May
I can’t stop thinking about Oliver. The way Lana stuck in my head as my first time and model for trans femininity Oliver is stuck in my head not only as someone I love and never want to not know, but also as a model for a kind of queer adulthood that makes me uncomfortable but that I want for myself so badly. I want to have a schitzo collection of leftist literature, to beleive in radical gay child education, to have an open relationship with a sick-in-the-head tranny hacker, to be 28 and fucking early transition college kids.
just kidding
When I first met Oliver it was during the lockdowns when Providence had an 8pm curfew. I remember trembling walking to his house imagining myself as a french woman during nazi occupation sneaking out to see her secret lover.
He was the second trans person I ever slept with. We lay on his floor and he asked me what I was going to change my name to. I told him that I had always liked Vivian and he scoffed and told me that sucked. Later, he called me Ada during sex.
Desire
It’s often difficult for me to parse where dysphoria ends and envy begins. Dysphoria starts with envy. Envy of girls, girl’s clothes, girl’s toys, girl’s friends, envy of boy’s affection, envy of boy’s attention, envy of one’s mother, envy of mom’s clothes, mom’s perfume, mom’s body, mom’s jewelry, envy of one’s sister, of how they are treated, envy of them when they get their first period, their first bra. Envy continues into adolescence; envy of girls getting breasts, girl’s boyfriends, girls having sex before anyone else, girls going to college parties, and so on. Dysphoria is desire, and what is desire but the wish to have what you see others possess.
It’s a flawed way to think about things; no one possesses girlhood or womanhood, no one possesses their body, their sense of self, their place in the world. But that’s hard to remember.
It doesn’t stop once one starts on the path of transition. If anything it gets worse. You see other trans women, how far they’ve come, how comfortable they seem. You see how little you’ve changed, how much you still feel unlike yourself, how much you still desire.
The post-structuralists we read in art school say that everything is based in desire, that identity is the culmination of our affinities, intentions and desires. I tend to agree. In a sense it’s affirming, I am just who I want to be.
The way I have had come to understand my transness for along time is that it was a determination to inhabit my own subjectivity and aleivate the pain of my metaphysical being misaligned with my material somatic ontology. This was how I felt when I started writing, before E and before Oliver came back into my life.
SECTION INCOMPLETE