Dispatches from the Ruins of the Present (5)

A guest essay from jonah wu.

Note: jonah wu is a queer and trans Chinese American writer whose politics are oriented against imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, and he believes that Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea. Currently, they are Assistant Fiction Editor at ANMLY and Editor-in-Chief at eggplant tears. They are a three-time Pushcart nominee and winner of Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror of 2022. Find his work in Longleaf Review, beestung, Jellyfish Review, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Seventh Wave, smoke and mold, and the Los Suelos anthology. In cyberspace, he is @rabblerouses.

Small God(s)

Witness an ordinary night turned sour with me: out at a sidewalk bar with a friend, sharing dinner and stories. My friend briefly leaves to use to the bathroom, and in his absence, a drunk cis man approaches me and sits in the just-vacated seat at the table. He’s trying to talk me up, I can tell. He thinks I’m a woman. This is not a hard mistake to make; I have long hair and a pretty face. My voice is prepubescently soft.

Even in his drunken state, though, he can tell there’s something off about me. Apropos of nothing, he asks, “Are you a boy or a girl?” I laugh, a bit ruefully. “I’m a boy.” “Really?” For confirmation. “Yeah.” My answer is decisive. I watch, in real time, as the image of me reconfigures itself in his eyes. Strong brow and jawline, broad shoulders: it checks out. “You’re beautiful,” he tells me, as if trying to explain his previous assumption. “Thank you,” I respond, matter-of-fact. I feel neutral about this compliment. It’s not that I don’t understand why strangers perceive me the way they do, and my masculinity acts as a bulwark against being sleazed. He chuckles as he gets up and heads his way back down the street, glancing back at me once, as if unsure what exactly he encountered. If I was lying. My friend returns not a minute later. I grab his arm and say, “I have to tell you what just happened,” and immediately recount to him the strange intermission that he’d been absent for, to find solace in the shared what-the-fuck of it all.

This interaction of gender confusion isn’t foreign to me — this type of thing has happened to me so many times that I like to joke that I experience “Schrödinger’s gender.” Testosterone works slowly on me. Eighteen months on HRT, and I still possess a multitude of feminine features, enough that most still visually categorize me as a woman. But I do, on occasion, pass. Especially when I’m masked, and even sometimes when I’m not, when the other party (usually cis men, surprisingly enough) assumes that I am a younger man than I actually am. Hence Schrödinger’s gender: how would one guess at the gender inside the unobservable box of the body? What is it when observed, or does it exist at all?

Living with the in-betweenness, this incertitude, has given me a keen glimpse of how people interpret gender. I’m increasingly convinced of the idea that gender is a negotiation between self and society. It is taking one’s conception of gender and contrasting it against what Judith Butler called gender performance, a reiterative game of gender telephone that has lost the original. So — I perform masculinity — or at least, my own version of it — in order to write on the box how I want others to observe me. Sometimes it works as intended. Whether I pass or not is entirely dependent on the eyes of the beholder — on that quick and subconscious mental calculation of whether I measure up to their yardstick definition of “man” or not. Such acts, it has to be said, are also impacted heavily by race. My perceived femininity as an Asian person in a white-majority society works as a double-edged sword; sometimes it writes me as Always Woman, and sometimes as I Perceive All Asian Men in This Fashion. What “masculinity” do I have access to, in a white-majority society, when the rubric for me is a moving target? And do I even want it, considering it has caused so much pain via patriarchal and white supremacist violence?

Finding freedom for myself, then, has been an exercise in side-stepping traditional and white-informed models of masculinity, and creating meaning from the in-betweenness. Another joke: to others, I sum up my gender as “transmasculine and non-binary” because being both is about as complicated of a gender identity that most people can handle. The truth of me is much more varied and difficult to explain. My “genuine” gender identity, whatever that suggests, continues to be a negotiation even this far into my transition, rife with reconsidering my previously held views of myself. And the new realizations are always at interplay with the ancient buried ones. Lately I have been surprised to find some amount of girl in me, despite my best efforts these past few years to kill her. Lately I have been finding some perverse joy in donning my old skirts and dresses, and finding that the lines of topography have changed on these once familiar clothes, and that they evince the boy in me more thoroughly than men’s clothes ever could. There is a kind of allure in that, in eating up the feminine image and spitting her back out forcefully into a disarranged mise en place. My girl is, and always has been, vengeful. With my mouth she swallowed Plath’s line and rises with her red hair.

(Maybe my gender is seasonal. Joke number three. I despise my choices for men’s summer clothes and it’s too hot for pants, so above the Earth’s increasingly intolerable temperatures, I take her out of storage from under the bed and wear what little she gives me. Including the mannerisms, the flirt, the voice. These all make me feel lighter in the suffering heat.)

I look at my soul and recalculate. What is in here, my ungovernable box unobservable even to me? Feeling strangered to myself, but also — the cusp of immense possibility. But also — rejoining with a childhood friend. I kept the dresses and skirts because I had always known, at some point, that I would one day feel comfortable enough to wear them again, just like I knew all those years ago at twenty-six when I told my therapist that I would one day want to explore the masculine side of myself. Non-binary, genderqueer, genderfluid, demi-boy and demi-girl — these are all words that capture, at best, a fraction of what I am, yet exist alongside my transmasculinity, making all aspects of me gestalt. It would be incorrect to say that I am all genders, as I’m certain that my experience of gender is unique to me, just like each person’s experience of gender is unique to them (even for cis people!). So, more accurate to say that I am all of my genders. All sorts of things in-between those genders that are true to me and possibly only me, but at the same time, reflective of all those who live in gender expansiveness.

Sometimes trans people are demanded proof of their transness, that their experience of their gender is not simply an emotional delusion. Questions like, how can you be sure? How can you know, with absolute certainty, that this is the real you? A cis friend once asked me, in the context of transness, whether I believed in anything like an authentic self. No, I told her truthfully. I think there are selves that we want to be, and that those, too, are social constructs. Humans, as is oft said, are social animals, and I don’t think any of us can understand ourselves without the context of others, even when we so desperately despise societal strictures. Anti-hegemonic — that is a construct we choose for ourselves, guided by our natural intuitions and proclivities. The rest is murky and uncertain. We craft ourselves in real time.

I think the lack of certain proof is part of transness, or gender, or even humanity at large. I think humanity exists in this exact lack. In Kai Cheng Thom’s recent article about the transphobic fixation on transition regret as a premise to deny people gender-affirming medical care, she argues for a concept in disability justice known as “dignity of risk,” or allowing human beings the autonomy and agency to make choices that they may regret, or may even hurt themselves, because that too is an extant experience of life. “Sometimes people make decisions that they don’t feel good about in the end,” she writes, “and I simply cannot believe that the answer to this problem is taking away the freedom to choose.” Trans tattoo artist Eoin McGraw expounds on a similar idea, writing in favor of trans doubt: “Trans people are asked for the impossible promise of certainty in how they align and understand themselves. The myth of certainty panders to cis understandings of gender, false binaries, and the false concept that there is a before/after ‘beginning’ and ‘end’ destination in transition … Who is allowed to experience doubt and still receive care? Who is allowed to follow their own joy without having to provide extensive written proof of their own ‘sanity’? I think we often view doubt (and fear) as a sign of something negative, when really — to me — doubt is a part of allowing yourself to feel.”

Humans are terrified of doubt, of the fact that there are no hard and fast rules for anything in life. But humans, all of us, are always in a state of transition, whether we know it or not, whether we’re trans or not. I am not the first to say this, but I do think that transphobes hate us so ardently because they are envious of our freedom. It takes great courage to step outside of a rule, especially one so steadfastly ingrained in our societies like gender. Trans people are one of the few groups of people who are both our own creators and creations, and that degree of self-autonomy — and murky doubt — is dizzying to the non-believer.

In injecting testosterone, I have a strange body made stranger; I am making my body thus because I don’t want a cis body, I love my body when it makes messy and fuzzy disorder out of borders, when it defies all definitions, even escaping at times my own.

I feel a little bit blessed, if I’m to be honest, that I’m still in the process of shaping and reshaping my identity. That it still exists intangibly as something for me to craft and discover through the crafting of. I often say that I only know myself through writing; you, my friend, are lucky as well to be bearing live witness to my transformation. In crafting this prose I craft myself before you. Who am I? I cannot say this in two or three words alone. I am the entirety of my written work, and I am more than that. I am cavernous expanse; I am contradiction enough. I answer to no god but my own, which is me. I have become a small god of my own domain, which is my body, and by extension my life and my existence.