Robin Gow: "On Visibility, and/or a T4T Love Poem" (Lyric Essay)
On the first night we sleep together, you cup my face in your hands and say, “I see you. I really see you,” and I know you’re talking about my gender and I believe you so deeply my body shakes.
I say, “I see you too,” and you cry and I cry and we both hold each other on my too-small twin bed.
You are the first other trans person I date and you have bright purple hair the same purple as mine. We lie on stomachs and invent pronouns and, alone with each other, we feel no shame or fear at all in letting ourselves explore what language could reify us.
What if I told you I only feel truly visible with other trans people?
I go to Longwood Gardens with you and your family. We kiss in front of flowers and in every bud and blossom we bury the vibrancy of our bodies. I take too many and not enough pictures.
Every Friday night for a semester I drive to Philly to kiss you. I kiss you so much your cat gets jealous and we have to lock him out of the bedroom. His paw under the door. We laugh. I ask to touch your chest—to trace your scars.
Every year on Trans Visibility Day, I feel grateful for trans people. I scroll and like a bouquet of our posts. I want a photo album of all our proud trans pictures. I want to stand in a room together. I want to know who first made you feel real.
At the Trans Wellness Conference in Philadelphia, we talk about security and someone says, “Anyone could just walk in here with a gun.” The windows are glass and a crowd of people use a trans flag to block the protestors’ hate signs.
On your dorm room floor, we fold laundry together. Your shirts smell like lavender and no matter how many times you show me, I can’t get the folding right. We talk about top surgery and chests and binders. You take me to your college’s theater building where you play me a song on the piano and then we dance to no sound at all.
I think I’m no longer interested in being visible for cis people.
We only text, but it feels like more. I can almost convince myself we kiss once or twice. Three cancelled dates and we still follow each other on Instagram. You’re breathtaking. I’m sorry.
At the book store we look at horror novels and I buy too many poetry books. Afterwards we walk up Main Street and I tell you how handsome I think you are.
For too much of my life I have been trying to make us legible to cis people and in the process, I’ve carved myself down smaller and smaller. I’ve broken my language to try to make myself visible for cis people.
In his essay Look! No Don’t! Jamison Green writes, “I lose a bit more control of the use of my own story every time I tell it.” The first time I read this, I circle it five times and write the quote on a sticky note to paste above my desk. Below the note I write another asking, “What would it mean to get control back?”
We meet in a parking lot in the rain. We watch a terrible movie and don’t get through the first scene before we start making out.
I ask you if you want to wear the strap or me, and you say you want me to—you help me put it on and take a picture of me in it. Leather harness tight against my thighs.
At Starbucks, we revel at how the barista calls our real names. The AC is freezing so we go sit in my humid, green 1993 Volvo and talk about living in the middle of nowhere with other trans people.
After my top surgery you and me watch Yuri On Ice every night while I lie propped up in bed. You hug me and I feel like a real body. We stare curiously at my drains as they fill little cups with bright red liquid. You wake up in the middle of the night with me when, sick and dizzy, I feel like fainting.
Today I’m thinking about how visibility often means danger in the sight lines of cis people, but visibility between other trans people is a site of revolutionary love.
I’m asking myself today what it means to de-center cis people in how I explain my own ideas about my gender and my body.
We hike up my favorite trail, and autumn is arriving almost just for us. Red leaves. Orange leaves. We take pictures of each other. I want to hug you but don’t and regret it till you leave and my apartment is empty again.
I want to kiss you the whole time you’re standing in my kitchen. We bake thumb-print cookies and talk about our tattoos, and spring feels possible even this early in March.
This is less a manifesto and more a reminder to myself—that what feeds me is love between trans people. Kissing love and board game love and footprint love and three-dates love and romantic friendship love and future love and the love of trans people from centuries past.
I’m sorry to steal the words you gave me years ago, but I’m saying, “I see you. I really see you.”
Currently, across the country, there are anti-transgender bills being proposed in numerous states. Please take action. Here is a legislative tracker to see bills across different states. Click here to combat anti-trans legislation being passed in Arkansas. Additionally, we encourage white people (trans or cis) to contribute directly to trans people of color to honor Trans Visibility Day. Seek out mutual aid groups or nonprofits in your area to find places to contribute (such as CBTEL). Our movement was built by Black trans people and we should always remember that. These bills disproportionately impact trans people of color and contribute towards a culture that leads to transphobic violence.
Robin Gow is a trans and queer poet and Young Adult author from and living in rural Pennsylvania. They are the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books 2020) and the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press 2019). Their first essay collection, Blue Blood, is forthcoming with Nasiona Publishing House, and their first Young Adult novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions, is forthcoming with FSG Books for Young Readers.
Robin Gow’s poetry collection Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy is available from Tolsun Books. When you purchase it using the link below, ORP receives a small commission from the sale (without adding to your cost).