They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name, Volume 10 - Babe, You Must Be Poetry

Side A: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me // Side B: She Sings in Riddles

***TW: I’m going to discuss bottom dysphoria. Bottom dysphoria is discomfort with one’s genitals. Nothing about the following is sexual.***

They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name — Miranda’s Mixtape Memoir

This post is Volume 10 in my memoir project They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name. Basically, I’m using my transition mixtape as a framework to write memoir pieces about my life as a transgender woman. If you’d like to know more about the project, thumb through the Liner Notes here:

A lot of my original poems lean toward the confessional mode, so they’ll tell you a lot about my life, too.

Thanks for joining me for this mixtape memoir listening party. Whenever you’re ready, hit PLAY

Side A: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me

Dressing like your sister / Living like a tart / They don't know what you're doing / Babe, it must be art / You're a headache, in a suitcase / You're a star — from “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” by U2

***TW: I’m going to discuss bottom dysphoria. Bottom dysphoria is discomfort with one’s genitals. Nothing about the following is sexual.***

I was four the first time I remember stealing a pair of my sister’s panties.

Four. It wasn’t a sexual thing.

Four. It wasn’t a fetish.

I had always felt uncomfortable with that part of my body, physically uncomfortable. I remember my parents getting onto me sometimes for rearranging myself. They probably assumed I was just a little boy exploring his body and wanted to provide those boundaries of when it is or isn’t okay to shift things around.

But no matter how things were situated, I felt uncomfortable. I felt wrong.

I had seen my dad get dressed, of course, and had tried to arrange myself in my underwear the same way he did. I had seen my friends in the neighborhood get dressed whenever we had sleepovers (or whenever the guys wanted to pee in drainage ditch behind Chris’s house), and I had tried positioning myself like they did.

I was four-years-old and hated my body. I especially hated the parts that “made [me] a boy.”

I was four-years-old. My sister was five and in kindergarten (we ended up being two years apart in school because I had a fall birthday). At our elementary school, kindergarten was in half-day sessions.

My sister was in the afternoon kindergarten session. Mom usually drove or walked with her to school. Sometimes I went with them, and sometimes I stayed home. Dad worked third shift and was usually home before she needed to head to school. There were certain days when Dad wouldn’t be home before she went to school. Some people who worked third shift had a bowling league that met in the mornings, and there were other times that he needed to stay over for whatever reasons.

Most days, I went with Mom and my sister or stayed home with Dad, but sometimes I had a chance to be home alone for a few minutes while Mom did the school run.

I was four-years-old and wanted to know what it felt like to be a girl. Mom and my sister were headed to school, and I knew Dad wouldn’t be home for a while, yet. Even though I knew I was home alone, I felt like I was being watched. I acted quickly. I opened the top drawer of my sister’s dresser, thumbed through her panties and picked a pair.

After I took her panties, I immediately hid them. I don’t remember how many days went by before I tried them on, but I remember thinking about them constantly, about how much I needed to try them on, about how much I wanted them to magically turn me into a girl.

All this happened after, months after, I had asked Mom to please have another baby because “I don’t want to be the little brother anymore.” I mentioned that in my poem “Selfies in a Rearview Mirror.”

I held onto that pair of panties, waiting until I thought I had enough unsupervised time to try them on. I knew this was something the other boys my age weren’t doing with their sister’s clothes. I knew I should be ashamed. I knew I needed to hide that part of myself.

I eventually got my chance. As soon as I slid them on, I started crying. It was so unfair that girls got to have softer cotton, that girls got to have pretty patterns and colors. Most of all, it was unfair that everyone else felt like themselves when they got dressed.

After I put the panties on, I tried tucking—or at least what I could figure out for tucking—so that I would look like a girl down there.

I was four-years-old and learning how to hate my body and how to hide and how to keep secrets and knowing there was no one in the world I could talk to about any of this.

For a moment, four-year-old me looked down at pretty panties and crossed legs and felt okay about myself. I felt okay, and I wished that I could always be a girl. But I knew better. I buried that pair of panties in the trash and buried myself in shame.

Side B: She Sings in Riddles

Words of a poet, in perfect time / With questions and answers every verse, every line / Well I smile and I wonder, is there a song / Well I've not yet decided if it's right or it's wrong // Yeah, she sings in riddles, she sings in rhymes / Sayin’ everything and nothin' at the same time / Still there's something that blows my mind / She sings in riddles, she sings in rhymes — from “She Sings in Riddles” by Third Day

In Volume 1 of this mixtape memoir project, I talked about a song that spoke to my dysphoria for more than 20 years and that I cried to a thousand times, “Your Girl” by White Town. “She Sings in Riddles” by one of the all-time bestselling Christian artists, Third Day, also fits that description.

Two related questions that I get asked frequently as a transgender woman are, “How did you know you were trans?” and “What does it feel like to be trans?”

Being trans feels like living inside a riddle that’s wrapped up inside a poem. I had to examine each and every word, line, stanza, metaphor, double meaning, rhyme scheme, and punctuation mark. I had to read and reread. I had to underline and circle and cross out. I had to write notes in the margins and then write new marginalia that contradicted that.

I had to memorize it all by heart.

Then I had to take the biggest risk—to erase it all and write myself anew.

I know that wasn’t really an answer. Except, it was.

I am someone who thinks with an internal monologue. Almost all the time that I’m conscious (and sometimes when I’m not because I have a helluva dream life), my internal voice narrates the world, reasons with myself, and imagines things. I don’t know if that adequately describes the narrative aspect of my neurotype, but I don’t want to get too far off the point.

So I have this voice trying to guide me through each day, and it used to feel so fractured. It used to be obsessed with telling me what was okay to like, what was acceptable to feel, how I could present myself to the world. I was supposed to be a certain way, a dad, a son, a brother, a husband, and every roll had a script that the fractured voice in my head enforced and then felt like a liar about.

The voice was always me, but it didn’t always allow me to be who I truly wanted to be.

There was always tension and pain and self-disagreement and a put-on masculine aspect and a feminine aspect, and I would put myself through cycles of allowing the masculine or feminine to be more of my voice at the time.

My hair was often a tell that the world could see that represented how my internal monologue was allowing me to be—a tell about the status of the fight between what I thought was expected of me and what I really wanted. I would grow out my hair and then cut it short. I would grow a mustache or beard and then shave it off. Cycle after cycle, all while arguing with myself about which version was the real me.

Below is a selfie from June 2019, over four years before I started my transition. The voice of me was tired, depressed, self-loathing, and hiding behind a mustache.

thepoetmiranda in 2019, 4+ years before transition, miserable af

The voice of me argued with itself about gender a lot in the almost 40 years I masqueraded as a man. Three-year-old me knew the I wanted to be a girl. Seven-or-eight-year-old me saw a trans woman at the laundromat and fell in love for the first time and felt connected to her in a way I couldn’t figure out how to narrate at the time. I talked about her back in Volume 4.

12-year-old me knew I was jealous of my sister and her friends in a million ways and not at all excited about stepping into my manhood. 14-year-old me dressed as a woman for a Halloween party and felt true to myself for the first time. 19-year-old me had a friend come out to me as transgender for the first time, and I was jealous. Every time a friend came out as trans (something that happened repeatedly for some odd reason), I swelled up with envy.

My envious voice said, “Why can’t I come out?” “Am I trans?” “I’ve always wanted to be a woman, but I can’t.” And on and on. My envious voice had a lot to tell me, but I wasn’t ready to listen.

Back to that riddle, the one inside the poem. To figure out I that I’m a transgender woman, I had to spend time talking with myself about every facet of my identity. I had to ask myself the hardest questions. Even worse, I had to answer them. But I did it, I figured out the riddle, and I rewrote the poem. I become the poet and the poem.

My voice? Singular. At peace. Happy. Loving. Who I always wanted to be.

thepoetmiranda in July 2025, 21 months into my transition, being the MILF I wanted to see in the world

Thanks for joining me for this listening party

Both sides of this release went to emotionally vulnerable places. Thank you for reading with care.

Love y’all!
💜thepoetmiranda📚