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Transcript Provided by YouTube:
00:02
I’m in the mirror, naked, rounding hand over stomach,
00:07
imagining the scar my mother will have.
00:10
She is sliced open on a Wednesday,
00:12
her womb, choked with dust, tossed into a bowl like it’s useless.
00:16
I push against my soft, at my insides,
00:19
wonder how they’d look spread out on the operating table.
00:22
Her largest fibroid is five inches across.
00:25
I see it stretching from the edge of my palm
00:27
to the tip of my pinkie.
00:28
She’s been bleeding every day for months,
00:31
living in a lake of blood clots and tampon boxes.
00:35
I count backwards.
00:36
Can’t remember the last time I bought tampons.
00:40
I have not had my period in 17 months.
00:43
The doctor assisting on her surgery is the same man who birthed me.
00:47
His name is Joe. He has four kids.
00:49
His hands are covered in my mother.
00:52
I think I see my face in the flood in the blood, the bleeding,
00:55
stitches, straining tumors.
00:56
I wonder if he knows I grew up to be trans.
00:58
I wonder if they both see the infant of a past I don’t remember.
01:02
My mother calls me “son,” calls me “boy,” “her boy,”
01:06
but if we listen to the doctors doused in our blood,
01:09
I am now more woman than she.
01:10
See, I still have my uterus.
01:12
See my body, the mirror womb,
01:14
muscle fibers stretched between us twitching and twisting,
01:17
hers lined with sores, mine sitting stale.
01:19
Fibroids rip through the lining of her uterus.
01:22
The goal of my testosterone therapy is to end my menstrual cycle.
01:25
She gives up her body for health. I abandon mine for gender.
01:30
My mother is sliced open 21 years ago.
01:33
Joe pulls a baby girl from her body.
01:35
My mother is sliced open today.
01:36
Joe yanks tumors from her womb, her womb from her body.
01:39
Her uterus is heavy with a false child, as if five months pregnant,
01:42
but she isn’t, and never will be again.
01:44
When I have my last period, 17 months ago,
01:46
I wonder if testosterone has ruined my body,
01:49
wonder if I can ever get pregnant.
01:50
I don’t want to, have never wanted to,
01:52
but isn’t this the shame, the guilt.
01:54
We abandon possibility like we tossed out tampons.
01:57
But I’m in the mirror cupping my stomach,
02:00
injecting myself with hormones I wasn’t born with,
02:02
looking at a baby picture.
02:04
It could be me, or my brother, or any baby,
02:06
since all babies look the same.
02:08
I imagine the knife, the sacrifice, the scar.
02:12
I should honor the bloody mass that birthed me, shouldn’t I?
02:15
Should honor the body that came before me,
02:17
even if the doctor saw me covered in my mother’s body,
02:19
and called me “girl,”
02:20
even if they will not call me “boy” until I’ve been cut open too.
02:23
They say boys don’t have bodies like I do.
02:25
Well, I wish I could give my mother my uterus,
02:27
but that’s not how it works.
02:28
I’m left trying to love something she had to get cut out,
02:31
feeling like I don’t deserve to be whole when she can’t.
02:33
Mine is stagnant, but it’s healthier than hers–
02:35
not poisoned and rotting, just sitting quietly,
02:39
waiting for the blood we’ve all known since birth.
02:43
(cheers and applause)
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This post was previously published on YouTube.