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Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.

What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

—LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

I want to write about the sky, and lakes underneath starlight. I want to write of possibility and newness, the way his skin tastes like the sun and dirt. I want to write about being holy. I never wanted to be a survivor, a girl who writes about trauma.

Do you know what it sounds like when a heron lifts off from a lake? It sounds like nothing. They are so powerful in their wings, so steady in their bodies, that they transition from one world to another without making a noise.

I want to be a heron.

I am talking on the phone with my friend. She is another Indigenous trans girl. She just let a boy fuck her without a condom. He came inside her in the apartment he shares with his cis girlfriend. She says she didn’t say yes to it, but she didn’t say no. Imperfect consent. She tells me that a part of her wanted him to cum in her. An intimacy, a small claiming of bodies and love.

The cis girlfriend doesn’t know about my friend, doesn’t know her boyfriend is ejaculating inside a trans girl. My friend asks if she fucked up, if it’s wrong to let a boy cum in you. Does she owe anything to the other girl? She went through the cis girl’s things when he was in the shower. She tells me he says he loves her. She won’t admit to me that she loves him, but I know anyway. I don’t know how to answer her, so I say it’s natural to want this form of intimacy with a boy you love. I validate her wanting.

She says he drove her home afterward, like this redeems him. I say that he must love her, because I know it’s what she wants to hear. It’s what I would want to hear. We fall silent for a moment. Her voice follows me into sleep that night. I dream of boys I’ve loved, their texts cascading around my body, and of trees moving in the night breeze.

Trans girls experience a unique form of misogyny, a violent intersection of being a woman and being trans. Like cis women, we are vulnerable to sexual assault, domestic abuse, catcalling, sexual harassment, and the thousand little ways that women’s bodies are policed. Most of my trans girl friends have been sexually assaulted. But there are very few resources for trans women who have been raped. Most rape crisis centers or supports are only for cis women. All women are vulnerable to rape, but girls like me face a heightened threat with dramatically fewer services for aftercare. Being a trans girl in the world constitutes a trauma. Every part of our lives is saturated with violence. It’s silent and insidious. We just live through, only talking about what happened when we are in rooms of other trans women.

What I envy in cis women is not their bodies but their possibility. Although cis girls share the same risks for violence as we do, I can’t help but see that they also possess radically different opportunities for love and healing than we do. This is how privilege works, quietly offering up possibilities that pass by people with less of it. Isn’t cis another word for privilege?

I remember listening to my ex-partner and his bro friends talking about girls in our living room. They went through a list of cis girls they knew, listing off their positive attributes. They gave one guy advice for seducing a cis girl, as if she were a prize fish to reel in. They agreed she would make a great girlfriend. Then one of the guys started talking about trans girls, how he was hanging around a local trans girl bar and chatting with one of the servers. “She’s trans,” he said, “but I think I might let her suck me off.” Everyone laughed, so he added, “Well, it will make a good story!”

Another one of my Indigenous trans girl friends passes for cis. Like me, she is a preoperation trans girl who primarily dates men, but unlike me, she does not disclose being trans to them. She goes on dates, leads up to the moment of first sexual contact, and then does a trans reveal by dropping her panties in front of them. This is one of the most dangerous things that a trans girl can do. We are regularly murdered by cis male sexual partners. The term “trans panic”—cis men’s sudden violent fear and repulsion in response to our bodies during sexual intimacy—has been used successfully in the US as a legal defense for murdering us.

When she told me about her nondisclosure approach, my immediate response was to condemn it. I told her she was going to get killed. She looked at me and shrugged before saying, “I don’t like telling them I’m trans. They treat me differently if I do.” I asked what she meant. “Well, they are really sweet and flirty before they know. Once I tell them, it’s either all about sex, or they just want to be friends.” Here is trans womanhood in motion, risking our lives to feel romance for a moment.

I hold another moment inside me. My ex-partner of five years was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the start of our romance. I spent a year helping him manage his medications and therapy appointments, comforting him when his moods plummeted. His doctor was weaning him off his medications, believing his psychotic episode was a result of his ADHD medications and not an underlying mental health condition. My ex was happy to go off his medications, even though it meant his sister and I had to watch for any signs of relapse.

We had just fucked. He turned to me and said, “Since I’m not crazy anymore, maybe I’ll go back to dating regular girls.” As if my love was only valuable when he felt unworthy of cis women’s love. Another time after fucking, he told me how much better vaginal sex felt than anal sex, praising a pleasure I couldn’t give him. I remember lying beside him, unable to sleep, feeling a hurt inside me that I’ve never healed.

This intersection of transness and misogyny is why I lied to my friend on the phone about the boy who came in her without asking. Both of us knew I was lying when I said he must love her. It’s not like my friend hasn’t been in this situation before, caught between a cis boy and a cis girl. Most straight trans girls have been in this situation. We know how it ends. He chooses the cis girl while we bundle our feelings into a tight knot in our hearts.

I could have told her that it’s a form of sexual violence, him cumming in her without asking, that it’s sexual violence against the cis girl as well. I could have confirmed what she already felt. Imperfect consent is imperfect violence. I didn’t say any of these things. I told her to keep seeing him. Any love is better than no love, right?

I spend my days after our phone call regretting my words, twisting around my own memories of sexual violence and how I’ve internalized transmisogyny like a tree growing around a metal signpost. I can’t sleep at night and spend the early-morning hours scrolling through cis girls on Instagram, tracking their likes, vacation photos, partner selfies, and nude shots. All I feel is how possible they are, how impossible I am.

I have no words for this feeling, but it is a dark thread inside me. It pulls me toward a violence I don’t want but feel constantly. I am no different than my trans girl friends. I risk my body for love. I lie to myself. I tell myself he loves me when I know he doesn’t. I pretend it’s possible for me to experience positive sexual intimacy when I know it won’t find me. Trans girls don’t have the luxury of everyday romance.

I smoke on my balcony at 4 AM and think of my trans girl friends. I assuage my guilt and worry by praying, repeating a wordless prayer song I learned from my elder. The song moves around me like water. I hold an image of my friend in my mind, already awake and booking her appointment to get tested for HIV and other STIs. I send my prayer out to her, imagine it wrapping her bones in the love she deserves.

I whisper the words “wintomoshiin mishomisinaank” into the departing curls of gray smoke. Help us, ancestors.

Nothing answers me back. Silence swallows my prayers and our bodies. Trans girl prayers are as quiet as our graves.

I had a sex reassignment surgery (SRS) consult last week. It’s what I have to go through to secure funding for my vagina. I have my second appointment this week. I cried after the first appointment, horrified by the images on the computer screen. The nurse forced me to watch a video of the surgery, images of a penis being severed and peeled into its soft tissue. I imagine she believed this was informed consent, but it felt like torture. I told my trans girl friends. They were horrified and offered to come to my second appointment. I said thank you, but I will not ask them to come with me.

What I don’t tell anyone is I don’t want to have the surgery. I do not want to experience the pain of the operation. My friend had it last month. She described the pain like a constant headache in the bottom half of her body. Her doctor increased her opioids to counter the pain, but she said it just made it bearable. She had a complication in the middle of the night. An abscess formed in her labia and burst. Blood ran down her legs and covered the ambulance floor. The doctor at the hospital fixed it, but all I can imagine is her at midnight, bleeding and crying with strangers.

Her boyfriend was with her throughout the operation and recovery. I don’t have a boyfriend. It’s too late now, less than five months out from my likely surgery date. Even if I met someone, there isn’t enough time to bond enough to survive what my surgery would mean. One of my closest friends offers to go with me, a trans girl who has decided not to get the surgery. I am grateful but doubtful. Friendships are fragile. They break and change like ice floes on the river.

I do not want to be alone. Waking up in pain, alone in the recovery room, unable to walk for three days, a catheter between my legs. My friend said there was so much blood after her surgery that the nurses changed her sheets every six hours. Her boyfriend held her hand while she cried during dilation. Who will hold my hand?

The nurse made me write a four-page letter for the surgeon’s office explaining my reasons and naming who will support me while I recover. The letter blinked at me from her computer screen. She made me watch as she filled in the template, parsing out my life into a paragraph. Ms. Gwen. Trans woman. Hormone replacement therapy for one year. Lived socially as a woman for a year and four months. I said I was a nonsmoker. She kept asking me if I have ever had any mental health issues. When I said no, I could see doubt on her face, but we kept going.

I lied to the nurse. I like my body as it is. I enjoy the complications of it, the possibilities. How it possesses the ability to be many things, to fuck and be fucked, and give head and receive head. How I am straight and queer, a woman who is not easy to define. I like the hardness between my legs meeting the softness of my body. How my breasts look in the mirror after I shower, two soft points along a lean line that runs toward a small cock. This body, this beautiful body I’ve made through hormones and prayers.

The problem is not my love of my body, but the desire of men. How a boy came into my life, held my hand on dates, and drove me home. His mouth on my mouth, his arms around me. Then rupture, telling me he didn’t want a relationship. He said it wasn’t because I was trans. Three weeks after he broke up with me, he started dating a cis girl. I am not supposed to internalize this as violence, just the realities of intimate love, but it feels like violence.

I don’t want to have a conversation about my genitals. I don’t want to hear another boy tell me they are curious, or they are not sure if they will get hard with me. I watch them flirt with cis girls, an easy nervous flutter in their eyes as they woo and dart around them. I feel an ache in my body. They look at me with fear or restraint. Careful of the transsexual, her touch and her body and her love.

I didn’t say any of this to the nurse while she evaluated my readiness for surgery. I will never say any of this. I talk to my friends about the surgery, but I don’t say why I am doing it. I rode in a car with two of my friends the day afterward, talking about social justice and being trans. We checked out my ex-boyfriend on Instagram. We found his new girlfriend and liked some of her photos. Trans girls being dangerous. I laughed with them. We played a French punk girl band on the car’s speakers.

When I got home, I cried in my bed. The next day, I hid out in a park and imagined myself with a vagina. I felt grief about what I will destroy in my body, how I will bend it toward their love with blood and pain. An offering, my flesh and suffering for their desire. I know this is wrong, so I don’t say it aloud, even to myself.

Will having a vagina heal me? No, it won’t. Will it make me a cis girl? No, nothing ever can. Will boys finally see me as real? Maybe. Do I love my body more than I love them? I guess not.

Silence is the only way I can hold this violence.

I used to write about being trans all the time. I had a blog when I first transitioned. I was convinced that writing would save me. If I wrote about trans girl sex and love, boys would realize it’s okay to desire us. To fuck and date us. I pretended this was for all of us as trans women, but if I’m honest, it was always about me.

Nothing changed from my writing. People consumed it. Thousands of views per month. My poems shared on social media, published nationally. My voice on the radio, saying trans girls are worthy of love. The truth is, nothing I said or wrote fixed anything.

I can’t render this body beautiful with language. Make myself desirable or human by naming how I’m erased by the politics of desire. I have this persistent urge to say to the boys I know that if I weren’t trans, they’d fall in love with me. I am learning to keep my mouth shut. Some truths are larger than me. I can’t speak them, no matter how blessed I am with language.

An older trans woman attacked me in conversation for how I write about being trans. She said she was worried about employment when she transitioned, whereas I seem to only care about my love life. As if my love life is a luxury of my body. As if exposing this to the world in poems and articles is an act of my narcissism.

I was at a poetry reading recently. A novice poet got up and read her work. She was nervous. Her husband watched and clapped loudly for her. Her poetry was not perfect, but it was honest. One of her lines struck me, and I keep repeating it in my head. She said a girl is always beautiful in the eyes of someone who loves her. I hold these words inside me like a prayer.

Is a trans girl only heard by the ears of someone who loves her? I don’t want to convince boys that trans girls are sexy and lovable. I want that to be something they already know. My writing about our desirability is another kind of violence.

The most beautiful things I write are the spaces between my words.

I spend much of my time with new poets talking about line breaks. The space between images in poetry is sacred. Where there is emptiness, there is possibility.

Do you know what the most beautiful part of a man’s body is? The space between his ears and his head, the room between his tongue and his lips, the distance between his shoulder blades, and the span of his fingers in your hand. How his cock rises up from his body, delineating his desire into openness. The soft line behind his scrotum to his anus, where shadow falls on his body. When he touches you inside your openness.

This is line breaks in poetry. Or silence in life. How beauty lives in wide spaces. What I love about boys is the things they don’t say. How their silence can constitute a greater love.

Line breaks, writing about trauma, being a survivor. I could explain this more, but I don’t want to. Like my lovers, what I don’t say means more than what I do.

I talk to my therapist about my childhood and when I was raped. He gives me advice on my relationships. He encourages me to relearn intimacy with the people in my life. I attend a trans girl support group. My therapist watches my interactions in a social setting and suggests small corrections. We meet once a week for an hour and a half. He knows more about me than anyone.

These conversations are threads running through my life. I think about things he has said to me when I’m hanging out with other people. I replay conversations in my mind after they’ve happened and decide what I should have said. The funny thing about being a survivor is learning how to have relationships from strangers you pay. Maybe it is working. I seem calmer, more open to the world than ever before. I imagine other possibilities for myself. Being in love and holding someone. Experiencing intimacy without being afraid.

But there is always a moment in our sessions when I stop talking. We fought about these silences in the beginning. He would jump in and push our conversation toward some deeper explanation. I would get angry, snap at him, until the session would fall apart. He asked me what I wanted from him when I stopped talking. I didn’t know how to answer him, but after three fights, I asked him to tell me that it would be okay.

“I want you to comfort me,” I said, fidgeting on the couch.

“It’s hard to know what you want, Gwen,” he answered. “You are one of the smartest clients I’ve ever had, and it’s hard to imagine you wanting something so surface. It almost seems like an insult to say something like that to you.”

My silence is an invitation to love me. No one hears that but me. I always hear it.

Writing about the moments that have broken me open does not sew me together. Being raped, my dad hitting me. The survivor revelation, the flashback scene on the television show. I am not going to write this. Perhaps you feel cheated by my silence. Maybe you are disappointed, but I am disappointed by my writing daily. By my failure to transform, to heal.

I do not want to write about being a survivor. It may help you, but it has never helped me. If we were sitting together in a room and you asked me to talk about my trauma, I would probably say some really profound shit about it. You would feel inspired and grow a thin streak of pity for me.

Then you would talk about something from your life and we’d bond over it. We would smoke and talk, and everything would temporarily feel better. Then you would go on with your life, and I would sit alone, light another cigarette, and stare into the silent distance.

This moment, the one you will never see or understand, is the real truth. I cannot give this to you. I am tired of trying to give it to you. It is mine until I die.

I have written three collections of poetry. I am writing a fourth collection in between work emails. If you Google me, you will find dozens of personal essays on being Indigenous and being trans. I am one of the most widely published trans girls in Canada. My work is taught in six universities across North America and anthologized internationally. I have performed for audiences of three hundred in professional theaters.

I have made a life from speaking about trauma and being a survivor. I have written poems about rape and child abuse. I have held the hands of other survivors after readings, told them I understand, and witnessed their pain. I have influenced and mentored other poets as they emerged their craft.

I am tired of writing about my trauma. It has not saved me. I used to think it could, but now I know better. There is more to life than your trauma. What I want is not another book of poetry or another magazine article. What I want is a miracle. I want to fall asleep beside another body, listen to the sound of breath moving through their body. I want to leave the city and eat ice cream in a park. I want to hold someone’s hand.

Writing has not brought me any miracles. Someone told me I would be a famous poet someday. I wanted to reply how much more I want to be loved, but you don’t say that to people. People assume being a writer is being powerful. Writing is the opposite. It is making yourself vulnerable to an audience who will read your work, comment how much it means to them, and then leave you.

Writing about trauma is being abandoned again. Writing is learning to live inside your failure to heal. Writing is naming every hope in your chest and watching them fly away to the skyline. Writing will not give me what I need.

So why do I continue to write? Because language is my first love. Like all great loves, you are hurt more by what it can’t give than what it can.

I want to break up with writing. Go no contact. Stop naming the things that wound me. Nurture the quiet longing of my body. Give nothing to the world but what I want to. Return to my private silence.

I want to go to a lake. I want to take my clothes off and slide into icy water. I want to move out to the edge of deep water, where I can barely feel the bottom. I want to float in that cold and moving expanse of water. I want to be wild in the waters of my ancestors. I want to be a body beneath a sky underneath a flat sheet of moisture. I want to smell the musk of lake water, silt, and possibility.

I want to disappear. I want to be a girl who disappears.

I want to go to a city by an ocean. I want to watch movies in the dark. I want to make French dinners. I want to return to your basement room beside Woodbine station. I want to be touched without hesitation. I want to have adventures and fall in love and take risks and ride a bicycle to the edge of the city.

I want to be silent. I want to never write or talk again.

I want. I have always wanted. This want is what wounds me. I want to be a different kind of girl. I want a different body, another set of genitals. I want to not want any other body than the one I have. I want my childhood to have never happened. I want to not be a survivor.

I want to pass this want to you in silence.

The happiest moment in my life was riding in a car with my ex-boyfriend and his parents. It was night in late December, just before Christmas. We were in Alberta, driving home from Banff in the quiet dark of his parents’ car. His dad and mom in the front seat, his hand in mine. We did not speak. Just the sounds of the highway, the heater blowing through the vents, and our movement toward his childhood home.

I like this memory. It replays within me. Riding in the front seat of a boy’s car, him driving me home after fucking me, as small and silent as I’ve ever been. A boy holding my hand, turning it over in his hand, squeezing with a gentleness in his eyes, a soft wonder around us. Smoking with my friends in a parking lot, each of us trans and each of us staring at the moon, saying nothing. Every moment silence has given me, when the ones I love have touched me without words. When I am whole, not explaining or answering or making something ugly sound pretty.

I have spent my entire life explaining myself to social workers, lovers, doctors, therapists, and readers. What if language has limits? Silence is the only way to hold the experiences of my life. I will keep writing, but sometimes, I want to be silent.

Silence is the only way a survivor can be loved. You don’t know what I’ve lived through. I can never tell you. I don’t want to tell you, to harm you with how I’ve been harmed. I will not give you what has been given to me.

I imagine another life for myself. In this life, I am a sweetness like honey and whiskey poured over brown sugar cubes. I am soft. I am held in the arms of a boy who smells like tree bark and old books. I move without hesitation. In this life, this life I will never touch, I am wild and free inside a body that knows nothing of surgery. Or rape. Or being beaten. I sing inside the bones I carry.

In this fantasy, I have moments of silence as well. The difference is in what the silence tells you. In this other body, this other girl I will never know, her silence is her love. It does not translate her pain but her wonder.

I dream of this silence like a lake dreams of the sky.