2024: Meditations on Pride

Back in February of this year I finished a piece entitled After Eve’s Betrayal for a school course on painting and color theory. The painting depicts me, shirtless, with Trans Tape and flowers decorating where top surgery marks might be. The photo it was based off of is a beautiful composition of blues and oranges complementing each other is a symphony of light and shadow. 

I am no master painter. This piece was the first real painting I did with acrylic and while I am proud of where the piece landed, you can still spot the struggles of my novice hood peeking through. Sometimes I find myself staring closely at it and wanting to take it to my studio to do just one more pass of paint— clean things up. 

But I am a person with obsessive tendencies, and to pull the painting back down is to reopen a wild world of tweaking and re-tweaking until the day I die. I cannot allow myself that. Sometimes we must make ourselves believe that things really die if only to move forward more easily. Thus, the no longer alive self portrait hangs in my home, not unlike the white animal skulls Georgia O’Keefe found on her property. A corpse really, both my painting and the skulls are now nothing but pretty corpses, frozen in time, a warning perhaps. 

I’m always thinking about what it means to be trans, and what it means to be queer and what it means to be human. I’m always thinking about art and life and how it seems I’m always trying to blend the two. I wrote somewhere, in a different art course this past year, that art should aim to be the reverence of life itself. And in that way, I am trying to make my existence art. The subtle imperfections and arguments and moments of reprieve all beautifully uncapturable, art that exists just beyond the fingertips.  

I’ve felt that a lot recently. 

To execute the staging for After Eve’s Betrayal I invited a best friend over whom I’ve bared my soul to in a way that can only be described as a leap into ethereal love. My chest already taped, I found myself standing in my kitchen, bouquets of flowers spread across the counter, the soft cadence of clippers against stems. She gripped a yellow hot glue gun, the same one I used in my youth, carefully applying flowers to the bottom of the trans tape. The heat bloomed through the thin fabric and I thought about the earth, the human, the man made, all linking uncomfortably but somehow cohesively. 

At some point the man made melted plastic hit the human skin atop my ribs and produced a painful burn. It has since keloided, a raised reminder that it is not always easy to become one. To become whole. 

And I certainly am not always whole. 

I recently listened to a podcast on how Will and Grace transformed mainstream opinions on gay people. I’ve heard often that similar hateful things are now being said about trans folk that were initially directed at gay people. It seems like a cycle no? But it’s eerie. It’s eerie that I have just concluded two and a half weeks of intensive filming for a documentary that is supposed to be about me and my identity. It’s eerie that so many young kids struggling to reconcile with their identities may turn to my face, my film, as a first introduction. It’s eerie to hear the people closest in my life speak of a trans agenda as though I have fallen victim to something I cannot conceptualize. They blame my youth. 

I don’t know what I blame.

A childhood friend who later came out as trans recently died from an acidental overdose in New York City. Another one of my trans friends is buying estrogen off the gray market since a parent of hers doesn’t support her HRT journey. 

I don’t know what I blame. 

But it feels like us trans people, especially trans kids, are racing against a clock. The sand slipping through the hourglass. How many years, weeks, hours, seconds do you get to live as you. Do you get to be ok with you before the intermission is over and it’s back to a state of disbelief. Back to dodging becoming a statistic.

I don’t think any of my trans friends feel like it’s easy to talk about being trans with BOTH parents. And the thing about that is, transness isn’t so much a political affiliation. Isn’t so much an opinion about pineapple on pizza or on how to properly make a sandwich. It is almost incomplete to label transness as simply an identity either because transness is laced into my cells. My transness is there between the in and out breath. It cannot be the result of a pretty picture but is instead the fragility of moving water. 

Your feet wading in a cold mountain creek. Children screaming through the sprinklers in the heat of summer. The deluge of rain on a stormy day. The rivers thumping in spring. The iced over ponds in winter. 

To be trans is to be fragile, but less like a wine glass with a narrow stem and more like the impermanence of water. 

To be trans is fragile, because it is impermanent. 

To gasp for air at the resurfacing— when the wholeness returns. 

To be stunned by the light, for only a moment. 

To hold the handful of sand, 

And to dance in a split second.