To go to Eden

A few months ago, we sat at a dark bar. I listened to her talk about her facial feminisation surgery.

6 weeks on and she was swollen, vulnerable, and hopeful for a new future. Without her, I never could have comprehended how an adjustment to the skull parallels sense of self and place – only for her it’s not only self-acceptance, it’s about compromising with the reality of perceptions that are baked into our culture. It’s about safety, advocacy fatigue, and normalcy.

She listed things that would be different in the privilege of being unclockable: To meet new people and choosing to disclose herself as trans only if and when she knows it’s safe. To go to the servo across the road without the attendant searching for evidence that justifies his assumptions about her body.

To go to Eden, not as the snake or the apple.

Jade is my partner of ten years, documenting our life together and her medical transition is a sustained part of my practice. Transness and queerness exist in grey areas, the in-betweens of expectations

that inform my understanding of reality, culture and art: One of those things that we weren’t taught and had to learn through feeling and listening. Evidence of the temporality and fictitiousness of prophecy.

Considering orientation (Sara Ahmed), and space - space that is inhabited, and the space that is between you and me (Doreen Massey); to move through space (to have a body, mass, and move through time) is to orient yourself either towards or away from things both physical and not. When it’s self-governed it becomes world building, a tailored existence in which we fill the space that our bodies and souls demand.

In unison we orient ourselves east. Towards an Eden that is both the small fishing town where Jade grew up and where we are building a small life for ourselves, and a place of bodily boundaries where under cultural lore we are othered. To be trans or queer in rural Australia is to forgo the anonymity and protection through community awarded by the city, but it’s also to have faith in people and parts of our culture that we are afraid of.