Me, Robin

I have some thoughts nobody asked for. It’s about AI, because of course it is. Maybe you feel like you’re missing out if you don’t use it. Maybe you want to just play along to trends. Maybe you think it’s practical and saves you time.

Maybe you should trust your own skills more, your own critical reflections, your own adeptness for growth. These tools, in particular the generative ones, will limit all of those things for you.

I want better than that. I want real things by real people. I don’t want more things averaged out by a language model that can only make likely sentences. I don’t want more creepy images directly sourced from thousands of copyrighted works. I want you to put yourself on the page. If you can’t, no problem! But let’s not pretend that we’re doing the same thing here. With everything I make, I hope to put my heart on the table.

I hope to make something that could only exist because I made it. Something that is the one thing that it is. Not an average sentence. Not a visual approximation of other people’s work. Not a stolen concept that boils lakes and uses more electricity than anything in my household.

I want to make the thing that I made, that is the one thing that it is. Is that vague? Maybe try it yourself then. You’ll be shocked at what you can get good at.

About a month ago I said that love does not need to be mirrored for it to be worth giving. That it isn’t something you can measure as a transaction. And that I don’t know how to justify myself receiving any in return. That was obviously a bad day, and I have those, of course. Of course I do. But maybe it’s a good idea to talk about mirrors then.

We can do better than measure love as something you give and receive in return – it turns love into interchangeable components, one currency of bills you break into coins as you spend it. But I believe almost nothing in the world works like that, and I got onto this deluded, labyrinthine trail only because I don’t always know in what currencies others spend their love, and it worried me that the coins looked nothing like mine.

But that’s the point, then. What I put in isn’t what comes out. That’s the entire point. If you gave me back my money it would be a terrible trade. You give me something else in return, and that will be in something foreign at first, and perhaps something curious for a while, and then familiar, and that will be understood as their way of expressing love. This isn’t radical.

But what is radical for me, and is beating me down like a heavy storm, is slowly learning to see myself in others. If I’m spending my love wisely at all, it will come back to me. It will reflect in the faces of my friends. I will tell them I love them because I see that I am part of them. The crashing humility of seeing someone love you back in a way you have shown them love before. Not that it’s about me, of course. Not really. It’s about how loveable and wonderful my friends are. But my friends all own a handful of cash in a currency I love to spend.

I spoke some half year ago about showing up for myself, and I talked about deserving. Well, I’m embarrassed to report that the question I asked myself, Have we not established that love is never deserved?, is still painfully relevant. I don’t believe it yet. Still. Always.

I hate the conflict between knowing that “deserving” is nothing, that we all deserve everything and, logically, therefore nothing, and the very important, very self-loving thought that I deserve things too. When it comes to fairness, it seems I don’t include myself in the list of people who deserve, a concept I don’t even believe in.

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.

—Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

Can you feel my agony? The vise that has long ago taken hold of my two parts – my thoughts and my feelings – and is squeezing them to a pulp, trying to make them fit together, trying to force them together despite all the resistance and all the pain. No, Ursula, I will not punish anyone else for eating when starved. I am punishing only myself. Don’t ask me why. The vise is tightening and I don’t know the answer.

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I said some half year ago that I stood up for myself, as if it was a kind of novelty. The truth is that it was. It still is. Because for as often as I still get misgendered, I actually rarely speak up. I freeze, or I dissociate and walk away. Somewhere in me is a voice that says, “that’s what you get for wanting something you can’t have”. I am so cruel to myself. When I look in the mirror, when I walk through the city, when I see my friends, I know I am a woman. Simply a woman. Maybe a woman with a footnote, but not an important one. But when people speak about me as if I’m a man – a man, one assumes, with a lot of footnotes – I let them say that, let them think that, let them treat me like that. How unfair! And how angry it makes me at myself. As if I wasn’t already hurting enough. What do you do with a train of thought like this? And where can I get off?

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I am not hopeless. I think I’m funny and cute. I think I give a lot, and I also show what I want. I try to give love and hope to receive it in return. I say hello to the birds, to the insects, I say hello to the moon. I don’t expect love to be mirrored directly, because none of this has to be a transaction – I’m trying to put into the world what I want to see more of. I do hope to receive more love, but I know that that will not solve the problem. Receiving more love will not automatically make me think I deserve it. I will just believe I get lucky. And I am often lucky. And I still talk about deserving. And how I’m not. And is “luck” meaningfully different? Love is probably like the weather, just out there for anyone to experience. Some days are wonderful, and some are terrible, but that’s just the weather. Nobody deserves rain – rain simply happens. Everybody deserves rain – rain simply happens. But I struggle to shake the feeling that I’ve been getting awfully bad weather for a while now.

And I think, somewhere, despite all I have said, that I deserve the bad weather. That I don’t deserve sunshine. And that I don’t even know how I could become deserving – something that, by all measurements, isn’t even a thing. And here we still are.

Showing up for yourself is a phrase I used to think was corny. I think a lot of things around self-love still feel corny to me. In my eyes it’s always sounded a little embarrassing – to make caring for yourself something atypical. Which, to be honest with myself, it has been. And now I’m trying to look ahead and see which new things have become visible in my future.

I went to a party (a great opening line for any blog post) and had a fantastic time. A romp. A hoot and a half. I felt loved, I felt seen, and I also felt like I deserved it. Whatever that means – love isn’t earned, only received – but I did feel like I did everything right. So let’s stay there. I did everything right. I loved, and I was loved. It’s enough to make you sit and think, days later. Enough to make you want to write it down.

But an important reason I’m writing it down is that I also loved myself. Because I showed up for myself, and made a big demand to others for the respect that I deserve.

May the bridges I burn light the way

— some wise people¹

It’s a good feeling to think you may have made new friends. So when, on the way home, you get misgendered and ignored by one of those people, it throws you off. Because you wonder what went wrong, and where. I always assume, in a situation of conflict, that I may be wrong (for which I’m in therapy). In a case of being misgendered by someone who seemed fully on board all this time, it points a bright sharp spotlight at everything I’ve done to, perhaps, deserve this.

So I go quiet, and I sit back, and I am stormy-headed.

And I am pestered, some time later, as to why I stopped engaging. And is there, internet friend, invader of my public notebook, diary enthusiast, a way in which I can respond to someone else’s disrespect without showing my disappointment? Maybe for you. Maybe you’re better than me. I can’t hide that sort of thing (for which I am not in therapy). So I show my disappointment, my frustration, and perhaps even my anger. I tell the person I thought could be a new friend exactly how she made me feel, how this always makes me feel, how this always is my problem, and how it always falls on me to somehow fix their mistake. And I worry that I lost a potential new friend. And I worry that I did the wrong thing. And I worry that I burned a bridge.

But perhaps that is what I need to be there for myself. Perhaps the bridges I burn can light the way. Perhaps the way I stand up for myself can be a lesson for how I love.

If I’m standing anyway,

What will I stand for? For myself. For love. For what love? How much love do I embody? How much love dare I give, and how much dare I expect? Dare I expect it in return? Dare I think I deserve it? Have we not established that love is never deserved? That will remain in the dark for me. But perhaps I will find another bridge to cross.

The other day, I received a message that, at first glance, seemed like a great opportunity. From the quick preview that popped up on my phone, all I gathered was that a journalist wanted to feature me for something. That’s not too shocking; Oslo is a small town, and I’m a visible queer here. I work with the local Pride, I organise queer events (but only in non-plague times, of course), and I get around, socially. I think it’s safe for me to call myself a Known Quantity. Not famous, but known by people across town.

Not only that, I received the message a few days after some Instagram activity: one, a post for Trans Day of Visibility, promoting queer charities; and another, a much more personal effort to describe the feeling of not seeing a future with yourself in it. I also paired that with a photo shoot in which I replicated a portrait of Cate Blanchett, because, that’s the sort of antidote that one needs sometimes, okay?

Anyway, that was my media week that week: a loud TDoV post and a photo shoot where I compare myself to a beautiful woman. It made for a pretty obvious stream of information, I would think. A very readable bunch of posts, where my transness and my womanhood are emphasised. But reading, I’ve found, is not something all journalists are capable of.

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The full message I received from that journalist was confusing, to say it kindly. I want to make a lovely story about how we express ourselves, and I’m currently looking for men who wear makeup. I saw your Instagram profile, and I’m wondering if I could have a chat with you?

Charming. Good opener. You have to be sloppy to look at my profile and not see the photos, and really bad at reading to not read that I’m a woman.¹

Now, this is just a blip in my life. A low-effort attempt at getting some ❝human interest❞ subjects for your newspaper. But what a fucking effort, y’all. To see an Instagram profile and have the ability to see nothing but the ‘Message’ button. To not read – for want or for ability – the word ‘trans’ on the second-to-last photo in my profile. To not even read my bio. I’ve long known to treat journalists just like everyone else: generally as clueless as the rest of us. But the blatant inability to read a profile, especially when you’re looking for people who, in some way, have anything to do with (very superficial ideas of) gender expression, really does lower my esteem a little more. It was a low bar, and this journalist limboed right under it.

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Queer readability is a whole thing. I know that. I live it. I’m visibly, legibly queer, and there are many more words to write about that. For example, every single stranger that I’ve met in the past year has misgendered me. Every single one. And that hurts every time. But I also know they’re all being colossal dipshits. It’s the twenties, baby! Get with it. If you meet someone and you don’t want to ask for pronouns, the best gamble is usually in their expression, not your assumption. If you struggle to read me, please, please refrain from trying to write your own version instead.

So the good news is that I’ve been on hormones for about a year. The bad news is that the official medical instance gives everyone the exact same dosage of the medication, no matter your weight, metabolism, current hormone levels, age, or any other factor that may introduce meaningful variance. All this is to say that, for some months in 2020, in the middle of pandemic isolation, I was also being chemically depressed.

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I’m on a mix of testosterone blockers and estrogen supplements. This makes sense: it is intended to bring my hormone levels closer to that of an average cis woman. And the package works. My blood levels have changed. But they changed a bit too radically.

After very few months, my energy levels were at an all-time low. My concentration was shot, and my mood was bad. Very bad. I mean: when I’m in a bad mood, I’m grumpy but energised. What was happening here was new to me. I was empty. That’s bad. I never feel empty, for better or for worse. But now I did. Horribly so. I was, for the first time in years, beginning to feel suicidal.

And I remembered something about Alan Turing. A fun little distraction, the man who won the war and who was hated by his country for loving men. What the government did to him after the war is one of those despicable things so horrible that the government officially apologised for his treatment. Posthumously, of course. It was so bad that Queen Elizabeth II pardoned him 59 years after his death. I’d be more impressed if he hadn’t died during her reign. She could have been a little quicker on the call there.

What the government did to him was, well, first of all to consider him a criminal, but also to give him chemical castration treatment. If that sounds spooky, it is. It’s a medical program that is intended to lower one’s testosterone levels, with the hopes of reducing their libido to zero. And, because Alan Turing was Criminally Gay, he needed to have his libido slashed, so that he wouldn’t gay so much anymore. It was that, see, or incarceration.

Now, one of the side effects of testosterone reduction is that, if done at too great of an effect, you also become depressed. Horribly, horribly depressed. A prominent theory about Alan Turing’s death is that depression took him really low, and he died by suicide. And this brings us to my 2020 realisation.

On a rough day with a lot of introspection, I stood in a corner of my apartment, and I realised that I was also being chemically depressed. It struck me that my misery was being induced. When I finally got my blood levels tested, the results indicated no measurable testosterone. The dosage was up to four times too high.

We adjusted my dosage, and I learned that every patient, no matter their medical information, gets the same treatment. I learned that all my trans friends have been through the same process, with the same doctors at the helm. And we all improved measurably upon changing the dosage. I stopped being suicidal, for example. Pretty good improvement in my book.

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There’s a story the doctors tell every patient at our clinic: We’re just looking out for you. We’re helping you make the right choice. We’re just here to provide guidance. But it’s hard to take that seriously when nobody looks at the data, when nobody considers the impact of a mistake, and when even my primary psychologist routinely forgets my pronouns. The only bitter consolation is that at least in this way I am being treated as a woman: having my medical concerns ignored by men.

In Vox Lux, a personality is formed either out of trauma, or despite it. In a sequence of events that reflect many facets of modern-day American society, the character of Celeste becomes a star out of victimhood. It’s a complexly layered film that pits a harsh world against mainstream escapism, and both look villainous. In this backdrop, there’s plenty to talk about, but I’m going to focus on a detail that I couldn’t shake.

☞ Spoilers follow.

The killer psychopath and… that other trope

The first person we see depicted on screen is a boy on a mission. He walks in the middle of the road, at night, unaffected by his surroundings. He’s clearly not well. We see him again, this time from behind, as he first kills the music teacher, and then proceeds to shoot up a classroom full of students. Cinematically it works incredibly well, and paired with the Scott Walker soundtrack it’s likely to stick in your mind for a while.

In my mind, mostly, is the makeup that Cullen Active, the shooter, is wearing. Eyeshadow, false lashes. Celeste asks him to stop it all. He says he’s killed too many people now, and it’s too late to stop. He takes off one of the lashes as Celeste tries again to stop him. He shoots her in the neck.

It seems unfair to focus on the makeup. Ostensibly, Cullen wears makeup because he’s into emo music. There’s nothing wrong with men wearing makeup. There’s nothing inherently anything about makeup, but there are a lot of associations. One of the first associations for me is Jame Gumb, also known as Buffalo Bill, in The Silence of the Lambs, the serial killer who kills women so he can wear their skin as a suit. He is labeled as a transsexual psychopath, a pairing of diagnoses that runs deep in society¹². With that in mind, it feels like more than just makeup. And Cullen, surprisingly, wears false lashes, which is more makeup than I believed typical for emo.

That makes me wonder why. In absence of an actual backstory, as the film doesn’t provide one, the only thing we learn about Cullen Active’s personality is that he wears makeup. He, and it is almost always a he when it comes to school shootings, is essentially a blank slate. That’s fine: the men that shoot up schools are so plentiful that we now see a reliable statistical average. On a blank canvas, however, any mark will stand out, beg for interpretation, and come loaded with meaning.

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After the film, I got a chance to speak with the director, but I decided to focus instead on an interesting piece of ambiguous grammar that, for a few seconds, gave the movie a decidedly magic-realist twist. I never said I wasn’t a nerd. But as we’re discussing this, a woman is walking out of the cinema, spots me, points at me, and shouts he’s the killer! I didn’t want to bring it up at the time, but, doesn’t that just make my point for me?

I recognise why people can perceive me as a man in makeup. I understand it, even if I don’t like it and if I think that people could think slightly longer before they speak. I don’t, however, understand why Brady Corbet gave his movie’s killer the Buffalo Bill treatment and me, subsequently, an uncomfortable night as a random woman calls me a killer, however jokingly.

Corbet himself tried to put me at ease. Some people see a man in makeup and they freak out. I didn’t want to protest, again. It’s difficult to have to tell people something you know to be true, but that they refuse to believe. Sadly, what many people are willing to believe is that that would make me so angry that I’d walk into a school with an automatic rifle. That story has been told a million times before, and every telling of it comes down on transgender women and gender-variant people all over the world. In a movie as depressing as Vox Lux, it’s the only thing that really got me down.

I can feel the fever setting in, but, because I’m broken inside, I’m currently baking bread pudding with my left-over panettone (from Christmas Day), and I’m prepping a carrot soup because I don’t feel like cooking. So obviously I’m not entirely all right. But I’m a lot better than I’ve been lately.

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A few months ago, we were victim to a burglary. The second one in two months. It was in our storage booth, but it feels invasive no matter how you slice it, and we did lose some important things. As I went to inform my neighbours of the burglary, I spotted some of our stolen items in someone else’s storage unit. It made a lot of sense. The thieves had had the key to the basement (where the main storage booths are), both times, and they knew where to look. The police had no advice other than to provide harder evidence – which is difficult – and I went to bed shaking and crying. At about this time, my upstairs neighbours also ended up getting into noisier and noisier habits, involving sawing, drilling, hammering, vacuuming and partying at any time of day. And I do mean any time. Almost every night I would wake up to a new exciting loud noise above my bed.

A few days after the burglary, I also learned that whoever did this must have found a document with personal information on it, and had promptly used that to try and take out a bunch of loans in my name. None of these went through (as I obviously didn’t actually sign for them), but it was stressful and a dumb waste of time. The apartment we’d lived in for three years started feeling unsafe. Two burglaries in two months is a lot. Identity theft is a pain in the ass. Sleep reduction topped it all off. We were looking to move out.

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For the past week, we’ve been turning our new apartment into our new home. But I’ll be honest: the first night that I slept in the new place, it was already my home. I’ve slept a lot this Christmas. I’ve been trying to sleep off three months of sustained anxiety and fear. I’m still adjusting, writing this from a kitchen that is only half moved-into, but at least it smells amazing. And if I do get this fever I’m feeling, it’ll be my only problem. It sounds absurd, but I’ve really looked forward to having only one problem.

Every story has the seed for something new. Whether you’re looking to be inspired, seeking for relief, or escaping something, a story can grow in you. We listen, read, watch and play stories – they can be told in many ways. But what you take away from it invariably ends up being the thing you consider important. Sometimes that’s the strange settings, sometimes it’s the implausible but still squee-inducing romance. When we consider stories in this way, we can also see very clearly that different soils sprout different seeds.

Consider the date – the romantic idea, not the fruit, for now. Some people meet and share stories. They share viewpoints, anecdotes, grievances and passions. They usually meet in a way that all parties in some way find appealing: on a beach, in a bar, over some food. There we already learn about each other. We already understand something of another person’s story when they say, ‘let’s meet in the book store’, or ‘how about the food truck at eleven’. With the setting established, the next chapter of the story can define if this story is a novella, a life work, or maybe just a poem on a bathroom wall.

There’s a wonderful and scary optimism involved in dates – like romantic dating, again, not the fruit. You find the boundaries of your shared language, and if the words click and the feelings jibe, you might just write a story.

Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? In this season of looking forward, meeting family and friends, or simply taking some time off during the darkest days of the year, I want to propose to look back a little.

I made my first consciously queer friend about ten years ago. She was the first person I ever came out to, and the first to celebrate it with me. We cycled across small towns, like lesbians do. We went to concerts and invented new soups. We kvetched and shopped and danced to Gaga. Basically, we were besties.

Even best friends have reasons to break up, but that’s not what we’re going to talk about. I was learning to deal with my anxiety and I lost friends that way. We both moved to other countries. It happens. What’s more important is to remember the friendship. She may be gone from my life, but I think about her now and then. I think about how she made me.

She taught me to articulate and embrace my queerness after years of fear, internalised hatred and ignorance. She was there for me when I needed to learn who I was.

Now, ten years on, I still fondly think of my old friend. I think of her, somehow, still as a friend. A friend who happens not to know my name. But I think that, if we were to meet again, that we could talk. And I hope that she would be proud of me.

For the season, indulge me, and think back on your old friends. Remember the ones that were good to you. It’s okay to lose touch. But remember, privately if you must, that every step along the way lead you here, and be thankful they allowed you to move on.