Maybe I’m actually learning to let go?

“Letting go” is certainly a topic I’ve touched on before here (want to know more, use the search function at the top of the page to search for “letting go”). Apparently, it’s a reoccurring theme (nightmare?) in my life. Perhaps something I’m bound to repeat until I finally get it “right.” Karma, reincarnation, etc...however you try to make sense of it, I may yet be getting there, as slow as the case may be.

It’s been almost a year and a half now since I came out as trans-identified. Some things haven’t changed (still non-ho and non-op), but others have (the name I go by, the pronouns I prefer, and the amount of work I put into trying to be understood and recognized as I’d like to be).

I was talking with a friend a while ago about how I thought, as transmen who were relatively new in coming out as trans, that we’d soon enough find ourselves changing in ways we didn’t expect and/or want to in order to be acknowledged for the men we saw ourselves as. He strongly disagreed, saying how much he didn’t want to be anything other than who he is, even if that meant being a different kind of man than most other men.

I wish I had his conviction, and his ability to follow through.

One of the things I never expected when it came to how people around me read gender is the significance of earrings. Coming from communities in California that are no strangers to body modifications, both in the form of tattoos and body piercings, I never understood earrings to be gendered as feminine, especially since I had long ago stretched my ears and wore relatively large-gauged jewelry.

In the context of California communities I inhabited, I don’t think such jewelry would be about gender, but about other cultural markings, but here in the DC area, earrings seemed to consistently be the telling sign to others that I was assigned a girl at birth.

When reading Jamison Green’s chapter “Body of Knowledge” in his book Becoming a Visible Man with my Introduction to LGBT students, we began discussion by talking about the things that we all do to gender ourselves in particular ways. Students, of all genders, specified earrings as something they did to display their femininity.

In that moment, I felt defeated.

I went home and took my earrings out (and other body jewelry), and haven’t put them back in since.

(It felt more traumatic than how simple/neutral it seems seeing it in print here.)

And, sad to say, the lack of earrings does seem to have a positive effect in being recognized more often as a man. (More on when I pass and when I don’t later.)

One of my female co-workers with stretched ears noticed that I hadn’t been wearing my earrings and lamented at the loss of them. My loss, though, has turned into her gain.

After more than a dozen years of accumulating body jewelry, I finally parted with them just a couple of days ago, when I passed them onto her for her birthday.

It was actually really hard. She had wanted them for some time, but I just wasn’t ready to part with them. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to them—ready to succumb to people’s gendered notions that earrings are feminine. But in the end, it wasn’t a battle I wanted to fight anymore. There are so many battles I feel like I’m fighting right now, I just couldn’t keep fighting for the gender neutrality of earrings. And, with this past Friday having been her birthday, it seemed good timing and a good occasion to finally let go, and I did just that.

I hope she enjoys them as much as I have, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t miss them. Still, it’ll be nice to see them “live on” with/through her. I definitely couldn’t imagine just throwing them away even if I wasn’t ever going to wear them again, not with a value of over $300, so here’s to being green, and recycling and reusing!