Time is a Flat Tranny

By Morrigan Vandelle

The moment I realized I was trans, HRT was my holy grail.  

Like a lot of girls who were told they were boys, I had a lot of expectations about what HRT could do for me.  

Having unmedicated ADHD made the road to getting it fairly bumpy too, and when I finally got a hold of some with the help of a friend and a partner, I finally started on 2 mg of estradiol and 50 mg of spironolactone.  

And for about 6 months, it was good.

Except for when it wasn't.  Unmedicated ADHD and medication regiments of any kind are very much like oil and water, in that one tends to repel the other. 

And for a little bit, the oil and water mixed, but eventually, I was missing my HRT for weeks on end without realizing it.  Well, that's not true.  

Sometimes I was missing it on purpose.  Sometimes because I was broke and I wanted to make the girl pills last.  

Sometimes because depression, anxiety, and borderline personality disorder would conspire to convince me the pills weren't going to do for me what I thought I needed them too.

This sort of hormonal wave pattern continued on for about 2 years and change.  During that time, I let my mental and physical health deteriorate.  I let my relationships go up in smoke.  I let myself become the worst version of myself.  None of it had anything to do with HRT.  HRT is still my holy grail.  

It's not the overwhelming need that drives me, but a more sublime want.  I want to be a woman, I need to be alive.  If I’m going to be alive, I should be alive as a woman.  Pursuing femininity gives me a reason to live, which makes being alive generally pretty agreeable.

Hello, my name is Morrigan, and I'm a transsexual woman who is temporarily forgoing HRT.

Transsexual folk exist in a strange state these days, at least from my perspective.  

It feels these days like folks such as myself live in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. Every trans girl is Schrodinger's Tranny.  

We are expected to both be perfectly at peace with the cards our genetics dealt us, and we are expected to pursue the pinnacle image of our gender and/or sex with superhuman resolve.

What's doubly awful about this tension is that the messaging comes from both within our communities and from without.  

From cishet society at large, we see trans folk (primarily trans feminine folk) be held up in the same way that cis people are if they manage to embody the ill defined but somehow perfectly understood image of their gender or sex.  

Everyone knows what a man or a woman is, right?  Even if the words fail to contain the concepts as soon as they’re even spoken or written.

Conversely, those who aren't able to fill that role or conform to that mold are labeled as "brave", or some other euphemism that lets us uggos know "yeah, we think you're gross, but we aren't gonna be mean about it.  At least not to your face.”

From within the community, we use dozens of terms like "cunt" or "fish" or any number of other terms co-opted from the ethnic minorities upon which we've built our fragile sense of communal confidence upon.

We'll see trans folk expose themselves to the double edged sword that is passing. We watch them become a part of the societal canon that is beauty, both adding to its definition while becoming bound to it. Not to mention all the fun and terror comes along with that binding.

Or, you end up languishing in the shadow of the folks who managed to become the dolls they always wanted to be and are broadly unaware of the no doubt myriad compromises they've had to make with their own bodies. 

At the same time, we are all too aware of the adoration and attention these "lucky" few trans folks get, and just sort of feeling like high school is a place you never get to leave.  

Alone in the cafeteria again.

Like everything we've been taught about gender, we allow these two paradigms to polarize and revolve around one another-  Oil and water, again.  

Every now and again, in my end of the social media ocean, someone will accidentally emulsify the mixture, and frothy discourse ushers forth, coating our faces, leaving us messy and unsatisfied.  

And eventually these polarized fluids quietly push away from each other, forming once more unto themselves, no one any wiser, but everyone feeling kind of hurt and divided.

Time is a flat circle.  I'm choosing to attribute that to Rustin Cohle instead of Nietzsche because I think Rustin Cohle is cooler, (and also I think he's an egg) but that's not the point of this article. Either way, time is a flat circle.  

Or rather, time is a flat circle because we allow it to be.  

We let these discourses and the divides they foster continue to be born and born again, festooned with increasingly academic language, if only because so many of us believe that our arguments become more valuable if the words we use sound more expensive.  

I bought into this idea, and I don't think I'm terribly unique in that regard.

Rustin Cohle, as a character, is a man trapped inside the idea that he can't change the world while being bound to a drive that demands he at least try to.  

He's become incredibly erudite in his quest to be a lawbringer, but that knowledge has only really made him better at addressing the symptoms of the fallen world he's fighting against, and not the things that broke the world in the first place.  

And in that respect, most trans folk are Rustin Cohle.  

We found the language, the knowledge and the will to change ourselves, only to realize that we couldn't change the world we live in.  

Every single one of us has the stink of capitalism tattooed on our souls, every single one of us is cursed with the red thirst and the desire to pay the red cost.  These things, these urges are like breathing to those born in the imperial core.  

This is nothing new.

Time is a Flat Tranny.  I'm the flat tranny.  Maybe you are, too. Or maybe your voice isn't deep enough.  Or maybe your hips aren't wide enough.  Maybe your facial hair isn't coming in the way you want.  Or maybe it's still coming in despite more money spent on electrolysis than hot meals. 

All of us are chasing an idea that we may have spent a long time building for ourselves, but no idea exists in a vacuum.  Indeed, all of our ideas exist in the era of neo-liberalism, evolving/devolving into fascism and all the satellite concepts that a post-Reagan marketing reality will inject into your subconscious.

And because we can't cope with that, we discourse.  We tear down each other's dreams, because we can see the faults in the infrastructure of those dreams as they relate to the political and economic realities we are all trapped in to varying degrees.

Maybe we should love each other about it instead.  The fascists aren't just at the gates anymore, they're in the fucking White House because Time is A Flat Fucking Circle.

But time is also a flat tranny.  Trans folks who are plagued with self doubt are the hottest, most capable people on the planet.  Time doesn't just have to go in a circle.  Time can move forward.  Time can be an arrow through the heart of our oppressors, if we take the time to accept each other and our wants, and realize that those things do not necessarily cancel out one another.  

The next time you feel ugly, and feel like calling someone pretty a barbie, maybe ask yourself how you'd feel if you got to where you wanted to be and it still wasn't enough.  

The next time you see a tranny that doesn't quite meet your idea of what is and isn't pretty, ask yourself who put that idea in your head, and then ask yourself if they profit from you propagating that idea further.

The next time you decide to pick a fight about the validity of passing or not, don't.

Focus on the fact that folks are being denied HRT for the most spurious fucking reasons you can imagine.  

Do what you can to separate the idea that pursuing HRT is the pursuit of passing as the gender you want to be, or the sex you want to be. Instead, just say "I'm a free willed human being with limited time on this planet and I'd like some sex hormones please". 

And if you don't think you want or need them, maybe come to the conclusion that some folks absolutely need them to live for any number of reasons, none of which are your business, and none of which affect your capacity to live your life on your own terms.

So go forth and pass if you want to, and feel that you can.  Or don't if you don't.  

Me?  I'll be a flat tranny.  

Hot as fuck, but still dissatisfied, but not so much that I won't appreciate that I get to live and love and all that other saccharine bullshit.