A few years ago, I took a bike ride with my friend Cameron through a remote New England swamp. This was August, and we pushed through the chewy air, bits of rotten leaves blowing up from the gassy marsh and adhering to our skin. Cameron was handsome with his shock of red hair and drooping green eyes, sailing along beside me with the occasional lazy pedal. We were discussing our transitions: he’d been on testosterone for decades, used male pronouns, had changed his name; within the previous three years, I’d had top surgery, sliced off my ponytail, and changed my pronoun to “they.” I felt better in my body than ever before, but I had questions.
“I still don’t know if I’ve finished transitioning, like you have,” I said, shooting along the river, out of breath. “How do you know when you get it right and can rest?”
Cameron snorted. “I don’t know if that’s even possible. Like, for anything.”
Still, as we glided along the overgrown river, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking he had transitioned “correctly.” My transition had been delayed for so long that I sometimes wondered about the other choices I might have made, if I’d had access to information and treatments earlier.
When I was a child, strangers thought I was a boy. I had short hair and an impish face. I was sensitive and wild; my nickname was Loudia. I hated dresses and cheery colors and longed to wear all black but I wasn’t allowed (a rule my mother doesn’t remember making but my miserable self-enforcement lasted years). Pictures of me in middle school are cringe-inducing. I look like a boy in dresses at the dance. My body is crumpled into awkward postures in attempts to conceal my shape. Other children, easy in their femininity, thought it was hilarious to give me “makeovers,” and I was a nightmare in lipstick and headbands.
This was the nineties, when I’d never heard the word transgender, and if someone had explained it to me I would’ve thought of Mrs. Doubtfire. If I’d known there was an injection that could halt female puberty, it would’ve sounded too magical to be real: a solution designed just for me. I would’ve signed up in one second flat.
But my parents knew nothing of such drugs. I knew nothing of them. There was barely any internet then. Not even the therapist I was briefly assigned at age eleven recognized my constant distress as gender dysphoria. So instead I marched along as the fake-ass girl I had to pretend to be.
After college, Cameron had been one of the first people I knew to transition, and his example opened up a possible solution to my dysphoria. At first, I was ecstatic — here was a possibility, where before there’d been none. But he and every other trans person I knew at that time chose the same path: they took hormones, changed to male names and pronouns, underwent available surgeries, and they emerged, on the other side, looking the way I thought a man looks.
This path was encouraging, but it didn’t feel all right for me. I wanted top surgery more than anything, but I wasn’t sure about hormones. I hated my pronouns, but my name had never felt gendered. (Perhaps because I knew no other Lydias until late in life, the name shaped around me independent of gender. This feeling would change in time, but at the moment I was fine keeping it.) I thought transitioning was all or nothing, so I went on as I had, miserably choosing nothing.
My bike tire rumbled over a mound of moss. “Sometimes I’m like, what’s wrong with me,” I said, breath fast in my throat. “Like what’s stopped me from going all the way?”
Cameron leaned back on the air as his bike rolled along without his help, sucking meditatively on a cigarette. “It seems like you have some weird hierarchy of transness,” he said. “You might want to examine that.”
He was right. Subconsciously, I believed I was “less” trans than he was, as though “more” male equaled more trans. Somewhere in me I knew that being trans is more like an on / off state: you are or you aren’t; there’s no “more” or “less.” But that singular path had returned to haunt me, even as I was thriving with the transition decisions I had made.
“I guess, yeah, it’s messed up,” I said. “But I still can’t help thinking what it would be like if I did what you did.” I tried to keep the rush of admiration from my voice, but it puffed out anyway.
We dumped our bikes on the boardwalk and sat on the edge with our feet dangling, watching a river otter weave through lily pads. Cameron’s shaved lip curled, the sun lighting his sinewy arms. He rubbed them, though they were dry of sweat. I longed to be as comfortable in my body.
“It’s funny, hearing you talk about all this,” Cameron said, pushing a hand through the bristly back of his hair. “Because my experience is kinda the opposite.” Like me, he had seen only the singular path: all medical interventions; looking like a man. “So that’s what I did,” he said, shrugging at the gooey pink of the sunset. “But I don’t think I would’ve done that now.” He stared at me with sleepy eyes. I froze, waiting for what he was going to say. “I might’ve taken your path.”
I blinked at him. My path? The path I’d considered stunted, like no path at all? Cameron had done what I’d always thought I should’ve done, with the same misinformation I had. He seemed happy and easy in the world. I processed what he’d said as he finished his cigarette and we waited for the otter to resurface. She was just under the skin of water, withholding her cute grace. Even Cameron, who seemed so fully realized in his trans identity, had also been blocked by lack of care and options. There was no way to know how toxic politics had fucked with anyone. More options was the only way to give everyone their best chance. More options for care, more role models, more people talking about how and when they’d forged their own unique selves.
Cameron blotted out his cigarette on the edge of the pier, tested its tip with a finger. We stood up. Beside each other on the beat-up boardwalk, such a distant ride from any road that it felt like no one had ever arrived at that particular spot before, I imagined how each of us would’ve grown up had we been born now, in states that still manage to allow care for trans kids. Both our roads would’ve been easier another way, or at least less haunted. For each of us there was another adult living in some other dimension who’d grown up with all options available, and had made different choices and ended up happy in a different way. But even as I squinted, it was impossible to imagine. Cameron was perfect: hot and hip and mysterious, bangs hanging in sad eyes, boots stamping the soft planks. He looked like a cool guy from an eighties film, red flannel shirt flapping in the hot breeze, freckles decorating his cheekbones and the spike of his chin.
And me. For the first time in my life I felt comfortable, went days or even weeks without getting derailed by dysphoria. I was embarrassed to admit I liked how I looked, even in that moment, in the swamp, sweaty and greasy, mosquitos stuck to my arm, because I’d never felt that way before and the experience was so deeply alien that it almost felt wrong. I tried to let myself feel it anyway, a burn in my chest that I had to fight against extinguishing.
In Tennessee, where I live, care for trans minors has been completely abolished. I fear more nasty and bigoted backlash against our tiny progress, and I hope more than anything that kids of the future will have the whole smorgasbord of transitions available to them. I wish trans care had been different for me, and Cameron, too. But in that moment, sunlight filtering through cattails, I saw that we’d found a way through. And I surged with weird power, like a golden light through me.
Lydi’s essay mainly focuses on human queerness, but didja know it also takes place in a queer environment? Yes, some scholars / naturalists / casual swampophiles suggest that the swamp itself is a queer ecosystem. We like this take from visual anthropologist Shannon Turner, who argues that “To subsume oneself in the moss and mud of the swamp is to reject social order and cultivate a relationship with chaos” and that “the sublime is not possible without slime.” Yum!
And speaking of rejecting social orders, we also like Lasara Firefox Allen’s guide to genderqueer menopause. (We kinda feel like “menopause” should henceforth be referred to as “cultivating a relationship with chaos.” But we digress.)
Last but not least, check out Trans Aid Nashville, a collective “providing aid, community, and building power for all transgender people in the greater Nashville Area.” Because as Lydi notes, it’s not a great time to be a trans person (not to mention a poor person, or a sick person, or an immigrant, or…okay maybe just a person) in the U.S. right now.
So yeah, we’re off to subsume ourselves in the nearest mudpuddle. See you there?
