“What kind of world does the core of your brain expect that you, you personally, get to live in? Wendy wanted to be loved. However easily she might have abandoned or ruined her prospects, Wendy did still believe she would have love.”
— Casey Plett. Little Fish.
So my haunting and I sit kitty-corner in my grandparents’ living room. We make strange ghosts. Renee is on a blanket-draped black recliner two feet away from the front door. I’m the couch, stage left. Neither of us know, exactly, what life is, but know only that what life isn’t is practically obligated to follow it around, begging for candy.
I don’t know how to look a ghost, this ghost or any other, in the eye. I never learned. Instead, I see Renee––tall, bracelet-laden, jingling––with the rest of my senses. I smell her; she smelled the way every mom except my own smelled, like a stranger-woman whose hugs had teeth. She shared the often-grating accent my grandparents also possessed, situated as we were a mere mistake from Rhode Island, another moment from Massachusetts. I hear her walk through my grandparents’ door, jingling, fumbling with her keys and her handbag, crowing, “Saaah-raah!” with those long, Harvard Yard ahhs and I’d groan and ask for more orange juice. I feel the old chair sag slightly beneath her, the couch beneath myself and Grammy. There we sat, sometimes for hours––Renee crossing and uncrossing her pantyhosed legs, me sipping my Snapple, Grammy her black coffee––speaking of inane adult things until Grammy tired of my impatient foot at her ankle.
Renee came over too much, that’s what everyone said. That’s what I said, too, eager to return to a movie or dolls or the old book of Rorschach inkblots I found endlessly fascinating. She came over too much, and we all knew why: her loneliness––or, more precisely, her aloneness––was an open secret. It lingered at the backside of her becoming, a tired, dying thing that began long before cancer and hospice and all the rest. I don’t know if we had an obligation to alleviate this loneliness. I don’t think we could have if we tried.
Renee came out when I was in fourth grade. I wrote about it in my Girl Tech Password Journal, which I could open only using my voice. I suppose the entry went something like this: “Apparently [name] is becoming a girl, so she’s my ‘Aunt Renee’ now.” I approached my first exposure to trans identity with a child’s clueless disinterest: My father had sat me down for what he intended to be a Big Talk about Accepting Others and Supporting the Transgender Community, and How Do I Feel About This Big Change? Nothing about the situation seemed particularly far-fetched to me, and I told him that. I was nine. It hadn’t yet occurred to me to like or dislike trans people; I hadn’t, of course, given the category any thought at all.
On a practical level, very little about my relationship with Renee changed after she began transition. I still saw her on holidays and on her periodic visits to Grammy’s when I happened to also be over. I didn’t ask her too much about being trans, and it seems in hindsight that she wasn’t interested in answering: Grammy’s queries about her surgeries, her pithy welcome-to-womanhood comments after all manner of inconvenience, received minimal responses. She only sometimes corrected Grammy’s misgendering, receiving the anticipated reply that pronouns are hard and old dogs, new tricks. It was in one of these moments of correction that I first learned what, exactly, a pronoun was.
“It’s really not that hard to just say ‘she,’” I once told Grammy after a misstep.
“Old dogs, new tricks.” (Grammy is now aware of my genderlessness. She addresses all relevant mail to Ms. Sarah Cavar. I no longer respond).
Even as my own relationship with Renee remained relatively undisturbed, every other part of Renee, for lack of a better word, transformed. From what I recall of her pre-transition self, Renee had approximated the barren silhouette offered by conventional transition narratives. Most of what had filled her, apparently, were the expectations of her mother, Rita, a squat and grating woman who fortunately died in time for Renee to exist at all. Though first immobilized by grief, Renee went on to live: she took classes at the local community college, tried intramural cheerleading. She and several other trans women had a View-type talk show that aired on a local station. She began dating; in one case, she even considered adopting and co-parenting a child with a serious girlfriend. She also got her first tattoo: a monarch butterfly, to honor her emergence. Having shed the dead skin of her former self, she could finally take flight.
This is a familiar trans story, one whose celebratory trappings belie its fatal implications: under this framework, we may only exist at history’s expense. We are compelled to bear a narrative that guarantees our death as prerequisites to our living, that the caterpillar be obliterated before we might fly. We are told that we can only be one thing at one time, and that we must reject our old selves––our names, our body parts, even our relationships––in order to inaugurate and to prove complete a process of becoming-real, to live at all.
Such a demand is paradoxical: it requires us to prove our veracity before biomedically transitioning, yet deems biomedical intervention a prerequisite for trans veracity. Until recognition is granted, a trans person is conceptualized as empty, lacking, blank, yet at the same time, carrying beneath their dead skin the potential to live once more. Hormones were good to Renee; she gained weight as well as substance, was continuously, burdensomely thick with flashes of sweat and feeling. Yet hormones and surgeries equally constitute a mandate for trans people to forget / how we got here.
At times it seems trans history has followed the same linear trajectory demanded of our personal narratives, archiving into what Foucault calls “histories of the present,” gaining meaning as present circumstances shift. In some ways, the change is, indeed, undeniable: within Renee’s lifetime, trans identity went from unspeakable, unnameable aberration to a site of underground community to, by the end of her life, the sort of thing that––in spite, or perhaps because of increasingly reactionary legislation––you can buy kitsch pins and T-shirts about. Even 2008 to 2024 has been an eon in trans years: the 2008 murder of trans woman Angie Zapata was the first of its kind to be ruled a hate crime. Now, the especial vulnerability of transfeminine people to assault, rape, and murder confronts us with each successive tragedy.
Still, when my mother told me of Renee’s death, I asked a single, pleading, hopeful question: “Did the cancer just come back?”
Let this death be a thing without malice.
A lifelong Catholic, Renee believed in things like ghosts. She believed in sin, confession; body and blood and presumably, some final space named Salvation. She believed that when her body died, she would not end, but simply go someplace else, become something better. Or, if unlucky, perhaps remain a ghost.
I can’t claim any particular belief in an afterlife or judge-in-the-sky, but I think I do believe in hauntings: I believe that the past sits beside each of us like a ghostly familiar. More precisely, I believe in the archive, Derrida’s self-winding truth machine that invents what was in order to determine what is. The past never passes, but lingers, instead, as a trace; in the same way, I cannot help but revive Renee in my own story of self: “You’re way better at being a girl than I am,” I once told her. Of course she was. All this time, she had been a woman, and I was hardly a girl at all.
There is no christening the archive. It neither starts nor ends, existing instead in a continuous state of creative destruction. History, Derrida argues, is happening at the same time as we are, giving us the potential to reconfigure “before” and thus transform the future. This, however, comes at a steep cost: that the archive is ever-changing means that history will never be complete. We can examine the archive through what Foucault terms “archaeology,” a sort of historical palmistry in which we follow the traces inscribed by our past in order to better understand our present.
Our own unwitting archaeologists, trans people are tasked with tracking our myriad crossings, marking the moments that imbued us with gender. We are not selves, exactly, but accumulations of meaning: when I tell you to call me “they,” I am always speaking in plural: me, and them, and her, and all my ghosts. We are told that if we work together, we can unearth the source of me, discover the creation myth that will make the life I live today true. Yet even amid the compulsion to retrieve our selves from history and make sense of them, we charge toward futility. We dig and dent our skin, only to return and widen the scabs.
A dent is a type of haunting. So is regret. Renee haunts me in the moments when I least expect it; my archive regenerates as if through divine intervention. A debt is a type of haunting. The debt I carry is unpayable, even as my creditor, my lineage, walks beside me. I am followed by a cascade of critical memories that hardly feel my own. They return to me at random moments, demanding collection.
In June 2020, I met a memory on my way to a heretofore-inconceivable local protest against policing. “They’re just so . . . different, now,” Renee had said of two policemen who had recently pulled her over. Like me, she could track thin, blue lines beneath the skin of her wrist. “They just kept looking at my license, that’s a man, that’s a man, over and over, and wouldn’t let me go.”
“Well, did you do what they told you?” Grammy had asked.
“At first I wasn’t even sure why they pulled me over.”
Renee had had a Yankee Candle car freshener––obstructive, she was told––hanging from her rearview mirror, accompanied by a serendipitously-out taillight.
When I was thirteen, Renee added me on Facebook. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I balked at the thought of befriending an old person on social media, let alone a family member. Still, I accepted, and we exchanged brief pleasantries on Messenger before falling silent, again speaking only at annual holidays at my grandmother’s house. Always, she sat in the fuzzy black chair; when we ate, her bag took her place.
Within a year or so of our newfound Facebook friendship, I deactivated or abandoned all my “real life” social media. I became sarah, queer, nonbinary, they/them. No one could know. Family members were blocked as a matter of course; even my closest “real life” friends were blocked. I lived inside this lie for the entirety of high school and a bit of college, coming perhaps as close as I ever would to what Renee endured for the first sixty-odd years of her life, all the while taking pains to protect her from what I was.
Of course, I wonder if she knew, if she expected. (I meant to write “suspected.”) The question nips at my heels. During those years I was so tempted to reach out, to pull her aside at some gathering and explain the true breadth of our kinship. Each time, fear stymied my efforts. Soon I was so far from the child I had been, so rarely at my grandparents’ house anymore now that I could stay home alone, that my impulse to confess lost any sense of urgency. I believed my trans had little to do with hers, associated her, perhaps, with an uninspired past which my own “progressive” identity had since overcome. A past already dead.
Messenger: 0 minutes ago
renee i built you [MORE]
a house. well i built you an archive
to live in. so the landlord won’t have
to find new rules for you to break
anymore
[:::typing:::]
btw idk if you’re familiar with it, but i
actually have more in common with
you than just genes haha! im also
trans, well, im nonbinary, meaning
(for me, it’s an umbrella term) not
a guy or girl or any gender honestly,
so the more specific word would be
genderless. i don’t know if you’ve
encountered this in your own trans
circles as i imagine they are signifi
cantly different from my own haha
but i can send you resources and ex
amples of people like leslie feinberg,
who in 1993 wrote this book called
“stone butch blues” and even though
it’s older than I am, it really resonated
When I look in the mirror, I don’t see the relative of Renee. I see a Sarah that always knew her insufficiently, someone who never earned the opportunity to grieve, paraphrasing Blues’s Jess as I “wince and turn from the memory,” the holes she has left. I know it is infinitely easier to harbor regrets over things left undone than to have simply done in the first place, yet I can’t help but feel that my Renee-regrets extend beyond my own capacity for action. She chose to enter hospice secretly, not telling even Grammy, her cousin and closest living blood relative, about the decline of her health. Her choice was, I see now, preceded by a slow, strategic disengagement with the family that lacked the will, or the language, or the courage to see her. Renee lived into death the loneliness that gnawed at the corners of even her happiest moments, her six scrapped decades of isolation and frustration, the quotidian violences meted out upon her when she, at last, became the person she knew she was.
Trans death is less an individual demise than an emptying of worlds, a reminder of the selves we have been compelled to kill and a foreclosure of our future trans-formations. Were she alive today, would I tell her? Were I nine today, would I have known already the meaning of her “trans;” would I have seen trans inside myself, would I have had the courage to speak its name?
I will never know the answers to these questions, just as I will never remember Renee in the way I need to remember her. To do that would require her here, a possibility this act of archiving already renders unachievable. Indeed, this textual bond, in which I attempt to carve us a suitable history, is the best we’ve got. I am inclined to believe that I am the result of every trans person who has ever lived. Certainly, each of us carries some haunting, some grief-stricken lineage that begins before we are born and lingers long after every death. We are in many ways submerged by our foreparents’ thwarted attempts at connection, carrying an intergenerational loneliness our own joys cannot simply wash away. For me, this loneliness is close. It is family not chosen, but blood. Our ties to each other come in the form of unanswerable questions and elusive, self-immolating truths that leave us aching.
Yet, in my moments of hope, I wonder: If trans signifies a crossing, might it cross the space between life and death? Can it make haunting obsolete, thinking instead in lineage, even if that lineage is too big and frightening to meet all at once? When my trans feels alone, after all, I never feel that company is very far away: I call a friend and we are lonely together. I call an archive from my shelf (I first wrote “myself”), hold it up against the story of my body, trace the spaces we align. For all the pain, I still choose trans every single day. If I could wipe my slate clean, I’d choose it again, grief and loneliness and all, because if I am to be empty, I will be empty in the together. Somewhere in this tangled mess of DNA linking Renee and me and every other sneaking, disappearing gender lies the thread that keeps us all alive. For all our deaths, we are very difficult to kill. We scavenge. We are impossible to write.
***
Rumpus Original Art by Ian MacAllen
