They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name, Volume 5 - Made to Emerge
Side A: My Body Was Made // Side B: Ich tauche auf
Miranda’s Mixtape Memoir - They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name
This post is Volume 5 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 trans woman. If you’d like to know more, thumb through the Liner Notes here:
In addition to memoir, I write original poetry, which you can find here:
And I select poems from the public domain to share with my readers. You can find my previous selections here:
If you’d like to support my writing projects, buy me a refreshing glass of iced coffee at ko-fi.com/thepoetmiranda and sign up for a free or paid subscription to this page.
Side A: Body Was Made
Your body is yours at the end of the day / And don't let the hateful try and take it away / We want to be free, yeah, we go our own way / And my body was made, oh -from “Body Was Made” by Ezra Furman
This post is in conversation with an article I posted over at WendytheDruid’s thistleandmoss.com called “National Day of Prayer and the Death of G-d,” so when you’re finished here, go check that out.
I’m an exvangelical—someone who left evangelical Christianity. Though I’m no longer part of that subset of Christian faith, I’m still connected to many evangelical people in both my family and my old social circles. When I came out as a transgender woman, I didn’t walk away from any of those relationships. I decided the best path forward for me was to live my life as my authentic self and let people self-select whether they still wanted to be associated with me.
I hoped they would see my joy. And my humanity.
Some people—including my late maternal grandfather—did choose to walk away. I wrote about him and his 1948 Chevrolet in a recent poem, here:
If you’ve read previous posts in this memoir series—or many of my poems—you know that my coming out and embracing life as a transgender woman also includes a lot of unpacking religious trauma. There are a lot of things I used to believe when I was a participant in high-control religious communities that I don’t believe now, but I’m not sorting that out on this track.
I want to tell you about an idea I picked up during that part of my life that I still find beautiful and moving: that each person is made imago Dei—in the image of G-d. When I think about how diverse humanity is while looking through that lens, I see an expansive, multifaceted, creative G-d.
I see a G-d who inhabits every race, nationality, tribe, and creed; a G-d who embodies the feminine and the masculine and everything in between and beyond; a G-d who isn’t limited by our understandings, misunderstandings, and prejudices; a G-d for the least of these. If I—a transgender woman, poet, wife, mother, daughter, sister—am made in G-d’s image, let it be that One.
I only hope that the Christians who are still in my life see that the G-d who inhabits them inhabits me—preferably before their brethren haul me off to a concentration camp.
Side B: Ich tauche auf
Ich tauche aus dem Wasser auf / Wie aus einem tiefen Schlund -from “Ich tauche auf” by Tocotronic (feat. Soap&Skin)
Translation to English: Im emerging from the water / like from a deep gorge
I first heard this song while watching the Netflix series Dark, an ambitious apocalyptic time travel sci-fi series about, inter alia, identity. The show’s original language (like this song) is German, but go ahead and embrace translated subtitles and watch the show.
I digress.
Sometimes we have to travel a long way before looking back becomes meaningful. In 2022, I turned 39. Though I had accomplished a lot of my life goals—married with children and pets and a modest house and working as a writer—I was miserable. And I made everyone around me suffer for it.
I was harboring a lifelong secret, my true identity as a transgender woman. In some way, I had known I was trans since I was three-years-old—when I wanted a Raggedy Ann rather than Andy, when I asked my Mom to have a third child so I didn’t have to be the little brother anymore. Of course, I couldn’t tell her that it was because I wanted to be a sister.
Mom’s response was that she and Dad had the family they dreamed of—one son and one daughter—so I crawled back into my closet and stayed there for a long time. To be clear, I don’t blame my Mom for answering how she did. Obviously, I was too young to articulate the deeper nature of my feelings, and I was growing up in a world that pushed the few out transgender people who existed to the margins of society.
It would be years before I (knowingly) saw a transgender person and years after that before I knew a trans person. In my twenties, multiple friends came out to me as trans. Each time, I was happy for them and envious that I didn’t have the bravery to do the same. Then I went back in my closet, and added another G-d has cursed me lock.
So I turned 39 in 2022, and I was dreading 40 coming up on the horizon. My gender dysphoria was more and more consciously on my mind, and it hurt. The thing that I had various levels of knowing throughout the years refused to be ignored any longer. So I told myself that I would figure out this gender thing by the time I turned 40. I needed to figure it out.
The next year was turbulent. I turned inward and often pushed away my wife who was trying to help me figure out the crisis of the soul I was enduring. I tried to solve my problems by turning my feminine self into a sexual fetish through “crossdressing” and related efforts (I’ll probably write more about that at a later date), which is something I had done intermittently in my life. This time, I really doubled down.
My efforts were unsatisfying. Sex can’t fix problems that aren’t sexual in nature. Being transgender isn’t about wanting to experience sex roles differently than what is expected from the expectations of one’s assigned sex. It’s not crossdressing. Sure, gender and sexuality intersect but as a complex weave of self image, not as a fetish.
In spring of 2023, my partner and I were invited to attend the annual fundraising gala for Oklahomans for Equality, an event we’d attended before. By this point, I was casually using he/they pronouns among queer friends (like those in my bisexual support group). I mentioned wanting to wear a formal dress like her for the event, but when we went shopping, I backed out and ended up picking out a purple men’s suit instead.
I was disappointed in myself for not being bolder, for not taking that brave step into public recognition of my femininity. The event came, and I at least asked her to help me with some eye makeup. It looked great, but I felt incomplete. I spent half the night sulking but not telling her why.
Over the summer, I drank a lot and was perpetually distant and miserable. I was an asshole to to my partner, my kids, my parents, my sister, people at work, and several times I almost let suicidal ideation about my worthlessness and inability to figure my shit out win out.
In July, I went down to part-time hours at work (barely holding on), and I decided to end my long break from writing poetry. Maybe my craft could help me get to my deeper emotions, my soul, my true self. It did, but it fucking hurt. I started jotting down a few lines here and there, and I was hit with a tidal wave of repressed memories—times I had exposed my femininity and paid for it.
I remembered being told I cried like a girl. I remembered being bullied for never measuring up to masculine expectations. I remembered being teased and that the teasing so often involved being called a girl and/or gay slurs. I remembered envying my sister and, instead of drawing closer to her, acting out with rage.
And I realized where this gender journey was going. I realized that I had been forcing myself into a dark closet and locking the door with as many locks as I could find. And I started crafting my coming out poem.
I’ll tell you more about my disastrous coming out process in a future post. The short version is that in September 2023, I broke down and told my wife that I needed to transition or I would die (I absolutely meant that), and I read her “You’d Look So Pretty.” Transitioning, and gender-affirming care, and my wife’s love have saved my life. I spent the first 40 years of my life wanting to die; now I want with all my heart another 40 years—as Miranda—in the arms of the one I love.
You do excellent work. Its visceral, painful even, and engaging. It reminds me of my own work.