An Open Letter to a Brand New "Old Friend"

For two years I’ve been thinking of how I can possibly explain. For two years I’ve been mulling over words. Angry, snarky, justification based words. It’s taken a pandemic to finally grasp the one truth that matters to me. Though you did not demand, and are not entitled, I don’t owe an explanation and never did.

You ask me personal questions because you don’t “get the trans” thing, but you refuse to tell me who you are. You say this “doesn’t require a response” but you probe. You won’t disclose your own identity, but you are here asking me to make available to you my innermost workings.

Truth is, I’m kind of fed up with having to cater to the sensitivities of people bothered by the way I live my life. Especially when said people feel like they have some kind of authority over it, whether in superior knowledge of my own experience, superior intelligence or moral standing due to their religious, or societal standing.

Instead I am seeking to approach this differently. I ask you to ask yourself, rather than me.

What about non conformity makes you uncomfortable? What comfort and stability do you find in conformity, and not breaking from the values you were raised with?

Why does it feel to you that queerness is okay, IF it conforms to your societal norms? How might I, someone who is neither a man nor a woman fit into your neat boxes? Neither of them line up with me, so how might I line up with them?

I don’t need you to understand my life, my identity, my experience, but I do need you to investigate why “flamboyance”, and me being myself makes you so uncomfortable. Why you don’t get “the whole trans thing”.

I don’t know who you are, but you seem to know me from years long gone. I don’t know you, but you know intimate things about me, and that’s okay, since I chose to put them out to the world to know of. I don’t mind that you know me by my dead name, or that you know me as the gender I was raised to be. I don’t mind that you know of the traumas I share with the world, or what I choose to show the world.

I do however mind you addressing me by my dead name, and disclosing that you not having known that I’m living this whole “other, strange” life has got you “hella shook”. I mind you apologizing on behalf of the adults in my life for not creating a safe and supportive space in my life, while bringing that unsafe space to me by putting your discomfort on me. I mind you apologizing on behalf of the orthodox community for letting me down in so many ways, and I most mind you apologizing on your own behalf for not being in a space to have prevented all of this from happening when you knew me up until the age of about 12.

I mind you apologizing for not doing anything, and then, coming to me with your complaints and confusion about the strange life I “choose to live”, and in this way doing the things you apologize for.

Your confusion around the flamboyance that we, the queers, display because we aren’t being queer in the way that the couple of LGBTQIAP+ family members in your life are comfortable in a “conservative” lifestyle despite their orientations.

You may not have been in a position to do anything to prevent traumas from occurring years back, but here you are, knocking on my email door from the safety that your “brand new” email account provides you.

Google some stuff about transness and you will learn that using my dead name and pronouns to preserve your own comfort completely negates the apologies on your own and others' behalf.

“I’m sorry people hit you with bats and I couldn’t stop them” While you hit me with a baton.

If conformity is what you seek, may I ask you why it is that you are a religious Jew who presumably dresses the part? Modern, or orthodox, you have a specific way of leading your life that does not “conform” to the standard. If you were to be more like all other Jews who do not feel the need to dress a specific way, eat a different way, act a different way, would the world not be more okay with you? Would antisemitism go away?

We both know the answer to this. We both know, because of how deeply it is rooted in us, that it would not. Your “lifestyle”, much like my own, must be rooted in something deeper. Something that can not be shirked like a coat as you walk into a warm room. Strip away the external and we would all be the same, but still so deeply not. I present my outsides to align with my internal truths, much like you, because hiding me from me for so many years did nothing but depress and nearly kill me.

Trust me lovely stranger, I tried. I tried to conform to societal expectations of “womanhood” for many years. Boy oh boy, am I a good actor, but it was never me. I acted that way to appease others. I dressed that way to keep a person in my life who was never deserving of my efforts. To keep more people in my life who never saw me. It took me so many years to realize the most important person I needed to keep in my life was myself. Alive.

Coming to terms with my queerness and transness has been one of the biggest transitions I have ever gone through, and I’ve been through many. It has also been one of the most important transitions of my life. The one that has allowed me to access my deepest most consistent truths.

That’s the only thing you need to understand. That being honest with myself and authentic to that truth, has saved my life.

I feel like I am coming home in this body. I experience different harassment, and yet I feel more at peace in this body than I have in perhaps ever. I don’t feel like I’m living a lie every single day of my life.

If being me is flamboyant, then this must be what freedom feels like.

I wouldn’t trade what you consider “flamboyance” for drab, for any amount of anything.