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Orion

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Trans...passing....???

Tell me, baby, baby, do I walk like a boy?Do I speak like a boy? Do I stand like a boy?Sorry, babe, you keep asking, do I kiss like a boy?Should I spit like a boy? May I fuck other boys?Tell me, baby, baby, do I walk like a boy?Do I speak like a boy? Do I stand like a boy?Sorry, babe, you keep asking, do I kiss like a boy?Should I spit like a boy? May I fuck other boys?Tell me, baby, baby - Lucky Love, Masculinity

I am most definitely, unequivocally, a trans-femme. I have been on HRT for about 18 months now and am so very happy about this. I am also learning about the intricacies of makeup, how to do makeup so you just look pretty as opposed to, say, drag makeup. Do I pass? I think I do some of the time. The point of this post is to interrogate ideas about passing, the male gaze, and the unduly heavy burden transwomen/femmes face with unrealistic beauty standards.

First of all, I think I am at one of the cruelest stages of transitioning, the one where people can clock you're different, not male presenting, but are going to project a male identity onto you anyways. "Oh look hahaha its a man wearing makeup." Is the vibe I get, sometimes. It is a disheartening time and one I think every trans person, mtf, or ftm, faces at some point. I have become something of an expert, or at least obsessed with, reading the looks on mens faces when they pass me on the street or I'm in public. I watch their darting eyes, as I feel them consuming my flesh. I catch grimaces, I catch interest, hate, attraction, even? Sometimes, nothing, which I prefer.

I feel as though I have become enslaved to the male gaze in such a way that I am totally preoccupied with passing. Logically, I know my goal isn't to pass for men. It's to feel comfortable, beautiful, and whole in my own body. Nevertheless, I scour my face for flaws. I don't grow much facial hair now, but I pluck even the most miniscule of hairs on my chin and upper lip, laser them, the whole nine yards really. I do vocal training too. I analyze my jawline, browline, the extensive shape of my face and do my makeup every morning at around 5:30-6:00 AM. I want to say I do it for me, and it's true, I do. I love makeup, I love experimenting and making myself look like an ethereal little alien princess, but as soon as I am out the door, I am checking myself in every reflection, do I pass? Am I pretty? And I am again scanning, surveying, the implacable faces of the men I walk by, as though I am handing them a quiz, does she look like someone you'd want to fuck?

Contributing to this anxious preoccupation of mine is AI. There exist so many tools by which one can see if they "pass" according to a series of machine learning algorithms trained on pictures of cis people. Visage, Nyckel, and FaceApp are all examples I have used. Visage is one I frequent quite a lot, as it feels more like a professionally developed system. Of course, these apps and pages are all inherently flawed: they are trained on white cis people, are largely contingent on the lighting, and play into the hand of a gender binary. Nevertheless, at work, or at home, I find myself visiting them to see how I am doing. But, I do have an obsessive personality, so there is that to consider. I am not miserable, but more or less fascinated by what makes something feminine or masculine.

I think there is a lot of pressure to pass. Not just from a safety perspective, to be left alone, but also from trans influencers. My god, I was following a lot of them and had to take a break. Like I am happy for them, but soooo much content just seems geared towards being perceived as hot, despite being trans. "Oh look at me, I'm so sexy and skinny, bet you thought I was just a cis girl, I'm actually trans." Like obviously, this content is for men to fulfill some kind of Madonna-whore misogyny complex in some way. I compare myself to a lot of these influencers, see their videos and look at myself in the mirror, will I ever be as pretty? I can't truly say what the motivation is behind a lot of influencer content, but it impacts all of us in some way and that is how I tend to view it sometimes. But there you go, trans-women face the same kind of unrealistic beauty standards cis women face. Big surprise.

I also barely know any transwomen who even look anything remotely like these influencers. Like not all of us have the ability to get a breast augmentation, and FFS. People are so lucky if they can get these things honestly, otherwise most of us are stuck with what we've got. And I so seldom see anyone appreciate a trans person's natural beauty as opposed to insisting you must do x, y, and z in order to reach this bar for beauty. But hey, if I could get FFS, I would, not gonna lie, so no shame. But, there is something to be said about the fact that influencers have sometimes had work done and comparing ourselves to that is not helpful in any way.

So much trans content these days feels as though it's never about being trans or what that means to the individual. And I'm not saying all trans content has to be about being trans. But, it mostly appears to me as content to be seen by men, to inspire rage, or lust. And that's fine, we love rage bating transphobes, but damn, I don't feel represented by most of these women.

There are of course influencers with their tutorials, stories, and what have you as well which is great. But, that doesn't evade the fact that much of this influencer content seems to be focused on the binary itself. Are we as trans people merely transitioning to be perceived as cis women or men? To simply exist on the opposite end of a gender binary generated and sustained by colonizer supremacy and patriarchal narratives (omg im so #woke)? I can't say, everyone's transition is different. For me, I don't want to be a cis girl. If I had to describe it for myself, I'd say I want to exist in a third non-Euclidean dimension that renders me as some kind of a femme fae alien creature.

But, anyways, its time to start my makeup routine. Trans people, passing or not, are fcking angelic beings who I believe are absolutely gods gift to this planet and passing is overrated. I love you.

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Self harm is so...like...weirdly queer

A little trigger warning here, I want to talk about self harm. It recently appeared back again in my life, my adult life. I think it just feels good to express what it means to me, since it is so prevalent in queer culture and basically everyone I know has bodies littered with scars from cutting, including myself. Also, disclaimer before anyone gets mad about the title: plenty of non queer people self harm and self harm is clearly not a prerequisite to being queer. Also, not all queers self harm. Self harm exists in many many forms as well. I just happen to think that a lot of queer people tend to do this in one shape or another and the reasons for it are many and I hope someone studies the sociological significance of this one day if they haven't done so already.

Self harm, attention seeking? Manipulative? Dramatic? Pathetic? Why do we do it?

When I first self harmed, I was a little boy, probably around ages 11-13. Also, while I did not know how to vocalize anything as I was a child, I was certainly a closeted queer kid. I can't remember the specific age, but I remember how I did it. I got in trouble with my parents, I think it could have been something porn related, because it was right around the time smartphones with internet access were becoming a thing and I was so filled with guilt and shame that I probably told them about my lascivious preteen/teenage activities. So, I went to the bathroom and punched myself in the face until I was bleeding out everywhere. I think this kickstarted something in me for sure. It felt somehow pacifying seeing my blood and sanctifying knowing I had punished myself. It felt as though it was a fitting judgement for my sins and perhaps an expiation for my disgusting little crime. There was blood everywhere too. My parents were mortified. Maybe, I wanted them to feel bad, or to see how bad I felt.

I ask why we do it? And I think I at least know why I do it now and did it then. Some years had passed from my first event and then my parents were getting divorced and I felt so horribly lonely all the time. So, at ages 16-17 I started cutting. People noticed and I got made fun of a little bit by the other teens in my pathetically small high school. I never felt as though I wanted people to know I was doing this or that I was too much of a coward to k!ll myself. When I held a blade to my skin and let it slide, it felt like control. I was in control of the pain I felt. I could for a brief moment be lost in that pain, be lost in the warmth of my own blood, and the bitter sting at the end. Then I could look and see my wounds and feel both shame for other people for seeing what I had done, but pride in knowing that I was the one who did that. For once, my life was in my hands.

I tried keeping it a secret, but that was hard in high school, wearing gauze and bandages in our physical education class over my wrists wasn't exactly discreet. My parents caught on and I went to a psychiatrist who did little to help me besides prescribe me a slew of antidepressants that I hated. Once I left the house, it stopped for a little while.

It was in the summer of my sophomore year of college in Redding CA, where my cutting, su!c1dal ideation, and depression were at their zenith. I was living with a friend who could not stand to be around me as I must have been quite the drag to deal with, he was gone all the time. I had a little engineering technician job and would get home, binge eat a pint of rocky road ice cream, chain smoke cigarettes on the patio, then, using a somewhat rusted scalpel I had stolen from the biology department, cut the living shit out of my thighs. My god, it was a patchwork of criss crossing blood lines and gashes I could have probably used stitches for. My roommate told me "I can't even look at you anymore, it's just so bad," he said when he saw my torn up legs one day while we were hanging out. I'd sit in our room, looking at a poster of Lana Del Rey that he had, and would cut and cut and cut and then sometimes paint with the blood which felt somehow sacred.

One day, I got home and all the knives in the drawers were missing, as were the guns, since this was Redding CA, and he was a conservative hunter type of guy. Oh well, I thought. It was my birthday too, all alone, with my ice cream and my show. But, long story short, the cops came, on my birthday, and took me to the psych ward. It turned out, my roommate had found my journal where I wrote my little, umm how to say, "death notes," I had a few drafts of these were I ever to need to leave one. Lo and behold, I went home later that summer, back to the psychiatrist.

Well, that was that. I had cut a few times after that summer but it was fairly isolated and marginal. I found new ways to cope and to indulge my pain. My body is not only covered in scars, but tattoos over those scars. Piercings as well. But, it doesn't quite feel like enough, these artistic expressions of both love and the painstaking process of manufacturing them.

I'm an adult now, a queer adult in their late twenties, who was always queer at heart, who feels like their life is beyond their control. I think it's because unlike my parents, or many of the neurotypical people around me, I have never imagined myself getting older. I never thought I would make it to the age I am now. But here we are. I can barely see what forty or fifty looks like for me because it feels almost miraculous that I made it this far.

I am an alien trans femme is how I would describe myself now, who has a little BPD flair. Alien, because I don't really want to look like or be perceived as a cis woman as many transwomen appear to want to be, but I am certainly on feminizing hormones. I find that the reasons so many queer people self harm is perhaps a means to control some aspect of identity that is forced upon them. You will be a man or a woman, your experience is just a phase, you don't understand yourself. And so self harm becomes a means by which we can control the narrative of the pain surrounding us. So much of our lives, our identities, our autonomy, feels so entirely robbed by a society who insists on projecting its own ideas of who we are supposed to be onto us.

So, self harm isn't supposed to be some attention seeking melodrama we want you to see so we can have your sympathy, it's precisely because you don't see us that we inflict this pain upon ourselves. And I wish that I could say oh, being on HRT has made everything better. It has perhaps just made me more aware of the depths of my own feelings in a way that was not previously accessible to me, which I do love. And, I can say, I feel more comfortable in my body than ever before, so, if you're trans and reading this, IT IS WORTH IT.

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Uh oh she's borderline again

It's so interesting to have BPD, like in a tragic kind of way. One minute it feels like you are soaring with someone who you love and adore and the days just melt away. It almost feels like some sort of manic state, this level of euphoria, then, it all comes crashing down in this cataclysmic spiral. I moved to a new country and found a partner I adore and, honestly, after having dealt with so much transphobia and what not in this place, they have become one of the only things I love here.

Well, they're leaving soon. The days of being together are drawing to a close and then we will have to navigate the logistical and emotional complexities of long distance. I don't really feel like long distance relationships are particularly ideal for BPD folks, tbh. Not to mention, my glorious ✨trust issues✨. It sort of make me want to fly off the handle a bit, the whole abandonment trigger thing. Like I just want to drink to oblivion, have abunch of random sex with strangers, and self harm. The self harm thing is another little quirk of mine, I am sure many people relate to, which started at like age 13 I think. I'll write about this somewhere else I think since its not within the scope of this right meow.

Sometimes, I just wish I could be my own girlfriend. Let me preface this with I know no one is going to ever be like this or do this for me and it would be insane of me to expect this in another person, but it would just be so nice to have a partner who wants to orient their life towards mine in someway. Where I can really, truly, tell that our connection is so important to them, such that they actually want to make real, feasible, and tangible plans to be with me and also accomodate my needs in a meaningful way. I know that I would for them. But, hey, that's just me, and that's why I wish I could just clone myself. Then again, everyone has their own plans and agendas and goals and more often than not, they don't align, its just the way of the world I guess.

I feel things so deeply and intensely sometimes, I find it hard for my heart to keep up with it. I feel like all my relationships become some kind of tragedy and my heart gets shattered into smaller and smaller pieces each time, to where I am picking up dust and trying to glue it together again. OH WELL little baby. How very very sad. L O L. See what I mean, so over dramatic, so borderline. Everytime I say that word, it makes me think of the lyrics in the Tame Impala song:

Gone a little far Gone a little far this time with something How was I to know? How was I to know this high came rushing?

We're on the borderline Dangerously fine and unforgiving Possibly a sign I'm gonna have the strangest night on Sunday

I dont think its about having BPD, but it feels relatable nonetheless. Like, I do go too far. I assume the absolute worst thing is going to happen because I am afraid of being abandoned so I do some stupid shit or internalize everything and ruin my entire day. I imagine some horrid scenario (sometimes tho, I have been right with imagining things and it leads me to believe I have a 6th sense for bullshit) and it just makes me look so insane. And I am dangerously fine ha jk, dont be mad. And then, we're on the borderline, between psychosis and neurosis and completely splitting.

Nevertheless, I am happy in some ways to be like this. To be able to cry and feel things so heavily. To be so driven to love and be loved. To be intense. I think so much of our dating culture is centered around detachment and avoidant people are so often idealized. I think they are a huge draw to BPD people because maybe we wish we could be so chill/non-chalant and not obessive/clingy little freaks, and I say that lovingly.

Oh well, I guess this little storm will pass, I'll be cringed out by what I thought or said, or who knows, maybe we will cascade down to yet another rock bottom of emotional despair?

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Optical microscope shot of Ti 64, anodized

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Petřín Tower and Crescent Moon, Prague

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Shid I seee in Europe deez dayzzzz

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Identity

My identity feels in so many ways illusive. Like a shattered mirror where I am cutting my hands while picking up the shards and piecing it all together. Areas of myself borrowed or reinterpreted from this place or another. Fragments strung together by the memories of the people I loved. Inspiration, perhaps. The people I had around me have all had a profound effect on me, for better or worse. But, all of this is to say that I feel as though I am evolving and changing constantly. Every year, I feel like a different person. Then I look back at the person I was and am always shook. I am a little hard on myself, realistically, but like a mirror, I am reflective, although my pieces are disjointed and fractured.

I see a person emerging in a genderless void transcending a binary. Yet, right now, if I am being honest with you, I feel like I am a slave to it and the male gaze. Men, actually notice me now. Not because I'm just so hot, rather, I am something to be seen, to be observed, to be perceived. Which is a new anxiety inducing experience, I've been acosted three times in the last week. Teenage boys and two old men. L O L.

I feel like I absorb parts of people and then those parts grow. Like someone plants a seed in me, and it can lay dormant past the life of the relationship, but then it springs forth, fertile and abundant. Quite strange, not sure if this is bad or not. But, I am on a whole slew of hormones so my mind is changing in incredibly different ways. I see remnants of my past partners inside myself now. As though, I am understanding my femininity through theirs because it was the form of it that I admired the most. My own feminity is being born out of my desires for love, intimacy, and connection. I metabolize beauty and transform this admiration into identity, perhaps. It’s not the exact same expression, of course, but there are similarities. I am adapting, integrating, and evolving into this multifaceted creature. . .

My mind feels like its going to explode sometimes, with all of the things I want to do with myself. Who can I be?