Building a Fairy

I was in a tiny California town in late November, smoking a joint while sitting outside my motel room. The village is so tiny that I’m staring at an empty acre lot at the edge of the motel's property line. A family of deer grazed in the distance near an unlit church. A black and white cat stared at me from a nearby picnic bench, curious but keeping her distance. Lana Del Rey sang in my ear about the prison of the basic bitch.  A few weeks prior, the nation had just voted to burn down democracy and I was having a crisis about earrings.

In the previous summer, I had my ears pierced. It was the latest change in my personal fashion to be more femme. Over the past few years, I started dressing in brighter colors, getting my nails done, and dying my hair pink and purple. Just the month prior, I was allowed to take out the studs and immediately started wearing the dangliest, shiniest, faggiest earrings I could get my hands on. I raided the local queer thrift store for anything in bisexual colors they had. I rifled through my dead wife’s jewelry box for the femmiest things I could find. When I came down from Seattle, I packed a pair of long, dangly gold earrings, but I planned on wearing my studs the whole time. The country had told me, in no uncertain terms, that being a fag was not safe.

I was in Siskiyou County, California for work. I help out with the tech at a tree nursery down there. Folks there care about God and guns and I have a coworker, lets call her Norma, who the sweetest, folksiest 60-year-old you’ll ever meet. She swears like a sailor, but apologizes for it mid-sentence. She greets every day with a smile despite the massive amount of shit life has laid on her. She has bible verses about resilience and devotion on handwritten post-its attached to her monitor in the seed lab. She’s a devout Mormon. She almost certainly voted for Trump. I was so afraid of taking the smile off her face by being too queer.

Over the years, something like this always happened. Every step towards being femme involved tip toeing back and forth over some perceived line. There was always some imagined crisis. Every time I allowed myself room to explore my gender, a voice of concern would enter my conscience. My hair had to be blue before I could dye it pink, so it could be read as butch. I panicked about taking my painted nails down to suburban Dallas for a work trip. Now it was a Mormon sexagenarian with a foul mouth and a heart of gold. What would the next crisis be? Could I handle doing this while the world burned?

Once again, I asked myself the same question I had raised several times over the years: “Am I trans?” I had always insisted the answer was no, but as time went on the caveats started to pile on:

"No, but I wish men had better clothing options."

"No, but being a guy sort of sucks."

"No, but I am a femme."

"No, but I kind of like it when someone uses they/them pronouns for me."

"No, but I sure have a crush on every trans person I meet."

"No, but I could be if my body were more androgynous."

I would continue to ask the question and every time I said no, I would force myself over some boundary to make me feel better about being a man: the hair, wearing lipstick, painting my nails. Every step was greeted with months of worry about how the world would perceive it. I knew this slow drip of fear was killing me, preventing me from becoming who I needed to be for my own self preservation. I had been doing it so long that in thinking about what earrings to wear, the answer of "No, but..." was being replaced with "Yes, but Norma will think that I'm a monster." I took another drag, and I wept. There was no longer any doubt, I was trans, and part of the world would see me as a cursed soul.

I had worried about being perceived as a monster in the past, but now the world was filled with actual inhuman villains. How could I, in good conscience, worry about someone's thoughts on jewelry when world was crumbling around me? I could either continue down this path, slowly being drowned by a need for perceived safety, or I had to embrace the monstrosity.

Regardless of what I did, my queerness would make me a wretch to someone. I could either be the type of aberration they wanted, skulking in the shadows, never knowing the light of day, or I could become the creature I desired to be.

In my heart, I knew I could do this. After all, there's little difference between learning to be a woman and learning to be a monster. Gender is filled with arcane secrets and whispered incantations. You may think you know the right spell to make yourself a woman, but a sloppy application of makeup or too deep of a laugh can expose you as something... other. As I stood on the edge of the forest, of all the monsters I could possibly become, a fairy was the obvious choice. Fairies, after all, have been associated with queerness for centuries. And honestly, the modern fae image shares a lot in common with my gender euphoria: beautiful, strange, otherworldly and prone to just a little bit of mischief.

And honestly? In rural America, being a fairy wasn't a bad choice. People out here wouldn’t cross the street if Tinkerbell was coming their way. In fact, they’d wave to her, say hello, and complement her dress, even if it’s a little slutty for their taste. These communities are often kind to people they meet. They help their neighbors. They practice a collectivism that, while different in method, provides a lot of the benefits leftists seek to build into society at large. Food drives, crowdfunding campaigns and volunteering replace the social safety net the last 40 years of malicious governance has stole from them. You could even call it a form of direct action. Of course, this type of support is a lot easier to implement in a hamlet of 700 people than in a country of 300 million.

Unfortunately, having small a community also makes it so much easier to be manipulated, as well. When a preacher tells you queer folks are monsters, it’s a lot easier to believe when you don’t see them every day. When the most exciting part of the spring is seeing the high school volleyball team's state championship run, the mere suggestion of a boy in a skirt standing in their way can make your blood boil.

But when you have a fairy drinking next to you at the local watering hole? It’s a lot easier to see her humanity and stop thinking of her as just a slur. After all, what possible harm could she cause sitting down and ordering a beer? All those names you've heard and maybe used (queer, fairy, sissy,) they imply harmlessness just as much strangeness. Who could possibly be afraid of a fairy? Why wouldn't you welcome little Tink into your community, at least for a drink at the bar?

The ones spouting that hate, though? They know. Once we're invited in, that's when our real work begins. Tinkerbell wasn’t the first fairy. The old folk tales may have had their edges polished off, but they still provide warnings about spirits in the woods. Sure, we’ll flit around and act all femme one day, but we’ll shapeshift into a genderfucking bulldyke the next.  We’ll giggle and bat our eyes, then steal your children away to a magical world known as The Castro. And if you’re lucky enough, we might just give you a taste of girldick and you’ll never return from Fairyland. There’s a tempting magic out in the world and if you’re not careful, we’ll show it to you.

And of all the magic we possess, the most powerful of all - with all the fear and power that comes with it - is our very bodies. Of all the divisions societies enforce around the world, gender is the most universal and our bodies are the reminder that it's all illusion. If the veil between man and woman can be torn asunder nothing more than a size 3XL dress and some lipstick, then nothing can stop us building a more just world. If, as Republicans suggest, God and his Heaven begin to crumble under the weight of 2mg of Estradiol under the tongue, then their deity wasn’t very omnipotent to begin with.

Preachers and TERFs may want to destroy us, but this body is a warning that Queen Titania does not fuck around. Fairies may not look threatening, but we are ancient and powerful. We’ve outlasted kingdoms and empires, and after all of your calls to wipe out the fae menace fade away, we’ll still be here to watch your cities to turn to dust.

I wiped my tears away. In that moment, in front of grazing deer and a leering tuxedo cat, I vowed to build a fairy. I would exist as a reminder of another, better world. I would give up on the lie of the safety of the closet. I would fly around this tiny California town sprinkling fairy dust on everything I passed.

By the way, Norma fucking loved the earrings.