I feel eyes on my neck, my chest, my lips, the curve of my hands
Endless surveillance
To fit me into narrow boxes that don’t
Fit.
Words, printed in dying institutions
Scream against me:
I am degenerate
I do not know myself
I cannot know myself
I must be sick
I must be ill.
You cannot love yourself in your messiness,
If you threaten our rigidity.
Another day; another power uses me to enact a war
On culture, on difference
A chess piece in a fight.
My rich inner life ignored
For volleying shots
Will they know of me in my wholeness?
My garden; seeds fighting out of the overwatered mire
Their heads rising to meet the warmth of spring sun
I wallow in the gold of a coming summer
Laid upon the fake wood floor
Exquisite, a sculpture in my trans body.
My excitement in seeing
A pair of jays fly by.
Jays mate for life
Brought oak trees back after the ice
Will some loving jay
Find my wholeness after I leave
Stuffed away like contraband
Will my story be more than my transness?
Can I be seen as more than identity
In this hateful climate?
There are those with more money
Than I will ever see
(My money pools in bank accounts
To patch the hole of
The NHS’s indifference)
The agony of their living
Abated by hoarded wealth
They turn to me
And see a target
For mirthful hatred.
The discussion of
‘Punching up’
‘Punching down’
Is too tame.
The language too gentle
The violence does not come
In punches.
The British are too
Concerned with appearances
Your hatred must be couched
In ‘reasonable concerns’.
When you call for my death
You veil yourself
In twisted ghoulish rags
Perverting the voice of women,
The voice of the radical,
Into poison.
I feel fear
Of ‘feminism’, of ‘Womens rights’
Corrupted.
It is au fait to be feminist
And to rally alongside misogyny.
I am not a threat.
I did not flee from womanhood
Womanhood is a skin that
Does not fit.
It never did.
I cannot walk down the street
In clothes that sit so tight
As to restrict blood supply.
To be denied my transition
Is to be constricted
To be amputated; half-formed
For the convenience of
The comfort of others.
I am a man
A self-built monument to
Possibilities of masculinity
Hitherto unexplored.
To be male is not
To be evil
We cannot wear male and female
Like albatrosses hung around our necks
Once, feminism understood
That a woman is not a reproductive
Factory
She is person
In her wholeness
Yet we have returned to the slums
Of prescribing life-meaning
To base biological capabilities.
Monuments to suffering
Have eclipsed
Monuments of joy
And of meaning.
To be female is to suffer
To be male is to wound
You cannot be more than your
Parts
You are
Entombed
In biological sex
Why must we be defined by pain?
I am trans in my wonder:
Gender euphoria.
The pure love to
Know yourself so deeply.
Self-love made manifest
Against fear.
Fighting the unknown;
Finding boundless joy.
To be threatened by joy
Says something, I think.