The Trellis of the Maiden Rose
Growing up, I had a childhood friend who we will call Miriam. Miriam came from a very Orthodox Chasidic Jewish family. Miriam went to shul on Saturdays, wouldn't touch men, ate only certified kosher foods, and dressed modestly. Miriam eagerly shared Chasidic mystic teachings with us, often with a snobbish air. Most of our community was Jewish, but Miriam liked to show off that she was the most Jewish. Not a lot of people liked her, but she was one of my best and oldest friends.
At age 15, Miriam's family hired a matchmaker to find her a boy to marry upon turning 18. A boy from a prominent Orthodox family in Crown Heights was selected, and the marriage would be economically beneficial to both families. A few visits to Crown Heights were arranged to ensure they could get along, and then the marriage, too, was arranged.
I remember, upon returning from her trips to Crown Heights, Miriam would gush about her trip. I learned nothing about the boy who was to be her husband, but many things about Brooklyn. She loved the abundance of kosher food establishments. She loved not being the only girl dressed modestly. She loved the Yiddish on the street signs. She loved the subway, and the access to Broadway theaters. If anyone asked about if she was sure about this whole arranged marriage thing, she would just say that this is the tradition, this is how things are done, and as "non-observant Jews" we just wouldn't understand. My half-bred hippie chimera status would be used to dismiss me. We'd drop the issue. She was happy, so that would have to be enough.
Miriam would show us pictures of tichels and tell us about how excited she was to wear one when she gets married. She told us about how the day of a woman's wedding is the most holy day of her life, and your hair is the most holy part of your body, so married Jewish women must wear the tichel over their hair to keep the holiness inside. Miriam loved this tradition and found it very beautiful. The matriarch of our community was an old Israeli woman—the daughter of a Haganah general—and she found Miriam's gushing about marriage to be tiring and anachronistic. She would ask Miriam what she wanted to do with her life, and Miriam would say she wanted to be a wife and mother. And what if that doesn't happen so soon as you think? The wedding is already planned. Miriam has already met the man she will marry. She knows exactly what day it will happen.
Well, at 16, Miriam developed a crush on a goyish boy. He was a remarkably tall boy of Norwegian descent, and not Jewish in the slightest. Let's call him Henrik. She confessed her crush, and he said he didn't want to date a girl who he couldn't touch and who was arranged to be married off to a near-stranger when she turned 18. Miriam would tell me she did not approve of my inter-married parents, and now she was the one with the crush on a non-Jew. Hormones will do this to you. She wanted Henrik enough that she decided she would break the prohibition on touching men. She kissed him. I saw it myself, it happened in the hall, they sat on the floor across from each other, for it was forbidden to be alone in a closed room with a boy before marriage, and then they were sitting next to each other, and then their hands touched, he helped her stand, she was nervous, and then she kissed him. Then they saw me, having seen them, and I turned away.
Miriam broke off her arranged marriage. Miriam's parents were furious. The matchmaker was very expensive, and do you think it was free to take her to Brooklyn all those times? They stopped talking to her beyond what was absolutely necessary.
One summer, I drove my mom's car up to Concord to visit her. I got a text from Miriam.
Miriam: Can u get marshmallows?
Shel: Regular marshmallows?
Miriam: y. 4 rice krispies
Shel: r u sure?
Miriam: Get marshmallows plz
In her kitchen, she savored the sticky melted marshmallows, even going so far as to lick the wooden spoon. On her face was heavenly acquiescence to Yetzer Hara. I didn't grow up keeping kosher, so to me, it was just rice krispies treats. I didn't understand marshmallows as being particularly indulgent or exciting.
I learned that day, that she was sleeping on the couch downstairs. Miriam's parents took away her bedroom, because she couldn't be trusted with privacy if she had a goyish boyfriend. All of Miriam's things were strewn about in the enclosed porch as a storage space. She seemed to take it on the chin. Her father came home and silently walked straight past us, as if we weren't even there. My presence had been a violation of yichud—the prohibition of two unmarried people of the opposite sex being alone together in a room. The Shulchan Aruch does not have exceptions for gay best friends or closet trans girls.
At 17, Henrik cheated on Miriam and they broke up. Miriam's parents were not sympathetic and did not return her bedroom privileges. Miriam became obsessed with Henrik. She gave up everything for him, and to him it was casual teenage exploration. She lost her Crown Heights young motherhood future, and had nothing to replace it with. Her life was to grow along a trellis, planned out before her since she was born with a uterus, and she was to bloom and blossom in the shape prescribed. A beautiful Jewish mother, her hair wrapped in tichel in public. She had nothing to cling to.
Henrik and I were accepted to the same liberal arts college. Her gay best friend since childhood and ex-boyfriend were to go to the same college, so she applied too. It was somewhere to go. Her parents clearly did not want her staying with them any long and had plans for kicking her out at 18. Her application was rejected. She did not demonstrate a comprehensive education or passion for learning that was necessary for a rigorous college where students must design their own concentration of study. She had been so focused on learning the skills of homemaking. She learned to make five-strand braided challah bread, to sew, to clean, and to mother. She knew a lot, but none of it was academic. She had no career aspirations. She had never considered what she would want to do in adulthood besides being a traditional wife and mother.
Miriam's parents sent her away to Texas to live with a distant relative and attend community college. She started a blog to stay in touch with her old friends from Boston. Many of us had done this, since we were all going our separate ways. We could update each other on our adventures. Most of our blogs did not remain frequently updated for long. The age of social media and smartphones arrived, and we all had Facebook now. I was so busy and caught up in college, I forgot to share with my friends back home. Miriam continued to blog, and I read her updates. She had found a new friend group of frum young women attending her community college who all had failed to find husbands immediately out of high school. They had shabbat together weekly and hoped to meet future husbands in the local Orthodox community. She was returning to her traditional lifestyle, and her parents were slowly starting to forgive her. According to her blog, she was starting to be happy again, now she that was reconnecting with the Orthodox community without the baggage of her past transgressions.
Her behavior on Facebook told a different story. She was bitter, and jealous, of the exciting college lives that Henrik and I were living. She posted passive aggressive comments under my statuses and frequently asked me how Henrik was doing over text messages. Had I seen him? Did he have a new girlfriend? I didn't see him much. We occupied very different circles on campus, but everyone knew of Henrik's dorm hall's rumored orientation orgy. I visited the lounge on their hall, in which they had put a full-sized mattress, and they had made a chart of who everyone on the hall had slept with, and made a competition out of who could sleep with the most. This man was never going to settle down with an Orthodox Jewish woman. Next to his name were both men and women, which he said was entirely for scoring some sort of merit badge for bicurious exploration.
Eventually, the jealous comments evolved into political disputes. She didn't really agree with the LGBT lifestyle so much anymore, even though her lifelong gay best friend had been there to comfort her when her parents partially disowned her. She was becoming a conservative Texan woman. She liked guns now. I told her it wasn't my fault she didn't get accepted to college. We never spoke again.
Miriam probably has children now. I'm sure she became the wife and mother she "wanted" to be. I never heard her express career aspirations or a desired college major. She was raised to grow along one path and the one time she questioned that path, her trellis collapsed and she was left with nothing.
It's not true entirely that she had never had an aspiration. We had once formed a small creative writing workshop with another friend of ours. She, too, had wanted to become a writer. She loved Broadway musicals and theater. We had once written a play together. She could have written something beautiful, I think. Her blog was not poorly written in terms of prose. She stopped writing altogether when she stopped talking to her old friends back home. She didn't pursue her one true passion she could call her own. It wasn't important to her. Materially, she was coerced into one economic role since birth, and couldn't consider another.
By contrast, here I am now, still blogging.
If Born a Maiden Rose, Her Path Constrained
Like every transgender woman, I have thought about the life I would have lead were I born as a cisgender woman. The body I would have, and all the things I could have had in life. It is easy to think of how life would be easier without the barriers we face. To see fertility and motherhood only as a path denied to us, but to miss the blessings of the paths we took instead.
When I think about my friend Miriam, I can see more honestly the life I would have lead had I been born a cisgender girl. Now, of course, if my parents had a cisgender daughter, that would simply be a different person. The DNA would be substantially different enough that it would be hard to argue that this person is still me. The chain reaction of differences would be insurmountable to predict.
But for the sake of simplicity, let's assume I would have the same relationship with my parents, the same medical and mental problems, more or less the same non-gender related things happen to me through childhood, I form the same interests, and I ultimately go to the same college.
Instead of requesting the LGBT dorm hall with a bunch of trans people, I request the substance-free dorm hall—I'd had hang-ups around drug use back then. I hang out with the straight nerds. I can remember many straight nerdy girls on campus on these halls and the shitty mediocre boyfriends they acquired freshman year and broke up with junior year. The same would happen to me. I'd end up dating some nerdy guy who gave me attention and it would feel good to pair up with someone.
At the end of my sophomore year, my parents had last-minute decided they weren't going to come pick me up from the dorms and I'd have to find my own way. They just didn't feel like making the 90 minute drive each way. I didn't have any money and no time to figure out a new plan. The dorms closed and I was stuck without housing. In the real timeline, my queer and trans community was there for me and already prepared with networks of mutual aid to find me a place to stay. Trans women often lose housing or the support of their parents, and we are used to this, and we step up to be the family we need from each other in times of crisis. Over two weeks I stayed at three or four different places and then landed at a summer apartment with two other trans women I had never met who also connected me with an easy to acquire job to help me pay the rent. This was how I ended up working at a call-center and sleeping on a dog bed in an empty room with no other furniture. I did manage to acquire a mattress to go on the floor, but everything just stayed on the floor. It was short-term housing until the dorms re-opened and it was depressing—but it was my first foray into financial independence and living on my own. It was the first major instance of the support I've received from the big extended family of queer and trans people, which I have sought to pay forward in my life.
What would have happened to me if I was cisgender? My primary support network would not have been the extended mesh of trans people in town, but my mediocre college boyfriend. I would have gone and stayed with him at his parents' house, perhaps in the suburbs, in Connecticut. I'd sleep in his childhood bedroom, old stains on the carpet, and a noisy old AC unit in the window. The bed would be a bit two small for two people, but we'd make it work. I'd be so grateful to have been saved from my situation. My boyfriend's family would seem to care about me more than my own. I'd shrink myself to be small and unintrusive. I would try to fit into his life seamlessly. This would be my most dependable source of material stability now, and advocating for myself in the relationship would become difficult. We would trauma bond—maybe become codependent. We'd stay together, and I'd become his wife and mother of his children, in a mediocre marriage to the first guy I dated, my rock and sole supporter, and if he was abusive or miserable to be with I'd be stuck and isolated. I'd have kids to care for. I have no reason to think being cisgender would have made my family situation better. I have no reason to think being cisgender would have made my autism any easier to deal with or helped me with my struggles to connect with others. In many ways, being trans is how I made so many friends who I could learn social skills from. The trans community has a lot of neurodivergence and I fit in. I can't say the same for cisgender heterosexual society.
There is another possibility. I'd sink all my time into that relationship only for it to end at graduation, and I would be without a support network entirely. Maybe it would have ended even sooner, when I started developing bipolar symptoms junior year. Would I have been able to move back in with my parents and tolerate being the adult child at home? Would I have been able to find financial independence? I would have been remarkably lonely. All my college friends would move away. The path of heterosexuality railroading me to motherhood would constrain my choices and when that path hit a dead end I'd be without much to show for it.
Everyone would ask me when I was going to find a husband and find children. It would have to be a conscious choice to not be a wife and mother. Careers are secondary under hetero-patriarchy for a woman. I would be a lonely traumatized Autistic woman struggling to get by. Would this really be an improvement? Would I feel that much better about my body? Do fat cisgender women feel that much better about their bodies than I do about mine, having never had to carve it to their will?
An Orchard Aspen, Rotting Within
I cannot fathom the inner worlds of men. The more I talk to cisgender heterosexual men, the more I am baffled why anyone would choose to be one. They are afforded immense power and privilege over women—yet the emotional repression is impossible for me to imagine.
Men tell me that they do not know what they are feeling, what they want, or how to communicate. A convenient helplessness, but it seems sincere. They brood, and stay silent, and leave no hints at their desires or feelings. Eventually they become lonely and depressed, or turn to anger as their only emotional outlet. They have no sense of personal aesthetic nor do they even tend to their personal health and hygiene.
I cannot possibly imagine choosing to live as a man, even if I had not had gender dysphoria. I could never have chosen that path. My attraction to men feels purely biological for it seems to me the worse of two options. I would always have been gender non-conforming no matter what.
Sterile Plants, Flowering Still
I was a gender non-conforming child, and everyone could see it. I was AFAB: assigned fruit at birth. If any expectations were put on me, it was that I would enjoy musical theater (and I do, is that nature or nurture?). I was never expected to have children someday. Nobody knew what life would be like for me. The main concerns were if I would contract HIV and if I was "too fat to be gay."
The unspoken autism, too, was a concern. Whenever I succeeded at anything, however minor, I never heard "I knew you could do it" but "I didn't expect you could do it" or even an outright "I expected less from you." As a "lifer" in my cult, it was expected we would somehow save the world as a cohort, but that path involved having children, and I could not have children.
I dreamed small. I dreamed of someday splitting a small urban apartment with just one person who loves me. I identified going to college as a path to getting out of my chaotic and dysfunctional household, so despite the discouragement from the cult, I worked hard to go to college. I often thank John and Hank Green for this. My parasocial relationship with these two teacher-paternal figures, and their free Crash Course educational series, were essential to believing I could get into college and learning the skills necessary to do it. With no math education, nobody else believed it was worth it for me to try. The cult ideology was staunchly anti-college, and some of the adults actively attempted to sabotage my efforts through tactics like writing disparaging "recommendation letters" discouraging colleges from accepting me. But still, I succeeded, in spite of the expectations around me.
When I got to college, I still had it in me that I could do my part as a Lifer to save the world. I could spread the ideology of the cult to young adults who could have children. I would try to twist the logic of Anarchism to gradually guide my classmates into agreeing that the best thing you can do for a child is to leave them alone unsupervised in the woods. Instead, I was soon converted to Anarchism, and began to transition genders at age 18.
In the early 2010s, the expectations for young trans women were bleak. Forget wife and mother, the expectation was sex work, or if you were lucky and privileged enough, freelance web design (remote, of course, so nobody could see your face.) There was a false belief that we would all die before turning 35. Sometimes, this statistic would say it was only trans women of color, and other times it was all of us. The self-pitying narrative of the doomed trans woman was all-encompassing in early 2010s trans culture and many girls did not survive it.
I began to see my future as short-lived. I would martyr myself for the cause of social justice. Self-preservation was never considered except as a means to continuing the work of the revolution. The conversion from Anarchism to Marxism-Leninism only worsened this attitude. "Self-care" is petite bourgeois. We were to be the vanguard, soldiers, stained by the original sins of colonialism and only redeemable through our own blood shed for the cause. Many trans women joined this cause, for we believed we were doomed to die young anyway—we might as well die for communism.
Living as though you will certainly die young is not the best for your health, and many of us acquired a particular set of disabilities and chronic illnesses—not always identical but with a common thread being that they were induced by chronic stress. This furthered the belief that we would have short lifespans. We were but day lilies: briefly blooming bright and vibrant, yet already wilting.
And then, in 2019, Katie Herzog debunked the myth of the 35-year lifespan. For a brief moment, we began to reckon with the possibility that we might all live to be old. With a doubled lifespan, what would we do with all that time?
Well, the pandemic hit, and again, the future was shrouded in shadow. Our movements burned out and died. The pandemic never ended but the world continued on. As we began to emerge from the chaos, we had to reckon once again with the shocking reality that we would, all of us, live quite possibly another forty years, maybe more, if we just tried, for once, to actually keep ourselves alive.
Having never planned to live this long, set out before us was a wide open field. No trellises, tilled rows, raised beds, or crops. Capitalism was not going to collapse before retirement, and long-term plans needed to be made. At this time, cisgender women began to speak of "The Great Divorce" as so many women realized they had only married a man because they had been trained to grow in that direction. Lots of women, cisgender and transgender, began to reckon with crafting a life from scratch.
Wildflowers, Free to Grow
Our gardens lie beyond the fields of expectations. — Raquel Willis, the Risk it Takes to Bloom.
We are traumatized, disabled, and burn out, but laid out before us now is a clear open canvas upon which to paint. It is easy to see birth without a uterus as a tragedy, a loss of the future so many of us felt must be right. It is easy to see dysphoria as a curse that prevents us from ever being happy claiming the power that many outsiders believe should have been our birthright. Many of us can attest to having already "failed" at being boys before we ever became women. I never saw it as a failure, for I had never even tried. I had never wanted to conform to begin with.
Since finally admitting that I feel no sexual or romantic attraction towards women, I have been exploring the world of heterosexuality, and as I do, I increasingly see my transition as a blessing more than a curse. Heterosexual cisgender men and women struggle against the constraints of their trellises. Thinking off-script is a struggle when they have never considered how else things could be. Surely, someone must be the man and someone else the women. Surely, relationships must function one way, and proceed "in order" towards cohabitation, babies, and becoming grandparents. Rarely, do they tell me what they want, only what they should want. They speak not of us, and what we wish to do together, but the "next stage of life" and if they are ready to "proceed" with it. Cisgender female coworkers often assume that getting married will mean de-prioritizing their careers to become pregnant with the children of their future husbands. Even very left-leaning women will fail to question that this must be the shape they grow into.
I find every return to queer spaces to be a breath of fresh air—even with our exhausting eternal cycles of discourse and incessant bickering. Here, people are free to shape themselves however they please. There is a freedom to grow wild and gnarly. I find myself wishing to steal away every straight friend I make and show them the world of wildflowers. I want them to see the range of possibilities, beyond expectations, and they don't even need to have gay sex or transition to do it. I want them to ask themselves what they want and to send them out into the wilderness to pursue it.
Raquel Willis writes in her memoir, the Risk it Takes to Bloom, that it is a good thing when one person's transition is different from another's. The freedom to be unique is a blessing. The ability to grow into a new type of plant not seen before by any. Even though I am a more traditionally feminine presenting heterosexual woman, I am still often recognizing the ways that my transition has lead me to a mental freedom not afforded to cisgender peers. I can see alternatives where they see fates. I am still, ultimately, non-conforming, even when I try to conform. Perhaps it's autism, perhaps it's transition. I think it's wonderful, in the end.
Most trans people face significant socioeconomic barriers due to the stigma against our people. This substantially constrains the paths they can take in life. It can be hard, under such circumstances, to still view transition as a blessing. But we know that traditional wives, however socioeconomically blessed their husbands may be, are far more controlled and restricted than we are. Things will go well for them, so long as they do find "Mr. Right" and he stays alright for seventy years. We know that, far too often, this is not what happens.
Miriam could have married into a wealthy family in Crown Heights, until one small act of disobedience cost her everything. Had she married, would the marriage to a near-stranger been good for her? Would there have been another act of minor disobedience leading to abuse or divorce? What if she had been completely obedient and servile, is that a good life? Would that ensure she would not be abused?
In 2024, Orthodox women in Kiryas Joel launched a sex strike to push a local woman's husband to allow her to get a divorce. This is the world of traditional gender. It is thanks to Feminism that more secular women can be gender non-conforming enough to have economic freedom from men. Black women in America, many of whom have never had the option not to work due to socioeconomic factors, have historically been perceived as more masculine, partially due to this gender non-conforming behavior of working a job to make ends meet. Even when cisgender women do have freedom, it is due to gender non-conformity, and they are often socially punished for it.
Transgender people are already gender non-conforming and already punished. We therefore already have all this freedom. What more do we have to lose? Our rights are already being stripped as quickly as we won them, what difference does it make if we try to conform to gender more? By transitioning, we are already as non-conforming as we can get. What difference would it make if our relationships were more traditional? What difference would it make if our sex lives were more vanilla? We have a freedom the cisgender people cannot fathom, even within our oppression.
When we chose transition over dysphoric conformity, we chose to live. We choose to live, and then wallow in self-pity for our choice of life? We choose to live a life of freedom, and then spend all our time consumed in a narrative of being doomed and miserable? The morose humor of transfeminine culture circa the 2010s has been fading, and for that I am grateful, but still so many white trans women act as if we are the pariahs of the world. We chose the freedom to be whoever we want to be, and we should embrace and celebrate that freedom. A narrative of trans joy and beauty is what shows that our choice to live was worth it. It is through seeing how happy their loved ones have become that cisgender people come to embrace and support the transgender people in their lives. It is through trans joy and community that we can lift ourselves out of the swamp of depression. We do not need to see ourselves as tragedies, lacking the freedom to pursue what cisgender women have fought to be free from. We can embrace what we have, instead of what we lack.
I have forty more years to live, maybe more. What do I wish to do with them? I want to work towards overcoming this brain injury. I want to write and publish a book. I want to build community. I want to do my best as a librarian to promote literacy in my city. I want to fall in love. I want to read books with my eyes again. I want to continue knowing what I want, and who I want to be. I want to continue to shape myself into the forms that I desire.
I want to see a field of wildflowers, blooming.
Wild off the trellis, we will bloom
Upon a trellis grows the maiden rose
Watch her vines, they creep up on the slats
She climbs to sunshine leaning on the road
Leading down a single structured path.
Conform, she does, to shapes she never chose
From seed to bud for she is but a rose
The garden has a plan that's presupposed
An ornament, so fragrant to the nose
See, the orchard aspen, tall and strong
Ghostly fingers reaching from the ground
The plan, to cut, in two
A box of matches
To burn to light a candle melting down
Stiff and stoic up the aspen goes
Never bending, soft, or prone to heat
Rotting from the heart, a tree still standing
Lost among the gridded zebra grove
From the trellis falls the feral bush
Her thorns cut in
to earth
to rest
to ground
Across the garden reaches roots and branches
Taking wild novel shapes
Her leaves unkind
Come wild insects here to drink her nectar
Come wild roses' pollen here to mix
Come wild water tinting petals blooming
Colors coming out to see the world
Come gusts of wind and storms
Unto the orchard
Weak rotted wood is blown upon the ground
Moss and lichen frenzy to the whale fall
Morels and turkey tails find home to bloom
The orchard grows and overgrows
Abandoned
Fallen leaves will mulch and shelter life
A wild rose will climb upon the aspen
Soil rich, the sunlight shining through
Must we grow along the path before us?
Destined to be shaped and burned alight?
I care not for these archways
or these granite castle walls
Wild off the trellis, we will bloom