Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

One of my grandmother’s best friends was assigned male at birth but sometimes presented as a woman, in the 1970s — long before we developed language and inclusive attitudes toward transgender people. We were instructed to call him Uncle Bobby. He and my grandmother belonged to a gospel singing group. He’d often quiz me and my cousins on American history. I remember him as kind and full of laughter.

After a while, we stopped seeing Uncle Bobby; the group disbanded because of his drinking. When I asked about him, my grandmother simply said, he was unhappy. I had not thought about Uncle Bobby in many years until I discovered an inherited photo of him in a wedding dress. The picture dates to 1973.

When I was young, on my way to the basketball court, one Saturday morning, I came upon a guy kicking and punching someone dressed in women’s clothes. I knew people like Uncle Bobby were in mortal danger for their lives. We have come a long way from yesterday, but people still refuse to see nonbinary and transgender folks as full-fledged members of our communities.

Society’s debates around gender identity boils down to this simple fact: people want others to see them as they see themselves. This is a pure, human need for affirmation from friends, parents, and peers. It builds self-esteem and mental stability.

Today’s poem grapples with the emotional difficulty of transitioning, but proudly asserts a sovereignty over the body and importance of the right to shape one’s identity.

Trans Loneliness
by Rickey Laurentiis

Martha P. Johnson

Why doubt I’d grow breasts a ‘Natural’ way?
Am I not ‘Real’ Flesh? Am I not enworthied sway
of that Biology? Not ‘Cis,’ you think me ‘alien’?
Loose? Do I so estrange? Wouldn’t I be, monstrous, the ‘Gorgon’
Lady with my two ‘new,’ added, latest ‘Eyes’ budding from the Chest
Plate O it hurt—the nips (eyes turned her into a ‘monster’) that gaze best
At a gracious, ‘specious’ World sends Fists. But I took my Estrogen
Chill, my Antiandrogen, over some several years, then ‘broke’
      my ‘Chill’ to stern the Heart—
That it? Then I ‘urged’ Progesterone into the Regimen,
Pills that nearly broke my heart, except I ‘bloom’d’—beware I am
A Beauty, with Spices added. I ‘bleed.’ Can I pray
Such radical, natural ‘unsurgery’ upon my Fungible self is enuf
      Trans? enuf Woman? (Black as I am?) And Soy.
God’s-child. Tho some surgery be our choice, Martha, our right to ‘appeal’
& so revise what Lonely, happy ‘Sovereignty’ of the Body we claim,
      I can’t afford it. So I learned to ‘express’ my Body piecemeal,
No ‘cancer.’ Didn’t I rise again in the AM to cry ‘pearls’? Please, Friend, girl,
      answer.


Note: As Carl Jung reminds us, “Loneliness does not come from having no people about 
one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, 
or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.” This sonnet, written to 
a pioneer, is not all Black trans women, incorporates the pharmaceutical names some 
of our hormonal regimens use. Where the single quotation marks appear I mean to put 
pressure on and reveal some ways figurative language is excused, where it’s refused too 
often with regard to “woman.”

“Trans Loneliness” by Rickey Laurentiis. Used by permission of the poet.