F My Life

I apparently missed my chance to correct the gender marker on my passport. The reason is boring and predictable: I went from being dangerously under-employed to completely jobless at the end of 2024, and scraping up a couple hundred bucks for a renewal was never a financial priority.  

It is hard for me to find work, and the effort I put into my personal writing doesn’t translate into paid bills. Despite this, I have needed food and medicine. I have needed to conjure up vast sums of money with little warning to cover emergency dentist appointments and other steep, unpredictable expenses. I have also needed creature comforts like seltzer and movie tickets. I stretch dollars into improbable origami and steal whatever I can’t borrow and accept charity from the people who love me, and that’s how I get by. That’s how every trans person gets by, except the ones who work for Google. 

Since I began transition, I have simply never had a couple hundred bucks that were mine to spend on whatever I liked. I’m told to save, squirrel away, be strategic with the ways I am willing to suffer. But there are lots of ways that being a trans person is expensive, and many of them are more immediately pressing than updating a document for international travel that I cannot afford. My needs are concrete and material. The idea of fleeing the country to escape my oppressors is a fantasy. What am I supposed to do?

And so, the passport never got fixed. I did not expect to wake up one morning and see a headline announcing that passports would now be bound to a person’s “god-given sex.” Like many queers before me, I under-estimated the speed and temerity of my incoming bureaucratic enemies and this means I am administratively fucked. Given the speed and violence of the executive order onslaught following Trump’s inauguration, I doubt I am the only one.

My passport still has that cursed F, and will continue to have one regardless of what happens to my body or identity outside of the government’s wildly limited understanding of gender. 

F my life, I guess. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the F on my passport because of the possibility I may need to use it, though to what ends I still do not know. As a trans person I am supposedly expected to be prepared to flee America, but for what? Another country also being seized by TERFs? Another big city where I have to start all over again at the age of 40, where I know nobody and have zero resources or safety net, relying on the goodwill of others in a time where half of humanity is convinced I am a secret bathroom rapist? 

I don’t have enough money for a fucking passport, much less a complete resettlement. People love to tell queer folks to move to somewhere safe, but they never have any advice for what you’re supposed to do when you get there. Chicago is safe enough for my broke ass for now.

There is also the lingering spectre of what I would have to do in order to use said passport. I no longer pass neatly as a woman, any more than I do as a man. In order to match my passport’s gender marker in the eyes of a border guard, I would need to shave my face and apply concealer to hide my stubble. I would need to contour and carve my cheeks and jaw. I would need to buy a nice lace-front wig and learn how to glue it down over my buzz cut so the edges didn’t give me away. 

I’d wear too much makeup like I always used to, back when I didn’t understand why I couldn’t make it look “right.” I’d move awkwardly and self-consciously, aching at the eyes crawling across the pieces of my body that have never really felt like mine. I’d speak in a whisper, like I did before testosterone dropped me an octave or two.

I’d be failing at the art of female impersonation to humor people who hate my guts, just like I did back when I thought I was a cis woman. I wouldn’t be a woman, because I never have been. I would once more be reduced to my best guess of womanhood, and this time it would hurt even more because I would know it was a lie.

Aside from the dishonesty, I find it particularly insulting because nobody should have to do that. There is no supposedly gendered trait that is actually exclusive to one side of the binary or the other. There are cisgender women with magnificent beards and buzz cuts in this world, and cisgender men with suckable tits and spectacular round asses. I got yelled at in women’s bathrooms for looking like a dykey dude long before my first dose of testosterone. 

I don’t have a great strategy for dealing with the bathroom stuff. Most trans folks I know wait till the bathroom is deserted, seek out a single-stall situation, or just wait to pee at home. I eventually stopped caring and started daring people to come at me, and since I’m a 300lb brick shithouse nobody’s taken me up on it yet.  I’d obviously prefer not to fight anybody, but at this point I’d rather somebody swing at me than some tiny thing that can’t take a punch. 

That inborn orneriness is why the state has to threaten folks like me with fines and jail time for daring to rock a piss in public in the first place. So what is left for those of us who cannot, will not, must not comply? Those of us who can’t afford to flee, can’t be bothered to hide? Those of us who are seemingly doomed to go down with this ship?

It seems contrary to conventional wisdom to be trans in public these days. There are new warnings everywhere about being captured in crowd photos, about publicly admitting to name changes and other evidence of transness. As if I could follow these rules and magically change the shape of my body or erase the portfolio of works under my dead name. I think it’s fine for people to hide, if that’s what they need to do to survive. I have always lived in public, and I have never even tried to pass. It feels a little late to start trying now.

I have purposefully created a life that cannot be hidden, the life of a transmasculine pervert with a slick modern Livejournal. I am committed to this loopy and overly-wordy public record of my transition because I think trans folks need to be visible in some capacity, and I am a trans person who can be visible with far less risk than those with children or sensitive jobs or other things that bigots like to take away from us. 

It makes sense for me to be the one to take a hit if needed, just like it makes sense for me to offer myself up as a punching bag in a public bathroom. It’s going to hurt, and I will survive it as I have survived everything else.

(I’ve also had a hard life that broke my brain in a way that means I don’t really care if I get murdered at this point, as long as I get to be happy before I die. Being Harm Cox makes me happy when nothing else does, and so I’m going to keep doing it until something makes me stop. I do not encourage you to emulate me. Prioritize your own safety however you have to. I got no judgement for you, come on and ache with me.) 

For me, it’s apocalypse from now on, just like it’s always been. Things are a little closer, a little scarier, and far more unpredictable. But that only makes me more intent on holding my ground. I think my writing is going to be a bit more conversational, though the film essays will continue apace. I want to talk about trans life as it is right now, in this precarious time, in my warm and currently-safe home. I want to be honest with you. 

i want to build a body of work that says trans people were here in 2024, in Trump's America. We were here, no matter what anybody says about us, no matter how they try to hide us or kill us or shame us into the ether. We loved each other and cared for each other and fucked each other and gave each other weekly shots of HRT and fought like cats and dogs in the streets sometimes. 

We were all worth something. We are all worth something. We deserve to be remembered as we were, as we are.  The F on my passport is only one document, valid on the whims of a leeching fascist empire I've never respected to begin with, one that lies about who I am as a matter of policy.

So. F it. The bastards can keep my records however they like. Let me create a portfolio of my truths, and let that be the record that matters instead.