Leelah

If you follow current events in the trans community then you probably already know who Leelah Alcorn was. If you don't, she was a 17-year-old trans girl from Ohio, a talented artist, and, most importantly, a human being. Last Sunday, in the early morning, she walked 6 km from her house to the interstate highway and stepped in front of a truck. She died at the scene, having posted an eloquent and moving suicide note to her Tumblr.

The note blamed her fundamentalist parents and their refusal to accept her as anything other than a "perfect little straight Christian boy," something she could never be. Yesterday her mother, Carla Alcorn, spoke briefly with the media, affirming that "we don't support that, religiously, but we told him that we loved him unconditionally."

I've been pretty shaken up by her death. She and I share a similar background. I don't know what would have happened if I'd come out at age 14, like she did. I think it's probably best for me not to think about things like that. By the time I did finally come out, at 26, my parents had grown a little more open-minded and were able to accept it.

I wanted to say something about her, but I'm kind of at a loss for words. Fortunately, other bloggers have been writing, and writing better than I could, so instead of my own words I will simply share two posts that I have appreciated:

• It's not about you... by Because I'm Fabulous
• God doesn’t make mistakes, people do by Raising my Rainbow

UPDATE: It seems her Tumblr page has been taken down. Fortunately, someone thought to archive it on Wayback Machine, (although her oldest posts, including the above selfie, are still lost). I've changed the link in the article to point there instead.

Disorientation

I usually do it without even thinking about it, but it's always kind of funny to me when I catch myself. My roommates are all boys, and when I'm just hanging out with them around the house I tend not to be overly concerned about my appearance. But when a girl comes over... quite often I'll slip off to my room, quickly dab on some foundation, maybe a bit of mascara, tie my dreads back (they look a lot more feminine that way), take my glasses off (they're a very masculine style, and I can see well enough without them), and spritz on some floral perfume. I come out again, still presenting as a boy, but feeling just a little bit prettier.

It's silly of course, but what can I say? I'm attracted to women, and like most people who are attracted to women, I want to look good around them. It's just a little disorienting when you happen to be a queer woman presenting as a feminine man around straight women.

Then again, my orientation has long been a source of confusion to me, just in different ways at different times. The thing is, while I've always been primarily attracted to women, I've never quite been exclusively attracted to women. As far as I can tell, I can be physically attracted to people of various different genders, but am romantically attracted only to women. Figuring that out would have been difficult enough on its own, but growing up trans made it more complicated still. For that matter, so did growing up religious.

I'd never heard of transgenderism or transsexuality when I was a kid. At most, by the time I was in my mid-teens I had a vague idea that there was such a thing as a "sex change", but I didn't have a clue what one might entail, and just assumed it was some kind of bizarre fetish thing. Certainly, at that age, it would never have occurred to me that someone changing their sex probably had feelings very similar to, if not the same as, the ones I was dealing with.

So, not having a concept of trans-ness, I made the best use of the meagre and distorted concepts I did have: I knew I was boy because everyone said so and I had boy parts; I knew, in some vague sense, that some aspect of me was deeply and fundamentally feminine; and I knew, because I'd learned it from my culture, that feminine boys were gay. Not surprisingly then, when I finally became honest enough with myself (around 19 or 20) to admit that there was something "different" about me, I thought it might be that I was gay. This despite the fact that I was primarily into girls.

There was another concept in vogue at the time that helped me make sense of that inconsistency: the so-called ex-gay movement. Nowadays of course the ex-gay movement is widely discredited even in most Christian circles. But this was back in 2008 or so, and we evangelicals all thought it was legit. There were stories everywhere of people whose homosexuality had been "cured" by their faith in Jesus. Some of them had even gotten het-married and had kids. They all smiled as if they were happy. And it was in this context that, desperately trying to make sense of my gender and orientation, I thought I might be one of them.

My feminine personality is that of a gay man, I told myself, but I'm mostly attracted to women because Jesus is healing me. Yeah, that makes sense, right?

Now I find it downright embarrassing to admit that I ever thought something so stupid. I will only say, in my defence, that if you've never been deeply religious you probably have no idea how badly it can screw up your ability to think.

And so it came to pass that, in the summer of 2010, while camping out with two fellow believers in the beautiful Alberta wilderness, I came out as "possibly gay" for the first time. Except you don't say "possibly gay" when you're an evangelical Christian coming out to other evangelicals; you say "struggling with homosexuality," because you have to pretend being gay is bad even if you can't for the life of you think of a reason why.

"I struggle with homosexuality," I said.
"It's okay," they assured me, "it's no different than any other sin. We all struggle with sin."

The second time I came out was much the same. But the third and final time something important happened.

It was late 2011, nearly a full year before I gave up on faith, and about a year and a half before I figured out I was trans. I had joined a small group bible study that met weekly, and at one particular meeting the discussion turned to the question of why homosexuality was wrong. We knew it must be because the bible said so, but we were scratching our heads trying to figure out why. It didn't seem like it hurt anyone, and God wouldn't just make up arbitrary rules, would s\he?

It seemed like a good time to come out to the group. "That's actually, uh, that's something I struggle with, personally." I said quietly. They all thanked me for trusting them enough to share that with them. The discussion would simply have continued from there, except for the curiosity of one group member.
"Wait. How does that work?" he asked.
I looked up.
"I mean, sorry if it's a personal question," he continued, "but like, do you actually find men attractive? Like, are you attracted to men the same way that I'm attracted to women?"

Not a very tactful question perhaps, but I'm glad he asked it. Because, for the first time in my life, I was forced to try and put into words how I felt. No longer could I cling to the ill-fitting constructs I'd been using to understand myself. "Um, well, for me personally it's not so much about being interested in men, it's more like..." my mind raced, trying to find a way to express something I'd never had a name for, "...it's more like... I guess I've always felt a bit like a girl trapped inside a boy's body."

Even as I said it, I knew it wasn't a totally accurate description of how I felt. But it was much, much nearer the truth than everything I'd been saying up until then.

To illustrate what I meant by it, I told them about a time I'd seen an adorable pair of red strappy high heels in a store and felt almost heartbroken that boys couldn't wear shoes like that. (Obviously, high heels are absolutely not what being trans is about, but I was still over a year away from even learning the word "trans"— at the time it was probably the best explanation I could give.)

"I don't think that's gay," responded the guy who'd asked the question. "I mean, not if you're not attracted to men. I don't know what it is, but it isn't gay. Gay guys like guys."
"Maybe," I said. "I don't know."
"Well, they do."

The room fell silent for a moment, then one of the women spoke up. "I feel really sorry for someone like you," she said. Her eyes shone with compassion. "Like, if a girl wants to wear boy clothes, people just think she's a tomboy and nobody has a problem with it. But if a boy wants to wear girl clothes, in our society people judge him for it. And that's just so, so unfair."

I appreciated her concern, but inside I was thinking: No, you don't understand. This isn't something that's wrong with society...

This is something that's wrong with ME.

Evidently no one present that evening knew what being trans was. If they had they'd probably have said, "but of course you're transgender!" and I'd have gone home and googled the word and learned I wasn't alone and gotten a year-and-a-half head start on figuring out my identity. But that's not what happened. And in a way maybe it's for the best. Getting out of religion first and then learning I'm trans has meant I've been able to work out my identity without needing to worry the whole time about what God thinks. That seems to me a much better way to go about it.

So, I didn't learn I was trans that night. But I did learn that loving cute shoes doesn't make you gay, and that was an important thing to learn, too.

In 2013, when I did finally learn the word "trans", I was amazed to discover that the "boy trapped in a girl's body" formula has been so over-used that it's become cliché. To this day I'm still not 100% sure if I made it up that night or if I'd heard it somewhere before, but I don't suppose it matters either way.

Of course, just learning I was trans did not mean I instantly and automatically understood everything about my orientation. For a while there I worried that maybe who I really was was a lesbian, and that my limited interest in men was just some kind of penis fetish arising from a subconscious heterosexism that viewed female sexuality strictly in terms of being penetrated by a man. That is to say, that I liked the idea of being with a man because in some twisted way I thought that's what would make me a woman. Soon enough I realized that's probably not where that interest comes from, that I probably don't have such insidious ideas lurking in my subconscious, and that even if I did (or had at some point), that wouldn't make an interest in men bad in itself— heterosexism is the problem, not heterosexuality.

The most important thing I've learned, though, is that a sexual orientation is something to be enjoyed, not worried over. I'll probably never understand how butch women can make my heart skip a beat, or why I think Eddie Izzard looks gorgeous in a dress but not so much with a beard. I'll probably never understand why I find narrow hips and broad shoulders sexy in other trans women even though I dislike those features in myself. But it doesn't matter.

Perfectly understanding myself is not a prerequisite for being myself. And I can continue to make myself look pretty around girls, disorienting though it may be.

My mom wrote a letter

Driving home from work last Wednesday I heard the familiar ping of an incoming text message. I checked it when I got home. It was my mom, saying she needed to talk to me, and asking if now was a good time to call. I texted back "sure" and my phone promptly rang.

"I think we should tell your grandparents about your being transgender," she said, after the initial hellos.
"Uh, okay. You mean like, soon-ish?"
"Yeah. I think they should know. And I'm sure they'll accept you."

She explained that her parents and my dad's parents had both specifically enquired as to how I was doing recently. Both of my grandmothers are active on Facebook— (that tells you something about my age, eh)— and she figured that some of what I'd been posting recently might have made them wonder about me.

Personally I thought that she might just be reading into things, making connections between phenomena the way our brains tend to do. But regardless, my grandparents have to learn at some point. So I said okay.

As we talked about it it became apparent to me that she had, in fact, already written out an email to her parents and my dad's parents explaining the situation. She was phoning to get my permission to hit the send button. So I asked her what she'd written.

"Like, it explains that you feel like a woman trapped in a man's body, and that..."
"Uh, well,"  I interrupted her, "that's not the terminology I would use."

(Of course, the old "x trapped in a y's body" is a reasonably good answer to the what is trans? question if you're talking to someone who's completely unfamiliar with the concept and have at most one second to explain it. But otherwise it's pretty inadequate.)

"Oh," she replied, "what would you say?"

And if I had had the presence of mind to do so, I might have come up with something like, "I feel internally that I am mostly female, despite the fact that my body appears male, and this incongruity causes me a significant amount of discomfort."

But instead I said, "Oh, I don't know. I guess that's close enough." (Not a great answer on my part, I know.)

At this point I asked her to just read me the whole thing, which she did. And for the most part it was pretty good: explaining and clarifying some aspects of what trans is and isn't, as well as stating that I'd always been this way and that my parents' relationship with me was still good.

Unfortunately it also included some theologizing that I found a little unpleasant. There was something along the lines of: "We don't know why God allowed our child to be born with this condition, but we believe all things happen for a reason." She actually felt the need to clarify that they believe God intended me to be born with a male body.

That stung a bit, to be honest. Personally I think that "a thing happened, therefore God wills it" is a pretty horrifying way to look at the world. But I didn't argue with it being in the letter: she was writing from their perspective and if that's what they believe, it might as well say so.

After reading the whole thing she asked, "does that sound good?" I said "Yeah, I guess so" and she sent it.

And then she started talking about Minecraft and how monsters had recently blown up her house. (She and I play on the same server, along with my brother, which is pretty cool). And I realized that I am a lot more comfortable talking about video games with my mom than about my gender.

This was over a week ago now. I haven't heard anything from her about how or if my grandparents responded, but I'm not too worried about it. They're good people.

Mom's letter may not have been the exact words I would have chosen. But I am certainly glad I didn't have to be the one to write it, coming out being pretty low on my list of favourite things to do. So... thanks ma! :)

Lovely Blog Award

Okay, before I get to anything else I first have to mention that it actually snowed here this week. The only consolation is that Calgary got more than us. (hehe)

That aside, I am the recipient of a Lovely Blog Award, thanks to Because I'm Fabulous. Thanks, Michelle! :)

I'm supposed to write seven things about myself. So... here goes:

1.
I am very interested in space travel. Okay, actually like, kind of weirdly obsessed with it. For some reason the idea of visiting other worlds has completely captured my imagination. I’ve spent a lot of time reading all about the history of space age, and the great scientists (Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, Oberth, etc.) who helped to bring it in. And I’ve spent a lot of time reading about what its future might look like, too.

Sometimes there is a small amount of sadness that accompanies this interest— I mean, there hasn’t even been a moon landing in my lifetime, it feels like we’re going nowhere! But I can always indulge in hard sci-fi to make up for it.

Suffice it to say, if humans haven’t landed on Mars before the end of my life, I will probably be very disappointed.

Sunset over Gusev crater on Mars. This is another world. And we can go there! I find that thought exhilarating.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

2.

I loooooove sushi. If I head ten different lifetimes I could devote to mastering different skills, in one of them I would be a sushi chef. For this lifetime, though, it’s just a hobby. And I still don’t make it nearly as often as I would like.

3.
Music is a hugely important part of my life. Not just listening to it, but playing it, too. I play drums and flute, but what I'm best at is piano. I’ve never had any music lessons (other than voice), I just started mashing keys until it sounded good.

Eb2 to A5

I can sing a bit, too. I hope it doesn’t sound braggy, but one thing I’m quite proud of is my range: I can hit notes as low as Eb2 and as high as A5. I’ve decided that if I do transition, I will continue to use that entire range, even the low notes. I refuse to pretend to be less capable than I actually am just for the sake of passing.

Oh, and I like writing songs. I started doing it when I was 12 and have never really stopped. That adds up to a lot of songs. A small handful of them might even be worth listening to. (And yes, an embarrassingly high number are about space travel).

I don't know of any experience I enjoy more, or find more rewarding, than performing music in front of people.

4.
I don’t play a lot of video games but when I do it’s usually Minecraft. I main Kirby in Super Smash Bros. (deal with it). I tried Dwarf Fortress once but gave up in hopelessness and despair.

Dwarf Fortress: I don't know what the hell's going on, but I'm pretty sure I'm losing.
Image credit: Casey Johnston

5.
I have an intolerance to citric acid. This means that my body doesn’t produce enough of the enzyme it needs to digest it; (this differs from a true allergy, which is an immunological response). Apparently this is a pretty rare condition— yay, I’m special!

So, I can eat small amounts of citric acid (which is good because it's in everything and you need it to live), but I do have to watch how much. Citrus fruits (oranges, lemons, etc.) are completely out of the question. Things like cherries and grapes are okay in very small amounts. Anything with tomato sauce is a bad idea. I definitely can’t drink wine.  :(

6.

I used to be a bad-ass anarchist. This was an extension of the religious views I held at the time. Basically, I saw Jesus’ teachings as requiring absolute non-violence, and I saw the state, the military, and capitalism as inherently violent and therefore needing to be opposed. (I wasn't the only person to get that from Jesus, by the way, Christianity has a long tradition of anarchist thought).

Since then, as I've changed from a believer to a skeptic, I’ve had to move away from the kind of moral absolutism that underlies anarchism. It’s very easy to be an absolutist when you’re basing your beliefs on “the infallible word of God”— much harder when you’re basing them on the entirely falsifiable findings of science.

To be clear, I still care about social justice, I’ve simply de-mythologized it. I now think violence is wrong not because God says so, but simply because it hurts people. (This is an improvement, because, like, there were a lot of things the God I believed in said were wrong that didn't actually hurt anyone.)

7.

I'm not originally from Alberta: I was born and raised in British Columbia, (Canada’s western-most province). It’s been eight years since my family moved here but in a way I still feel like an ex-pat. I am, it seems, a child of the Fraser River, and the forests of Cascadia will always be my home. Oh yeah, and go Canucks!! :)

Okay, I'm sure that was way more than I needed to write. Ayways, the actual rules for the award are as follows:
1. Thank and link back to the person who nominated you.
2. List the rules and display the award.
3. Include seven facts about yourself.
4. Nominate 15 10 some other bloggers and let them know about the award.

Since it's a chain-letter-y type thing, I will add that I'm passing it on obligation free: if you want to take part, go for it. If not, that's totally okay too. :) And so, I hereby nominate:

• A Part Time Girl

• An Unexpected Queerdom (although clicking over there her blog seems to be down at the moment...)

• Two Spirits - One Halle

• Cassidy's Quest

• Transfinite Love

Community

I miss the sense of community I had when I was a conservative Christian. Even though that community didn't exactly foster critical thinking, even though I had to work so hard to hide all my doubts about basic tenets of the faith, and even though no one really knew me 'cause I was lying to all of us about my gender identity: still, in a way, those were some of the closest friends I've ever had.

I moved to Edmonton in December of 2012; before that I'd been living in a town called Grande Prairie. In Grande Prairie I played piano at my local church, and I helped out with the soup kitchen they ran. I attended a weekly bible study group, and I lived with all Christian roommates— (one was even an ordained clergy member). One of the main reasons I moved was to get away from all that. By the end of 2012 it was finally becoming apparent to me that I was losing my faith. I needed space to ask basic questions about what I thought was true, and I wasn't going to find that space in the evangelical Christian community. So I got out.

I moved to Edmonton because that's where my family lives and I thought I might end up going to school here, (which in fact I did). I found the space to ask questions, and in that space I discovered and accepted that I am transgender. But what I lost in the process was a close, loving community. I still keep in touch with some of my old friends through Facebook, but I feel like we're drifting apart. It makes me sad.

I suppose what I ought to do is get involved in the queer community here in Edmonton. (I went to two meetings of my school's queer social club, and one meeting of a trans support group, but that's all.) To be part of a community again, and one where I can actually be myself, would be fantastic. I'm shy and making friends is hard, but still I should try.

Oh, and guess what? I got to see Laverne Cox speak last Friday! She gave a talk as part of my school's pride week, it was really good. Even though I went by myself, it was very refreshing to be in a huge room full of people who accept the legitimacy of trans identites. That's precisely the kind of community I want to be a part of!

Science, religion, and why I'm going to school

Guess what I'll be starting in a week? My first year of university! At age 25 I suppose it's better late than never. Sure, it's been eight years since I graduated from high school, but that's just how long it took me to figure out what I wanted to study!

Actually, seven years ago I thought I wanted to study Christian theology: (as I've mentioned before, I had a very religious upbringing). So, I started attending a theological college and ended up staying for almost four years. That was about how long it took me to figure out I didn't actually believe in most of traditional Christianity. I also began to doubt that there was (or even could be) any sound epistemic basis for believing in the authority of scripture.

During the years that followed, I very, very gradually came to believe that the scientific method provides a more certain means of acquiring knowledge than faith does. This was not an easy process: I became profoundly depressed, for example, when I realized I couldn't be certain whether there was an afterlife. (That might sound silly, but when you've believed since childhood that you will literally live forever, and then find out you might only get eighty or ninety years, it hits you pretty hard). But eventually I concluded that, as Cat Faber puts it in The Word of God, "humans wrote the bible; God wrote the world." And that if I wanted to search for truth, I'd do better to study the natural world than scripture. And as I spent more and more of my free time devouring science articles on Wikipedia, I fell absolutely in the love with the awesome, beautiful universe in which we live. And so, here I am today, about to start a four year degree with a major in astrophysics! Yay!!

Astrophysics, dude.

For much of my life the bible was a huge factor in determining what I thought, did and tried to feel; and for a long time this hindered me from recognizing and accepting my trans-ness. It wasn't until I began to see the bible as, not an unquestionable divine authority, but merely a good book, that I felt free enough to try to understand the gender issues I'd been struggling with. This is partly because the bible, as you might expect, specifically condemns transvestism (in Deutoronomy 22:5). But more important than that was an entire understanding of gender that I internalized from reading Genesis 1:27, which says, "God created humans in his image; in the image of God he made them male and female." Like many conservative Christians, I took this to mean that male-ness and female-ness are not mere social constructs, nor some accident of biology, but direct manifestations of the very nature of God himself. Thus I felt like any queering of gender norms was a very serious transgression. And though I very rarely "gave in," I felt guilty any time I even wanted to wear heels or dresses or makeup. And I almost always wanted to.

Needless to say, I am deeply grateful to have changed my way of thinking!


[EDIT: Just to clarify the terminology for the rest of the world: in Canada, a university is an academic institution, whereas a college provides vocational training. They're not the same thing.]

My queer-ness is showing!! Yay?

It's only been a few months since I accepted I was trans-something-or-other and started cross-dressing properly. Almost immediately I noticed a whole bunch of areas besides dress where I had been forcing myself to conform to the masculine gender norm. Things I say, how I walk, talk, sit, etc. I determined I would start just being myself in those areas, too. The result, I suppose, is that even in boy mode I now come across as a lot more feminine than I used to.

Last Friday I was making small talk with a co-worker, (a straight male), and he asked me casually, "So, do you have a boyfriend or girlfriend?" It was the first time in my life someone has made it explicitly clear that they're uncertain what my orientation is. (For the record, I like girls). I smiled and said, "Nope, no boyfriend, no girlfriend!" Which, you know, didn't exactly clarify things.

At first I was quite pleased by this. I liked the fact that someone had noticed my "queer-ness," even if they misunderstood its exact nature. I told myself I would rather people mistake me for gay than mistake me for cisgender.

However it slowly dawned on me that perhaps everyone I work with thinks I'm gay. And the more I thought about it, the more it started to bother me. I'm honestly not even sure why. I really, really hope it's not due to some latent homophobia buried somewhere deep in my psyche. I'm ashamed to admit that I used to be quite homophobic back in my days as a fundamentalist Christian, though that feels like a different lifetime now. I will have to take some time to think about what this means.