In a blog post from August about my transition, I wrote that my birth gender “was like my hometown: I grew up here, there are things I love and things I hate about it, it’ll always have a place in my heart. We have relationships not only to and with other people, but also places and things. We won’t ever fully know (let alone control) them - but we don’t need that to revel in their majesty, or to traverse them to unimaginable places. When considering the symbolic water in both this and “Daughter,” I’m reminded of what Laura Jane Grace sings in Transgender Dysphoria Blues: “Rough surf on the coast/ I wish I could’ve spent the whole day alone/ with you.” We can revere our genders in all their vast, powerful, mysterious and dangerous depth and breadth. As with “She,” the protagonist here is poised to take a step they’ve been contemplating all their life, away from social order but towards personal truth.
Take you to a gay bar lyrics movie#
So, you know, I’ve listened to the Moana soundtrack a lot over the years! There are volumes I could write about what this movie has to say about intergenerational trauma, collective healing, and attachment theory, but let’s just stick to gender for now. I happen to have experience parenting a literal human child as well as myself. “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana, Sung by Auli’i Cravalho But even on our worst days, we can remember that we have chosen to feed and love a child that society would have left for dead. When we’re at our best as parents, we know our kids can live better lives than us - carrying less pain, believing in their own goodness, not limiting their imaginations in ways we take for granted - and we exult at this. Just as with regular children, even as they demand and rebel, our young genders desperately need us, and are taking every single thing we tell them to heart. Just as with regular parenting, we are bound to make mistakes when nurturing our tender trans genders: to be rigid or lenient at the wrong times, to teach the wrong lessons. That’s the strain I feel when I listen to “Daughter.” I realized being trans often means both being a new baby and birthing/parenting yourself, and that’s both the most wondrous wonder and the worst, most impossible burden. And then consider the speaker: “Scream at me until my ears bleed/ I’m taking heed/ just for you.” That rare person who sees us, who accepts our rage as the natural product of our disenfranchisement, who is ready to witness all of our experience.Įver since I wrote “ Twin,” a new neural pathway has existed in my brain to interpret songs about interpersonal familial relationships as in fact intrapersonal. Knowing that our confident expression of self-knowledge will be deliberately misconstrued as just the opposite. I’m struck by the juxtaposition between the chaotic “riot penetrating through her mind” and the intense calm of her “waiting for a sign to smash the silence with the brick of self-control.” With lines like “she’s figured out/ all her doubts were someone else’s point of view,” once I started looking at this with a trans lens, it became hard to imagine how it could possibly be about anything else. My short list of Songs That Are Actually About Being Trans highlights several tunes that have been my teachers about gender - which is to say about the world, and about myself.ĭookie came out just as I entered middle school, so this is the song on the list I have the oldest relationship to. So to be perfectly clear, I’m not trying to win you over to my interpretation of the lyrics of any of these songs but I am inviting you to explore the world within each of them. We come back to this plane with a sense of having grasped the soul of a thing. More than mere cleverness or evocation, a solid analogy has the ability to cast us into a metaphoric dreamworld, which not only resembles reality superficially, but can be manipulated and studied in intricate detail from all angles. I have cultivated a deep reverence for analogy. When I wanted to convey the fraughtness of familial relationships before and after coming out, I imagined my birth gender/pre-transition self to a twin brother. The first song I wrote about transness, “ Farewell to my Man,” likened transitioning to the breakup of a romantic relationship. Long before I was a woman, I was a songwriter. I’ve been especially keen on curating my list as a study in songcraft. Sometimes it’s a glib body humor joke, or sometimes a queer upending of a familiar classic (offered without explanation: “Bohemian Rhapsody”). We were talking about the mental playlist we each keep - of songs that, while not technically about being trans, are, in fact, about being trans. “Every trans girl has one,” a Twitter mutual told me.
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