Arts & Culture Queer Life
Making Connections Through the “Trans Trade”
The act of the trans trade, and its ritualization, came readily to hand for me, but it’s a distant possibility for so many of us.
Most evenings, I swirl a badger-bristle shaving brush to work up a lather, the first of several steps in a shaving ritual I had to teach myself because while I grew up watching my father shave, he never taught me. Why would he, when the hair on my face was soft and downy, pale, nearly invisible?
The brush came to me in a Priority Mail box many years ago, when I first started T and commented on Twitter that I guessed I’d have to figure out this whole shaving thing. A trans woman who had just finished electrolysis asked if I wanted her old brush and I said sure, and it arrived swaddled in tissue with a friendly note. It felt like the passing of a baton but also a moment of shared ritual for both of us. She released something that did not serve her, that came with unwanted memories of an unwanted time, and I in turn picked it up and cradled it in my hand with my ginger-and-vetiver shaving bar at the ready, prepared to embark on a new adventure, new memories.
I’m still not particularly good at shaving, inevitably missing an inconvenient spot or leaving a nick because I’m too lazy to replace my blades. But I think, a lot, about what I term the “trans trade.” The few wearable bras left that I sent to a trans woman after top surgery. A series of swing dresses sent to a young agender person who had trouble finding affordable clothes that fit their busty body. This shaving brush.
These are not just things sent out of my life, for me, goods donated to a person who can use them. They are a shifting within my larger community, a building of connections that enriches us as a collective. Things that carry a gendered weight for me that I don’t want anymore aren’t just things to be donated but something deeper; they are a part of my personal history and gendered past in a way that an old coat or button-down shirt simply isn’t. In the giving, they become a part of someone else’s history as they venture forth into a new world that they are building for themselves.
To call it a “trade,” even, is not quite accurate: It is not tit for tat, but rather a vast, swirling, amorphous blob of items given back and forth, postage paid, clothing-swap parties, kindnesses offered, dare I say it, the dreaded “pay it forward” line at the drive-through. It is a trade with the world. Here, you look like you could use this. It is also a silent nod: We are here together, on our own journeys. It is seeing someone long for something on Twitter and secretly sending it to them. The giving is a surrender of a thing undesired, and the taking a shifting of that burden, turning it into joy. It is an emotional trade as much as a physical one.
I went to a high school that was deeply steeped in ritual: We had two annual retreats out in the woods for bonding purposes and special ceremonies, and we shared a collective shorthand of terms and beliefs and experiences. Growing up without religion, it became a sort of cultural touchstone for me and informed my deep and sometimes-hidden love of ritual, the little things I do that carry me through the year, that are important to me and my friends.
I can’t remember the first trans trade I received; possibly a looted pair of cutoff shorts might qualify, but that would have been a trade under duress. I do remember the first “girl” thing I gave away specifically because I understood I didn’t want it anymore because I was not a girl: a pair of huge peacock-feather earrings with giant gold beads. I saw a six-foot trans femme with an Afro that brushed the ceiling walk into a house party, and I knew those earrings weren’t mine anymore. The trans trade became a thing in adulthood that made me feel like I belonged to a community, that maybe we would go skinny-dipping in the ice-cold river later or make sandwiches in the darkened camp kitchen, watching the stubs of the candles from the candle ceremony burn down, wavering in the old glass of the windows. Tucking in a note feels akin to running around in the forest, burning off frenzied energy, the panic that comes with being a teenager.
After I sent the bras to the trans woman, she never dropped me a line to let me know if they arrived. I tried not to be stung by it as a person raised to send thank-you notes for everything. Maybe they didn’t arrive. Maybe they weren’t what she expected. Maybe she got busy and didn’t have time. Maybe she did send it and something went wrong. Maybe by the time she realized she hadn’t sent a note, she felt awkward. She was not required to perform anything for me, but my expectation of ritual still overshadowed our interaction, reminding me that imposing any kind of values on someone is a troubling, invasive act. Sometimes a gift is just a gift, a hand up is nothing more.
And as we live under constant, existential threat, there is an acute awareness that one reason we are suffering is the imposition of outsider rituals and values upon us. That is to say: Rituals we did not consent to. Expectations we do not agree with and did not sign up for. Beliefs about how we should behave based on value systems we do not agree with. There is a temptation in the face of that to build more ritual, to lend weight to things like the trans trade, to treat it as an act of defiant survival. But sometimes perhaps it is simply an exchange of items, and that must be okay too.
But sometimes perhaps it is simply an exchange of items, and that must be okay too. There is a weird kind of respectability politics happening in some queer spaces right now. Either you need to assimilate, be unremarkable, don’t scare the cisses and maybe they won’t hurt us. Or, actually, no, you need to be defiant and loud and wear Pride-themed makeup and lead marches because there’s so much to be mad about. There seems less and less space to just be , to be trans and queer and boring. “ Queer as in fuck you ,” to me, also means “ queer as in fuck off ,” and it is weirdly through the trans trade that I find my little corner of the world where I am happy and good, because if you have it to give, you give, and if you need it to take, you accept it. Whatever kind of queer you are doesn’t matter; if you wear those earrings at a Pride parade or an office job or whatever, it’s out of my hands now; we don’t need to have a praxis conversation about it. I worry sometimes that the pressure to be the “right” kind of queer with a constantly moving goalpost makes people hide themselves, shuts them out of community: too flamboyant, not flamboyant enough, chews their nails too much to paint them either way.
We are living in a moment where a lot of people want to impose expectations and beliefs on us, and sometimes they are lethal. When you are caught in a darkness, surrounded by hostility, you kick at whatever comes in range without stopping to see if someone is friend or foe. I want to be friend, yearn to be friend, to bring someone into my ritual and sense of place, but in the darkness, a lumpy, uncertain shape, I am an unknown. I want to hold up a lamp, to show a way out, but a light in darkness can be dazzling, disorienting.
Mismatched meaning feels like a perennial theme of being human, one I often see on display on the subreddit Am I The Asshole?, my frequent late-night haunt. So many of the problems there would be resolved through communication, but also through understanding and awareness of the fact that different things mean unique things to different people, and neither party is necessarily wrong. If I expect you to conform with my sense of ritual, I am, indeed, the asshole.
Another trans person sent me a patch that just said fuck , because, you know, give a . And it hangs over my desk until I find the right person to send it to, someone else who gives a fuck. It was a gift that meant a lot to me, and I don’t know if they felt the same way on their end, but I realized that it didn’t have to. I gave a fuck, and made meaning out of something. Those are my terms and I made them.
Communities cultivate and fabricate their own senses of ritual as a form of ingrouping, but that can become dangerous: Those who don’t know the rules or don’t follow them become outsiders, the subject of anger or upset for not aligning with a majority. We all know what it feels like to misstep, to fail to read the room, to resent or misunderstand a ritual, to feel like an eternal guest rather than a member of the family.
Some people hated our high school’s rituals, opting out as much as possible, fuming at the imposition of 1970s-era hippie values on their public school experience. The social consequences could be complicated, delicate. Other times, blunt, with members of faculty and staff finding ways to punish people for not following the spirit of the school’s ethos. Why did you come here if you didn’t want to build mud statues in the riverbank, walk blindfolded through the woods with a stranger?
The act of the trans trade, and its ritualization, came readily to hand for me, but it’s a distant possibility for so many of us. Not everyone has a friend or internet follower to send them a random thing at a fortuitous moment. Some don’t have those networks, or are in dangerous living conditions where they can’t access a trans trade, because owning an item could be unsafe. A trans trade might be fervently desired but out of reach. It may also feel repulsive, unwanted.
The act of the trans trade, and its ritualization, came readily to hand for me, but it’s a distant possibility for so many of us. There is a tendency in the modern world to problematize everything, to search for the thing to feel guilty and unsure about within a larger story or experience, but these are truths: Not every trans person has a support network, and hearing all about other people’s networks can feel deeply painful, a constant reminder of how you don’t fit in. Sometimes it feels like a challenge as to whether you are truly “trans enough,” as though transness is contingent on hitting the right number of friends or supportive people, before which you are not truly trans, do not have “community” or “chosen family,” do not get the special pin, will never be told the password to the speakeasy. Not everyone wants that. Some people are still understanding who they are.
When we interrogate the things we feel are deeply meaningful, what do we learn about ourselves? About the world we live in? The tension lies in those lines, the realization that something seemingly beautiful is a fragile and complex web, that you must pluck at it to be honest with yourself about it.
In undertaking the trans trade now, in attempting to name it, I accept that it has meaning for me and that meaning may not be the same for the person on the other end, that this is all right, that the person I trade with does not need to follow the same rules and social niceties that I do, that not doing something the way I want them to should not be grounds for denying them access to community. I think about the quiet networks of communication we build, and how to make them stronger, more vibrant, by leaving ritual in the hands of the individual, rather than turning it into something larger than it has any right to be.
