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I continue to want to learn more about transgender people's development and experience. I feel a great willingness to learn, so far primarily through reading, listening, and supporting those who are dealing with life before, during, and after transitions, coming to realize its implications socially, psychologically, biologically. I have never seriously considered changing sex, but I've wondered what it would be like to be a woman or another gender. I value in myself plenty of characteristics and qualities socially coded as feminine. My interest may also be fueled by the amorphous attractions and identifications of a bisexual orientation and a sexualized ambivalence between reality and fantasy in sexuality, along with my uncertainty about their place. How normal am I? What difference does it make? Who am I? Not this, not that, neither continuous nor unfamiliar. A transgendered identity might be an impulse, a potential, a dream, in any of us (Cate Blanchett seemed closest to getting it right as Bob Dylan in I'm Not There), but to deliberately bend gender or commit to a change of sex has radical, uncontrollable ramifications in lived experience.
From such a platform of rampant naiveté, I'm writing here about Trish Salah's new book of poetry, a glistening, grueling, challenging, and potentially liberating exploration of meanings, identifications, experiences, associations, ordeals, revelations, and questions associated with trans experiences-others' and her own. Whether I comment on her work with adequate savvy, skills, and sensitivity will remain an open question, at least for me, but I urge it on any other interested reader as a great effort and achievement on a present reality many find difficult or imponderable. What a gift! Let me know when someone writes such a poetry book on climate change!
Faithful to a title more than demonstrative of Salah's clarity, wisdom, and perspicacity, suggestive of unlimited scope and detail, of academic scientism and romantic folly, imb