I feel like I’m at my clockiest right now, which is ridiculous. I sit at the food cart pod, watching couples review menus as I poke at my pad thai. My bleach-blonde highlights are up in a claw clip, and bruises from a night out dancing show through my tights. No matter what I do, or how I show up, it feels like I have more eyes on me than ever. Some of those eyes are cruel, but most are just inquisitive. The biggest shift I’ve noticed in how I’m being clocked seems to come from the people I spend time with in public, and that determines how much I get to let down my guard and just feel normal. Moments of normalcy and quietude out in the world have felt increasingly hard to come by.
Back in the bad old days, trans women were told to follow the Rule of Two: if you’re seen with another trans woman, you’ll both be clocked. Stay separate to stay safe. I went to an iris garden with Lily and her daughter last weekend, and despite being clocked again and again, our 2-femme-women-with-a-child dynamic profoundly shifted the gazes I met: sometimes quizzical, but almost always followed by smiles. Women with a child make sense to the world, in a way that two trans women on their own do not. (Later in the car, Lily would joke about how if anyone were to press us on who the biological mother was, we both should step forward.) I pulled Lily’s daughter in a green wagon meant for hauling potted plants as we wound through the blooms, and when the coast was clear we charged giddy down a pea gravel path, laughing the whole way. The three of us stopped to smell every kind of iris we passed, even the ones marked Fragrance: NO on their placards, and we savored their fresh, peppery scents. We fit in, just a little bit, and were rewarded with room enough to be with each other.
Casey Plett talks about the seductiveness that tastes of legibility can provide in her perennial essay collection On Community. Here she is describing some of her dates with cis men:
And suddenly, the world feels different. Particularly when that man is not aware that I am trans—which is even rarer, but truly, suddenly the entire world is whole-cloth different. Bartenders treat me differently. Strangers on the street, their body language is different. I walk to the bathroom in a restaurant and I can feel myself walking differently, and in the mirror I see a softer, happier, more restful woman. It’s like a puzzle you never found the last piece to but suddenly it turns up and the picture is complete out of nowhere. Every song, every movie, and, beyond that, every piece of family lore and wisdom that rests on conventional heterosexuality—suddenly it all snaps into focus[…] What I’m talking about here, it’s a feeling like I’m sharing something with not a small group but with the world.
Speaking of restaurants, when I’m out with Lindsey, there’s no question who wears the pants in our relationship. Lindsey gets the eye contact and banter from servers when we’re out trying new breweries or getting pizza, and Lindsey gets offered the check. Her read as “the man” in our relationship—for responsible things, at least—has always been like this, honestly, even since before my transition. Years of contractors working on the house and late night beers shared with male friends at campfires attest to Lindsey’s inherent approachability. As of late her gender presentation has been shifting even more butch, but just because there’s a more obvious pants-wearer between the two of us doesn’t mean my femininity has started making any more sense to others when I’m with her. Reliably, when we’re at a bar I’m almost always misgendered by my drink choices (excuse me, I’m the girl drink drunk), and often I’m talked over or ignored by wait staff until we hit an awkward silence. Part of the joy of being a trans woman is you get cast as a man when doing so provides an opportunity to impress a cis woman, and cast as a woman when there’s an opportunity for misogyny. Best of both worlds. Lindsey and I don’t fit a script, we never have, and while you would think that two partners ostensibly listing away from each other in the gender continuum would give people a damn clue, it really hasn’t.
Another book I’ve been revisiting is Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. A friend gave me a copy years ago, and I found myself reaching for it again initially as an example of unorthodox essay form. I got my socks knocked off by Vivian Blaxell’s Worthy of the Event last month, and her final essay on the relationship between form and content in writing (and more importantly, literal shit) stirred up some self reflection around where my blog writing has been heading. I keep telling myself that I’ve been experimenting more and more with what constitutes a blogpost, but that’s not really true, some of my earliest entries are machinima and lyrical essays. Back when I was making egg art, I liked to talk about my fascination with “the formal qualities of digital media,” and aspired to make form that first defined content, which often meant that it lacked content. These days my relationship with form feels like I’ve cooked up way too much yogurt in the crockpot, and I’m pulling every odd-shaped container out of the weird corner kitchen cabinet of my subconscious in order to scoop some of it out. I’m trying to do the best I can with what I produce, but there’s not much intentionality to it.
Blaxell’s writing got me thinking about Maggie Nelson because Nelson seems to work in small, unrelated bites while she secretly feeds you the main course. The Argonauts is an unbroken string of short paragraphs, often with quotes of philosophers and writers folded in, like swirls of cinnamon and raisins in a dough. Nelson veers and coasts through her meditations on gender, attraction, what it means to be queer, what slipping and falling out of visible queerness into seeming heteronormativity can steal from a person. In order to resist typecasting as Het Mother, Nelson shares with the reader the joy she experiences in what it means to be queer and a mother at the same time by stripping the experience down to the studs, which is the sensorial: baby tongues white with milk, feathery earrings and “scribbly” blouses, labial lips touching without sensation, a leather belt sliding through a palm. Maybe there’s something I can glean from her scratch-and-sniff approach to shared humanity.
Maggie Nelson and I have a shared grief for what felt like control over our legibilities. There was power and eroticism in Nelson’s prior life as a proudly out dyke that became more subtle as she built her family with Harry Dodge. I had high hopes when I started transition of being understood as just a woman, and those moments continue to be rare and highly contextual. It’s almost worse that I get snatches of ease in womanhood, like a payout at a slot machine, random reinforcement in different spheres and modes. I increasingly understand how one could develop a taste for these moments, an addiction that determines the bounds of a life. But I think it’s probably better that I acknowledge my queer existence for what it is—and relish the taste of normalcy when I can—as nothing more than an unexpected treat.