I Don't Have The Words

I'm starting this blog because I find that I don't have the words I need most of the time.  I don't have the words to talk about my experience, to talk about what I feel.

I'm a transgender woman.

This fact has steadily become more and more clear to me throughout my life.  That means that I was called a boy when I was born for the perfectly logical reason that I was born with male genitalia.  That's a pretty accurate predictor of my future gender identity, so I don't really blame anyone. But that incorrect assumption has caused immense pain, and that's only so far.  There's a lot of pain to come.

But I don't have the words to describe the feelings.  There aren't really a lot of them in use.  Very few people who have made up words, wrote words, or did anything at all have been transgender.  I don't have great works of literature to look back to for consultation on this issue.  I don't have some wise words from past generations.  Given the suicide attempt rate (over 40%) of a group that's already small to begin with (0.3%), I doubt a lot of trans people that had been born in the past made it very far in life.  So I don't have a lot of role models from times before today.

And there is a kind of loss in having no real place in history.  We've certainly been around, just given the traditions of the third gender in India, Two-Spirit people in Native American cultures...we've always been there.  There just aren't a lot of us who became famous.  And I can tell it's missing because I don't have a Langston Hughes to write my thoughts, or to reveal my rage in some empathetic and beautiful way.  I have the words of my peers on youtube talking about their tradition.  And I love those people for they've done for my identity, but they're not exactly our James Joyce.

I'm going to keep writing this thing until I find some way to describe the emptiness and loneliness that leads to who trans people are today.  I hope.  I may never find it because our language may not be built to support the weight of it.  I suspect that this isn't true, but I'm aware that there are limitations I haven't explored.  Thanks for reading my crazy blog, and hopefully the next entry will be a bit more logically consistent.