They Will Keep On Speaking Her Name, Volume 4 - A Labyrinthine Life

Side A: The Labyrinth Song // Side B: My Own Prison

My Mixtape Memoir - They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name

This post is Volume 4 in my memoir project They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name. Basically, I’m using my trans woman transition mixtape as a framework to write memoir. Read the Liner Notes here. Check out my transition mixtape on Spotify.

If you’re looking for my poetry, my original poems are here, and my readings of selected poems from the public domain are here.

Side A: The Labyrinth Song

Oh, Ariadne, I am coming, I just need to work this maze inside my mind / I wish I had that string, it's so damn dark, I think I'm going blind / Oh, Ariadne, I just need to work this maze inside my mind / For the life of me, I don't remember what I came to find -from “The Labyrinth Song” by Asaf Avidan

(If you’d like to learn more about the Ancient Greek myth that inspired Avidan’s song, here’s a start)

I remember her dark hair with sterling silver streaks spaced throughout as natural highlights. It was wavy, windblown, and just long enough to drape across her shoulders and touch her exposed collarbones in the black sleeveless blouse she wore. She was tall, at least six feet, and slender.

Her jawline was sharp, but her pink rouge and round dimples softened the overall look of her face. Her eyes, framed by subtle eyeshadow and long, curved, well-mascara’d lashes, were blue and deep. She saw me try to look into them—to read the thousand emotions hidden there—when my mom and I walked into the laundromat and looked away.

I thought she was absolutely stunning.

After we settled in, and my mom had started our laundry in the orange and white machines along the wall, I asked, too loud like so many childhood queries, “Why does that lady have hair on her face?”

Her eyes caught mine for a split second—long enough for me to feel the connection, to know that we had something profound in common—and then she turned to my mom and said, “It’s okay, hon.” It wasn’t the first time she had heard that question. Her voice was raspy like Janis Joplin’s and mercurial like Nina Simone’s (both these incredible women have songs on this mixtape that I’ll write about later).

Mom quietly told me that some people’s hearts feel different than the body they were born with. No judgement. No sociological theory. Just a straightforward and compassionate explanation. I didn’t know how say I felt the same way.

Later, I saw her walking around town from time to time, often wearing a long fur coat that caught in the Oklahoma wind and stuck out behind her like a cape. On such one occasion, my best friend and I spotted her while his dad was driving us somewhere. While I stared in admiration, they taught me a glossary of anti-trans slurs that were popular at the time.

I hope that the life I now live is one that would show a lonely transgender child—us trans adults were once trans children—bravery, beauty, and hope that there can be a place in the world for people like us.

Side B: My Own Prison

The walls cold and pale, the cage made of steel / Screams fill the room, alone I drop and kneel -from “My Own Prison” by Creed

I have a confession about the large portion of my life I spent as an evangelical Christian who was trying to pray away being a transgender woman: I only ever believed in Hell for myself.

Though I grew up Southern Baptist, got saved and baptized in an evangelical church, attended other churches that fit that mold, and sent myself to a Christian university under the impression that G-d had called me to go there, I never fully bought into conservative Christian theology.

I saw G-d’s love as something expansive, mysterious, incomprehensible to our feeble human minds, and intended for everyone. Well before I studied enough to know the terminology, I was a Christian universalist—someone who believes that Christ’s redemptive work is freely given to all.

G-d’s love was for everyone but me. I only ever believed in Hell for myself.

I tried to be Christ-like and forgive the guys who bullied me throughout my school years for acting like a girl—despite my best efforts to be my father’s son. I could even believe in redemption for the one who kicked me in the back while I was in a bathroom stall in 7th grade, causing me to fall against the toilet and wall and piss all over myself (“You’d Look So Pretty” an original poem). I walked (and cried) my way home that day rather than taking the bus.

All sins were forgivable, except mine. Anyone could be saved, but there weren’t enough altar calls or Bible studies or intercessory pray meetings or missions trips or faith in the entire world that would redeem me. A murderer could pray on his deathbed and find himself in Glory a moment later, but my sin—being transgender—was too far gone.

I consciously remember feeling trans (though I wouldn’t have language to describe that until much later) as early as when I was three—when I wanted Raggedy Ann like my sister instead of Raggedy Andy, when I asked my mom why she wouldn’t have another child because I don’t want to be the little brother anymore (“Selfies in a Rearview Mirror” an original poem).

My transness was always there, so it must be my original sin, I thought. The fact that I couldn’t shake it must mean that I lacked faith. I preached a loving G-d to everyone else, but I believed—wholeheartedly—Hell was for me.

After decades of breaking bread and praying together, and of them calling me a “man of G-d, evangelicals now make sure to let me know they still believe Hell is for me. It’s not for their church leaders who’ve threatened to rape and/or murder me (“Christmas 2024” an original poem), but it’s for me. They salivate at the thought of me being eternally punished for being a type of person they refuse to have compassion for.

It took nearly 40 years for me to pick the locks, unshackle my body and soul, throw open the prison door, and become Miranda. And I won’t go back.

💜Miranda📚

p.s. Sunday marked a year and a half on HRT! Instagram, TikTok