Into an Inside

Rivka Clifton's essay explores the intricate balance between exterior perception and interior truth, set against the backdrop of microplastics, memories, and the gaps left by those who knew us.

Technically, I have the same ratio of microplastics to testicular tissue as a cis woman—none. In the year or so after my orchiectomy, I feel my hips rounding, my breasts growing fuller. I wonder how my ratio of microplastics to breast tissue compares to cis women.

I used to be more concerned with how my body stacked up against cis people. I measured my waist, shoulders. I compared these numbers to clothing sites, knowing full well I would not land squarely within what was reported. Once, I even Googled “how much does a six-foot woman weigh.” The results were rough—less telling of near constant transphobia and more implicit of a ubiquitous fatphobia with (dis)respect to femmes.

I monitored my hormone levels, comparing my results with what’s considered to be the average levels for cis women at different points of the menstrual cycle. This was despite knowing these levels fluctuate wildly between women, between periods. But still I wanted to know that what was inside me was similar to what was inside others.

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Discourse around transpeople often focuses on what’s outside, visible. Passing, or being clockable, is held up by those within the community as ideals. Whether transphobes admit or not, passing is important to them too. They want transpeople to be easily spotted. Or they want us to walk and speak like cis people, fuck like cis people, be cis people—all a way to disappear us.

But the interior is more important. Metaphysically, my transition started when I began asking who’s inside me, what’s she like. Physically, it started when I first ingested estrogen in the form of turquoise oval-shaped pills, which later become an oil I inject weekly into my thigh meat. Microplastics, and the data around how much of them are in my body (and where exactly), is another type of interior tell, albeit one that is nonconsensual.

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Despite its name, coming out is an invitation for others to glimpse a person’s interiority. When I came out to my family, my friends, my mentors, my coworkers, when the exterior signs of transitioning were ignorable to anyone not looking, I felt like I was letting myself be known to people, finally. The people in my life had the choice to peek inside me or to cling to their understanding of who I was based on an image that was slowly disintegrating.

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Now, I live almost two-thousand miles from the city I grew up in. The majority of people in my life have only known me as a woman. It is one of the many joys of being an out transperson—from the first moment someone meets you they are offered a partial glimpse into you. It has no analogue.

As any joy, this constant outing is fringed in sorrow. While recovering from the second round of facial feminization surgery, I discovered that my judo teacher had died earlier that year. He taught my how to move within my body, how to avoid being pinned and controlled by another twice a week for five years. We roadtripped to tournaments across the Midwest. He came to my high school graduation—a surprise my parents orchestrated without my knowledge.

In the months before I left Kansas City, I ran into a friend who was a student at the same dojo I attended. He told me I needed to see Coach, our name for this man who seemed older than the city itself. He said Coach was dying, that he had been asking about me. At this time, I was slowly glimpsing my transness. And like any queer, I avoided this demand. I moved away, first to Dallas then to Seattle.

Seeing me wouldn’t amount to anything otehr than seeing a version of me that I was trying desperately to perform. Though I didn’t frame it like this, it felt pointless to show my face to Coach, because it was the face of a stranger.

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Coach is the first person close to me who died after I started medically transitioning. There would be no chance for me to invite this man into my being. There would be no narrowing of the gap between who I am and who he once knew me as. We are separated, now, by an eternity.

There’s no way to know what his reaction would be. I want to say he would accept me. I want to say he wouldn’t. This uncertainty—a bit of plastic inside me.

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