If You're Nice About It, Call Me Allison

 A Halloween poem... It’s Halloween night and you’re 16 Coming off a boring shift at the grocery store And looking forward to doing nothing and falling asleep   You hear the kids outside It sounds like fun Fun has never been for you   But you see someone enter the dark space to your room It’s you, it’s me! You don’t believe… I’m in a long black robe with a black wig And my eyes and lips are painted Our eyes and lips are painted No they’ll laugh at you   But I smile “I know you Allison __ Shuttup, yes, you are Allison Take my hand” I extend it   You’re too scared You love the comfort and safety    So fuck it I GRAB your hand…   And we are here Halloween night The West Village 24 years later   When people asked what my costume was I didn't know what to say at first Eventually, it came to me... I am the ghost of Halloween past That was queer magic That was you, at last getting to have fun   Let’s go in this bar And see…   And see! See ...

If asked at the beginning of my trans journey would I want to be AFAB, I’d have said yes in a hurry. To not have to worry about the process of transition, one that our society has riven with pitfalls and danger, sounds awesome. I would have sooner lived as who I was meant to be. In the last few weeks, I’ve changed my tune. I like the freedom to find out what femininity means to me, what I want and don’t want. It’s a creative tableau for womanhood. Once, the notion of such abstract thought would have surprised me. Yet with every euphoric effort that works and does not, clarity emerges on who I — Allison Julia Whitney — want to be. And what I am becoming.  But of course, society wants to define gender for us. Even the most well-intentioned of the cissssss have wanted to know why. Why why why. The only people I’ve subjected myself to the world salad that is my etiology are my loved ones. Everyone else who happens to know I'm trans that is not trans themselves can f off.  When did...

There are distinct memories we carry from our childhood years. Some are real but most are a knitted assortment of fractured recollection, sensory encounter, flattened context, life experience, and shifting perspective. What we are remembering is not what actually happened, it's how we remember it from the last time we thought about it. And if you live long, you create a train of thought where jangled memory defines present reality. All that to say, I have many distinct memories about driving home in the back of my mom's car after visiting my grandparents. The son is setting and I, for reasons that are unclear to me, am feeling maudlin. My mom didn't get to experience much of her young adulthood before I was born, so unlike most of her contemporaries that favored Madonna, White Snake, and other 80s music, she would always have on alt stuff from the 90s, perhaps to try and enjoy the moment. And not Nirvana or Pearl Jam, but the kind of acceptable pop stardom for parents. Alan...