This past weekend, I’ve been at the Philadelphia Trans Health Conference. I feel like I should write about this as soon as possible, but I’m in late conference zombie mode tonight and feeling slightly blocked, so I thought I’d just focus on twenty minutes I spent in a writing workshop yesterday, wedged in among the presentations about hormones, harassment and surgery. There, surrounded by about 40 other trans people in a comically small room, our moderator prompted us to spend twenty minutes continuously writing the old fashioned way – longhand on paper – without stopping to edit. The prompt – Tell your pet about your gender identity. Here, unedited, is what twenty minutes with a notebook on my lap thinking about my bulldog produces, in case you’re interested.
Oh, Bruno. You don’t care very much about my gender, do you buddy? It’s one of your many awesome qualities, my man. We make fun of your less than sharp intellect, but I keep coming back to your spectacular full-body smile, that drooling slobbery mess – so at ease with your joy. That Fred Flintstone start to your gallop to the food bowl, the Scooby Doo slide across the kitchen floor. My disgruntled, undercaffeinated lump standing by the microwave in the morning doesn’t dampen your spirits. It can’t. I love being irrelevant to you in this way, buddy. Irrelevance as forgiveness as acceptance.
My ability to click your leash onto your collar and walk you out the front door is of utmost importance, in cosmic inversion to the importance of my scars, lumps, slowed gait after surgery. Invisible to you are my hours of hand wringing and anxious glances at the computer screen, fingers hovering above the keyboard in amber suspension, forever acting out the moment before I wrote the story.
My feet on the couch under your belly are relevant, as are the precise number of scratches, head rubs and cookies from the jar above the counter. You ignore me in the kindest turn of ignorance, need me in the happiest waves of desire, love me in the truest embrace of agape.
You offer many gifts, my friend, the least of which is the wave of digestive smell unleashed in mixed company. Still, you roll your 85 pound frame onto its side, breathe deeply, sigh. Satisfied. At ease. Naked. Smelly. So comfortable in your goofy, ill-fitting dog suit. Silently urging me to be comfortable in my ill-fitting human suit. No, you don’t care very much at all about my gender, which is the greatest of your gifts, my man.
Maybe you could teach me not to care as much as I do.
Is it Level? 