Vascular (2020)
I wished to stay and pursue a friendly chat. I wished to run. I frantically reached for the closest object I could clutch to my chest — muddy beach blankets — and eventually made it into the house.
BY matthew heinz
IMAGE BY MEAHA CAUDLE-CHOI
I have received much support for my transition. And suddenly, everyone wants me to go swimming all the time. They don’t understand that I don’t have a reflection in bodies of water.
I remember being 13 and sitting in the car with my mother. A rainy parking lot next to the beautifully ozone-laden, skylit community pool in a small Danish town. I tried to wrestle myself out of my jeans and into the bathing suit, fighting angry tears of unknown origin.
“You’ll have to take your suit off in front of others anyway,” my mother said. “It’s a Danish pool. We will go into the women’s locker room where everyone will be nude and take showers so that everyone will be clean in the pool.”
I can’t do it, I thought then. Lacking any explanation for that impulse, I attributed it to pathological shyness although I was not shy. “You’re prudish,” my mother said. Thinking of the erotic literature I had stashed under my bed; I knew better without knowing anything at all.
The words found me much too late. Forty years later, the trans tipping point flooded my imagination with a dazzling array of authenticities. A German, I followed the manual. On the fifth anniversary of a rather public transition, the man-like in the mirror scrutinized me for signs of attachment. My balding head seemed larger, but much too small to hold my many lives. The razor traced a barely perceptible shadow of futures. Was I looking for myself in all the wrong places? #ThisIsWhatTransLooksLike.
Declaring that I know myself to not be a cisgender woman brought relief. That speech act also unveiled my vulnerability for all to see in the most trivial of moments. Touchy lesbian, they might have said. Now, vulnerability clings to me like wet swimwear. Coming from a swim in the lake last summer, I had erred on the side of throwing caution (and a dry binder) to the wind. Unbound, I figured it would be two, three steps from the car to the house without being seen by the neighbours. The neighbours know, of course, but the trans in my gender is not articulated in over-the-fence conversations. It doesn’t matter what they know. What matters is me seeing what they see.
As I opened the car door, a neighbour whom we had not seen in a while appeared on the sidewalk and involved us in a chatty conversation. I wished to stay and pursue a friendly chat. I wished to run. I frantically reached for the closest object I could clutch to my chest — muddy beach blankets — and eventually made it into the house. Water pooled in my sandals, driven down by the weight of my gender fatigue. Lake basin, sandals, skin; temporary containers alike. Full but porous, like the gender designations in our lexica.
My partner followed, quietly applauding the creativity of my blanket armour. Regardless of which philosophical argumentation I chose, I would have remained naked under these blankets.
If you care to Google my name, you’ll find my trans+* pedigree. If you ask me, I will tell you everything I know (to date) about my gender identities. But I care — oh I care so much — about those trivial, two-minute interactions which will affect any trivial, two-minute interactions to come for years. I detest the ways I seek approval for being. I’m a seasoned academic administrator, but collective bargaining and grade appeals are no match for an invitation to a beach.
Has anyone noticed that I haven’t declared myself to be a man?
Online trans visibility can’t help me unsee what others have seen. Believe it or not, I’m not dysphoric. My body has been an amazing vessel so far, and I’m not about to abandon ship. It’s not about others seeing my feminine shape. It’s about others seeing my discomfort at being seen in my feminine shape. The age of the visual is terrifying. How I would like to choose the order of my reductive representations. I don’t want to be glamorous in my imported, pretend no-gender bathing suit. Before I transitioned, swimming wasn’t nearly as complicated. But once I had forced the words off my lips like the last drops out of a women’s bathing suit, I could not re-enter these bodies of water. Like that of many other trans or non-binary people hidden by breasts, my body no longer passes for anything. Leaving me always subject to the cisgender gaze.
Back at the lake, what I see in the ripples of lake water cannot be fixed in time or place, but the shapes assure me that I’m not nothing when all I know for certain is what I’m not. Flooded by identities like the gentle but persistent waves lapping over me, I unsteady my being to immerse a timid toe on the small beach. Late summer idyll: children splashing, the serious swimmer, teens on floaties, mountains, trees, and parents dabbing sunscreen on infants. One foot barely curled around a reed; I can picture myself swimming toward shore as if stable banks existed. The still lake is interrupted only by the occasional fish bubble. And me, in my unisexish Taiwanese import.
Keyword: transgender binder swimming
Tag: neoliberal transgenderism
Hit: Going Swimming. Tips for FTM, non-binary, tomboy
The suit may be worth its extraordinary cost and shipping fees on a slim young transmasculine swimmer, but on me, the act of veiling serves as an unveiling mechanism. It only exposes my weaknesses. If only nudity could cover me up. My foot recoils from the cold water although I’m boiling on the inside. I should bite my lips and lower myself into the water. I cannot swim away from my embarrassment. Precariously balanced on a pile of pebbles, I awkward myself back to the beach. There is no health benefit to this exercise.
The pandemic spared me the threat of beaches, lakes, and pools and the awkwardness of explaining why I would, seemingly, prefer to sit dressed much too warmly and watch others frolic. It allowed me to move freely within my mind and house. It let me find my voice again. After years of shrinking into a taciturn version of shortened and thickened vocal cords, I gave up on the voice. Let the awkwardness be theirs. In the safety of my house, I’m done performing.
It is so tiring, being so angry at the water we are all made of.
matthew [bettina] heinz writes on Vancouver Island and is the author of Entering Transmasculinity: The Inevitability of Discourse (2016, Intellect Press).
Image: Meaha Caudle-Choi, Vascular, acrylic paint on canvas, 2020.
Edited for publication by Christopher Middleton as part of the Professional Writing and Communications Program.
The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by Applied Research & Innovation.