Cracked

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Nonah Palmer

__________

The egg, as a biological entity, is pretty simple to grasp. Families the world over are familiar with it. The humble chicken egg is a staple of breakfast, lunch, dinner, of Easter pageantry, of overhand vandalism and elementary science experiments. The American Egg Board, in the ‘70s, seeing a decline in egg consumption, crafted a slogan that is also simple to grasp, so much that it sticks around in the memory, scrambled up in the soup: “The incredible, edible egg.” The egg can be hard or soft boiled, fried, scrambled, used as wash for various fried foods; it can be baked, poached, and, from the blenders of meatheads, drunk as a slurry.

To reach the nutrients inside, that which has the most value, an industrious cook must crack the egg, break its calcinate shell. A tip: break the shell on a flat surface, not the edge of a pan or sink, as you want to keep the inner membrane intact, which makes it easier to keep less than edible shards out of the egg proper. Those shards can pierce the yolk, so take care.

***

March 10, 2021, was my one year transiversary. It’s the anniversary of the date that I first went on hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Of course, one does not need to be on HRT to be trans, or to have surgery, or to even have dysphoria. It has been a year and change, now, of a new life, of learning, of dysphoria that I did not know was there at first and lesbianism and panic attacks, suicidal ideation in some instances, of blinding euphoria and the wind catching a long blue skirt, swirling about my legs. Of new friendships cast in a feminine color, new frequencies of light playing across my eyes.

Her name is Aubrey, and we went to high school together. Aubrey likes to say that she was lucky, because she was already fortunate in the body shape department. She’s been: a diver, a boat captain (not a ship captain, she told me, an important distinction), she went to state for wrestling when we were in high school. She was someone who rode the same bus as me, someone who was a year behind me in school, a freshman to a sophomore. However, I moved to California in 2000, and in that way that kids these days probably don’t worry about, I fell away from any and all friends at my old highschool. Transitioning from a semi-rural, small town school to a bustling science based school in a town in the northern valleys of the Golden State was extraordinarily difficult, and not just because of the culture shock. We grew up poor, my sister and I, in trailers that flooded because we always lived near the water, the West Fork of the Calcasieu River in southwest Louisiana. But when we moved to Tracy, California, we had a two story house. We had a neighborhood instead of a swamp. Transitions can be hard, even if it’s a move to something that’s objectively better.

In the late 2010s, Aubrey and I reconnected. I was in my last year of undergrad after a long journey back from California (a couple of times, actually). I was president of my southwestern Louisiana undergrad college’s LGBTQA+ bar-be-que. McNeese State University is a small three block college in a midsized town (or a small city) along the Louisiana-Texas border, and while it felt odd for me to be the cisgender white hetero man who was also in charge of the university’s queer advocacy organization, no one else stepped up to do the job, either. We called it PRISM at first, after SPECTRUM at Louisiana State University and GLASS at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, rival schools in our minds, often dismissed by theirs. When Aubrey came back into my life, the name had changed to Progressives at McNeese. Still felt strange to me to be at the head of it, but I was solid, a good ally, cisgender but extremely interested in knowing everything there was to know about trans issues. Transition wasn’t for me, I reasoned, because I wasn’t trans, even though… even though… even though…

***

The egg, as a transgender metaphor, is also relatively easy to grasp. In short, the theory is that most trans people are inside of a relatively fragile yet completely encompassing shell. The metaphor can be found all over the internet, but especially on Reddit. As for most marginalized groups, any trans person should be careful in exploring the site; that being said, so many use it as a place to find people who are already out, have been out for a while, or have only been out for a few months. Subreddits like r/egg_irl compile memes about the egg experience, while my own community, r/translater, cater to folks who cracked later in life.

There’s a bit of discourse about the egg metaphor, because it requires the trans person to be a passive entity. Incubating might be a connotatively good term, a sense of safety, growth, warmth. Other terms and phrases might include: repressed, a sense of tamping down, unrealized potential, or trauma scars obscuring a clear view of the trans horizon. My own personal understanding and use of the term is only to describe that slipperiness of memory from the before-times. It’s considered rude at best and abusive at worst to tell someone they are an egg, and that in order to be happy, that they must crack somehow, that their shell is a barrier to their true self. It smacks of gender essentialism and a bit of transmedicalism, and honestly it’s just kind of gauche. So why use it?

Much of what I’ve identified as the trans experience hinges on self discovery, and self determination. Sure, it is rude to see someone that you think could be eggy, to approach them and knock on their shell loudly, as if you were a police officer at the door to their hovel, and demand to see the yolk inside. It’s an invasion, a sweeping away of agency, in a sense. Which is not to say some don’t think it’s welcome! Yet I think of the ideal cracking as that incubation, perhaps, a warm environment that stimulates the organism inside to press against its shell, or perhaps nudged by environmental factors, or by accidentally bumping up against a fully realized chick out in the world. The egg itself is not rude, as a metaphor, only those pushy folk who demand an egg crack for their own validation.

***

Aubrey had messaged me on Facebook.

“Hey, I’ve seen some of your posts. How involved are you in the LGBT community? One of my friends has a transgender teenager who just came out to her, and surprisingly, Lake Charles is a shithole for any kind of TG care. I find it hard to believe that a place like New Iberia can have an LGBT health center but there is nothing here. Do you know of any resources?” she asked. Aubrey’s conception of Lake Charles was not just informed by her years of closeted existence, but also by the way that queer people exist in a profoundly conservative atmosphere. There was one queer club, Crystals. There was a Pride organization, but it was seen as an oddity. There is no strong queer acceptance movement. At least, I didn’t know of any. The egg often thinks they know everything.

Well, in this case I did know something. “Yeah, we have a pretty good TG org, let me see if I can pull up any contact info.” It was extremely validating to be able to help Aubrey.

Weeks later, Aubrey messaged me again. “Is there a campus LGBT org/advisor? The MSU website sucks.”

“Not really: the Progressives advisor is Dr. Franklyn.”

“Progressives is the org?”

“Yeah,” I replied, “Progressives of McNeese. We do a lot of LGBT stuff; we have a joint float for Homecoming with Pride of SWLA.”

“Hmm, ok, thanks.”

“Is someone in trouble? Being discriminated against?” I was so transparently earnest.

I like to think that there was this dramatic pause, but there’s no way to really tell. “I’m trans-” (My mind raced to reconfigure all of my responses, to try and be the best ally. How could I help Aubrey, who has rocketed to being important to me. God, she’s so brave. Ok, ok. Wow. Ok.) “-and I’m trying to decide what to do about next semester. Helping my friend’s son kind of lit a fire under my ass,” Aubrey said.

“Oh! There are a couple of nonbinary and trans folks in our group, and so if you’re interested I could get you invited to the FB page. What pronouns do you prefer?”

***

Her name is Sarah. On Twitter and online, and on her Youtube channel, her name is Sarah Zedig. I don’t actually know her. Well, I mean, I know her in the same way that many of us know people, especially folks that we respect, doubly people online. I found her through a chain of events that began in the prehistory of my egginess, all grey’d out memories and (re)contextualized encounters with queerness.

In late January or early February 2020, in the predawn before the pandemic, I listened to Sarah – parasocially I allow myself to call her by her first name – as she finished one of her most recent podcasts. Her guest this episode was Rose Benjamin, who Sarah describes on the listing as a therapist specializing in transgender issues. The episode’s show notes tell a curious listener that “Topics include: The application of wisdom, the truth of ourselves, passive vs active trauma, historical roles of trans people, and the pitfalls of the stereotypical trans narrative.”

I find Sarah’s voice to be soothing. She speaks in a cadence that is suited for podcasting, and for her Youtube channel, Let’s Talk About Stuff. She is intimidatingly smart. She is a film critic, a filmmaker, an auteur, and a model on which many a trans woman (myself definitely) have imprinted on. Not as freshly hatched gosling to mama goose, of course, but as scanner to original document – transitioning at an older state has us (me) casting about, looking for someone to emulate. One could do worse than Sarah Zedig.

***

I pulled over to the side of the road. My memory records this moment as being rainy, but the National Weather Service archive for regional weather patterns in Lake Charles, Louisiana for that week in February shows that it wasn’t raining, actually. That is, if you trust official reports. Trans women, or maybe this is just me, but I feel sometimes representative, we distrust official reports. Often they can gatekeep us from needed care, from bathrooms or even the good mascara.

The report does throw my memory into doubt. Momentous occasions demand momentous weather. In film, rain can wash away pretension, or old lives, old conceptions, false or perhaps even true memories. There’s the pivotal scene in The Notebook, where Rachel McAdams confronts Ryan Gosling over never sending letters to her, like he promised. In the lead up to the kiss, the rain is pouring, because they could not outrun the storm. Both are vulnerable. Both are wet, a wanting wetness granted by the sky gods, or maybe just the screenwriter. It is a romantic scene. In The Shawshank Redemption, Tim Robbins crawls through a river of shit a mile long and came out clean, according to Morgan Freeman’s narrator. Here he is cleansing himself, but the story is cleansing him as well. The rain, the thunder, the sky opens up and showers his freedom with baptismal waters. He is transformed, a broken man unjustly imprisoned, now free, if always with shit in his past.

I want that. And so, my memory obliges. It was raining, no matter what the meteorologists report, no matter the accuracy of that reporting, no matter the conditions of the road. Real life is the present, but memory is story, and story is drama.

Like I said, I pulled over to the side of the road. I turned off my windshield wipers, put on my hazards. My ex-fiance, having come to the start of their own gender journey, had shown me Sarah’s podcast when I began my master’s degree at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. That was a year before, and in my first semester in UL’s grad program I came to understand that I too was nonbinary, and adopted, slowly but with increasing enthusiasm, they/them pronouns.

But now, listening, I was crying. Sarah’s show was on, and I was listening to Rose Benjamin speak. She was explaining that some women and men and nonbinary folks come to her and tell her that they think they are trans, but the possibility of transition is too scary, too remote, to far afield. They are thinking of ending it.

She said: “Let yourself be who you want to be for one day.”

I was crying. Crack. “One day.”

I listened, and then said aloud to an empty car, filled with another woman’s voice, “Well, okay. What if-”

The road was blacktop. It was around 10 p.m. I was driving back from Lake Charles to Lafayette. I had and continue to have a bad habit of not wanting to stay the night in Lake Charles, either at my sister’s house south of town, or my ancestral trailer in north Calcasieu. It annoys both my mom and my sister. “Just sleep on the couch,” they’d somehow say in stereo. But I’ve always had a hard time sleeping anywhere that wasn’t my own bed, even on nights when I’d spend over at a girlfriend’s, even on nights when I was drunk and close to blackout.

I wasn’t tired on this trip. I hadn’t been drinking. I was just listening.

“What if I was-”

Crack.

“What if… I was a woman?”

Crack.

Benjamin: “Just for one day.”

“Ok. Ok, so for one day. For five minutes. I’m a woman. I am a woman.”

Cracked. Yolk spilled out, yellow flowers on a black dress, a cottagecore future. Trans. A woman. Queer. Straight? Eh, no, actually. Gay. She/her, eventually. She/her, now. How could I tell her, how could I tell her, could I tell her? Could I be her?

***

I messaged Aubrey. “Hey, can I ask you a question, if you’re not busy?”

“Sure.”

I can’t remember what I felt in this moment. I was a freshly hatched egg, and I have this theory, a corollary to egg theory, perhaps: eggs might not have memories, we have stories. The life I lived before, male man boy pants, was as much a construction as the life I live now, but there is a patina of surreality to the memories I made. David Palmer was fairly bad at being a man, which makes sense! But that might mean that I don’t have access to the story that I’m writing here, when I asked Aubrey “Where did you go, to start HRT? If it’s too invasive a question, I apologize. I’m doing some research.”

“Beaumont,” she said.

I was living in Lafayette, and Beaumont was actually far away. I do remember being disappointed that she didn’t come to the town I lived in. “That close?” I said. “Ok! Thanks. How are you?”

“Yeah, there’s an OBGYN there with a trans son, so I funnel ppl from here to there. There’s a couple of doctors in Lafayette” (ding ding ding) “but it’s about the same distance, so might as well go to the one who is in the family, so to speak.”

“Hmm. Would someone just need to call them, or would it be better to go to one of the informed consent clinics in Houston or New Orleans?”

“It’s informed consent over there,” Aubrey said. “It’s at Legacy – they operate on a grant, sliding scale, and all that jazz.”

Alright, I thought. So there are quite a few places to go. “Ok, thank you so much! I really appreciate it.”

An indeterminate amount of time later, perhaps after a suitably pregnant dramatic pause, she messaged me again. “Soooooo… how are you?”

I laughed. “I’m doing good. Writing poetry and flash fiction, teaching beginning writing, thinking about all the changes in my life, etc etc. I’m sure you can detect a theme.”

She did. “We think our stories are so unique, then we talk to people and realize we can basically file off the serial numbers, change a few things and the story mostly fits in an almost creepy way. How long have you been out to yourself? Are you still leaning NB like we discussed many moons ago?”

Nope, I wanted to say up front, but there’s this thing, at least for me, about needing permission to really allow myself to adopt a label. So I equivocated. “I guess it depends on how you measure it? I’ve been going by – yeah, I’ve been using they/them since the spring of last year. But in my secret heart of hearts (and apparently in my fucking poetry, it just keeps coming up) I’m going all the way.”

As if it’s a second virginity? Ask me after I get confirmation surgery. A bad joke.

I continued, “It just feels kind of difficult, because I’ll always have a football player’s frame, you know?”

“Not to take anything from NB people, but you’re not the first that would use that as a stepping stone, so to speak.”

True enough, though it feels strange? This is one of the drawbacks of egg theory, something I’ve seen in discussions and in reddit threads: not everyone you’d think is an egg actually is one. I follow a ton of trans girls on Twitter, which is a mixture of solidarity and my own thirst, and of late many of them have been saying that they’ve gotten quite a few followers who turned out to be chasers. Yet even later, those chasers turn out to be trans women, hatching or pushing against the shell, seeking release!

One of the discord servers I frequent, called “The Orchard,” has this to say about what they call egg culture:

Whilst often benign, the language used in it is often inadvertently and subtly pressuring and we believe in a community where everyone can explore and decide for themselves without feeling like there is a right or wrong choice. Gender is deeply personal to our lives and how we view the world. And everyone deserves to come to understand their gender on their own terms.

They’re not wrong, of course. One of the problems, I think, is that there are plenty of gender nonconforming, nonbinary, genderqueer, or any other not on the binary trans folks that don’t need and would in fact be harmed by some woman or man approaching them and trying to break through. No doubt this is the fear of many in the TERF community, who are afraid that trans men are being pressured to abandon their femininity, abandon lesbianism, as portrayed by the reaction to Max in The L Word. Of course, this isn’t the way often that things happen, and The L Word was during and just after its run rightly criticized for its portrayal of transition, trans men, and its outright refusal to portray trans women and lesbians. Yet it would be equally wrong for those of us who have taken the plunge to walk up to some potential eggy person and push them into the pool. The thing about hatching is that it still has to be your decision.

I do want to push back on the subtle pressure that the administrators of The Orchard speak on, however. Pressure exists everywhere. Egg theory (though perhaps not egg culture) mainly is a metaphor to explain to cis and questioning people an aspect of identity, and metaphors are necessarily imperfect. Cisnormativity is like sea level air pressure, and a change in environment or a diving session (perhaps into reddit or into the memories of your trans friends) can enact transformation. The egg metaphor allows trans folks an easily visualized image to tell other people that simply seeing a trans person out and about can enable them to come out themselves. Should any egg be aggressively cracked? No, of course not. Should any egg potentially rub elbows with those who have hatched, and accidentally crack themselves? Like I said, it’s not a perfect metaphor.

For what it’s worth, I needed a push, myself. I was nonbinary as a stepping stone, yes, but as I told Aubrey: “Oh, I know, most of the people that I’ve researched seem to do that.”

“Support group will help a ton, seeing and interacting with everybody at all sorts of stages. I’ve been gently urging you to go, if you haven’t noticed.”

In truth, I didn’t notice. And I didn’t go!

***

This is not a coming out essay, though it includes a coming out. Interestingly enough, I never outright told Aubrey that I was trans. She read it in my words, in the questions I was asking. At lunch once, months after beginning transition, just after Hurricane Laura cracked and crumbled many of the places anchoring my old self to my hometown, we were talking, eating shrimp tacos from a food truck in the parking lot of a bombed out restaurant. Have you done voice work, yet, she asked? I told her no, that I was just trying to survive starting a PhD during covid and transition, all that stuff. She nodded.

“You know, on a scale of 1 to 10 on how sure I was that you were trans, I’d say 8 or 9,” she said.

“What? No way.”

She smiled. “ Yeah. I was this close to telling you to shit or get off the pot.”

A lot of trans folks seek validation. We live in a world that is constantly discussing our validity, our rights, whether we should or should not exist. Whether we are predatory, whether we practice self mutilation, as Senator John Kennedy, my representative in Congress, asked Dr. Rachel Levine as she was being confirmed for her position as assistant health secretary, the first transgender woman to do so. Whether we are transing kids as proponents of rapid onset gender dysphoria contend, or if we are autogynephiles courtesy of Ray Blanchard, or (in the case of trans men) if we are lesbians who hate our womanhood so much that we’d be willing to abandon the fight for women’s liberation.

I call Aubrey my trans mentor. It’s possible she trans’d me, put her trans ray on me and converted me to the cause, like some kind of science fiction or video game, or maybe some Harry Potter fanfiction. Expecto trans patrona! Persona reparum! But if she did, then she also gave me outright euphoria, a happiness that my Mom and Dad and sister see in me, the flowering of my poetry and my art, the drive to begin a PhD program, the resolve to be happy in my skin, to lose weight and perform in front of people and be so unapologetically me.

It would have been worth it.

I used to drive a 2002 Ford Mustang. It was monstrous, a two door behemoth with a busted muffler that made it loud as hell. After lunch, Aubrey texted me: “That’s totally a chick car.”

“What? No way.”

“Next time you see a car like that on the road, look who’s driving. Nine times out of ten.”

This isn’t a coming out essay, because I’ve been out for over a year now. I burned the fucking closet down, set fire to each of my memories until all is ash. Still in the same shape, but delicate, liable to be smudged. And there are a few dramatic moments, like a rainstorm on the highway during a podcast, that were fabricated because memories are stories, and story is, again, drama.

Step forward, and hear the crunch of an old life.

__________

Nonah Rose Palmer is a PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She’s been published in Clitbait, MockingHeart Review, and Rejection Letters. She lives in Lafayette with her partner and, their cat, and their dog.

__________

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