I use the pronoun “he.”
It’s been a great delight to live at a time when trans experience and visibility have been expanding so much and to have that exquisite sense of coming home to what my body longed for.
I identified as lesbian for many years – a femmy lesbian actually. The term “woman” never really worked for me. “Woman” wasn’t comfortable, and neither was “lesbian.” But a femmy guy – that feels comfortable.
I love my hormones. Testosterone is wonderful. It feels as if my body is on the hormone balance that it always wanted. I’ve had no surgeries, for health reasons – I would have liked to have chest surgery.
I have a dear little beard and a moustache, and facial hair is such a strong gender signifier that people just don’t see my tits. (I don’t like the word “breasts.” I prefer “chesticles.” Somehow “breasts” feels more feminine in a way that’s not comfortable, or it’s too medical.) I get “sir” 99.9 per cent of the time in public even though my voice is female in tone and intonation, and I’m happy about that.
When I was transitioning, it felt very important to be specifically a Jewish man. In ages past, Jewish masculinity was connected to learning rather than to brawn and macho in the standard white Western sense. So it’s lovely to express a Jewish masculinity. According to Elliot Kukla, a trans rabbi and scholar, in some of the Jewish texts, including the Mishnah, there are actually seven genders. And in culture after culture all over the world, two genders is not the norm.
I know the concept of gender will keep changing, and I hope the changes will be around flexibility, expansion, a million genders – as many genders as there are people.
In this historical moment, trans man is the best fit for me. Self-identifying is so central. It’s not okay for anybody else to identify our genders. We’re the ones who get to do that for ourselves.
