the kind of adult I actually want to be. And all while self-parenting and maintaining a professional life that once saw me as a man. Herculean effort, I say! Especially as I’m constantly being vilified daily by a powerful segment of society that knows nothing of the real trans experience and has no interest in seeing through their hate and fear!
I’d still rather live in these anxious times with the awareness of transness and the support that does exist, than go back to a time when transness was basically invisible and was naught but a scary and amorphous thing. I will be unraveling the impacts of that erasure and gaslighting the rest of my days, I think. But that’s where stories featuring trans and femme people help! The power of feeling seen and reflected in a positive light!
I had been preparing for major surgery and I was a bit distracted. After a year and a half of waiting, I got my first gender affirming surgery (facial feminization round one) and I have looked and felt like roadkill the past week. Stitches come out today! As I recover, I am starting to see the direction my transition is heading. It’s really exciting and I can already feel a weight of dysphoria lifted!
I have been struggling to build momentum with my voice training. I’ve been learning the tools, but it’s really hard and emotionally challenging work to wrestle with my testosterone deepened vocal cords. But I’m starting to turn a corner and tonight I decided to practice my technique and stamina by reading. And something clicked for me. As I’m reading, and recording snippets and cracking myself up, I started hearing a voice that makes me happy to call mine!
(About her poem) It was written at a hugely impactful moment in my early transition. I had gone to the beautiful rural coastal region where I grew up for the first time since “my egg cracked” (when I finally figured out what was really up with me). I was just starting to come out to the closest people in my life. It was exhilarating and empowering and oh so VERY terrifying. While I was there I started getting these imaginary flashes – seeing my young self back in time, but imagining her as if she had room to explore those feelings and knowings inside herself. What if she had been allowed to grow up as the girl she longed to be seen as? Ah, it was like breaking the bonds of linear time and freeing that young, confused girl from her prison retroactively and letting that in turn unburden me in the present. It was healing. Yes there were tears.
This poem essentially wrote itself as I made the long drive to where I live now. I was still making peace with the fact that trans people like me are able to so effectively repress their identities that their hidden truths may not come out until much much later in life – if ever (sniffle). For several years, I used the fact that I didn’t know I was a girl when I was young as a reason to think I couldn’t be a trans girl. I mean, trans girls all want to wear dresses and KNOW they are girls at an early age! Wasn’t I just the kind of boy who didn’t want to be a boy and only wanted to be a girl because, well honestly, who doesn’t want to be a girl? Lol. They call that “egg thinking/denial”. It can be a powerful force. It can be humorous in retrospect, but it is rooted in survival.
Trans people are so very interesting and diverse in their experiences. I have learned so much about the human psyche on this journey of self discovery and through unpeeling the complex layers of identity repression.
Lea’s Poem
(April 2024)
Young Trans Child
I see you
with your heart overflowing
bright fire in your belly
and arms loaded with
contradictions too big
for a kid too carry.
You bound and scamper
in your wooded habitats
and on the cliffs
at the edge of the big ocean.
Like other beings of mythical
and obscure origin
you found no mirror
that could catch your image
or reflect back
your precious sparkle
and show you who you are.
Your essence went unrecognized,
but you sensed it as an
invisible, unknowable, mysterious
and dangerous force.
Something lurked there
simultaneously
beautiful and shameful.
You quickly learned
that your young truths
threatened everything
and the world around you
was built to shut that down.
For the good of the order
and for your own protection,
you were assigned a personae
and given a lodestone
to point out your life’s path
as determined by the
shape of your genitals.
You didn’t know any better.
Nobody really did.
They didn’t really know
beings like you existed.
Instead you haunted
the margins of their fears.
An abomination.
A joke.
On your own,
you tried to make sense of it all.
You tried to make them proud.
You wanted to belong.
You tried to avoid detection
and the hurt
for the ways you did not conform.
You tried not to see yourself.
Yet, on some misty mornings
as you moved in solitude
you caught glimpses
of your forbidden self.
In stressful times
when self-soothing instincts
brought you silent imaginations
you were visited by
veiled fantasies
of transformation
of being in a different body.
A body that somehow
solved so many of the unsolvable
confusions you faced.
I watch you
my dear one.
You made your way
as best you could.
You squirreled away
so many cherished secrets.
Kept your numerous caches
of wistful imaginings
memories and longings
far apart and hidden.
Even you could not see
their telling totality.
You lovingly stockpiled them
not knowing they would eventually
become your arsenal of resistance
and awakening.
Yet you were oh so careful
not to look directly at those secrets,
to keep them safe from detection
by the endless patrols
of the binary enforcement police
and their pervasive allies.
And I see how you
were ever so cautious not to
spend too much time tending
your precious treasures
lest the longing in your heart
might become too strong
and the shape of your true self
become too clear
and make it impossible
to continue hiding.
Young trans girl
you had to keep yourself alive
in a world that should have
celebrated you.
Instead you survived by
crafting an outer covering.
You invented tools of concealment
no one was there to teach you.
Grey and dull and intricately layered
it served to keep you smothered
and undetected.
You designed gaps and peep holes
so you could breathe
and see out with your own eyes.
And there was a back door.
You did not suffocate yourself.
Or burn out on your own
frustrated fire.
Or drown in depressions
of your watery heart
when the floods rose high.
You kept yourself alive,
though the strain and the drain
often felt like too much
to want to survive
and you collapsed in sobs
that were bigger than
you could make sense of.
Oh Sweetie.
You trusted no one.
Told no one of your
rituals of release and nourishment.
Not even once.
Like times you sought the
electric pulse of the blue dress.
Or when you felt the quiet thrill
of defying manliness
with a certain lightness
in your movements.
And when your spirit slipped out
the hidden back door
of your protective shell
to lay dewy and naked
on the moon bathed hillside
where you remembered
your other name
whispering it to the stars
to the winds
to the trees
and there you fell to peaceful sleep.
Remember my dearest,
how you woke
giddily satisfied
from dreams of knowing
what it is like to be a woman.
Not just any woman
or a social performance
of femininity,
but a fully femme expression
springing from your own
beautiful essence and vitality.
I see you erasing your tracks
as you returned from your
restorative escapades,
letting sadness and
longing for the impossible
sweep across your subtle trails
as you crept back
to your grey shell
where the color of your
aliveness shifted to the margins
not forgotten
not ignored completely
but you pretended
to not know what it meant.
You were at odds
with all you were taught.
All you witnessed.
Do you see how you pretended
yourself a safe identity
and didn’t look closely
at your dreams
or your fears?
Your desires were
dangerous and scary.
See here your fears
and the protective
measures you took:
Hide the damning truths.
Conform enough to keep safe.
Do not show who you really are.
Do not let your guard down.
Do not stand out.
Do not long for something more.
Learn to be alone.
Stay safe.
Many want you dead
or humiliated and broken.
Some will even hunt
beings like you.
Ah, but I see you notice
that your waking life
is not all facade and camouflage.
That you have had real
experiences and relationships
that bring meaning
and richness to your life.
Such a blessing that is!
What would your life be like
without the love of family
and friends and all the
moments of growth
you have experienced?
That is real and important.
A critical key to your well-being.
Hold that close.
And pay attention here
because this is about the
neglected part of you.
About your true experience
of gender
and the ways that gender
folds into everything
in a binary enforced world.
The ways you held yourself back
from your closest relationships
and from yourself.
Ways you haven’t really lived.
This is to bring light
to your shadows
where you have hidden
your effervescent life force.
My dear sweet one,
often the waking world
is cloaked in impenetrable
false desires, illusions and lies.
The insidious harm of this
cannot be overstated.
And then,
sometimes our dreams
bring and surprise us
with the deepest
and clearest truths.
Thank you for keeping
your spirit alive
in the world of your dreams
and not surrendering
your soul to the grayness
of the waking world
that rejected you.
The grayness drains you
of your vitality.
Stunts your growth
even as it keeps you hidden
from persecution
and from your own longings.
It is a dull and heavy
burden to carry
leaving you lonely
and depleted.
Awaken now
my young shimmery being.
It is time to rediscover
and celebrate
the truest truths
that you have known all along.
It is time to put
the pieces together.
To let it all rush in
as the gray walls
collapse and dissolve
around your bright
and shining electric body.
It is ok to be afraid.
It is okay to be brave.
It is ok to feel proud
for the first time.
The world has changed.
You are no longer so alone
or unknowable.
Your truths are beautiful
and others are waiting for you –
those who can see you
and finally reflect back
what you could only ever
imagine and hope for.
You are in fact a magical
mythical creature.
You are the contradiction
the world needs.
Part of the remedy for
society’s collective maladies.
Your skills of concealment
may still be needed.
But do not hide from yourself.
Don’t let yourself be alone.
Find others that
will see and cherish you.
Find ways to express and evolve.
You are a gift
You are beautiful.
You are part of something timeless.
You are loved for who you are.
You are needed.
Remember this.
And step free
S. R. Crawford 