Daddy Issues

This is a poem I wrote about my experience growing up nonbinary and having the ability to put it into words, along with my relationship with my father. The video is composed of a recording of my poem Daddy Issues put to a slideshow if pictures of me growing up to help show that while I may look like a little girl but, I was always nonbinary.

To Be Understood

sexual themes below the cut, but no content warnings : )

Trans Femme & Queer Poetica: Compilation of Poems Regarding Themes of the Body

I had started this post as a very generalized collection of Queer poetry relating to trans femmes, with themes such as transness, sex/kink, sexuality, grievances, trans rage, gender nonconformity, etc. Of course I have still found poems with these themes, but what I wasn’t expecting was the complete dominance of The Body theme. I myself, as a trans femme individual, have complicated and loving tendencies towards my body, but there was a propensity of The Body theme in which I was not fully ready for.

Trans and Queer individuals, no matter femme or not, have to live inside of their body, they have to justify what is going on and have to breathe and sleep within the same framing structures every single night. Sometimes, that is the part that hurts them the most, sometimes that is the joy they can gain from having a body. To me, transness doesn’t mean leaving my body or giving it away, it can for others, but my body IS important because I’m trans and disabled. There isn’t always an escape as well; the sheer amount of external pressure on trans individuals creates an Extremely strong focus on our bodies. I believe this external and internal focus on trans bodies to be a large reason why The Body and/or Body Horror is so prevalent when going through Trans Poetry.

Transness as a concept is not always in relation to ones body, the whole point of identity is to fit outside of the limitations placed on our bodies. Many of the poems I have put together speak on what the said limitations can do to them, but the trans body is also beauty. It’s the part of oneself you can fully share with the world around you, the only aspect that other trans people can physically hold closely. Body horror is hard to escape though, its something that we all know as Trans people, and its something that we are all facing no matter how we feel about our own bodies. I decide to face it though; it’s something that has to be looked at because it exists and affects marginalized individuals more. So, rather than doing a much to broad focus on transness as transness, I decided to focus on The Body. Going forward, there are multiple trigger warnings for the poems as the horror aspect tends to come out with trans femme & Queer individuals, especially in my own work.

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Poem and picture editing by Piper Gibson (full text of poem under the read more)

For my submission I decided to write a poem about my own nonbinary identity, and how that identity is affected by social norms, pressures on people perceived as women to be feminine, dysphoria, mental illness, and erasure. Only recently did I feel comfortable enough in myself to call myself nonbinary, and I still struggle with so much internalized queerphobia. This poem was a way to work through how I grew up, and how instances of my childhood, bullies, family, and friends have affected my journey, both positively and negatively. I wanted to get at the pain of realizing these things about yourself, and how uncomfortable identity struggles can be, but also how joyful and loving, especially when you have so many good queer friends like I do.

I wanted to do this poem for my contribution because although we focused on various nonbinary identities in this class, they are still absent from mainstream media and often neglected even in queer spaces. This contributes to the erasure of nonbinary identity, which makes it even harder for people like me to feel less alone and confident enough in ourselves to come out to ourselves, let alone friends, family, coworkers, etc. It’s hard enough to realize your queer gender identity without people pretending it doesn’t exist or actively railing against it.

I want to encourage queer people to think beyond binaries, to think about what transness entails, who is included and excluded, and why. How can we ensure a movement that is sustainable and doesn’t push people out who desperately need it? I want to make sure that nonbinary people of all cultures, backgrounds, and intersections have a home in queer spaces, no matter what that looks like. It took me long enough to find a home in my queerness– we should be helping others do the same.

i remember being seven
or so
asking my mother to paint a castle for me
on the walls of my bedroom, in pink and purple.
i imagined myself a princess, who could hole herself
up away in the sky with the ones she loved and never come
back down.

i remember being twelve,
twelve or so,
with skinny jeans too short and
sweatshirts too big,
and a friend,
she said she was my friend,
told me the rules of being pretty,
(they were rules i did not yet follow,)
how i would need makeup and better clothes,
how she could teach me,
and i’m sure she thought she was helping.
i’m sure in her mind she was so nice.
my little heart,
which had not yet recovered from being torn
and stomped on
in previous years by girls who did not deserve my attention
could not take this,
and swum down down down
to my toes and beat
there
quietly
and i said something like
“oh
okay”

i remember being–
i remember high school,
feeling so removed from myself
i may as well not be alive,
a ghost floating gently above my body,
and that princess felt so far away from me.
she was free, and i was not,
and she could not yet understand how
her favorite colors would be used as weapons
in the war against her, and
the rules were pushed onto me until
i thought i needed them to survive,
needed to cover myself up until i
could recognize someone like a human
in the mirror.
femininity was a mask,
but i was suffocating,
and i couldn’t know why.

i remember being eighteen,
(surely i wasn’t already eighteen?
i didn’t think i’d make it this long)
and even short hair couldn’t liberate me
from how stuck i was.
i was so goddamn lonely
in a way that went beyond having no one.
i was lonely from myself,
about myself,
for myself,
a floating island who forgot its mainland,
couldn’t even conceive it had a home
of origin.

now,
now i breathe a little easier, now,
now i am less lonely,
now my hair is short and my
makeup is gone and my
dresses are shoved in a bag
put away.
now i have examples of those who
live outside, apart from,
and in spite of
everything that wants to 
eliminate them.

we are still alive,
despite the stares 
and the questions
and the looks up and down
in which you can tell exactly
which box they have decided
to place you in.

i am still alive,
despite my old fear of becoming
a sexual assault statistic morphing into
the new fear of becoming a hate crime one.

(i don’t want to imagine
how they would label me
in the headline.
how the police would describe
my death.
how my funeral would ring
with shes and hers and
daughters and womans
and all of the wrong and violent things
i wouldn’t be there to dispute.
i don’t want to die before i can teach
my family how to talk about me.
before i hear the right pronouns 
fall from their mouths without stumbling,
soft and assured.)

but–
i am,
after all of it,
alive.
i will celebrate myself
while i am living and i will refuse
to be one or the other and
i will make the world better
for those who come after me and
i will do it because of the ones
who came
before.

something,
a seed,
was growing in my gut all along.
just because it only sprouted now
doesn’t make it any less
of a bloom.