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[bethdelaguerre]

foreward: t4t

I’ve arrived in this place where thoughts feel important enough to record, and screaming it to an anonymous blog is somehow less passé than carefully crafting clauses in some instagram story for my friends to read and assess or swipe and ignore. That was for them, this is for me.

At three years into transition I have arrived at some sort of queer awakening. For someone who spent most of their life as some kind of confused effeminate bisexual man who wasn’t into men, finally transitioning and yelling I’M A DYKE felt like the most relief someone could have, that I could finally understand to myself that yes, I love women, but no, not like that. Dating women, straight women, as a man was this confusing exercise in relatability and frustration. It’s a tired trope, isn’t it? Trans woman dates women she’d rather be— never finding anything approaching love, only envy, frustration, and depression. Dating queer women, dating lesbians, was entirely its own awakening. 

But waking up comes in stages. For these three years I’ve surrounded myself in the company of other lesbians, I met and married a woman whom I could finally say I love and adore. There were not many trans women. There weren’t any. 

My transition, like so many other COVID trannies, began in a bubble. I figured my shit out, I changed my name, I started hormones; I was alone. It didn’t feel that way— we had the internet, after all. But the company I kept with my cat and my seventy thousand something parasocial following wasn’t community. 

We like that word, community— we throw it around as some vague catch-all as if it has some ubiquitous meaning and that it is the cure for most psychic ailments. The thing is, it’s a transient idea: you find the people whom you love and support and in return they love and support you and then *bam* you’re fixed. But people will fall in and out of this category, and the categories of people therein will vary greatly with the passage of your own identity into the next. 

Anyway, for a time lesbians were my community— they still very much are. But I’ve met someone and it has upended my entire perspective on community because she’s among the first in another less transient selfsame category: a transsexual woman.

I put maybe too much weight into this particular person. I have had friends who are more or less like myself, but I have never felt so terribly aligned as I do with this woman. It should be noted that in addition to being an hopeless romantic I just finished my first reading of Imogen Binnie’s “Nevada” and am as raw as one might expect. I think we all see a bit of ourselves in Maria and loathe to see ourselves in… I can’t even remember his name because I hated the experience of reading part 2, relatable as it was.  

This girl has me romanticizing my life in every way possible. Shortly after we met she made me a mixtape (it was a Spotify playlist but I was born in 1990 and some things just can’t change)— I don’t even listen to music but I found myself making reasons to leave the house and walk and listen. I live just on the other end of a redline: the neighborhood across the street from mine is this ostentatious enclave of opulence, an island of privilege and superficial beauty that is morally repugnant in a city with the wealth disparity of mine. I put on my headphones and immerse myself in this music that she’s selected for me, taking in the beautiful gardens and perfectly manicured lawns and just thinking of her for hours at a time. My best friend tells me that I’m not falling in love with her, I’m falling in love with the idea of her. Given enough time and connection, aren’t they the same?

She tells me sometimes that actually when the limerence wears off you’ll find I’m quite plain. I can’t imagine. Every time I see her, every new conversation, all I can see is this perfectly messy intellectual beauty of a woman and wonder what it could possibly be that she found attractive enough in me to ask if she could kiss me the night we met. 

Yesterday lying in her bed with her body nestled against mine, I looked out of her bedroom window to a towering tree and remarked how lovely it must be to have that view. I thought about how meeting her now at the height of summer meant that I could measure the passage of time not only in the moments between messages but in the turning of the leaves, and a little piece of me feels like it is dying. That’s what love feels like, right? A slow death in the changing of leaves before they fall to the earth.