A Life In Many Genders by

Kalil Cohen

Strongly trans-identified, I cultivated a community of trans and genderqueer friends and chosen family. I finally felt seen, understood, accepted, and respected. For the next seven years I explored this realm of gender outlaws, transhuman futurists, and body sculpting visionaries. I played in the infinite colors of gender fabulousness. I mostly gravitated to a butch expression but revelled in my femme side as a performance artist with a fey aesthetic. Proud of my place as a freak, I was glad to exercise the important muscle of evaluating rather than accepting social norms, and rejecting those unaligned with my personal sensibilities. Strongly connected by our shared social marginalization, I bonded deeply with my chosen family.

At the same time, I was now experiencing the other cage of the gender binary, the “man” box. It didn’t bother me at first, because I was so relieved to no longer be trapped in the “woman” box that had plagued me for 23 years. At first, I enjoyed that people listened to me more, criticized me less, and didn’t objectify me physically. But slowly the male cage started to feel just as claustrophobic as the female one had. While the constraints and expectations of being male were not always as offensive, they were just as oppressive. I was no longer allowed to hug children in public lest anyone thought I was a sexual predator. Men teased and bullied me in their quest for dominance. Queerness was more strictly policed, and the homophobia more violent and aggressive. I was also less supported in exploring my emotional world, healing from trauma, and becoming an embodied and balanced person. And even after all my physical changes, I still felt disconnected from my body. While I was no longer measuring myself against the impossible standards of female beauty, the muscular masculine ideal had quietly replaced them. I slowly realized that my body dysmorphia was about more than just gender. It was about living in an anti-body culture, dissociated from physical sensation and lacking mind-body balance.

Ten years ago I stopped taking testosterone. I didn’t want any more body hair or facial hair than the small scruff I'd already grown, and although I really appreciated the benefits of no menstrual cycle and greater muscle tone, it wasn’t worth it to continue just for that. I was lucky that hormones were no longer crucial for my mental health, as I had already achieved the physical changes I desired. Additionally, I'd become more interested in nutrition and holistic wellness and felt growing concern about Western medicine and more cautious about what I put in my body. I had also started a new selfdevelopment process for my 30th birthday in order to become a more heart-centered person, and hoped that coming back to a female hormonal balance would help me deepen my connection with myself. Little did I know that this would lead me on an entirely new journey of self-discovery, healing, growth, and transformation.

Only a month after I stopped taking hormones, I started to bleed again, for the first time in seven years. On a camping trip and ill-prepared for this novel occurrence, I reached out for help. I connected with a female friend over the rhythms of our bodies as she shared her pads and tampons with me. The experience was somewhat familiar and yet entirely new. During my adolescence, I hadn’t felt allied with my female friends as we were initiated into this rite of womanhood. Not identifying as a woman, I had felt like a foreigner, an imposter. Now I had a community of genderqueer and trans friends who bled, with whom I could explore this experience of body and moon in rhythm together. Now I had a spiritual connection to this monthly cycle, to the opportunity for mindful awareness, reverence for the sacred womb, and the emotional expression that it offers. Now, no longer consuming hormone-laden dairy and meat, my cycle was much lighter than it had been. Now, I knew about the cup and cloth menstrual pads - ways to bleed that were not toxic to me or to the environment.

As I started to settle into the rhythm of bleeding, I opened into a whole world of beauty that I had never known before. I discovered that I have an open door to grief when I’m bleeding - a mechanism to process and digest the pains of my life in a measured and consistent way. I discovered the empowerment I felt when I gathered my blood in a cup - when I could see what was being released. I discovered that this cycle asked me to arrange my life with flexibility so that I could take it easy for the first day of bleeding. And suddenly I felt the supportive, profound, esoteric sanctity of what had once been a terrible burden and insurmountable obstacle in my life.

With this shift came a newfound reverence for my womb and its power. While I had always been a yonicentric person, the rest of my sex-specific organs had always been somewhat mysterious to me. They were vague line drawings from biology class that didn’t have real meaning in my life or self-image. I now felt drawn to deeply know my womb, to embody the