They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name, Volume 2 - The One I've Been Waiting For

Side A: If You Could Only See // Side B: (Are You) the One I've Been Waiting For? / Bonus Track: (Are You) the One I've Been Waiting For? - live at Alexandria Palace, 2020

Volume 2 - The One I’ve Been Waiting For

This post is Volume 2 in my They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name memoir project. Read the Liner Notes here. My trans femme transition playlist is on Spotify.

Side A: If You Could Only See

If you could only see the way she loves me / Then maybe you would understand / Why I feel this way about our love / And what I must do / If you could only see how blue / Her eyes can be when she says / When she says she loves me -from “If You Could Only See” by Tonic

When transgender people are talked about in the media, the conversation almost always surrounds dysphoria. As I wrote in my latest Thistle and Moss article, gender euphoria and dysphoria are common experiences for both transgender and cisgender people. I’ll talk about my dysphoria on Side B of this single.

Let’s start this listening party with the good stuff: euphoria.

I like taking and sharing selfies now, and one common comment from both trans and cis people is that there’s a light in my eyes that wasn’t there before. Even people who didn’t know me pre-transition can see that light. That’s not just my trans experience, though. I’ve seen comments like that in a thousand different trans people’s comment sections.

I can see it in my own eyes. Despite GOP attempts to erase trans people from public life, my euphoria—my joy at being myself—persists. For me, euphoria is something that is always there and also something that springs up in certain times and circumstances.

It’s always there because I love being a woman and experiencing life as a woman. I love being friends with other women and how that’s different than man/man or man/woman friendships. I love being a wife (today is my wife’s and my 18th anniversary!). I love being a Mum (my wife is Mom, I’m Mum). I love how it feels to have estrogen coursing through my veins in greater amounts than testosterone. I love being a daughter. I love being a sister. All of this feels right. All of this gives me peace and clarity in my mind and, dare I say, in my soul.

Back to the light in my eyes… One of the first poems I shared on this blog, “You’d Look So Pretty” is the poem I read to my wife the day I came out to her and told her that I wanted to transition. I start the poem with “Why did G-d waste those damn lashes / on a boy? They would say that, the ones / who loved me.” Sometimes the girls I grew up around would express envy at my “feminine” eyelashes; often, my bullies would zero in on this “girly” feature as worthy of humiliation.

But fluttering my eyelashes always gave me—and still gives me—euphoria. Even when I was trying my utmost to perform manhood well, and well before I had the terminology to describe how I really felt about my gender, I could look in the mirror, flutter, and feel pretty and feel myself.

Side B: (Are You) the One I’ve Been Waiting For?

I felt you coming girl, as you drew near / I knew you'd find me, 'cause I longed you here / Are you my destiny? / Is this how you'll appear? / Wrapped in a coat with the tears in your eyes? / Well take that coat babe, and throw it on the floor / Are you the one that I've been waiting for? -from “(Are You) the One I’ve Been Waiting For” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Last week, while I was visiting (and drinking with) a friend who is a cisgender woman, she asked me, “What does dysphoria feel like?”

Like euphoria, there’s both chronic and acute expressions.

The chronic form, for me, is that overall feeling of disconnect between my womanhood and being assigned male at birth. It’s unease and pain and longing and so much more than the cliché “born in the wrong body.” It’s questions that I can remember as early as when I was three-years-old of “why wasn’t I born a girl?”, “why can’t I be a girl?”, “If I were a girl, [this aspect] of my life would just be easier.”

That last question might seem ridiculous because we know that our patriarchal culture burdens women a lot more than men—in a thousand different ways. The question isn’t about that, though; it’s about me feeling like my life would make more sense as a woman.

When my friend asked about dysphoria, I told her about this song and about a specific piece of dysphoria that I have and continue to experience: my voice. When I was trying to perform manliness for the first 39 years of my life, I thought a deeper voice would help me portray that more effectively. So I trained myself to sing like Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and Nick Cave. I also put a lot of effort into training my speaking voice to sound a certain kind of masculine.

And people loved it. My pre-transition poetry readings almost always led to someone telling me that they enjoyed my reading voice. My rare public singing performances—like when I sang a Johnny Cash song at my Grandad’s funeral—earned me similar compliments. My wife always enjoyed me serenading her with the artists mentioned about and all the classic crooners.

No matter how much effort I put into that voice, it never seemed right. It never seemed genuine. When people complimented my voice, I deflected. I could hear why they might like my voice, but I hated it. And I hated myself for using that voice.

I’ve been doing self-directed feminizing voice training since coming out (and I’ve looked at voice lessons), and the times that I can’t make my voice as femme as I would like: dysphoria. I’ll do some formal voice training soon, then we’ll see if I feel like I need vocal feminization surgery to more fully get rid of this part of my dysphoria.

Bonus Track: (Are You) the One I’ve Been Waiting For? - live at Alexandria Palace, 2020

Oh we will know, won't we? / The stars will explode in the sky / But they don't, do they? / Stars have their moment and then they die -from “(Are You) the One I’ve Been Waiting For?” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

I’ve had friends and family express concern about me transitioning during this time in U.S. history. At the very least, Republicans want to make transgender people second-class citizens. Some of the religious fanatics in the party want state violence levied against us—either in the form of imprisonment or execution.

Some Democratic politicians are fighting for trans rights (I wrote Iowa State Senator Tony Bisignano a thank you letter for his efforts), but party leadership seems happy to bargain us away.

No matter what happens politically or socially, I’m happy that I finally got to be Miranda. The euphoria I’ve experienced is stronger than any law, any government, any bully. Death before detransition.