Nov 5, 2024 6 min read Transness

The Ball-less-ness of It All

A slice of trans Election Day life.

My state-issued secretive voter-registration address. Add it to your Christmas-card list!

STANDING IN THE garden, my cat at the other end of the leash in my hand as the sun moved toward Set, I shifted my weight. One Birkenstock-clogged foot to the other, feet spread wide atop the famous cork beds. I haven’t worn underwear in weeks, partly because it’s hard to get laundry done, partly because I had some ink healing on my abdomen. But even though I’d finally washed my underpants, and the tattoo had fully healed, I was still free-hanging it. Free-swinging it. “I don’t say ‘free-balling’ since I didn’t get balls,” I’d said to someone earlier, and there’s something satisfying about issuing this statement so bluntly: I didn’t get balls.

Subtextually: I’m a man and I don’t have any balls and I even went through drastic surgery wherein I had my entire genitalia (and therefore life) remade, and I still didn’t get balls.

Standing in the garden, shifting my weight, I felt the tops of my thighs slide together—heft, hair. I felt the glancing weight and ambient warmth of my dick against the inside fronts of them. And I felt the specialness, the sacredness, of the space behind it.

Not a void. Breathing room.

Breath, around the singular magnificence of my cunt, which I also unusually kept, tissue soft and simultaneously combat-ready. Forgiving but unapologetic and resilient—angry; perfect. Scarred. Healing, while helping to heal the rest of me at the same time.

My Election ballot was forwarded to me by a special office in Olympia. I don’t live in Olympia; I’ve only been there once, and it was ten years ago. Several weeks ago, my friend Sky took me to a shelter organization, the only place in our Washington county where I could apply for an ACP voter registration—the Address Confidentiality Program. “You know it’s for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, human trafficking, stalking, and protected health-care or criminal-justice workers,” the guy I finally reached after several calls with several local administrative offices said.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m all but one of those things.”

“Okay, good,” he said. “Well, not good. That’s…bad. I’m sorry to hear that. But good that you found the right place.”

I found it through some creative googling when I was lamenting not being able to register to vote because I’m afraid of my father (less so these days, I’m happy to report) and of trans-exterminationists who’ve been obsessed with me for as long as I’ve been out about having had my genitalia (and therefore life) remade.

Whether I’ve got on panties or not, whether I’m alone in my house or sauntering down a grocery aisle, my genitals—the site of so many traumas that for so long they seemed like my undoing—have, since surgery, been not just a great but the greatest source of resource and (nonsexual) pleasure I’ve ever known.

Because of the rightness of them, however spectacularly wrong they are and I am and all trans people have become in the rhetoric of this horrid fascist revival. Whatever Jewish relatives I had left in Hungary when the Nazis came must be rolling in their graves. Maybe we were holding each other’s pain last night when I erupted into wails so deep, I couldn’t get any air into my lungs.

Thomas got up and put a fuzzy little foot on my leg. When that didn’t work, he pressed his teeth lightly into a spot on my thigh, and then into another one, as I screamed super silently, the way one does when it’s not safe for screams to come out.

I am lucky I have him. I am lucky I have a passport already marked with the name and gender I need to feel remotely safe traveling internationally, a passport I could get only with a doctor’s letter saying I’d been examined for satisfactory maleness, a “right” horrifyingly redeemed but that some candidates have vowed to entirely revoke. I have a clean sheet underneath my clean body, which I was able to wash in clean water. I own my own home, however most laws and public departments don’t consider it a legitimate one and most places criminalize it, just like states increasingly criminalize trans bodies. I have several blankets. I have a dehumidifier. I have the kind of self-love where when I wake up in pain, which is most of the time, I can say to myself, I love you, I love you, I fucking love you, I love you so fucking much, and that alone is beyond any miracle I ever could have imagined, to say nothing of this body that is beyond anything I could have dreamed.

I voted today. I worked so unfathomably hard to get myself to today that it seems unfathomable even to me, however present I was for every excruciating second. I got my manicure redone before I filled out my ballot, my sparkly stiletto nails as integral a part of my gender as anything between my legs. I went to a place where I’ve never seen another man getting his nails painted—this very day, some young dude came in with his girlfriend for a couple’s pedicure, and when he was asked if he wanted polish, he snorted and laughed.

No, probably not.

The manager laughed as well, though he’s always been super kind to me, if surprised the first time I walked in. I pay more to go there than to the cheaper, closer place, where they treated me like a freak. I bike up the long, hard hill for the sake of my integrity, my humanity. But shitty attitudes are the shittiest things that have happened to me in response to my flamboyant trans adulthood.

It’s a low bar, but a blessing as real as the faux-fur blanket covering my body at night: Despite decades of terror before I transitioned, after stories about how transness made me deserve the violence forced upon my childhood body, I have not been unrecoverably hate-crimed for being such a faggoty-looking trans fag. My great-great-great trans grandmother, Martha, was murdered, though she never dared to ask—let alone demand—that the whole world call her by her real name.

She is not rolling in her grave tonight. Tonight, she’s reveling in how many people are on our side, because as way-too-close as this election is, the number of people loudly saying that they give a shit about what happens to us is better than anything she could have imagined on the night she walked home from the coal mine where she worked and was unceremoniously, unrighteously, drowned in a shallow puddle.

A sky that is light blue at the top, with white clouds in the middle, and pink underneath, over tall green pines. — Another trans-pride sky in Washington, in another parking spot, on another day.

The sky in Washington is often so trans. The sky outside my window as dawn breaks in Washington on Election Day now is streaked pink and blue and white, the flag of a people to whom I’m so fucking proud to belong—of whom I’m lucky to be one, hard as half the country (hopefully less than half the electoral-college country!) is working to demonize and politicize our very breath, the air in our very lungs, the space around our precious and powerful cunts, whatever their configuration. This is considered a not very trans thing to say, but: I love this country. As many ways as it has failed me, it has supported me in others that I wouldn’t count on anywhere else, with my super-secret voting-registration address and my passport and my five—five!—free timely gender-affirming surgeries to my exact specifications. A few years ago, a magazine editor assuming that America was way behind the trans times asked if I could go report from the best country to be trans.

And I had to tell them: Obviously, it’s not perfect here.

But baby, this is it.