In 2010, I started to come out to people in my life in conversations, in phone calls, and sometimes in letters. Some of these letters were to trans elders—questions that today I’m astonished they had the grace to answer. Some were letters to cis friends at a distance, trying to articulate my transness. How had I known, and what would I want? What would I wear? What would my name become; what would my body become? What pills would I take, what surgeries? Who and how would I love? Who will want to hurt me, and, more quietly, do I deserve not to be hurt?
That year, I came out to an older cis man I knew in a taxicab. “Don’t talk about your transition all the time,” he advised me. “I know lots of trans women; they all talk so much about transitioning. It’s exhausting.” Later, I wrote a very patient trans elder that I had gone clothes shopping alone for the first time, that I had changed on a bus trip in a Dunkin’ Donuts bathroom, that I was feeling for the first time the hollowness of how I’d been living, the growth of a still fragile power. “It’s sort of like the fruit is more thick and full at the center as a girl,” I wrote, “but the skin isn’t really fully intact. … I’d be really interested to know if you felt the same way early on in your transition, or still feel this way.”
Reading this now, I think the help I wanted from this person was confirmation: You’re trans; is this how it was for you? If it was, am I too? It’s a magic spell: Establish the words, and the world changes to match; the words of the spell form the papier- mâché skin on the fruit. And I slowly realized that I wanted to explore the new voice I found in writing these letters. This is the voice at the core of Summer Fun, the novel I had just started to write, a voice made of letters from a trans woman who describes her life even as she projects herself onto a famous musician.
Why do I feel so strongly that I could use a voice in letters to express deep transness? Why, when I see Akwaeke Emezi’s Dear Senthuran on shelves, do I feel such a strong sense of yes from its form? Why do letters and transness travel together?
Maybe because part of transition is narrative, which is always an adornment applied to facts. In writing letters in 2010, I felt adorned, like I was wrapping myself in silks and pendants. In person, there’s limited patience for such adornment: You watch a friend step again and again from behind a Japanese screen in interminable thrilling outfits; you tap your foot. (I’ve been out 11 years now; I’ve smiled at many women in their first two years out; one day, they’ll smile at other women too.) But in letters, I could stretch, explore, confess, often in walls of text I find hard to engage with now. I’m grateful for those who had the patience to engage with them then.
And maybe there’s something about the disembodiment of letters. In a 2016 article, scholar Kacy Tillman called letters “paper bodies”: “a contested space where women writers and their readers vied for control over the female body.” I couldn’t control my body then: gatekept from estrogen, slowly figuring out new codes of clothing, asking myself whether someone called me sir because they didn’t perceive how I wanted to be seen, or because they did. But I could control my paper body, what I said in it.
That control gives letters their almost hypnotic quality. In her 1978 book, Gyn-Ecology, which has sat on my night table all pandemic for when I’m feeling bad and want to feel worse, trans-exclusionary radical feminist pioneer Mary Daly calls transness a “Dionysian boundary violation,” which is maybe the same thing as a spell. Daly asks us to stop asking cis women to recognize our gender, which is “essentially a male problem…[a] perpetual need.” How would Daly regard the “trans tropes” of my 2010 letter? (“Second adolescence,” “sense of power as a girl.”) The TERF model of transness is a narrative of cultural hypnotism: Trans women are conning the good people. So many trans women show me every day how to refuse those narratives, which reduce our subjectivity to pathology. But the echo of them lingers; it’s hard to get them out of my head. And, trapped with those narratives, we need a way out.
One way out is to reach out to others like us, people who can tell us our subjective experiences are not wrong. Needing that way out is a basic existential condition of transness, another reason transness and letters are fellow travelers: Any letter is, must be, an incomplete text, an asking text. I am telling you who I am; do you believe me? Do I?
But energy that has no way out but a letter can build, ferment; it can explode at its recipient. I wrote one letter to a trans elder in 2010 that I don’t have the guts to look back at again. I wrote it in a dissociative state after a bad work incident; it was a plea for help, long and raw, directed to someone I didn’t really know yet onto whom I projected much need (behavior I wish I could say I never repeated). The person I wrote to never spoke to me again. I told this story to another trans writer recently. Xie did not say what I’d done then had been okay. But xie had been on both sides of that letter too.
One of my favorite works of the transfeminine epistolary is an unpublished poem by Cat Fitzpatrick, a long letter written to her best cis male friend. “We loved each other,” she writes. “It was love. Of friend / For friend. Which is no lesser thing … I don’t suppose / I’ll post this letter. It’s not one of those / You read, it’s more a letter that you write.” (Although, obviously, the poet does send the letter, having it both ways like Alanis Morissette.) This is also an effect I wanted to achieve in Summer Fun: letting the reader spy on an intense and unidirectional correspondence. This is part of the thrill of epistolary novels as a form, from Samuel Richardson’s Pamela on up: the thrill of Other People’s Business, turning unsayable things into statements that have relevance to everyone. (Another way to say that: The baby shoes are never worn, but all of us still think about them.)
To this point, I’ve talked about letters as unidirectional cries for help. And I don’t want to think of them that way anymore. There’s a quote from Camille Billops to bell hooks about the revolutionary power of putting people you know in your work, “so one day they will find you and know that you were all here together.” Thinking about this, I think about all the emails I’ve sent to and received from trans women in the years since 2010. The poem I quote above came to me in a letter from Cat; I think of all the other writers I’ve read in letters and drafts, some published, some never to be, existing like inbox ghosts. I think of the letter Cat sent me when I showed her this piece; brilliant things she said about letters, the Internet as letter, transness. I think about letters with friends talking about fears—Why is the U.K. so awful? Will we lose the gains we’ve made? Are we doing enough?—and feeling better in the act of talking. In that correspondence that instantiates community, where we are all here together, I found answers to questions I never thought to ask. One day, other people may too.
Half of transition is asking for the acknowledgment Mary Daly will not give, asking that the spirit inside us that we find ways to bring outside be respected, independent of what you may think you see in the signals of our bodies. Part of grace is recognizing that our bodies will never be cis enough to pass every test we’re set. But the other half of transition has nothing to do with that: It’s just being with trans people, our completion in presence. This is because transness in the end is a type of humanness: being an incomplete mess, asking beyond ourselves for completion, offering the same where we can. I was sure a mess in 2010; I still am. And novels are as messy as letters. However “dialogic” they are, they’re also often long, self-serving cries for help. This is what’s good about them. But a correspondence, and the de facto community it instantiates, doesn’t have to be that: If it’s a cry, that cry is whale song.
The help that comes when we stop demanding it—this is the transfeminine correspondence that I want, from here forward, both to give and to get. Here’s how Cat’s poem ends …
Perhaps this move will break the curse.
Perhaps I’ll get my joie de vivre back,
And then I’ll write and send to you a stack
Of letters full of gossip, insight, wit.
Although I’m tired now, I must commit
To finding such a life. I’m certain that
It’s out there somewhere. Yours sincerely, Cat
Message in a Bottle
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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