In my poetry and occasional prose, I am constantly attempting to exact the metaphor with which to speak about gender. Sometimes I believe, to some extent, that I might finally be making progress in my own understanding of the thing. 

 

“Gender is a room,” I write. 

 

“Gender is a field,” I try again.

 

Or, borrowing from cartoonist Maia Kobabe, “Gender [is] a landscape . . . Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home.”

 

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On the train, I repeat to a friend, attempting to clear it up for myself as the month of June sets California aflame once again, “The restroom ban isn’t quite, or only, about the restrooms themselves. It’s signaling to something much more sinister. It’s pointing to a culture that wants trans people gone. That wants us to stop existing publicly. That wants us out of any place where a public restroom is needed: work, schools, shopping malls, politics. The restroom ban is just a euphemism, a metaphor for that eradicative impulse.”

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Toward the end of 2020, tired of being obligated to share my birth name with my co-workers, with my doctors, with anyone else, I began the process of a legal name change. I had already used my new name for a couple of years in both informal and professional settings, and I had published an essay about it in Riggwelter Press. This legal process, I had hoped, would fortify the transition, making it harder to use my previous name within the more draconic of these institutions. So far, as it turns out, this has not really been the case. So far, as it turns out, a name follows you. 

 

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My legal name change is also a metaphor, albeit a State-recognized metaphor. 

 

The metaphor is as follows: The name — a figurative social convention, a largely imaginary object — or the shifting of names, superimposed upon the subject (a nonbinary trans person living in the United States), signals a transgression of the prescribed gender norms and of traditional US American subjecthood. While the danger the subject poses to the State is likely negligible, the subject will be required to undergo fairly rigid short- and long-term screenings to ensure that no one takes advantage of this change in official identification. 

 

In the metaphor’s wake, I apply mascara, color in my eyebrows, and take a new picture at the DMV, laughing when the state employee, noticing the two first names, one middle, and a hyphenated surname recorded on my request for a new license, remarks, “Five names???” 

 

 

 

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When people write about gender, they typically write about one of two things: 1) their personal experience of gender, or 2) a collective legacy thereof. I’m attempting to do both when writing a poem about a moment at the doctor’s office, or in late-stage capitalism, hoping to capture within it a conversation with the ways other people, namely other trans people, have written about the subject. The issue, however, is one that will always float to the surface of an identitarian politic — that personal experience is nuanced and varied, shaped by, to paraphrase Jasbir K. Puar, assemblages of body, desire, geography, history, patterns of complicity, and so on. That which is captured under the wide umbrella of transness is nowhere near homogeneous. 

 

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In the notes app on my phone, I write things to myself like, “Only write about the material conditions of your life,” and, “Don’t hide behind the mask of figurative language.”

 

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One week, curious about how nonbinary people are read by the general public (trans or not? why?), I conduct a survey on Instagram. My own definition of transness is rather simple: if you do not identify with the gender assigned to you at birth, either partially or in full, you’re likely trans. Some people respond with more specific answers, saying that nonbinary people are trans, that nonbinary people are cis, that nonbinary people belong to a third category. I decide to press my nonbinary friends on the distinction they draw, on why so many of them don’t feel comfortable identifying as trans. Almost invariably, I get some version of, “I don’t know if I have the right because I don’t experience the same levels of violence as [binary] trans people,” or “I don’t want to appropriate that oppression.” I subsequently begin to worry about the way in which we are defining transness — that is, through a framework of violence, of precarity, of proximity to death. Is death, here, a metaphor for transness? Is it the other way around?

 

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We have to contextualize these things or the meaning will fall through.

 

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In 2020, according to the Human Rights Campaign, approximately 44 trans and gender-nonconforming people were killed by violent means in the United States, a significant number of them black trans women. Trans people are disproportionately underemployed and underinsured, homeless, and subject to violence and harassment, in particular by police and by romantic and sexual partners. I have a comparatively well-paying job. I have an apartment where I can afford to pay the rent, with kitchen knives and a subscription to Netflix and wood-adjacent flooring and ceiling fans and a spot outside where, sometimes, at my leisure, I can read and warm my face in the afternoon sun. Occasionally, I’ll receive an electricity bill that I deem is too high and I’ll grumble for a week, and then I’ll pay the bill with the money that I have in my checking account, which, most of the time, is not much, but nevertheless usually exists in positive numbers. This discrepancy between the transness that is most subject to violence, and that which is less so, my transness, is startling. That discrepancy is vast, and I wonder: Am I using the right metaphors to talk about the conditions of my life? Is the construction of these metaphors itself a violent act?

 

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Of course, gender is itself a metaphor. It is not a thing, per se, but rather a series of things, or, perhaps, a way of imagining a series of things, often in ways that are divorced from the things themselves. Gender is an abstract structure that connotes a network of relational values — one’s connections to and rapport with the people around them, with themselves, with their body, with their dress, with the language they and others use, etcetera. In a trans and gender nonconforming meditation group online, each of us a queer little square in a virtual room, I attempt to expand the metaphor as wide as possible. Gender in that moment then becomes the way I inhale a breath into my belly, then release it. It becomes the way my joints sit in their sockets (poorly, as it turns out), the way the saccharine sun, peeking through the blinds in long white strips, settles on my skin.

 

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“The closest I can come to articulating my gender is Fat . . . ” Caleb Luna writes in a 2018 essay titled “The Gender Nonconformity of my Fatness.” They are writing of the ways in which fatness “arrests [their] gender,” in which it interrupts the inherited tradition that is the metaphor of gender. Normative and legible gender performances necessitate thin, abled, cis, heterosexual, and often white bodies to enact them. Otherwise, the metaphor becomes an ineffective strategy for relating to certain figures within the field. The necessity of these characteristics is constantly bleeding through the social cloth, a spot of oil in the sheet.

 

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In a physical therapy session, the clinician attempts to secure my subluxed shoulders into place with a figure eight shoulder brace and I am struck by its likeness to a sports bra or a binder under my thin mock-neck top. I am suddenly performing gender variance at the clinic without intending to. I am suddenly more visibly disabled and gender-ambiguous than when I first breached the building’s threshold. Jillian Weise, disabled poet and self-identified Cyborg, locks into this reality, the failure of disabled genders, like that of fat genders, stating in a Twitter thread, “I’m a cyborg. Here’s my pronoun: cy . . . This pronoun is all, any and no gender. Whatever the cyborg wants. Importantly: Only disabled people are cyborgs. So only disabled people get this pronoun.” We are constantly making the metaphor of gender, and its failures, languageable, or attempting to do so. 

 

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The word “metaphor” comes from the Greek μεταφέρω (metapherō), which can be broken into μετά (meta), "after, with, across" and φέρω (pherō), “to bear,” “to carry.” Together, it refers to a carrying over of something. It is a sticky substance which affixes the real to the figurative and vice versa, the figurative to the figurative, and the real to the real by way of the figurative. It’s a difficult thing to avoid, sprouting up, often incognito, in every register and modality of human language. In their book-length essay, Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through, T Fleischmann describes a writing exercise in which they attempt to write simply of the ice surrounding them abundantly in the winter months, while staying within the real, avoiding all intrusion of metaphor. “Tedious and repetitious,” they detail, “I almost always went wide and failed the game . . .” To avoid the act of metaphor, one must be particularly mindful, monastic almost, in their application of language to the events and objects of the world that surrounds them. 

 

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Etymological trajectories inherent in linguistic evolution and transfer ensure that the metaphor continues “carrying over.” (There are surely better ways of getting at this point that I am not quite privy to — something about Saussure and signification.) A dove (Latin: columba) is carried over to a sprig of columbine (the perennial breed). A plume of thinly shaved market meat (Latin: caro) is carried over to a bouquet of carnations. We speak figuratively, attaching one thing to the next, borrowing metaphors from our linguistic ancestors, often until the metaphor of the thing is washed out almost entirely. 

 

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Frequently, the figurative makes the real more acute. Only when my mother is diagnosed with breast cancer a few months before my 16th birthday do I recognize the abrasive nature of the American Sign Language equivalent to the English “cancer” — depicted in ASL as a thing that eats, crawling up the arm (people often shy away from this sign, in fact, due to its inherent viscerality, opting, instead to fingerspell “C-A-N-C-E-R” in an attempt toward some form of rhetorical self-remove). The cancer eats my mother’s flesh, the figurative making it more real. When, at 25, I am diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, I look up the word “collagen” — the protein suspected to be modified by the condition, and find its Greek ancestor κόλλα (kólla) meaning glue. Suddenly, my silly, floppy, Gumby body, with its blotchiness and elasticity , its flailing and fainting and falling apart, is made that much more ridiculous in the light of the discovery that it is a simple issue of faulty binding.

 

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“Of course!” We say when we rediscover the metaphor hidden within language’s history. 

 

“Of course ‘disaster’ means ‘bad star’!”

 

“Of course ‘mediocre’ means ‘halfway up a rugged mountain’!”

 

We are being carried over. Across. Back. 

 

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Sometimes, I attempt to create a more exacting account of my life (gendered and otherwise) without employing the convention of identity markers. “It’s taken a lot of resistance,” Fleischmann writes, “that I want to leave my gender and sex life uninscribed — that it took me years to consider the fact that I did not have to name my gender or sexuality at all...I insist on this absence more, even, than when I used to insist on my identities…” I practice by removing the identity markers from the bios on my Twitter and Instagram profiles. The most recent iteration to be removed: “nonbinary trans & disabled poet. Soda. interpreter, translator, habitual language learner. (they/them).” 

 

“When I say I am a white genderqueer trans masochist faggot dyke,” Davey Davis ponders, “am I describing my kyriarchical position as filtered through and informed by aesthetic, desire, and relationships, or am I filling out the census so as to be a better, more legible, more easily surveilled, more governable citizen?” 

 

Everytime I push against the walls of identity, I inevitably slip through its grated bottom. Within days I start to feel that I am no longer real, the inscribed virtual profile a metaphor for the embodied sphere. In an open document, following Fleischmann’s practice of writing about ice, I attempt to write about the nodes populating the cold and crystal-pocked substance of gender, the thing surrounding me during every season of the year. I get a few sentences in, try my best, but “I almost always [go] wide and [fail] the game.”

 

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I am obsessively grappling with metaphor for a week before I discover one of its linguistic cousins, amongst many, hiding in the weeds. Dysphoria, from the Greek δύσφορος (dysphoros), also carries. This time it is carrying “the bad,” “the difficult” — δυσ- (dys). My recent attempts to engage with and defend myself against the increasingly present force of gender dysphoria have been, more often than not, simple, yet tangible, things. I wear a pair of earrings, a crop-top. I paint a poorly-shaped wing onto my eyelid. These are things that in the grand history of our species have become strangely and arbitrarily taxonomized between the two genders of the dominant Western culture, and to which I am only recently becoming literate. 

 

Occasionally, in these experiments, drifting to the other half of the store, as it were, I find myself with a third cousin — euphoria, carrying “the good.” Euphoria finds me in a skirt or jumpsuit (also metaphors for something else, something beyond), and smiles in my midst. I flash a goofy grin back.

 

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When a queer friend who isn’t sure about their gender asks me, “But how do you know?” I point to these moments of gender euphoria. These are the flashpoints where things lock in, and make sense. These are the instances when I can say, with the most certainty, looking elsewhere, “Yes, that over there is gender enacted.” I am attempting to define the metaphor of transness by what I find joyous, thrilling, by what carries me across the ice. There’s something in here about starting to feel more real. About no longer needing the metaphor, but using it anyway. Because that’s how one goes about describing a life in relation to other lives, a life in relation to a world of abundance, always teeming with new and known and unknown things.