My Chemical Hormone Therapy Romance

This is Formation Jukebox, a column by Lio Min on being in transition and the music that helps them make sense of it all.

There’s an auto repair shop a few blocks away from where I live. On a faded wooden sign, someone once painted a list of services. At the bottom of the list is TRANS, short for TRANSMISSION. Every time I’d pass by it, I’d think to myself, “RIGHTS,” then knock myself on the head for making a joke (in the vein of this) out of a reality that wasn’t mine to joke about. Of course trans rights aren’t a joke.

The phrase is a rallying cry with serious intentions; as I write this, I feel like I should be ecstatic. The Supreme Court says trans rights. In response to JK Rowling’s snide assertion that she says trans rights but wHaT aBoUt BiOlOgIcAl WoMaNhOoD, so many voices immediately hollered back, trans rights. Brooklyn, flush with thousands of people wearing white, says trans rights, centering Black trans people.

I’m new to myself, or the version of myself who, when they say “trans rights,” is talking about themself. Even though I spent years thinking about finally getting here. Dreaming about it. Yearning for the language to give voice to this thing that, once named, slowly curled itself into the column of my throat and made a nest there. I’ve been taking testosterone for nine months, a heavy-handed metaphor of gestation. The eggs have yet to hatch, and it’s finally time to shine a light on them to see what is forming inside them.

I’m new to myself, or the version of myself who, when they say “trans rights,” is talking about themself. 

No bodies are ahistorical, but some histories are more obviously present than others. So often, trans people are in the news because of some violent reaction. Even when I take in celebratory stories, there is always the knowledge that there should be more of them (us) alive; that whatever dazzling spotlight they’re (we’re) standing in casts a dark and unknowable shadow, a reflectionless reflection.

About a month into shelter-in-place, someone wrote CLOSED on the side of the auto shop sign. When I run past it, all I read now is, TRANS: CLOSED, and I laugh. “No more applications.” Now I’m joking again—no, please, keep them coming.

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This is still a music column, so: I’ve been revisiting a lot of the bands that I associate with my teenagerhood, back when I pirated discographies through multi-part Mediafire links. I dropped most of those bands as my tastes changed, but I never lost my love for My Chemical Romance. Clearly I’m not the only one, as the band was set for a stadium reunion tour in 2020 before live music as we knew it was put on pause.

MCR is earnest and chaotic and dramatic in the aesthetic sense. If someone tells you they like MCR, you instantly have a sense of their self and how they place themself in the world. Music filled with howls and baroque embellishments and horror places a partition between those who listen and hear cacophony and those who listen and feel a sublime recognition. Anyone who’s ever claimed an allegiance to an earnest and intense subculture might understand: You’ve probably been called “sick” (in the unwell way) to knowingly desire attention for your open commitment to embracing strangeness and difference. The exact stakes of not fitting in, whether implicitly or explicitly, have changed throughout history, but are always high.

“Teenagers” is an MCR song that explicitly lays out stakes. As a teen, the song resonated because it really felt like adults indiscriminately ignored or turned away from the pain I and so many of my peers felt and projected outwardly as a scream or a scab. We were to be managed, and as long as you gave off the appearance of being managed, you would be safe from the dehumanization that treats labor as a raw material like oil or sand. Now the song is a reminder to me that the youth, always called upon to lead charges for societal change, have very little reason to trust adults. Management’s timeline never accounts for the fact that in the time it takes for them to put together a “diversity report” or “serious reform” or “have a conversation,” people die.

During coverage of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that erupted in early June, if you replaced any TV anchor’s script with the lines, Teenagers scare the living shit out of me / They could care less as long as someone'll bleed, the point would get across the same. To choose turmoil over the illusion of civil peace? Something must be wrong with them. To those who believe this, all agitators are spiritual adolescents who have no idea how things “really work” and “always will be.” You’re living in a fantasy. Do you really want to burn the world as you know it?

In “Teenagers,” the retort is, So darken your clothes or strike a violent pose / Maybe they'll leave you alone, but not me. Buried within the stance is a question: What’s more worth the effort, trying to change the mind of someone who implicitly considers you an enemy, or forging bonds with people who don’t need to be convinced that you’re real?

Your imagination is an asset. Your desire is not a weakness but a weapon. Your life matters only/obviously because it’s yours.

The youth, always called upon to lead charges for societal change, have very little reason to trust adults.

I think often of this bit from Andrea Long Chu’s read of trans desire: “[T]ransition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire . . . transness as a matter not of who one is, but of what one wants.” I roll this idea—what if what you wanted for yourself could actually be?—around in my head like a pearl that would explode if it stopped moving.

Why did I want to transition? I’ll never forget: When the doctor who prescribed me testosterone, herself a trans woman, heard my first stab at an answer, she told me quite bluntly that I was describing the way other people treated me and how I acted in response to that conditioning—but what did I want?

I thought the things I wanted would sound ridiculous and contradictory and complicated and sure, they did, but as soon as they came out of my mouth, I felt the strength of my desire like a hot iron to the heart. I just knew womanhood wasn’t working. I just knew that I wanted something else.

Transition begins by insisting that you can want more. It’s a dream in the sense that it reveals the version of you that wants, above all, to be here.

I think about how fearful and fragile I was as a teenager and how it’s taken me years to realize I can do and be more, but I can’t be alone. I think about the kids growing up with the Gender and Family Project, but they can’t be alone. I think about the friends and acquaintances who’ve quietly changed their names and appearances as they reorient their gender presentation, but they can’t be alone. I think about the Black trans women who’ve had donation links for gender-affirming surgeries up for years and are finally reaching their goals, but they can’t be alone. I think about the people who don’t have the time or energy or chance to do something with their desire, and the kids who are learning about desire, and it’s for them that I write: trans rights, trans liberation, Black trans lives matter. Transition is a dream in the sense that it’s a light at the end of a tunnel, but I want to flood that tunnel with light, and in that, I’m not alone.

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