My Gender is more of a Mushroom than an Attack Helicopter

My life is defined by transformations; surrounded on every side by constantly shifting borders. How many sides does a person have? When does Theseus find himself sailing a new ship? My own growth is perhaps the most important of transformations on a personal scale, but I find it’s also the hardest to define. It’s a vague assemblage constructed of experiences and hopes, loves and hatreds, memories of what is now “I was” being “I am”.

Cooking is inherently a transformation, and is one well and truly built into my foundation by my parents. Throughout my childhood they did their best to make every weeknight a family dinner. A transformation of food from one state to another, or the transformation of a group of separate and unique ingredients, and five people as separate and unique as my family, into one cohesive dish, even through something as simple as reheating rice and beans from the night before. Outside of the kitchen, in my bathroom or in my bedroom late at night, I’ve had to transform into a new self. Different from the growth everyone goes through, just a different facet of growing up, my gender transition has become the crux of my survival.

In a class I took my freshman year of college, there was a heated debate regarding when an octopus you’re eating becomes You. When do memories become you? Is it after they’ve been processed, digested, thought through and sorted? Part of the issue of the octopus question is that it fails to recognize that the octopus became you as soon as the plate was set with the intention of being brought to your seat at the table. Trying to break up my memories and me, the octopus and the self, food and the self, is futile.

I am Lavender now, and when I was five years old I was known as [REDACTED], but that doesn’t prevent my experiences, under a name that is no longer mine, having an impact on me today. The octopus on the plate and the conception of Lavender before I knew her name are just as much a part of me as the octopus ingested; the trans woman out to the world. I am my memories, and I am creating my memories, and my memories are creating the present me that is then being remembered seconds later. When everything is either in the past or in the hypothetical future the exact distinction between a remembered self and the ‘present’ self makes significantly less sense.

But there is certainly a difference between my five year old self and myself of two minutes ago. The issue becomes one of scale. The closer I get to the actual border, or a specific value, , the harder it becomes to define. Humans have a couple different kinds of memories: procedural, semantic, and episodic. Procedural memory is motor skills, muscle memory, the way a chef just knows how to hold a knife, or the way my fingers automatically rest in a certain position depending on if I’m typing an essay or playing video games. Semantic and episodic memory are more central to a childhood memory than self-actualization.I don’t believe they are any less important to making me who I am. Semantic memory is the ability to conjure up general facts whereas episodic memory is more tied to personal facts or experiences.

I’ve had difficulty with semantic memory since middle school. My architecture class freshman year of highschool was an especially frustrating example of this. The quarterly memorization quizzes tanked my grade till I figured out how to cheat on them. Supposedly episodic memory is most important to understanding what we’re able to remember as a child, but for me it is more often a procedural moment in the present that lets me remember parts of my childhood. Just yesterday, I was helping my dad bring Christmas decorations up from the basement. While respective Christmases have their own specific memories tied to them (Christmas of 2019 stands out especially, both due to its recent location in time and its lack of a Christmas tree in deferral to our new kitten), “Christmas” as a part of my mind is much more cohesive. This assemblage based memory is reminiscent of Hiro’s strategy for “heritage Matsutake picking” as described in Mushroom at the End of the World. Each remembered spot for Matsutake can be revisited, and is a separate location, but together make up a route that is never quite the same.

My imagined Christmas assembled from the variety of individual memories doesn’t exist in the real world. I am only able to access it through my mind and even then barely able to articulate how it feels. It’s made up of eggnog, and stress about traveling, and the smell of my sibling burning cookies. It’s made of visiting partners and snowing on my birthday and presents under the tree. The yells of Sebastian as he unwraps the Lego Deathstar, the month my dad and I spent afterward building it. Christmas is a single day, yet the memories tied to it span not only months but years, noted only by the calendar.

When unpacking Christmas decorations earlier this week, one of the boxes I brought upstairs struck me with a memory completely unrelated to Christmas, one of Pre-K and cleaning up train tracks and singing “Clean up clean up, everybody everywhere…” This was brought on not by the boxes’ relation to Christmas but instead by the tactile sensation of opening the box. I realized, maybe not for the first time, but for the first time I could remember, that the same type of box was used to hold the toys at my nursery school. What brought me back to that moment was a sensation in kind. And it is that type of sensation, whether the taste of cookies or the smell of a pine tree or the sight of my father cooking dinner with the relatives, which allows me to remember things I’d otherwise forget. My memory is a mycelium of interconnected impressions and experiences, at the same time episodic and procedural.

I moved around very often as a child, and my own intentions had very little to do with that transformation of here to there, of alchemizing each new location to home. Do you have memories like that? Where one could swear a story has been told to them so many times they might as well have been there? My memories of the boxy house in Bloomfield, NJ we moved to when I was one year old are made up of stories told, unclear if I actually remember the contents of the story happening or just remember the last time it was told to me. Perhaps all memories are made up of that, stories I tell myself each time I think back on it: my father throwing a soccer ball at the pigeons roosting in our rafters, my fascination with the wires criss-crossing the legs of my mother’s massage table, tumbling down the stairs and a family friend giving me aspirin. Did the pigeons decide to antagonize my father in their choice of home? Am I not a rock in my parent’s garden?

As a case study of sorts: does a rock have a home? Maybe, but I think that would require a third person perspective of the rock, an imposition of what the rock’s home “should'' be. A gardener or bored kid thinking, “this looks good right… here”, and nodding to themself in satisfaction. I somehow doubt the rock cares very much where or when it’s placed. Perhaps it is intention that makes the abduction unique, as regardless of the conceptual nature of a home or a destination, in order to get from here to there my intention must be to do so. But again I am faced with memories that disprove this.

I don’t know that location is actually a part of nature though. I think it is closer to a conception, created and defined by the human mind. To claim location is a part of nature fails to take into account how necessary my ego and perception are in creating that experience. Location requires human perception, the location being either here or there, near me or far from me. In the case of my after school walk especially, there is home, perhaps not an inherently human concept but one requiring consciousness. We project humanity onto animate and inanimate things, but how much of that is truly projection as opposed to a sincere recognition of our sorely inadequate definition of ‘living’? Assuming the pattern I have noticed continues, the distinction between animate and inanimate is likely less clear cut than we like to think.

Is memory, a concept, not a part of the super-nature? Anyone who either has or knows someone with PTSD would never dismiss the power of memory over the ‘real’ world. But it need not be an example involving trauma. How much does my memory of myself inform my gender? Is gender an exclusively human experience? I think gender is exclusive to humans, as it requires the social superstructure that informs the variety of assumptions and oppressions that come with it, as opposed to the more simple sex of an animate being.

My social transition is another transformation that nourishes me, that allows me to thrive. It is, on some level, fundamentally different from the chemical change that defines cooking. As any trans person will tell you, social transitions are imprecise, and wrapped in expectations. Transition can’t be boiled down to a recipe.

On another level it is simple enough to be summed up in a sentence: Transitioning is an attempt to be perceived by the wider world as I perceive myself. Those two perspectives, myself and the world, are not so easily distinguished. Aren’t I made up of the selves that inhabit the minds of those around me? I was fortunate to be given a chance to intentionally set that image in coming to Bennington. Previous to that reset, my image was chosen for me in the vast majority of ways it mattered.

Hearing my little sibling introduce me as his sister is a subtle joy, a quiet one. It’s not met with trumpets, or even my thanks most of the time.I’m not certain he knew I could hear him. In actively choosing this part of myself, however, I am blessed with joy through an avenue I had never explored.This is a joy derived from the pleasure of being seen; whoever coined “gender euphoria” knew what the fuck they were talking about.

Though “sister” makes my heart sing, I do not know that I am only a woman. I introduce myself to the world as a trans woman, if only for simplicity’s sake, but truly it is less clear cut than that. Again the borders between things are unsatisfyingly defined. If borders and distinctions, especially semantic ones, become muddier the closer we get to satisfyingly defining them, what is their use? Perhaps this recognition of inconsistency in borders is what comprises consciousness, what separates me from a rock. When relying on Levy Flights¹ to find food, the semantics of when the berry becomes you, the metaphysical distinction between one sight and the next, is not so important as the material reality of whether or not each location has the food one is looking for. Once abundance is ensured, once precarity is eliminated, humanity is able to take a much needed breath.

This train of thought however falls into Maslow’s blunder: it fails to recognize the ways in which we have always been interested in self-actualization. It is important to distinguish between poisonous berries and safe ones, but also between me and you, and between here and there. To pull on Maslow’s pyramid again, there are abundant examples of self-actualization in spaces with precarity. The world is precarious! Especially for trans people! And being trans is one of the most literal and intentional examples of self-actualization I can think of. I exist in the world, and, while I am privileged in many ways, I do not live free of precarity, nor am I a model trans person you can study in order to determine consistent givens.

I am neither a woman nor a man, but I do feel closer to womanhood. In my utopia the cost of bottom surgery is non-existent; I need not conform to the traditional gender roles set to the genitalia one has — also I’m a butch lesbian. That is, understandably I think, difficult to achieve when one was assigned male at birth. A major aspect of the butch aesthetic is a cisnormative feminine reclaiming and elevating of masculinity past the gender binary. To achieve this, I must not only cross the border between male and female sex, but then back again over the line of gender presentation. The gap between idealized Lavender and current Lavender is a wide one, but is it greater than the gap between me in my senior year of high school and me now?

My hair has been growing out since I came to college; a transformation of dead skin cells to a physical representation of my journey with gender. The way my hair frames my vision brings me such euphoria. It creates borders around my vision, literal framing. This border, too. is constantly shifting; in the wind, when I move; the difference being the speed of the change and, yet again, the scale that it is perceived at. Both my gender transition and my hair growth occur at a pace that will never meet my utopian dreams, but is instead an exercise in patience. Each inch I notice is a victory, the wings sprouting from behind my neck carrying me to ever greater elation. And as with my gender, the framing of my face occurs at close proximity to my eyes; this distance is an important (though not all important) part of the process of perception. I need a mirror to know how far I’ve come. The mirror often comes to me as friends or partners exclaiming at how much I’ve changed since I last saw them.

I, of course, run the risk of confirmation bias. But looking back on my many memories of adolescence I am confronted with how split I was between genders. I had two friend groups in middle school, one made up of straight-white-cis-boys, the other of queer-women-and-nonbinary folks. Both were admittedly weird and toxic in their own way. By the time junior year came around though I was spending less and less time with the boys I had been friends with since third grade, feeling ostracized by what I believed to be their hyper-masculinity. .Looking back now, it was just their masculinity in general.

The summer camp I went to was another example of gender deferred. The last night of camp there is an event known as Rumpus, a massive bonfire with drums and running and whooping and crying and laughing. It is a wonderful thing. And, traditionally shirtless. This presented an issue. New York state law requires AFAB people to cover their breasts in public. Unirondack, the summer camp, is a supremely queer place in terms of both gender and sexuality. There was a long debate in the rec lodge on whether or not it was transphobic to force trans men to wear bras or if we should just suggest the people assigned male at birth cover their nipples ‘in solidarity’.

It was eventually decided everyone needed to wear a top, or at least nipple tape. It was the only way to be fair to everyone and follow state guidelines. At the time of the debate I didn’t talk much. In 2018, I didn’t see myself as trans and wanted to make space for those who would be more affected by whatever option was decided on. The experience of putting on a sports bra in order to cover my chest, feeling the summer air heated by the massive bonfire rushing over me, was a revelation and a gift. The pressure on my chest, the itchiness of the sweat after the night was over, was truly euphoric. And for two long years I left that euphoria at camp.

Maybe it was survival instinct, maybe it was repression, but I think the two overlap quite a bit when it comes to queer experiences. The border between being free to play with my gender and restrained to what I am perceived as is both a physical one and one made of memories. The farther I am from home, and therefore the fewer memories people have of [REDACTED] and her mistakes, the easier it is to create a new self. It isn’t a projection of myself that I change so much, as it’s a perception of myself I patch over from the tatters of the self I used to be.

As uncomfortable as it can be to not know exactly where I belong, it would be foolish to think I could know something like that while still in the midst of the experience. I, the me of the present, am but a single bud of a vast myciliac root system. A root system made up not only of my elder’s experiences, but also each iteration of myself across temporalities. I tap into the roots of trees, of people far more wise than me, for the wisdom gained from surviving the precarity that threads through each of our lives. I don’t know what I will become. I don’t know what the forest will look like when I finally come up through its floor. What I do know, however, is that it is the connections with other consciousnesses, human and inhuman, that will have gotten me there.

1. wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9vy_flight_foraging_hypothesis : “A Lévy flight is a random walk in which the step-lengths have a Lévy distribution, a probability distribution that is heavy-tailed. When defined as a walk in a space of dimension greater than one, the steps made are in isotropic random directions”