Keeping the Faith
act IBIG MILK
Setting: It is the early aughts in Minnesota and you are about thirteen. You don’t have synesthesia but you are quite certain that when the letters G-E-N-D-E-R are arranged in this particular order they are synonymous with all things lighter than you. Gender presentation is the hottest topic in the locker-lined halls right now but absolutely no one is getting it right, let alone understanding what it could possibly mean to “have a gender identity.” So you’re just tryna vibe.
Despite what the media at home told me to believe, I never actually had much of a problem with the shape of my eyes. Instead I chewed on my too-puffy-lips, sniffed through my too-flat nose, and cringed whenever I caught the reflection of my misshapen profile. For so long, those were often the dominating thoughts that made my body foreign to me.
When it was time to start blending into the people around me, it wasn’t gender I saw first; it was everything else. Tripping through eyeliner, short skirts, and pictures posed with at least one dislocated hip was a rite of passage into whiteness that I saw no way around. Those were the moments I was socialized to understand gender to be tethered completely to a race different from my own. In real time though, all I felt was envy and confusion. It didn’t occur to me as I was learning the ropes that it wasn’t just whiteness I was absorbing. I was in training specifically for the role of Midwestern White Girl. And I practiced hard. I fried my hair, called my skin color a tan, and took mental notes on appropriate conversation topics. This is where my girlhood was most alive–--when white femininity led my circles and psyche.
It wasn’t until the day Faith Allen went out of her way to tell me I looked like a boy that I realized how much performing whiteness meant also playing a gender. Surely she was not wrong, but I was wonderfully offended; a fear of just how right she may have been was born. It haunted me for days, then weeks, and eventually years. I remember feeling weirdly found out, so guilty of the conviction that I pushed on with full force, into yoga pants and Ugg boots just off trend enough to signal how uncomfortable I was in my skin.
Eastern media would eventually lead me to understand that the ethos of my personal crash course in gender expression and identity was actually much more wide-spread than I realized. It would take nearly a decade from that confrontation with Faith until I understood how ubiquitous the tie between racial dysmorphia and gender dysphoria can be—that surgeries exist to correct each condition, and that sometimes one procedure might cure both at the same time.
I would learn that one of the reasons I didn’t have a problem with my eyes was because my lid type was so desirable that millions of people across the world since the ‘50s have sought out racially affirming surgeries to be donned a double lid. And that the distaste of my flat nose was far from unique–in fact, it was so unoriginal that rhinoplasties were commonplace across Asian countries, and beyond. I would learn that one of the crudest forms of modern-day colonialism to witness was the construction of class and gender built on whiteness that is quite literally bleached into existence. Because, as it turns out, where I thought my allies might be hidden from me is actually where the hottest girls and prettiest boys keep this marble fallacy most alive–in parts of the world where whiteness should not exist.
It was during the impressionable years of junior high that the foundation of gender was laid for me in exclusively one color. It was similar to the pure white swirled in my cup that I was forced to drink every night by Big Milk. I have no idea what happened to Faith, what part of the north woods swallowed her up, but I am quite certain that one of the many reasons her parents named her so was so that she might one day impart her judgment, and, consequently, faith to me---to help me become my truest trans self.
act IIBeauty Queens
Setting: You begin the fluency of power dynamics in earnest, even when you don’t always realize it. Around those with an advantage, you’re learning that there are usually two forms of their self-defense to watch out for, and to resist forgiving. The first is their innate ability to undermine your feelings until they shrink out of sight. The second is that those with the upper hand can and will scare you away from your own truth with semantics and jargon; they will pathologize you until you are left confused, and they have intellectualized themselves out of their culpability.
In the most predictable pipeline ever, my sexuality was also of course tied tightly to my journey with gender. So tightly in fact that I didn’t know how to identify them as separate things, let alone concurrent. It started when cis white partners became the ones mirroring back idealized beauty standards and gender norms I could never meet. Tall blonde white women had me in a chokehold that was criminal and I am nothing if not a glutton for the punishment of recycling old power dynamics until I can get them right. The people I had learned to emulate started holding onto my dreams too, but despite them being the embodiment of all of my social and physical dysphoric nightmares, I could never look away.
And I didn’t know what I didn’t know, so when love was shown I believed it. I believed it until their words lived far from their actions, and homophobic mothers were being excused, and brothers were being shielded from their white manhood, and personal successes were attributed solely to grit. I spun in obsessive spirals over these women trying to understand the sharp bitterness I grew to feel—because the ignorance to their own race and gender was by extension an ignorance to mine.
Navigating spaces as a pair was an exercise of entering separate realities within myself: the one she thought we shared and the one I knew others saw in me. Public places like the bathroom exposed this chasm most. Ironically the people that cleaved our realities looked less like her and more like me. It took me a while to hear the women of different shades trying to protect themselves—to understand their voices were spotting an intruder familiar to them in their space.
I’ve beaten myself up many times for taking so long to understand the driving presence of whiteness in my sexuality and gender---for taking so long to see myself. I’ve reasoned that self-preservation compartmentalized the different parts of my identity for younger-me. Because of course none of it was ever truly in isolation, despite what I told myself. Our identities are not siloed semantics---we’re not just white people run in a different hue or cis people using different pronouns or people born in different countries waving the same flag. Our identities are not just buzzwords to roll off tongues and into posts and papers; they are simultaneous, they are constant, and they breathe our lived complexity.
I may pass socially into American-brand whiteness and speak the language with fluent ease, but I am asking in return that you also learn mine. I am asking that you not fall into the trap that we are no different because we are indeed different, and that is the point. I am asking that you help me remember that.
act IIIA Lineage of Thomases
Setting: You’re still a few years away from saving yourself from a dysphoric breakdown by throwing your body into youth sports. You’re perched on the stairs waiting for Grandpa’s regular lineup of NCIS to start but Barbara Walters takes over instead. You’ll wonder why the memory of this interview stuck so cleanly for so long—why you obsessed about it afterwards, why it felt like a perverse secret to keep to yourself.
Barbara Walters was asking a couple about their conception and commenting on how the imagery of their pregnancy was disturbing. As a couple they initially seemed unremarkable. The father’s name was Thomas. He grew up in Hawaii, was half Korean and half Minnesotan, and as a kid was a model and did karate. I certainly did not know these things when I first saw the interview but our similarities are curious. I have to believe that part of the reason he stuck in my mind was the novelty of a visible Asian man; though when I really think about it, I always knew why he lingered.
Considering it was 2008, it is no surprise that Thomas Beatie’s hotly debated minute of international fame was anything but exalting. In a glorious display of fetishization of Asian and trans bodies by Western media, Thomas became the medical miracle otherwise known as the First Ever Pregnant Man.
It is gutting to realize that in all of those moments in both my childhood and adulthood, where it seemed near impossible to conjure up a clear image of my future self, that I had once stared a plausible version of it in the face. What I could not conceive of on my own I had unknowingly stored away so I might catch glimpses of it every now and then.
This kind of insight brings about a type of grief that marinates deep in your bones until eventually you realize the lasting ache in your joints. In some ways, though, because of this memory I also feel I have been given another chance to build the conception of how my gender exists on the axis of race. But let this all serve as a testament to how much representation matters in our formulation of self, and a pressing reminder that we should have faith in all queer and trans youth who choose to share with us the ivy crawling out of their hearts.