Burn It Down Read online

  I always have the option to move again, to escape into a slightly less dystopian reality, but the veneer of progress or liberalism quickly wears thin to reveal that I’m still in the same house, just peering out a different window. Regardless of region, the fight continues for women and LGBTQIA communities, voting rights, affordable housing, universal health care, and living wages. The fight, always, continues. We’re all living in an Ohio—a state of ongoing tension.

  When we drive on Highway 62 and pass the Confederate flags and the billboards declaring “one man, one woman = real marriage,” I see it now as an opportunity to give my kids what I wish I always had: an example of how to embrace anger; how to use it as a natural resource, whether facing injustice or critically interpreting political and religious propaganda. “You see these big signs?” I ask my kids when we pass religious billboards. “There’s a lot of people out there who are afraid of anything different from themselves. People who are afraid will try to tell you who to love, how to love, or who to be friends with, but we’re not afraid of other people just because they may be different from us. That’s not who we are.”

  I tell my kids that anger is part of a well-stocked arsenal, and that the arsenal isn’t just for Ohio. It’s for life. Increasing scientific evidence shows trauma and pain can be physically, molecularly passed down from one generation to the next. I believe other things can be passed down, too. Although fear and habitual submission may have played a part in my formative years, I believe that having an alchemist as a mother—a person who learned how to transform caustic racist experiences into an arsenal for protection and healing—will extend some of my tools for living with anger to my children.

  It’s because of my choices that I can fluidly speak about anger as a source of strength, and how, even after all these years, I’m still challenged to define my identity as I teach my kids, and others, how to cultivate their arsenal, how to live with anger as an invitation to a life of resistance and relationship. Without anger, I would have never found like-minded women of color thinkers, writers, scholars, and activists in the bourgeoning landscape of the internet and social media. Without anger, I would not have had the fuel to examine and recognize the historical marginalization of other communities of color, especially Black women who have largely carried the burden of and endured the legacy of America’s racist misogyny.

  At so many points, I swore my anger would drive me out of Ohio, but because I befriended anger as a discovery site of necessary ferocity and growth, I now see Ohio as a particular kind of kiln, a place where I have learned that heat is the ingredient that solidifies clay into sculpture—into something of a marvel.

  Crimes against the Soul

  SHERYL RING

  I usually wear skirts or dresses, with high heels and my hair done and nails polished. I love sparkles and makeup, and I usually wear lots of both. And though I haven’t been blessed with the biggest chest in the world, it’s decent enough. All in all, when I show up, it’s not that hard to figure out that this person in front of you wearing makeup and sparkles and a dress with red hair down to her back is a woman. At the very least, I know I don’t exactly scream “guy.”

  And yet I still get called “sir.” And “him.” And “he.”

  For a long time, I thought it was me, that I was being misgendered because I didn’t pass well enough. We in the trans community have an awful habit of internalizing things like this. But the reality is, I am a woman, and therefore, I am what a woman looks like. Every trans woman is what a woman looks like. It’s not that we all pass—it’s that whether or not we “pass” is a question we shouldn’t have to ask. We shouldn’t need to meet some arbitrary patriarchal standard of womanly appearance in order to be referred to as the women we are.

  We shouldn’t, but we do.

  My entire life has been a war between the woman I’ve always known I am and the man I was always told I was. Until I transitioned, I didn’t recognize my reflection in the mirror; there was this sort of disassociation, a disconnect between who I was and what I saw. My mind couldn’t process the idea that that was me (because it wasn’t). There were the nights I cried, praying to God that He correct this mistake and fix me. There were the nights I cried, cursing God for giving me a body that mocked me every time I looked in the mirror. And then there were the nights I denied God existed at all, for no benevolent deity would do this to a person. My genitals were a tumor to be excised, a cancer to be cured. And some nights I cried myself to sleep, thinking myself insane.

  I kept my identity a dark secret, terrified of what I was, until I could hide it no longer. The scariest step I ever took in my life was deciding to trust my mind and my heart over the people around me and the body that they saw. I came out after a bad car accident, one I was lucky to walk away from, because I realized that the thought of dying with people thinking me a man was too painful to bear. I would rather die a woman than live one more day as a man.

  The truth is that not one of us asked to be trans, and most of us wouldn’t have chosen it if we had been given the opportunity. My soul didn’t ask for this body.

  But I’m here, now, and this is how I was made. It’s not my fault that I was born into a body that you can’t see as female. If you could see my soul, you’d have no doubt. But when I tell you—when I expose a bit of my soul to tell you that, no, this body is wrong, and you in turn say it’s my soul that’s wrong, it’s literally a soul-crushing experience.

  To purposefully misgender someone is to commit an act of violence. It’s the exercise of control over their person and identity without their consent.

  The line between misgendering and sexual assault is blurrier than it might seem. I once went to a doctor’s office where a nurse consistently misgendered me while checking me in. And then, without permission, she reached out and poked my breast, repeatedly, laughing all the while, because she wanted to see if it was real. (It is.)

  By taking away my womanhood by misgendering me, she’d given herself permission to assault me. If I’m not a woman, then she can’t be doing anything wrong by touching my breasts. Misgendering is a violation of my womanhood, just like grabbing my breast is. Its goal is the same: to put me in my place.

  To misgender me is to take that femininity that I’ve nurtured and cherished and sustained in the darkest places—and which has nurtured and cherished and sustained me in the darkest places—and crush it. To deny its existence. And worse, deny its worthiness to exist. When someone misgenders me on purpose, they are saying I’m not woman enough to be recognized. They are saying that I’m not a woman at all—that I’m crazy, and they know me better than I know myself. When this happens, I feel my anger as pain. It’s not in any physical part of my body, but I can feel it all the same, in a visceral way, somewhere deep, like being punched in the heart. I grit my teeth, I breathe heavier. I talk slower, and my voice becomes softer but with a sharper edge. The feeling of anger at being misgendered is the feeling of controlling my anger; of staying sweet and acceptably feminine in the face of being told I’m not.

  I get misgendered everywhere. In the grocery store (I’ve had clerks refuse to give me deli meat unless I explain how a trans person is allowed to get a job), in restaurants (I had a manager literally try to break down the door to the women’s restroom I was in), in doctors’ offices (my favorite was a nurse telling me “you’re not trans, you’re just a drag queen”).

  Some of it comes from other lawyers. When I first came out, people who worked for the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC), the attorney licensing board in Illinois, told me I couldn’t transition because it would be “deceptive” to the public. Then they made me deadname myself (use my birth name) in court for months. I would show up, in my dress and heels and makeup, and have to use my deadname in court arguments and on filings. When I petitioned to have this rule changed, they sent me a terse letter saying that because no other states allowed trans attorneys to use their chosen names, even legally changed names, they wouldn’t
either (that’s not true, by the way).

  I eventually decided, for the sake of my sanity, to use my legal, feminine name—my real name—anyway. Some attorneys refused to speak with me after that, saying they wouldn’t violate an ARDC ruling by using female pronouns or my legal name.

  When I came out, my boss refused to call me “she” or “her.” He would call me “he” and “his” and “him” in court, in front of clients, and interrupt me to tell people to use male pronouns. When I asked him to use female pronouns for the umpteenth time, he told me, “I have a business to run, and I don’t have time to coddle your feelings.” When I insisted, he responded, “You didn’t consult me in your decision to transgender, so I don’t have to deal with your transgender issues.” He fired me later that week, telling me, “I think you had a sex change just so you could be a bitch to me.”

  That statement, calling me a bitch, was the closest he ever came to calling me a woman unprompted.

  After I found a new job, which wasn’t easy with one firm after another unwilling to hire a trans lawyer, I was in court arguing a case before a judge who utterly refused to use female pronouns. I corrected him once, twice, three times. After the fourth time, he looked over at me and said, “I’m wearing the robe, so I can call you whatever I want.” In that one conversation, the judge both negated my entire identity and forbade me from doing anything about it—I can’t be a litigator if I’m not in judges’ good graces. I felt brutalized, violated, put on a stage for the judge’s amusement. I felt inhuman.

  I wanted to lash out, to cause the same hurt I felt, but that just made it worse because then I was angry at myself for feeling that way. I felt guilty, because I was angry and women aren’t supposed to be angry, and yet there I was. I felt exposed, vulnerable, like my inability to control my emotions was a personal failure. Then the anger gave way to humiliation—being forced to stand there, silently, trying not to show that I was on the verge of tears, knowing that if I were to challenge him, my career might very well be over. The judge forced me to choose between my dignity and supporting my family. The worst part of anger for me has always been when there’s no outlet for it. For trans women, that happens all too often—especially when your livelihood depends on swallowing your anger.

  More than once, I thought about quitting law. But one trans child, who had just started high school and wanted to be a lawyer one day, asked me to stay. “I need to know it’s possible to be myself and be a lawyer,” they told me. “If you leave, I’ll have to bear the burden of being the first. And I don’t think I could do that.” So, I take the body blows so the next generation doesn’t have to.

  As word got around, attorneys learned they could use my gender as a weapon. And they did. I had an attorney call me “that” and “it” in arguments. I had another refuse to speak with me on a religious objection and ask the judge to order my client to hire someone else. Another told me that I was required, under the rules of civility, to allow him to misgender me because, as he put it, “it’s easier for you to just let me call you a man than it is for me to unlearn sixty years of morals.” One attorney sent me an email telling me that my presence in the case was unfair to him because he didn’t like trans people and that he wouldn’t discuss the case with me or agree to extend professional courtesies unless I detransitioned. “You’re either a man or a woman,” he said. “Grow up and face the real world.”

  These people substitute their judgment for mine, telling me I don’t get to control my body. Or they insist that they know my identity better than I do. There’s the “you’re just a gay man” argument. Well, no, I’m a lesbian, I’m exclusively attracted to women (most of all my beautiful wife). Then there’s the “you’re not a lesbian, you have a penis” argument, which makes me wonder whether they inspect everyone else’s genitalia and how they know what genitalia I have anyway. Both of those usually come from the same person, which means they’re deciding my gender identity and sexuality for me. How generous of them. I really didn’t need the help, though.

  Then there’s the argument that the sexism I experience isn’t fair to cis women. I face sexism like any other woman. I get called “baby” and “honey” and “sweetheart.” I have a halfway decent figure, a good pair of legs, and Julianne Moore hair, so I get hit on sometimes, usually in entirely inappropriate situations. I’m not thrilled about it, but it’s a fact of life, so I deal with it.

  A while back, a woman saw me get called “honey” by a guy who hit on me while I was at work. This woman came over to me and said, “It’s so unfair how you face sexism like this. I get when it happens to me—but can’t they tell you’re not a woman? And why do they hit on you? You don’t menstruate!”

  In other words, she was offended that a guy found me attractive. Offended because I wasn’t enough of a woman to be found attractive by a man.

  There’s this belief in transphobic circles that trans women can’t be women because womanhood somehow depends upon reproductive capabilities. That argument hurts me the most. I’d trade just about anything—my sight, by hearing, my arms, my ability to walk—to be able to menstruate. I’m a woman, approaching thirty, and I can’t get pregnant. I can’t have kids of my own. Thank you for reminding me of that particular pain—I wonder if you tell all infertile women that they’re men.

  It’s not a feeling, or a whim, or a curiosity that makes me a woman. It’s who I am, and who I’ve always been. What I have—what I was born with—is a birth defect. No more and no less. Some people are born with a cleft palate. Some people are born conjoined. I was born into a body with the wrong parts. It happens. Nature isn’t perfect.

  But being trans is the only birth defect where we tell people who have it that they are delusional about it. If doctors told patients with cleft palate that they were supposed to be that way, they’d lose their licenses.

  To misgender another purposefully is to commit an act of violence. But it’s also an act of erasure. Erasure of identity, of presence, of existence. Saying that I am a man means I don’t exist, because I am not a man and never will be. So the anger that comes from being misgendered is more than righteous indignation. It’s a burning hatred against someone who would deny my very existence.

  For Women Who Grew Up on Eggshells

  MINDA HONEY

  The night before my middle sister’s wedding, my father sent me a text message. He wanted to talk, “So, it won’t be awkward tomorrow.” My father had not spoken to me for one year and two months. In this time, I had quit my job and moved from Denver, Colorado, to Riverside, California, for graduate school. I had learned my mother had leukemia. I had turned thirty. None of these occasions had warranted a phone call from my father or a text message or a flock of homing pigeons with apologies and congratulations and consolations secured to their miniscule ankles.

  So, I spoke to someone else. As a graduate student, I was entitled to five free sessions a year with a therapist through the campus mental health clinic. I had never spoken to a therapist before, but when my sister called me that May to see if it’d be possible for me to fly home in June for her short-notice nuptials, I knew she was also asking me to stand in the same room as my father and smile. It would not be possible for me to return to Louisville, Kentucky, for her intimate thirty-person wedding without seeing him. And I did not know how to be in one city and leave my anger in another.

  They didn’t have any Black women therapists on campus, so I took an appointment with whomever was next available. The therapist was a white man in his fifties, probably around the same age as my father. His features were about as interesting as his university-issued office décor: faded teal couch, grayed-out walls, boxy desk, fluorescent lights. I would have preferred a warmer color palette with softer lighting, but this was the aesthetic of free mental health care. The therapist asked me why I was there, and I told him, “I’m either crazy now and need help or I will be by the time I get back from Louisville.”

  I wanted to talk about my father, the therapist wanted to ta
lk about my mother. My father is not speaking to me. My father can be cruel. My father has a temper. But what about your mother? My mother? My mother has cancer.

  Growing up, my mother taught us three girls how to read our father’s moods like the weather, how to discern their ever-shifting winds. How to carve out a childhood at the base of an active volcano. How to survive the flash flood that was my father’s temper, rage like water rising fast. He’d yell, he’d berate, he’d snarl. He’d snatch sentences from our mouths before we could finish them and twist them against us. This was at home. This was at school. This was without notice. This was a torrential downpour on a day the weatherman hadn’t even warned me to bring an umbrella. There was so much of him that there became very little room for me in my own head. It never occurred to me to stand up to him, to raise my voice in return, find out what he was truly capable of. All I knew was what my mother had taught us, that you can’t control the weather.

  We rode the waves of his anger, never really knowing how far away from shore and safety we’d be swept. Every chair we neglected to push in after dinner, every light left on when leaving the room, every smear of egg yolk remaining on a counter was taken as a personal slight against him. Expressions, words, behaviors that seemed benign could mean something entirely different to my father, something worthy of a vortex of anger.

  But the weather wasn’t always in climate. He also helped us with our homework. Patiently explaining algebra to me, long hours spent solving for the unknown. He bought me a used car at sixteen and when I totaled it, he arrived at the scene unconcerned about the vehicle, saying, “All that matters is that you’re okay,” and replaced it with a brand new, cherry-red Jetta a few months later. I was born two months premature, and he often told me stories about holding me in the palm of one hand. How he’d dreamt of the father he lost at eight every night of his life until there was me. How I’d changed everything, meant everything to him.