A Moment of Truth Tamara Sanaa Leigh

A Moment of Truth

Tamara Sanaa Leigh

I’m so nervous about writing this that I’ve started writing it about six different issues and abandoned it, four or five versions for this one alone. Which is absolutely ridiculous for someone like me who champions authenticity and basically speaks their mind for a living. If someone else asked me about writing it I would have told them that their voice matters and even if it isn’t a popular opinion or no one understands where its coming from or how you meant it, you should write it anyway. That in that case, maybe you should write it even more. One version I went ridiculously far in my backstory and coming out process and I know it was just a rant to try and justify my right to speak my feelings and hopefully not be judged for it. Just as this is stall tactic to avoid getting to the actual point. So I’m erasing my next however many paragraphs and saying what I came to say. Loving someone who is Trans is the most beautiful and terrifying experience I have ever faced.

As I said, one version there was a tragically long back story that can basically be summarized by saying it took me a REALLY long time to figure out I was Queer, to figure out who I was. Catapolted into LGBTQ+ culture by an extremely damaging accidential unofficial relationship which came with the gift of an introduction into queer culture and FINALLY feeling at home both there and with myself. Being Queer became a huge part of my identity and eventually even became my career. I was a Lesbian and proud of it…. Until I wasn’t (a lesbian).

Out of nowhere, I met someone who I fell so deeply in love with that I realized I had never really loved anyone before. He was born biologically female but was seriously considering transition when we met. It was a crazy time to enter into someone’s world, in the middle of such dramatic transition but it was also the beautiful part, watching someone discover who they always were and I was ready to hold his hand every step of the way.

We’d stay up all night long talking about it, he opened up to me in ways I don’t think he had with most other people since our story started around the same time, he wasn’t “letting me down” with some other vision of him than many other people in his life had been accustomed to. And I loved him so profoundly, so completely that he could have been transitioning to a giraffe and I wouldn’t have wanted him any less. Our relationship took

many twists and turns over the years, very few having to do with his transition. But it did change him. In so, so many ways. Watching him hurt and struggle and be rejected. Watching the hormones course through his veins and affect him emotionally and physically. Watching him find pieces of himself while losing things and people he loved has been heartbreaking. He backed away from me for a lot of reasons that I won’t get into but I also watched him isolate and turn inward as he faced emotional and mental health battles that he couldn’t begin to explain. He was torchered in a way that I couldn’t reach as bad as I wanted to and I hope one day he writes a book to talk about it so maybe both the rest of the world and I could have a clearer window into his soul.

That's not what I want to talk about here though, because that's his journey and I could never do it justice. I’ve wanted to write this article for a very long time but I was afraid to. Even still I’m crying as I type this because I’m afraid both he and the readers will take it wrong. That they’ll think I’m selfish or wrong. That he will. This transition was his story, not mine. It felt selfish and unfair to make it about me. And the pain I felt couldn’t possibly touch his inner battles. But I feel like maybe someone needed to hear this and maybe I needed to say it outloud.

I remember when I was the editor of another magazine, a girl named Courtney had written an article about her journey as the lesbian spouse of a Trans partner. It struck me as being important at the time but I couldn’t have predicted how much. Loving someone who is Trans is a constant exercise in terror. I was and am afraid all the time. That he’ll get mistreated in the world and I can’t fix it.

There are thousands of Trans people murdered every year for being nothing but who they are. That he will jump in the car to take a trip and never come back because he stops at the wrong rest stop. Did you know that as many Trans people are murdered way up North in Pennsylvania as they are in Texas? Nowhere is safe. That he will try and date the wrong girl and she will kill him or her boyfriend will or her ex will or her brother will or her father will. That depression will mix with mones and the disappointment of an unforgiving world and he’ll kill himself. Loving someone Trans is constantly being afraid. He has had a complication from minor to major for every single gender-affirming surgery he has had. Every single one. In the quest to live authentically I’ve almost lost him time and time again. Sometimes he’d want me to be around to take care of him, most of the time he didn’t. So I’d be waiting on the other side of the line waiting to hear if he lived. Major surgeries that could make him whole or easily could disfigure him if anything went wrong. But you have to smile and be supportive because you don’t want him to be afraid or to catch any glimpse of you hesitating to support him because you can lose him like that too. I silently mourned after his top surgery. Because I loved every part of him as it was. And I quickly fell in love with his new body and all the things it could do but mostly the joy I saw in his face living inside of it. And I couldn’t help but be joyful for him because of that. And if you truly love someone, that's what you do.

Loving someone Trans is watching them walk into a tunnel that you can’t walk with them through. You can just walk along the outside of it and press your face against the wall to hear a sound or catch a glimpse and hope they make it out of the other side. It’s getting to know a person all over again that you’ve always known. It's watching them love the things they’ve always hated or hating the

things that they at least pretended to like and sometimes that thing is you. It’s knowing that with this new awakening they may realize different sexual interests or even that they just want to try out things with different people from inside their different body and new mindsets. It’s realizing that you may never be enough again. And even if you have the most supportive and committed partner in the world, you still live with traces of the fear of it. Loving someone Trans is constantly being afraid.

None of these things are the other person's fault. It’s nothing for them to be responsible for or feel guilty about. But it was the things I thought about and cried about and then felt guilty for feeling and cried some more. It’s the things you can’t say out loud.

It took me a long time to figure out who I thought I was. I was a woman who loved women. And then all the sudden I was a woman who was desperately in love with a straight man. His physical transition was smooth and beautiful. He is a handsome, fine ass man with a naturally raspy voice that had a strong beautiful jawline that only got stronger and more beautiful. So to walk in a room next to him, I was all the sudden a straight woman with a fine-ass man. But my life, my world, my identity wasn’t set up like that. There was explaining to do before introducing my LGBTQ+ friends who didn’t know him. Was I fake gay? But explaining was spilling tea that wasn’t mine to pour. Thankfully he is super open and real so I never had to worry much about that but I can’t help but think that many people do.

The world is a small and scary place for Queer folks, especially Black Queer folks. Our circles are small, our trust is short, our

communities are tight. People want to know if you are a fraud or if you were just trying this Queer identity on for fashion. It wasn’t until him that I started calling myself Queer. I always felt like it was an ugly word with too much bad history to make it worth using. But I was at work going through a diversity training that my agency was running and they asked us to sit at the table with the label of the identity that represented us and it felt like I was silently denying his identity sitting at a table labeled lesbian when I was loving and laying down next to a man. So I sat at Queer so I felt like I could still hold on to my gayness without casting aside his straightness. At some point our romantic relationship mostly ended for him and he decided he was ready to move on and explore a life beyond me and I was left trying to figure out who the fuck I was outside of that particular situation. Was I straight now? No. But I was changed. Was I pan? No, because the idea of being with a cis man is still silently nauseating to me (no shade). So what the fuck was I? I didn’t owe the world that explanation but I did feel like I owed it to myself. I’ve realized they don’t make a category for me. I’m not truly a lesbian, not bi, not pan. My attraction is to mascpresenting women and Trans-Masculine men. I shied away from saying that to people because a Trans co-worker took offense to it saying that it implied that you can spot a Transman from across the room or it suggests a difference between Cis and Trans men. I never want to invalidate anyone's feelings, but the difference is for me that typically Trans-masculine men and Trans-feminine women are for some period in time socialized within the LGBTQ+ community and so have a different level of acceptance and understanding of Queerness than the average cis, straight man could ever. They ideally don’t carry the internalized homophobia that so many within the Black

community do. My family, my friends, my work and my world is very, very Queer and I need my partner to understand that from a from an inside out kind of way. I’ve realized that I need that to feel heard and seen in an intimate relationship. So there doesn’t happen to be a label for that yet. I wish there was one because it would be nice to find a community of people who understand the things I talked about above and have been carrying for years.

I feel this need to further explain everything I’ve said so no one, especially him, gets mad at me. Which I hate because every ounce of my being stands for speaking your truth and being who you are. But I acutely understand between my life and my work the scrutiny and trauma and pain and danger and disenfranchisement the Trans community and especially the Black and Brown Trans community face every single day. I respect their bravery more than words can express and I’d never want my words to in any way make anyone-especially him, feel like I am centering myself in an experience that isn’t mine or that my pain is anywhere near quantifiable next to his. Next to anyones. But I do feel like maybe someone might read this article and feel a little bit seen. It’s hard af to love someone who has been through much and is fighting everyday for their place in this world because even as the person who loves them more than anything in the world- some days the fight ends up being with you too. I don’t want him to feel like I’m blaming him or that I’m mad or that he did anything wrong. I just want the other people that are so fucking scared to share their truth and their feelings because they don’t want to hurt

the person they love any more than they are already hurting- to know that they aren’t alone. I am beyond grateful for the experience I had with him. It was hard and scary and transformative and confusing and heart wrenching and terrifying. But I would do it all again every single time. He taught me how to advocate fiercely and fearlessly for a community I’m not a part of with love and empathy because it remains the only way to show him how much I love him and that a battle doesn’t have to be your own to fight it. That even those of us who usually have allies can become allies too because we all carry some sort of privilege. It forced me to educate myself about Trans rights, it has pushed me to keep up with every court battle and battle ground state that is fighting for or against legislation. It has taught me to use the platform of this magazine to always advocate for and give voice to a wildly overlooked community that is in trouble, that is dying, that is SCREAMING for help. It has taught me my own resilience and shown me another piece of who I am and peace of who I am.

This was the scariest article I’ve ever written. But maybe one of the most important ones. Certainly the most honest.