the geography of the Open Letter: how to make it home to where your children live without burning down the forest or drowning anybody.

On behalf of all the trans kids Somewhere Out There:

This is a message to the Loving, Well Meaning and Terrified Parents of Trans Children, and all the other adults (ahem, ira) who are so very afraid of what everybody else, and they themselves, might think about all this. Because reassuring cispeople is a job I don't get paid for, but I have an amazing family who used to be really scared by all this too. and because i think i'm finally figuring out what to say, and getting old enough that grown-ups might listen:

Thank you for talking about it. thank you for going through your process. you need it, so we need you to do it. We thank you for loving our new generation, for trying and stumbling, and for being as nurturing as you know how.

and i thank you for not stealing our family's next generation from us, for not trying to fix them or erase them in one way or the other.

I have just thanked you for not hating and annihilating your own children. That should not merit gratitude, but i have given you my thanks. now you must carry it with you. i apologize that it is cumbersome. but as you wander down this steep path, you may have need of remembering that burden.

and with those same hands, carry your process. it is a gift that our world desperately needs, almost as badly as yours does. rush down the hill with your passion, like prometheus bringing fire down through the hills of southern california.

screw up, make a mess, feel a total idiot and come back to us, slowly cleaning up after yourselves. hair and trees almost always come back if you give them time. we will if you will.

but own it. it's your process. get to know it, get uncomfortable in it. stretch out until you can feel its seams. learn to hear it reflected every time a kid talks about dreaming of being Normal,

and being invisible,

of vanishing down to a mote of dust,

and being a total secret

that nobody

would

ever

know.

get to recognize the echo of your own voice, or you'll wander forever in circles in the canyon, your voice causing terrible avalanches that will never bury your house. but there are other people down here in this canyon. and after all, don't you want to get out? eventually?

be open about your fear of the process. you're lost, and that's scary. and lost is not the worst thing to be. you'd be surprised what you'll find when none of the paths you've been told about lead you anywhere you want to go.

there is a deep, slow river in the valley. your fear is the fear of falling off the bridge, in the instant before you understand that there are such things as fish, and swimming.

take a deep breath. your first impulse is to hyperventilate, but the water is not so cold.

slow down. your first move is to thrash, desperate to cling to anything you can hold in those first few disorienting moments. anything which seems constant with the firm reality of solid ground.

but you can't stand on water, you can't dig into it and leave grit in your nails. neither can we.

the current is gentle, and the handholds you have found are parts of other people's lives, and other people's bodies. some of us are new to life in this river too. none of us can keep you afloat for long if you don't turn your furious stamping feet to kicking, your desperate grasp to paddling.

you already know how to swim, if you will remember that this is what the situation calls for.

you even know this river, if you can bring yourself to the necessary vantage point. This canyon you have lost yourself in is carved by its flow. you have lived in the mountains which hide its source. you have felt its currents before. you may not quite remember, but all your life, from time to time, you have found your way to its banks, where so much grows. returning home, your parents and your teachers, your lovers and colleagues and friends have sometimes pointed out the mud on your feet. when they have smiled at your dark footprints, it is because they almost remember the feeling of mud between their toes. and when they frown and scold, or say nothing, it is for the same reason.

you know the contours of those banks, even if you have forgotten the river until now.

you can make your way back to the shallows. whether you thrash frantically, swim confidently, or let yourself float, you will find your way. the difference is how much water you choke on and how many you have dragged down.

floating or swimming gets you to the most hospitable terrain though, trust me on this.

your hands are empty now, and there is muck under your fingernails, mud past your knees and beyond your elbows. i do apologize for this part: the river has tricked you, and we have been complicit in it. The burden you carried was not fire, after all, not only. This is a complicated river, and it has complicated ways of replenishing itself.

hold steady: your inner ear has grown used to the river's current, and now you are back standing on one bank or another. nausea and vertigo - we've all felt it, don't worry. some make it this far only to mistake those feelings for mortal illness, terror even. find the horizon. find the horizon, if it helps.

there's more stumbling to do, and now you're at a strange bend in the river, covered in mud. the mud can come off, once it's dry, don't worry if you have taken on new contours underneath.

this part is not a trick: the mud can dry out, but you never will. once you've been in the river, it leaves its mark. not all that visible, just something you'll feel when others brush up against you, or your shoes squelch on dry pavement.

but all that's still to come. for now, if you're very careful, you can find your way, mud-covered as you are, to the village we've built along the banks. we're waiting for you there, your children and their family. sometimes, our friends will get confused, think you're a visitor from the other bank. you might be, too. it's partly the mud, if that helps. down here on the banks, the river connects more than it divides, and it's not that far across. You won't be the only one covered in mud. so when the sunlight and the mud play tricks, on your eyes or theirs, feel the flow of the river and go easy.

take a breath. we're glad you're here, and these kids already know that a girl who looks like a boy is not such a bad thing to be, if you don't mind the mud.

you will be surprised how well they can swim, your children. sometimes they'll seem to hop from bank to bank, but its our village over there too. other times they'll dive into the current and disappear down the bend, through rapids, over waterfalls. the flow of the river is complicated, sometimes they'll be carried upstream.

the gift that you have brought is yourself, what you put into the river, your own eddies and tributaries. some of the gifts you get back are bruised toes in wet shoes, scalded fingers, water up your nose, and all that mud. The other gift is this: your children will be much braver, more wide-eyed, and have more incredible adventures than we can ever imagine, if you let them.

Sensitive Men In Suits and their Lady Producers Talk About Gender Dysphoria.

This American Life is a very good radio program. it stands head and shoulders above every other NPR show save radiolab. And radiolab is an unfair standard against which to measure anything. But both shows work because so much of their affect and politics seem to be shaped by a constant confrontation with human experiences of the world, and an openness to being undone by that confrontation, and those experiences.

But Ira Glass, he of the soothing-and-seemingly-unrehearsed radio informality, slips into being the Unequivocal Voice of the very self-consciously equivocal radio program. Ira is that sensitive, bespectacled, soft-spoken, lightly tousled, don't-quite-buy-that-he's-straight variety of man, instantly recognizable to the plentiful offspring of any number of progressive liberal arts Alma Maters. The problem with this kind of guy (as anyone who's made it through a class, a party, a few drinks, or an uncomfortable and abortive flirtation with him can attest) is that he's so performatively careful in choosing his words, he'll choose ones you're really not ok with before you can catch it. and when you do catch it, you feel sort of bad bringing it up. Because he's so nice, after all, and really seems to genuinely get it, most of the time. And we wouldn't want to shut him down, right? So he can provide the unifying theme for stories of disparate experiences, share his seemingly thoughtful, hesitantly-arrived-at generalizations, and his producers will join him in the background noise of Polite and Genuine Interest. There's a lot of Interest in This American Life, and very little Passion. the experiences Ira & Co confront might undo or disturb some part of their world, but the moment when the undoing happens is always being recalled, after it's been assimilated and dealt with. This American Life already knows what they think about what you're about to hear. but they might be politely interested in how you feel about it, once you hear it.

(Jad and Robert, on the other hand, are loud, and silly, and absolutely firm in their beliefs. Beliefs which are performed as constantly in flux, and drastically different from those of their co-host. These are differences they will argue about up until the moment of being undone by the big, loud, messy, beautiful, jaw-dropping Eureka moment which Radiolab pivots around. And then they'll catch their breath, change their minds a bit, and resume arguing.)

but that's not what i came to tell you about,

i came to talk about the draft.

Just today, I listened to Ira & Co's podcast from 2 weeks ago. This episode, for reference and context, is entitled "Somewhere Out There."

Chronologically, the episode starts with a story of running numbers to find out how many potential partners any individual might have, in the universe, the world, or the city of boston. but ontologically, it starts with a world where everyone has one single fated life partner. This fate is recognized as a fiction, but an emotionally True fiction. the specialness of a heterosexual pair bond lies, to an enormous extent, in the feeling that it is the Only Possible True Pairing. (whether the rest of us have that problem is left unresolved, as our existence is mentioned throughout, but only by exclusion. the first statistical order of business when running the numbers is to eliminate members of the same sex from the pool.) so, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, this week's episode is about the Possibly Futile Search for the One Other Person Out There who will understand and complete you. which sounds, to me, like the blurb on the back cover of the Trashy Bestseller of heteronormativity and the neoliberal nuclear family.

As if dizzied by trying to focus on sexual and gender experiences so close to the end of its own nose, this collection of stories takes a sudden zag out of the romantic realm altogether, and starts talking about Thomasina and Lilly, two young girls who meet and are instant best friends. I realized that this was not going to be a Gay Story at the instant of the Reveal:

Thomasina and Lilly are both transgender. We can now rest assured that the rest of the segment will focus on the trauma that this has inflicted upon their families, and their struggles to fit in as totally normative, unremarkable, appropriately feminine girls.

and i don't imagine the producers of this american life know they've tapped into this genre, but the rest of us now also know that this will be a story about being petrifyingly alone, and maybe managing to find one other person like you, who can, in the most chaste manner possible, penetrate the well of loneliness for a fleeting moment. (anyone who thinks trans women don't belong in lesbian separatist spaces, just look at pop depictions of our social lives while wearing a flapper dress, and it'll all start to make sense).

What's sort of reassuring though, is how much of the fear and trauma in all the rest of the story is so transparently... parental. Thomasina's parents are the ones who are bereft, without support structure. They try to find other parents with similar experiences, but can't. None of their friends even understand that such a thing is real. then Lilly and Thomasina talk about their friends, and the conversations they have with those friends about The Trans. Those conversations are about genuine friendship and genuine ambiguity. All their positive fantasies seem to focus on not having gender matter so god damned much. And the worries their conversations bring up seem to focus on a negative fantasy of media exposure and shame. and for this tranny's money, 9 year olds don't come up with a fear of paparazzi on their own.

and then Lilly's mom cries about how her daughter said she was angry at god, and about having to send her daughter to school with a haircut that made her look like a boy. and Thomasina's dad cries about the emotional and mental reality of the situation for his kid, while using the wrong pronouns.

and the kids, through all of it, seem pretty fine. and don't seem desperate to maintain this one, precious connection in the way their parents are.

The Kids Are Alright. Let Them Be.