Last month I found myself in tears at the grave of my grandparents. I was on a trip with my wife to Raleigh, North Carolina, and through a series of events ended up flying into Charlotte and driving to Raleigh from there. My father had told me that my ancestors were textile workers for over 100 years in a town which happened to be on the route to Raleigh. A last-minute decision to stop off in the town turned into a visit to the family plot, and after some searching I was able to find the headstone of my grandmother and grandfather.
I wasn’t very close with my father’s parents, I got the impression that they were never particularly cut out to be parents and found it difficult to relate to their grandchildren. Their funerals were small and quick, and I didn’t attend for a number of reasons. But sitting at their grave, I found myself wishing that I had been able to know them as an adult, meet them where I was now, and learn about the history that shaped them. There was no possible timeline where this could happen, but I wanted it anyway and felt sad for our unbridgeable distance.
Of course, I also wondered how they would handle their first grandchild turning out to be trans. What if I had grown up and visited them as a cis girl? What would it have been like? A wave of remembered interactions and relationships from my five years in the state rolled over me. I imagined refactoring the friendships I made in school and in my neighborhood. And would I have been shuffled through school in the same way? I was given a lot of praise and opportunity for my intelligence in school, would sexism have denied me those opportunities? Could I even now reconsider my childhood as that of a misunderstood trans girl?
I believe it’s been established that the act of remembering is essentially a rewrite operation, so people’s memories always acquire the stamp of the present, like an increasingly crunchy JPEG being copied and saved over again. I’ve read some interesting discussion in trans circles about how memory relates to past identity in this way. Some people think of themselves as having been a completely separate person and becoming a new one upon acceptance and transition. Others talk about transness as being a form of time travel, where their present identity reworks their past which in turn reinforces their present. I think where I’m at right now is closer to the latter group, and that I’m allowed to try and reconstruct my past. I feel this way because when I return to my memories as a woman or a girl I still feel the smooth snap of puzzle pieces flying together in the same way that I did when I encountered my gender identity. Something is connecting, some truth is quietly assembling itself.