So about the name—

I sat in my small, quiet, velvet-lined mastering room in a panic. I’m not often made nervous by clients or by the anticipation of how my work will be received, but this was different. It was the mastering engineer’s equivalent to The Actor’s Nightmare: I had an artist coming in forty-five minutes to listen through an album that wasn’t done yet.

I hit play.

“My auntie is a man now,” Kendrick Lamar’s voice said through my speakers.

My stomach tightened.

I hit stop.

Unsavory messaging doesn’t usually bother me. Artists regularly broadcast all sorts of homophobic, misogynist, emotionally distorted and toxic coping mechanisms. I took a breath and reminded myself that passing judgment isn’t my job. My job is to elevate every song that crosses my path to the best of my ability. I resumed working.

“Back when it was comedic relief to say “faggot" / Faggot, faggot, faggot, we ain't know no better / Elementary kids with no filter, however / My auntie became a man, and I took pride in it”

Time ground to a halt. I stopped working. I clicked back to the beginning of the song, held still, and listened.

By the time the song was over, I was overwhelmed and amazed. I held my head in my hands and stared hard at the wrinkle in the armrest on my console, how it puckered. My eyes stung and adrenaline pumped painfully through my veins.

I didn’t have time for these feelings. Yet, hope screamed through my chest. A rap song about trans acceptance, crafted from a personal perspective that didn’t gloss over how much more easily society accepts trans men, how in the same breath trans women, particularly black ones, face danger, violence, and condemnation, how the safe haven of churches became pulpits of shame and blame. This kind of acknowledgment could change so much.

Suddenly this was the most important thing I’d ever done. I had thirty minutes left to compile an album that required a hell of a lot more time than that. My eyes still burned. I went back to work with my jaw clenched.

You see, it had only been a few months since I’d started testosterone.

I’ve never thought my life was anyone else’s business. As a young adult I made some impetuous decisions, but when choosing which side of the glass to build a career on, I was extremely intentional. I’m also under no pretense that I am so important that people must know. But the past several years in the world have been harsh, and I am still frequently reminded how much hateful discourse has returned to queer rights. For that reason alone, I feel the need to be visible about this.

I’m trans.

I didn’t always know that. Even at the beginning of this year, I wasn’t sure.

I don’t have the “typical” story. I didn’t know when I was five that the body I was in was Wrong For Me. The story I was used to hearing. That trans people always knew they were trans. My existential and physical mortification at the changes that came with puberty seemed comparatively inconsequential. Since I hadn’t been certain I was trans since I was a child, that meant I wasn’t.

Growing up, I played Trans Support for everyone else. I read all the Kate Bornstein books and regurgitated the information. I told everyone else to be who they are, told everyone that Kate said exploring gender is meant to be fun. I never really understood what the fun part was, and never gave myself permission to do the same. I watched others access joy as though watching a documentary; neither the permission nor the joy registered as something I could understand, let alone experience. The question, Am I Trans? repeated in my head decade after decade, punctuated by fear and horror. No, I told myself, because if I was, I’d have known already. No, I told myself, because nobody else thinks so. No, I told myself, because the few times I got drunk enough to admit my questioning out loud, my friends—people who purported to be fellow LGBTQ allies—rolled their eyes and scoffed at me. That’s not how it works, they said. I wasn’t gay enough. I wasn’t trans enough. I wasn’t enough. I starved myself to silence the cacophony in my head, the rejection I felt from every direction. As that form of coping became more untenable, I drank myself into oblivion instead.

During the pandemic shutdown, I turned inward. I learned to stop running from everything about who I am that scared me: the parts of my life and myself I was ashamed of. To sit with everything about me I considered terrible and ask why. To let go of the pain and self-hatred I’d carried. I learned to forgive my past selves for the harm they had caused to me, to themselves, and to others. I was then able to offer my current self the extraordinary gift of compassion.

Having top surgery provided freedom I hadn’t been able to access in a long time. The first time I went for a run with a flat chest was magical. I began to realize how much of what I thought was plain old body dysphoria was actually gender dysphoria. Suddenly, I didn’t mind that there was fat on my body now that there wasn’t a specific kind of fat in a specific place. I didn’t hate myself every time I looked in the mirror.

I gained confidence. I considered dating, but immediately hit a snag: what category did I fit into? Who would be attracted to me? While I knew gender roles fall apart at the slightest of inspection, it was different when less of a philosophical question and more about how I’d be perceived. How would my identity affect who might be interested in me? Do boobs make or break being a woman? Does nipple placement? When does it begin to matter? Was I still a woman to straight men? To lesbians? Had my identity membership changed?

After finally getting rid of a thing that’s bothered you since puberty, it’s confusing to be so compelled to preserve the social membership you’ve always known. If I identified as non-binary, would my “woman card” be revoked? When had that become important to me?

In college, I was so surrounded by men that another woman in a classroom made me uncomfortable. In my early days in the music industry, all the women I met were in administrative roles, not in creative or engineering ones, and they terrified me. I was constantly afraid of being found out. For what, as what? Unsure. But it was Something, and it was Huge. So why was I so afraid of being expelled from a group within which I was always uncomfortable?

I decided no, top surgery didn’t cancel any of my membership cards. My chest was my business, not anyone else’s. My friends encouraged me to try a more gender-neutral name on, and I started crafting a secret, second identity under a name I shared only with a few trusted people. I carried my secrets atop my chest, where tissue used to be, like fake invisible padding. Like a fake, invisible persona.

At night I would lay in bed, basking in silence and solitude. I’d put a hand on my chest, where no one could see. My chest. My flat, masculinized chest, because that’s what I had now. I’d delight in it, my little secret, away from the world. The secret I was too afraid to tell anyone about. I tried sleeping without a shirt on, but I couldn’t. I tried walking around my apartment, alone, without a shirt on. I couldn’t. Not the first year.

For my thirty-fifth birthday, I bought myself a video game. Set in a dystopian cyberpunk future, the strangely pensive cyborgian main character seemed to have already gone through so much. I learned half his body was replaced by augments without his consent years prior, that he’d been betrayed by those he loved and trusted. He learned not just to accept what had become of him, but to embrace it. He walked around his apartment shirtless, and he didn’t hide if someone saw him.

Resonating with him was easy. My body horror came from the body I was born into, his from the one foisted upon him after an accident. He never asked for this, but embraced his new body anyway. I hadn’t. Something in me snapped and I started reaching for the life I wanted, the existence I craved. I started working out. I started not being afraid of my body even when the sun was out. I started asking about testosterone. I accepted myself without concerns about membership. I gave myself permission.

Society changed, too. The same groups and sometimes even the same people who once said, “You’re not trans enough,” now touted, “Everyone has their own journey, not everyone knows they’re trans immediately.” Still, I didn’t trust anyone. Still, I couldn’t understand where the fun was.

Until one day, very abruptly, I found it.

That day, I realized if I changed nothing about my mannerisms, nothing about how I spoke or reacted, but became noticeably masculine, I’d become Jack McFarland from Will and Grace. When I imagined it, I was suddenly and incomprehensibly filled with joy. It had never occurred to me that “sassy effeminate man” was an option. I’d been too busy making lists of all the reasons I couldn’t be a man: I was too short, I was too introverted, I wasn’t big and strong, I had wide hips, tiny hands, and little feet. There was no magic wand I could wave over my head when I went to bed to wake up a foot taller with a close-shaven beard and the kind of glow reserved for comic book superhero transformations. But sitting on my sofa with a book hanging precariously out of my hands, I could see myself in an embarrassingly plain white turtleneck and khaki slacks, cartwheeling into a room to yell WILL, you are NOT gonna believe what just happened, and I laughed until I cried. And kept crying. Because the image, as absurd as it was, wrecked the illusion that held me back. The illusion that told me no, that tangled me in lies. If I could be Jack McFarland—even lacking his full capacity for sass and dramatics—then Kate was right: gender is fun.

Trying testosterone felt like snapping puzzle pieces together. There was a quiet relief that grew until it was overwhelming. I’d finally given myself permission to stop trying to jam the square peg into the circle slot. Ani Difranco has a lyric, “you know they never really owned you / you just carried them around / and one day you put ‘em down and found your hands were free.” I didn’t know how heavy a weight gender had been until I put it down. And in the absence of that weight, joy flooded in. It was like that first run, but all the time.

I haven’t completely escaped the sensation that I’m cheating, that I put down the tools and walked out of my battle to make it work existing as a woman. That I’ve given up and taken the easy route. But if I stop for a moment, it’s pretty telling that I consider transitioning the easier route.

With that relief, however, came a new worry. Soon, I would no longer be able to pass off my changing voice as simply being tired today, before more of my features became more blatantly masculine. Yet outside of a few close and select friends, I hadn’t said anything to anyone. What was I supposed to say to my parents—immigrants from a different culture, a different generation—with whom I’d never broached the topic of gender? While loving parents, they didn’t have a history of being receptive to queer-related news.

Where was the line between my life being nobody’s business and being able to live honestly and openly?

What about my credits, the career I’d built in the music industry?

Then Texas Governor Abbott decided trans children shouldn’t be allowed medical treatment and that any parents who helped them should be prosecuted for child abuse, including parents who had helped provide gender-affirming care to their now adult children in the past.

Florida introduced the “don’t say gay” bill.

Several other states followed with more hateful, anti-trans legislation.

I’d discovered my joy, my relief, my deliverance. Around the country, white cis-gendered men were once again trying to take that away from others.

I hadn’t been looking for a sign, for a reason to come out. I knew the right thing to do was to be as public as I dared. But how—and who to tell first—daunted me.

In marched Kendrick Lamar, with an album as vulnerable as it was self-assured, as introspective as it was the scathing societal commentary his fans are used to. An album from the perspective of a man considering and challenging the roles we’re locked into in society. Evaluating those roles whether they affected him personally or not. It’s impossible to have a conversation about trans rights—or gender in general—without having one about racism, without having one about privilege, about patriarchy, about who holds power, why, and to what lengths they will go to preserve it.

In contrast, during the Me Too movement: I wrote, I shared statistics, I yelled at anonymous defensive cis men on the internet. I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t see anything changed by my anger or resentment. In my mastering room with Kendrick’s team, there was no fury, no elevated blood pressure, no blaming. We were finishing a powerful album and we were there to elevate art. The space between each of us was cushioned by kindness and gentleness and the process to which we were all so dedicated.  When the album was finished, they were the first people I came out to in the industry. I was met with love and open arms.

If there’s one lesson that album has taught me above all else, it’s to approach everything with love, with honesty, with authenticity and hope. To leave the fury and finger-pointing at home. Kendrick didn’t need to stick his neck out for trans people. He didn’t need to learn from his past, he didn’t need to evolve. He chose to. It’s an arduous, grueling path to the grace we all have the capacity to offer ourselves and others if we have the courage to do the work.

It’s easy—too easy—to feel bleak about the current state of affairs. Yet, as in art, if we want to adequately transcend ourselves and our time to add a snapshot of humanity to the swirling cosmos, historical context is vital. Eight years ago, when Laura Jane Grace came out as trans, it was a shock to the system in the music industry. I’m not sure the Wachowskis have yet to escape their transness as an unyielding topic. What Leslie Feinberg endured is beyond the pale. I wonder what it was like for Wendy Carlos. Of course, everyone I mention is white, which is why they were allowed to live at all; it isn’t a luxury we often afford to trans people of color, trans women in particular.

My north star, Kate Bornstein, encourages us all to laugh about gender. Have fun with it. My whole life, I struggled to understand where to find that joy. Now that I’ve found it, I refuse to let it go.

When grim moments draw near, I remember that in the 80s and 90s lesbian nurses went out of their way to take care of the gay men no one would touch while they died of AIDS. I remember it took twenty years to lift a ban on gay people holding federal jobs after Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order. That transgender wasn’t even a word until 1965, and still classified as a disease until 2012.

It’s important to remember we stand on the backs of those who have fought and died to get us as far as we are today, that culture and society is shifting and that these laws and reversals are desperate measures dealt by a minority with disparate power to control something they cannot change.

All those people fought against that now-diminished power to protect their joy and to allow others to have it too. I stand with them. I stand with you.

So if you didn’t think you knew a trans person, now you do. If you’ve ever felt alone, unwelcome, not gay enough, or not trans enough, I’m here to tell you that you are valid and you are enough exactly as you are.

Anyway, call me Emerson, or Em, if you like.

And please, for the love of all good things, protect trans women of color above all else.