Rivka Clifton

I scour my childhood home, counting family photos. I categorize them—full family, ones of me, ones of my sister. I make a tally. There is a disproportionate number of pictures of my sister, and only a handful of me. I report my findings to my parents, telling them that it is indicative of, if not how they quantify their love, but the level of pride they feel for their children.

This is how my parents should have known I was a transgirl.

*

In the 2021 film Vampir, Arnaut, the protagonist, who is played by the director, Branko Tomovic, moves to a remote Serbian village to act as a cemetery groundskeeper. In the opening of the film, when the person connecting him to his new job and residence asks if he his Serbian, he replies that his mother is but he spent most of his life in London.

Each night, the townspeople visit him, inflicting ghastly and oneiric horrors. They are, as you might guess, vampires. At some point in the film, Arnaut discovers a photo album full of images of past groundskeepers and impossibly old portraits of the villagers. He sees them but does not recognize them as what they are.

The nightly visits continue until eventually Arnaut’s photo is added to the album and he joins the vampire village.

*

After six months on HRT, I finally feel visibly trans, that is clockable to other queers. I can still hide from cis-people if I want. In a couple more months, I will be clockable to straights as well.

My breasts have filled out to moderate B-cups; I have hips for the first time; my facial and body hair is all but gone. It is more common for men to call me ma’am, to stare at my cleavage, to disregard my opinions. I undergo an orchiectomy. I schedule a vaginoplasty and facial feminization surgery. My therapist’s voice echoes in my thoughts, “What will you do when your body more closely aligns with cis-expectations?”

In some ways, being clockably trans is a milestone for me. I can find others like me in public. I don’t need to say a thing to feel a connection with them. In other ways, it feels dangerous. I feel eyes on me, a creep’s breath on the back of my neck.

The process of recognizing transfemmes by sight is complicated. It engenders such community for us. For me, especially early in my transition, it also led to spirals of dysphoria, of feeling like a man pretending to be a girl. In the first year of medically transitioning, I consistently feel not femme-passing enough for the straight world and not trans-presenting enough for the queers.

*

On Tinder, I paraphrase Robert Hass’ “A Story about The Body.” To my surprise, a cis-het guy messages me and asks about the poem. We discuss how it feels to read it, what he thinks of the poem, my own complicated reactions to the story—I confess how the speaker’s response to the dancer’s confession of having had a double mastectomy (“I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.”) has haunted me, has shifted in tone and timbre. Eventually, conversation pivots to meeting in person. I tell him that I am trans. I tell him I have yet to have bottom surgery. “I’m sorry,” he echoes after not responding for a week.

*

Both of my parents have had difficulties accepting me as a transgirl. My mother has told me she feels like her son is dying. My father says he has trouble thinking of me as anyone other than B----.

They are elderly. They live in Florida. They do not use social media. Our only connection is through text and the occasional phone call. While my voice has a subtle femininity to it, I do not believe they have ever heard it that way. I do modulate my pitch and my voice’s breathiness in almost all interactions to sound more femme, but I only use a subtle girl-voice with them.

It takes a year of HRT for me to realize that to them I haven’t changed at all.

*

One of the early plot devices used to keep Arnaut in the village is the lack of cell reception. The characters comment on it in the opening scene, and it continues to frustrate Arnaut even before the villagers begin to terrorize him.

As Arnaut boomerangs between paranoias—are the townspeople attacking him or is he dreaming? is he losing his mind or is this real? who can he trust?—, the visits from Biljana, the person who drove him there, accentuate the schisms between what Arnaut experiences and what he allows himself to believe of these experiences.

Maybe this is what is most horrific in Vampir—witnessing how easily a person, that is to say any one of us, can be influenced by the inability to corroborate the verity of our own lives.

*

Will, my best friend from childhood, texts me a picture of a goth store in New York. He types, “I thought you’d be into this store.”

I am. It is a week from my orchiectomy. I posted on Instagram that I was having a hard time with trans stuff. Will says he saw I was having a rough go of things and that he’s glad I’m doing what I need to do to be happy. Why do cis-people say this to trans-people?

I explain I will be having an orchiectomy soon. When it is clear he doesn’t know what that means, I explain, “My testicles will be removed.”

He is supportive in the way that he can be. But there is no enthusiasm in what this surgery will mean for me. He reiterates his support, and the texts slow.

*

My surgeon applied a glue to suture my wounds. I feel it as a hard crust along the center of my empty scrotum. In less than a week, the hardened glue has completely flaked off. In a month, I have completely healed. It is like my body has always been like this.

*

In 2008, The Black Angels released a second album, Directions to See a Ghost. It is a fuzzed-out odyssey of neo-psychedelia—a genre almost exclusively populated by white-passing cis-men. I hate how much I do not hate the album.

The second song of Directions to See a Ghost is also the single, “Doves.” The song’s lyrics vaguely detail a story of a potentially dead dove that the speaker is urging to wake and fly away. There is a drugged-out urgency to the vocals—if they could manifest enough vibes maybe this dove will fly. Through the slur of guitars, the vocalist chants the two-line chorus, half of which is “You look all day.”

I discovered Directions to See a Ghost when I was working in a record store in the mid 2010s and played it whenever I wanted some kind of aural wallpaper. Listening to the album while mid-transition, I keep getting hooked on this chorus. How long have my friends and family looked at me and not seen? How long have I looked at myself and not seen?

*

A couple months into my medical transition, I attend Anthony’s wedding in Kansas City. We’ve known each other our entire lives. I can still pass as a boy. I am a part of the wedding party, so I am required to wear a suit. I no longer have masculine dress shoes, so I wear heels. Instead of a tie, I wear a fringed leather choker Adamska, my exboyfriend, gave me. I help the men in the wedding party put on their attire, making sure their suit stitches are cut, their ties are proper length, their pants are at their waists and not hips.

As I’m tying one person’s tie, he says, “B----, something tells me you don’t follow the traditional rules of fashion.”

“Oh, I’m very traditional,” I say in as much girl-voice as I can muster. My shoulder raises up as I turn away to hit peak coquettishness. It’s all oddly gender-affirming—a little queerness in this celebration of cis-heteronormativity. And yet, no one acknowledges the subtle femininity within my movements.

*

I meet a guy from Tinder, Vic. He knows I am trans—he tells me he is “very experienced” with transgirls. First red flag. Throughout our date, I try to assess if he is a chaser or interested in me as a person. We’re at a pinball bar. There is a tournament happening. Another guy approaches us and asks, “Who’s this supermodel beauty?”

Later, Vic tells me he rarely talks to this man, that he was trying to woo me away. My date repeats, “He just sees me with a hot transgirl and thinks he needs to insert himself.” We make out just outside the bar.

On our next date, Vic says he would very much like to invite me back to his place. I would like that too. I tell him, “I have quite a bit of bottom dysphoria, so we’ll have to do some negotiating on intimacy.”

Vic assures me that’s fine, that he can accommodate anything I need. A few days later, I text him to say my surgeon has moved up my vaginoplasty date.

“That’s amazing, Rivka!” He responds. We never text again.

*

The first night Arnaut is in the Serbian village, he walks to an outdoor restaurant. He asks for food, for wine. The waiter says the kitchen has closed. A group of people sit at a table near him. They all watch a traditional Serbian song and dance. The lyrics of which are not translated in the subtitles, an odd choice since Arnaut has indicated that he knows some Serbian.

The choice not to translate dialogue and signage is deliberate. It echoes the isolation Arnaut feels—choked off from his London home due to lack of service, separated from those close to him by his introductory knowledge of the language and customs. It allows the audience to experience in some small way the disorientation Arnaut feels, to mimic the slow piecing together of what is occurring in this rural village, what is occurring inside Arnaut.

*

Rowen and I plan to go to a drag event at Pony, our favorite queer bar. The event has a costume contest, so I decide to go as a crystal ball. I drive to Goodwill to find a hula hoop to be the frame of the crystal ball. It is a month before Halloween, and the store has arranged a costume and décor section. Because Halloween is essentially a trans-holiday, I am almost legally required to casually peruse what’s on the racks.

As I do, I feel a man walk up uncomfortably close to me. I turn to him. He greets me. I greet him. He asks, “Do you have a cock?”

“Excuse me?” I say, my voice breathy and cunt.

“Do you, uh,” the man hesitates. He has a broad chest. We are eye-to-eye despite the fact that I’m wearing six-inch platform heels. “Do you have a cock? Are you a transgender?”

“Why are you asking me that? What the fuck is wrong with you. That is vastly inappropriate. So inappropriate,” I nearly scream. Miraculously, I do not deviate from girl-voice. It’s like I’m not even trying. The man begins to backpedal.

“I’m sorry,” he stammers. I stare at him, his stupid fucking brown Carhartt jacket, his bright orange hat, his straight-leg jeans. He continues to back up until he is in the store’s main aisle. He limply says, “You’re beautiful,” before running to the nearest exit.

I want to leave, but I’m afraid he will be in the parking lot, waiting to hate crime me. I take several deep breaths. I focus on the shimmering sequins of a mermaid costume. I want to punch a hole through the face of every cis-man I know.

*

At Anthony’s wedding reception, I come out to my oldest friends first, the ones I’ve known since kindergarten. I come out to my now married friend’s younger sister, who says she’s a lesbian and her sister is too in response. Everyone is supportive—they even tell me I will make a beautiful girl. The early fall evening dissolves into night. The wedding party boards a few buses that return us to downtown Kansas City.

I ride next to a high school friend, David. He and his wife are expecting their first child. I tell him I’ve started HRT, that I am a girl. We are both tipsy. I ask if he wants to feel me up and guide his hand up my shirt.

“I mean I was a fat kid in high school,” David says. “I had titties, too.” It is the most nonchalant response I’ve received. I feel entirely normal.

*

I come out to my parents at a chain restaurant that serves watered-down Caribbean cuisine. It is the end of December, the end of 2022. Though, it doesn’t feel like it, winter is settling in Tampa Bay. My mom is silent, leaning back in her chair, arms crossed. My dad is very talkative—he says I will be a hot bitch.

Finally, I make eye contact with my mom. She says, “You’re an adult so I can’t do anything. If you were under 18, I wouldn’t allow it.” We all walk silently back to the motel where we’re staying.

A few weeks after, I receive a hand-written letter from my mom. It says she has been crying, mourning the loss of her son. She says it is like I am dying. She needs to know why I would do this to her. Was it because she didn’t hug me enough? This is a fairly common reaction, to attempt to pin the desire to medically transition to some childhood trauma. It’s difficult for some cis-people to understand that this decision is not a response to anything other than the acceptance of oneself.

My mom’s difficulty in seeing me may be partially due to this ingrained understanding of what being trans is. It may also be related to my mom’s upbringing in Baltimore. Her parents’ were strict, and she attended an all-girls Catholic school, Archbishop Keough High School. A couple years before coming out to her, I watched a documentary on this school—it details the rampant sexual abuse from priests and members of the community. The events match the years when my mom attended the school.

Earlier in the conversation in Tampa Bay, my mom addresses this. She discredits the people who spoke up. She says she doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

*

Further into Directions to See a Ghost is “Mission District.” Like most of the songs on the album, it accumulates layers of hazy guitar lines and thrumming bass. The entire album feels like one long, monotonous song. The lyrics begin with “You only love yourself.” Halfway through, they hit a counterpoint, “You make it hurt, honey.”

Just vague enough to be a receptacle for any feelings a listener wants to pour into it, “Mission District,” like every other song by The Black Angels, is more about feel, about capturing that paisley-toned fringe of some blubbering nothing. But listening to it while being mid-op (had orchiectomy, seeking neo-pussy), I see these lines in conversation with my experiences of transitioning—all hinging on the protean nature of the second-person.

There has not been one bit of pain from the process of transitioning. Each time the estradiol tabs dissolve under my tongue, the surgical interventions, the stinging whip of laser hair removal and electrolysis—there is a pleasure to these processes that negates their pain. The mourning of a childhood in hiding, the synthesis of past and present self within a body that is mine; this is not painful. It is powerful.

What is painful is what others hoist on me—from asking about my anatomy to medical red tape, from claiming I am dying to turning into a ghost when I explain my desires for bodily changes. The you that is external from me makes it hurt.

I text Blythe, a transgirl I met on the apps, that mentally, the biggest change for me has been being content and comfortable merely existing, not having to strive to achieve something to prove my worth to myself. The you that is the I only loves herself, finally.

*

Seattle is full of transgender people. I see a transgirl almost every time I leave the apartment. Though I don’t like to admit it, I compare myself to them. Are we equally fishy? Who has a more femme physique? Who is further along in hair removal? Has she had bottom surgery? FFS? Oh my god! She’s gorgeous. Girl. Hiiiiiiii.

I know this line of thought comes from insecurity—the insecurity of constantly not feeling trans enough to be trans. I know these questions are null—not everyone shares the same dysphorias, not everyone’s bodies react to hormones the same way. And yet, I fall into it.

“Seattle is the most transphobic place I’ve been to,” Raine, my electrologist, tells me during one session. I asked her about traveling while trans. She turns her light away from me so I can see her face. I stare up; she stares down.

“It’s because there are so many trans people here,” she elaborates. “Cis-people are always trying to clock us, and that is an involved process.” In a previous session, Raine tells me that she allows herself to love her parents on her terms, that this is the way to be vulnerable.

The two conversations meld in my brain as she goes back to plucking and shocking every hair follicle on my face. I wonder if my mental comparisons are a deep-seeded, internalized transphobia.

*

Part of the process of being cleared for surgery by my insurance is obtaining a letter of support that meets the criteria outlined in the WPATH guidelines. The steps to attaining this letter, for me, required two sessions with my therapist. They asked me about my dysphorias, my gender awareness from childhood to today, who I am out to and how long have I been out.

My therapist is transmasculine. Throughout the process we joke about the reductive nature of the survey. I enjoy the reflective nature of it, how it guides me through my youth under the lens of transness. It is as if I’m picking up pieces of a puzzle and watching them fit together. It is as if I have always-already been a transgirl.

But this process of return cannot be trusted. I remember things and attribute them to my latent transfemme self. There was no certainty in each experience I detail to my therapist, just as there is no certainty in the words typed to a page and emailed to the insurance company that decides if I am truly trans enough to warrant surgical intervention. Under each rose petal of a memory, the body of a dead bee.

*

Towards the end of Vampir, Arnaut tries to escape the village. After a nightmarish few hours, he has awoken in a shallow grave and has decided enough is enough. But he doesn’t have a car, so he must flee on foot. He runs down the road, onto a path and along another road.

Eventually, he ends up entering the village’s outer-edge. Ahead of him, the villagers stand. He turns around. He runs along the road, onto a path, down another road. He reaches the village’s welcome sign. He knows he will eternally return. He walks toward the townspeople, who turn and scatter ahead of him.

*

“Your voice has changed a bit,” Rowen tells me. I must have asked them about it. “But it has always been a little femme.”

When I pretended to be a boy, I would intentionally lower my voice. Since I gave up that ghost, I let my voice return to itself. I can’t always hear how I sound—how I imagine myself sounding is almost always louder.

Blythe asks how to pronounce my name. I feel cheeky and send a video. I listen to it in awe. I hear myself as a girl. It clicks for the first time that this is what insurance agents, bureaucrats, my parents, clients, editors, and everyone else hears when I talk. I play the video again and again. That night, for the first time, I dream of myself as a girl with the body I now I have. All my dreams are silent.

*

The number of people I find attractive on Tinder is significantly lower than the number in real life. Even when the United States pretended to care about people by mandating masks, I found myself checking out everyone around me.

“I can’t just fall in lust with a picture,” I lament to Rowen. One of the perks to polyamory is getting to complain to your partner about the dismal state of dating in your mid-thirties. For a while, it’s like a sacrament to us.

I think of Pygmalion in love with his own sculpture. I swipe no. And no. And no. I imagine I’m chiseling away the app like a block. I wait for its true shape emerge—a static image of an ideal lover.

A man messages me. He wants to know my “length.”

*

“B---- is the only guy who’s texted me,” John, a high school friend, exclaims. This is 2005. My phone is a prepaid brick. Each message costs the equivalent of one minute of talk time. The other boys in John’s upstairs bedroom agree. They do not text other guys. I am the one exception for all of them.

I date a woman who writes an essay about conformity—what it is, why it bristles against her. One snowy day, she reads it to me. She has a slight lateral lisp. Years later, I find out she has married a woman.

In undergrad, I have no qualms about the men I touch or the ones I let touch me. Many of them claim to be straight. Many of them tell me I am the first boy they kissed—some, I know, have never kissed another boy since, though I felt, pressed into me, their unmistakable desire. In my egg days. when I told queers about the number of straight men I’ve been with, their heads turn. Now, they say, “Makes sense.”

*

“18 Years” sits squarely in the middle of Directions to See a Ghost. From my perspective, the lyrics capture either a kidnapping or a BDSM dungeon. Either way, I’m into it—with lyrics like “She’s got control of you, and you need it” or “The curtain surrounds you and you begin to forget/The hammer cracks the iron core of your mind,” who wouldn’t be?

How the lyrics are lineated on the internet resemble a sonnet—the ready-made love poem. Only a two-word sentence—“Who knew?’—disrupts the form.

Despite having a long-term interest in kink, I rarely engaged in it in my actual life. And in boy-mode, I was a sub through and through. As I become more femme, more ecstatic with my body, I feel myself gravitate toward being a domme. Whether I’m praising an obedient sub or punishing a brat with any number of instruments, I feel fulfilled in the control I have over myself and, to a lesser extent, the other consenting person. Gone are my qualms about power dynamics.

I have also met many subby trans people. The common denominator between myself and them is that in allowing ourselves to find the expression of our innermost parts, we can more readily slide into the roles that feel most pleasurable.

*

I go to a karaoke party. Towards the end of the night, I sing “Love Shack” by the B-52s with Austin, my closest friend in Seattle and Adamska’s legal husband. Rowen takes a video of the two of us. I am shocked at how femme I look, at how femme I sound.

*

My mom’s reaction to my decision to transition haunts me. Our interactions do not necessarily change. She is a fact-driven person. She asks me about my weeks. I ask her about hers. There is little room in our conversation for feeling.

One of my earliest summer memories is folding laundry, her laundry. I held up a black t-shirt with a white graphic. It said, “The Evolution of Humanity,” and showed a hominid footprint shift into a human foot, a shoe, a dress shoe. It ends with the unmistakable stamp of a stiletto.

In another memory, my mom regales me with stories of the cruelty of nuns—their rulers thirsty for a set of knuckles to break. I think about her teenage years: the swirl of communal sexual trauma at the hands of men within the church, the physical trauma inflicted on her by the women she spent the most time with.

It makes sense—her bristling at anything related to sex or gender.

*

The more conscious I am of intentional girl-voice, the more I am aware at the spectral nature of it. The control over how I want my voice to sound exactly when I talk to people is limited, especially in terms of its breathiness—the coup de grace of sounding sultry. If I’m required to speak louder than normal or to project, it is easier to drop the breath. In these moments, I sound like a transguy.

To maintain the performance I want others to witness, I have to project into the future, to the moment when my anatomy more correctly aligns with who I believe I am. In this way, girl-voice is a promise of a future that I cannot grasp entirely yet.

After a reading, I met an older transfemme. She is the first transwoman over 40 I’ve met. Our conversation is nothing remarkable. We talk about surgeries, birthdays, dirty jokes—before she skips away to talk to her friend. The days after, I think about the void transphobia has created—how trans people have shortened lifespans for so many reasons we cannot control. I think about how much I desire the presence of an older transfemme to guide me, to tell me how to act.

Most of all, I think about how this is the first time I have ever glimpsed myself as an older woman. Previously, I could easily imagine myself dead but not old. Aging is a promise that lives in my voice.

*

In Vampir, Arnaut’s transformation is inevitable. Perhaps even before the villagers deliver nightmarish dreams, we know he’ll turn. What keeps us in rapture are the particulars of his transition into vampirism—the move from loneliness to paranoia, from desperation to draining a man left in his makeshift home. In the ending scenes, Tomovic shows the audience a flashback to an earlier moment in the film.

Arnaut sits at a table in the home of one of the townspeople. The villagers are swirling around him, setting the table, but Arnaut remains gravely still. He stares into the camera—we know not at us but something eerie off-screen. We see any radiance he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity wither very quickly. In the flashback, we are shown that Arnaut sees himself. Two meaty hands encircle his doppelganger’s neck and squeeze.

I’ve had this experience—looking back, seeing the woman I housed inside myself being choked by some unknown hand.