Lidia

It wasn't as hard as you'd think, at least not for the reasons you'd think.

When I met Lidia and fell in love, I was perplexed. I hadn't ever fallen in love with a woman before and it seemed unlikely that I would suddenly do so at the age of 24 with no warning. I wasn't closeted, there wasn't some secret well of repressed longing in my heart. Or rather, there was, but it wasn't for what you'd think. It wasn't a repressed longing for the partner I knew I wanted but could never have for fear of what others would think of me. But there was a longing in my heart, and I was terribly afraid of it. This much is true.

Falling in love with Lidia was revelatory and confusing. It never stopped being revelatory and confusing, even across all five years of our relationship. The one time our love descended from those heights to something I could almost categorize neatly alongside the rest of my understanding of my identity was the time most people think must have been the most challenging, and that's why I feel I have to be emphatic in explaining. It wasn't as hard as you'd think, at least not for the reasons you'd think, when Lidia, two years into our relationship, came out to me as transgender.

She told me over coffee. At that point I still used that pronoun to describe her. Gender doesn't exist for cisgender folks like me, so it was difficult to understand. I'm masculine, she said, stretching to the depths of her soul for words to reach me. It isn't well-studied yet, how this happens, what it is. But I've always felt it, always. Now I finally have a name for it.

It wasn't easy to understand but it was easy to accept. I looked at her face, the smooth, olive-toned skin, a deep-red curl touching her cheekbone. She smiled and closed her eyes and -- I don't know how to explain this -- I saw her shift. One moment she was Lidia my girlfriend and the next moment under the same light she was someone slightly different. Not male but masculine. Still her, but also, somehow, him. All hail the mutability of perception and the power of an idea to twist it.

...

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Jennifer McCharen writes nonfiction and poetry, including translation. Her video work has appeared on MSNBC, and her writing has appeared in Tiferet, the Tampa Monocle, Elan Magazine, and is forthcoming in the anthology MOTIF-4. She currently serves as Translation Editor for Lunch Ticket, and currently resides in Montgomery, Alabama where she works to fight voter suppression.