QUEERLY TRANS
It Started with a Whisper and an Egg Crack
Logan’s Corner writing prompt: Pivotal moment
This post is in response to a Queerly Trans Logan’s Corner Writing Prompt: Pivotal Moments.
Every moment is a pivotal moment
This is such a great writing prompt as it has forced me to think and consider moments, events, people, self, life, existence, the butterfly effect, truth, core… Oh crap, I didn’t mean to dive into existentialism in the first sentence. My bad. Back it up.
Oh, hi!
Every moment, every decision, every action, every thought, is a pivotal moment.
Have you heard of Quantum Jumping? No, not that awesome 90’s TV show with fine AF Scott Bakula and Dean ‘is-it-just-me-or-in-his-twenties-did-he-look-a-lot-like-Dave-Franco?’ Stockwell — that was Quantum Leap. Different, but verging on the concept.
TRANS-TANGENT: Hmm, I loved Quantum Leap. The main character, Sam, would ‘’leap’ into a new character every week — be someone different, every episode — Oh, boy! Interesting now that I think about it. I’m sure if I watched it now, it would be highly cringy, but at the time, it sang to my little unknown trans heart. It would be an interesting exploration to watch it now and see how they explored gender and sexuality.
Quantum ̶L̶e̶a̶p̶Jumping
I’ll let Muang'Akili Tugmakvu do some of the heavy lifting here in regard to quantum jumping as they’ve already done a great job overviewing some of the concepts in their article below.
So picture it — what if every moment, every decision, is creating a new universal timeline, and what if you could access all of the other timelines? What if you could access all of the experiences your millions of duplicates have had and tap into their positive elements?
TRANS-TANGENT: Wait, does that mean I could quantum jump into a cisgender male version of myself? I mean, if every point is a new trajectory of universal experience, a new timeline, and if the theory of transgender occurrence is based on in-utero hormone levels, then it stands to reason that I could quantum jump into a version of me in which the hormone levels weren’t interrupted. But what if all versions of me are trans? Oh man, that’s a new level of existentialism!
Wait, does that mean I could quantum jump into a cisgender male version of myself?
Oh, right, this article isn’t about that. I got carried away. But, seriously, it’s interesting stuff. Go google it.
Anyway, the point is (wait, do I have a point? Yes, yes I do) that every moment could be considered a pivotal moment because sometimes (often) the greatest pivotal moments, those of greatest impact (the butterfly effect on butterfly steroids) aren’t necessarily obvious. What if instead of an explosion, it was a whisper?
Yeah, yeah, answer the damn question!
Okay, calm down! Fine. I’ll choose one pivotal moment, but I do not guarantee that it won’t be a whisper.
🎶 Inserting thinking music 🎶
Alright! So I’ve selected a pivotal moment in my egg cracking. As Logan Silkwood mentioned in his prompt, there are so many options with how to tackle this idea of the ‘pivotal moment’ in relation to the Queerly Trans experience, but I’ve decided to go with the classic, “Oh, crap, I’m trans!” moment. Well, not entirely. But it was a start.
Long story short — but here’s the long story
It all happened quite quickly and it was in the moment of realization and acceptance that I was genderqueer (the first label I assigned[sic.] myself) that my identity of attraction basically fell apart.
The whisper came in a definition. I wasn’t searching for me; I was searching for my character.
SPOILER ALERT: All my characters are aspects of me and they turn up to show me a piece of myself I need to explore or develop. You’d have thunk I’d have learned by now! Read more on THAT debacle here.
The whisper came in a definition. I wasn’t searching for me; I was searching for my character.
In searching for ‘labels’ to attach to my characters, I read a definition of Genderqueer that froze me.
I’ve tried to find that exact definition, to replicate the situation, but it seems I’ve changed sufficiently enough that I have no idea what past me googled! That or the definition was so damn inaccurate, it’s been corrected. But it’s what I needed at the time. It was my whisper. My pivotal moment! The definition was something like this:
Genderqueer: Having a gender expression not typical of male or female.
But it’s what I needed at the time. It was my whisper. My pivotal moment!
I was ready to accept that my ‘gender expression’ was essentially queer and that was the tiny little start of the crack I needed.
The whisper of a badly defined label was more powerful than the years of unnoticed dysphoria. It was clearer than the hundreds of signs that I wasn’t who I had learned to portray. And it was louder than the shouted voices of my growing band of characters beating at my skull to see them, to hear them, to be them.
With great power comes (out) great queerness
What came next was a long stroll off the short pier of cishet artifice, straight into the rainbow ̶p̶o̶o̶l̶ ocean. I wrote about it a year ago, when it was still new. It’s entertaining, weird, and a little forehead-slap worthy to read my poor little gender-confused thoughts when I first popped my head out of the egg. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m still confused AF, but in a completely different way.
But wait, I thought I was a straight cisgender woman? If I’m not cis, then technically (and let’s keep this baby on the surface while I still tread water) I’m trans. So, what? Am I a gay trans man? Initiate head spin.
If you want to fill in the blanks between then and now, I wrote an article about my journey. It’s a thing.
I can no longer deny that I am genderqueer by the very definition, but my poor little brain has suffered for so long with the narrative that ‘trans people transition to become straight’ that I am struggling with the concept of being trans.
This is the part where I say, “Smell ya later!”
And so, in conclusion:
- Pivotal moment
- A whisper
- Genderqueer
- And then shit got real
Your turn! What was your pivotal moment? Read the Logan’s Corner prompt here. And check out all of the Logan’s Corner prompts and responses here.
If you would like to write your own response and have it published here on the Queerly Trans website, read the article below to find out how.
