Extra: Fluid Dynamics II

A yearly Pride conversation with my best friend

Thanks for reading my newsletter! All opinions expressed here are strictly my own. Find me on X, Instagram and Bluesky. I’d also love it if you shared this letter with a friend. This is an extra edition of Ultracold, a regularly scheduled Media/Diet roundup will run on July 14th.

This Pride month, please consider donating to an organization such as the Trans Youth Emergency Project, the Transgender Law Center or the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, or directly, materially supporting a trans person in your community.

FLUID DYNAMICS II*

It's June again, Pride month is nearly over, New York is scorching hot, and I'm back in my living room speaking with my best friend

alex

. Last summer, we sat down to discuss identity, style, and how those things map onto the way we move through the world and interact with people, and publishing the transcript of that conversation was one of my favorite Ultracold dispatches of the year. Because of that, and because I fully believe that queerness thrives in friendship, companionship and community, as one last seasonal indulgence, I wanted to record another one of our chats.

Reflecting on last year’s conversation, I am struck by Alex talking about Cancer placements in their astrological chart and the meaning they derive from that as a sense of change, but also expansiveness and steadiness in their life. Speaking of the ocean, they told me:

“It's never the same, and yet it is constant.”

Those two seemingly opposing forces feel representative of where we find ourselves a year later. We are both restless and feeling out the edges of a metamorphosis, and we are both searching within ourselves for what constants might serve as handholds, or fixed points, throughout whatever happens next.

The past six months have been marked by an intensified wave of hostility towards trans people in the United States and many of us have found a sense of safety and refuge in our kin. I am really grateful that what the friendship of people like Alex, another masculine-leaning nonbinary person, has meant for me has been more than solace. It has also been an inspiration and encouragement to not let myself get neither bitter nor stagnant, and to stay as big and as full of power as the ocean. Below, we speak about how we have changed in the past year, about getting dressed, searching for masculinity, grappling with history and the terrifying yet joyous ordeal of having a body.

Alex and me this past February while I was selling Valentines Day cakes at a beloved neighborhood sandwich shop

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan: Let’s begin with an obvious question: what about your presentation in the world, or how you're thinking about putting yourself together, has changed since last June?

Alex C.: Last year, we talked a lot about clothing and style. At that point last year, I was feeling very lost in terms of style. Partially because I've gained a significant amount of weight over the past few years and with body changes like that comes disillusionment, to a certain extent. But this year, fortunately, I think that questioning is over. I kind of know what I want to look like. Or rather, I'm okay with not knowing some days and trying different things out. What about you?

KPC: I think I've written about style more than in past years, which I guess means that I'm thinking about it. I have such a uniform sense of style, it's been pretty fixed how I show up, especially at work. But I've been trying to be more okay with moments where I am not in that uniform, on weekends when maybe I go somewhere without makeup, or maybe I'm out in track pants. It's been about letting go of some of the rigidity. Maybe that is my own way of being more open to questioning.

AC: This is especially top of mind because we were just deep diving into our own respective historical Instagram posts. And both of us used to dabble way more heavily into the feminine side of things, I would say, in different ways. It was kind of shocking to just see how starkly womanly we both looked at a certain point. This too is partially because I was skinnier back then and it's easier in our culture to read skinnier people as more feminine. The fatter I've gotten, the less feminine I've perceived myself. This is kind of a chicken and egg conversation, like, when does feeling boyish start and when does it end? And how is that impacted by things like weight or muscle?

KPC: I am heavier now than when I was more girly, for sure, but I'm heavier in part because I put on muscle and I wanted to be more muscular to work out how I would feel in a more masculine body. Then, having muscle has also made me feel more masculine, which I guess was the point. It does feel like you can't escape the actual material reality of your body. You can kind of conceptualize your gender or gender presentation, in your head, there's a thought, but eventually you have to confront the fact that you actually have a body.

AC: I've been thinking about lately, how sometimes you see someone, or you know someone, and you're looking at them and you're like, this is how they're supposed to look.

KPC: I think people have an expression of body that just clicks with them, then they're more emotionally at home in that body. And you can see that. When did you first feel that “this is what I was supposed to look like” feeling?

AC: When I first got my hair cut short! It was like “oh, this is what I've been intending to do since I was 13, and I didn't have words for it!”

KPC: I remember my parents cutting my hair really short when I was younger, when I was six or seven. And there are all these photos of me wearing a tracksuit, doing woodwork with my dad at our cabin in the woods, or going hiking. And I don't know if I always liked the haircut back then, but I remember feeling very free, running through the woods with my dad. How can I go back to that place? I'm not saying that cutting my hair short gets me back to that place, but I cut my hair short in the last year of college, it's been a really long time, and I’ve felt no need to change it. And there is some resonance here, this good childhood memory that shares a visual characteristic with what feels good about me now. I think these things have to feed into each other at least a little.

AC: I think the first glimmer of myself that I saw in anything was through anime, specifically through gay male fanfiction characters and whatever. Actually, I showed a picture of Austria, from the cursed anime Hetalia to my barber, and that's kind of the haircut I have now. Gay fanfiction was so formative to my identity, that's the first time I ever felt my sexuality, that was the first time I ever felt like I wanted to be like someone. I feel like part of why I was so confused for so long is because I have had this weird, tentative attraction to men for a long time, but it never felt right, so I ended up identifying as a lesbian, and then that didn't feel right, because my gender wasn't right. Now, as I've gotten closer to feeling boyish, this attraction to men is coming back up, and it all circles back to anime fan fictions where I was reading about gay men. You know what I mean?

KPC: I don't, because I think I don't swing that way. [Laughter] But I think I understand what you mean: everything feels incoherent until you find the one missing piece, which is gender, and then the puzzle locks together.

AC: Or it’s like a corner of the puzzle, yeah.

KPC: I have had this thought before, what if I had grown up somewhere that wasn't a very Catholic country in Eastern Europe? Would I have grown up to be primarily a lesbian? I remember, as a teenager being pretty repulsed and scared of the idea of heterosexual sex and never having boy crushes, trying to talk myself into having boy crushes and then falling in love with my best friend. I don't think I was sexually attracted to him, he was just my best friend who I liked a lot because we were very similar. But then there are men that I'm attracted to, because I did marry a man who, again, is similar to me temperamentally.

AC: I'm not trying to erase your bisexuality. [Laughter] But it’s interesting to think what culture you are coming from as someone stepping into trans masculine identity? I think it's fun to think about us coming from different approaches and ending up in a similar place.

KPC: It’s a really interesting question of what masculinity means if you're coming to it as a 30 year old or even a 20 year old. I've spent a lot of my life trying to be feminine, even though it's always been very unintuitive to me. Of course, there's so many different ways to be a woman, but I had always had this real distinction in my head of, like, real women feel like X and I feel like Y. So I need to work on turning my Y into X. [Laughter] I didn't mean to make this into a biology joke, sorry. [Laughter]

AC: I think it was something worse. It was a math problem. [Laughter]

KPC: But I think now I’m at the edge of the other side of that, where it’s more about what does it mean to be masculine to me? I think, again, about my partner, a man that I genuinely like. And he’s been so accepting of me and he exists in a queer way in a lot of queer spaces, so what are the differences between us other than anatomy?

AC: I think this brings into question for me the transphobic argument of “why can't you just be a tomboy woman? Why do you have to be transmasc?” There’s so much of that TERF-y argument out there.

KPC: Whole books have been written about the fear of transmasculine identities taking away our butch girls, but last I checked, butch lesbians are still out there. I have met them. [Laughter] People who make this argument, maybe they're just not hanging out with enough butches, and also making this ahistorical argument, because some of the butches were always transmascs, and the language was extremely different, right? People used to use butch as a gender marker back in the day too.

AC: Sometimes I have this, I think dysphoric thought, of “am I just really a butch?” But I think at least part of my gender has to be cultural. I didn't ever really identify with lesbian culture that I encountered, and what I did identify with was the nonbinary people or trans men. The people that I was seeing online or interacting with in real life, it was like “Oh, there's a culture difference and I fit in more with this culture. What does that say about me?” But I’m now also coming to a point where I have to stop looking so externally and look more internally.

KPC: I think those two things are never fully decoupled. It really took for me to, like, move to New York and meet other nonbinary people who just had normal lives. That was that cultural part where I could say that these are people I have a lot in common with and they've found words for the feeling that I didn't know where to put.

There's this transphobic myth of “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” where everyone becomes trans just because their friends are trans. Where it's a social contagion, a hysteria, and not a real thing. And I worry that the adults among us, we sometimes over-correct, we're afraid of being accused of doing something just because our friends are doing it, or just because we saw it on the internet.

AC: But how else do you learn?

KPC: Right, seeing your friends is extremely influential, because it shows you that it's possible. The point absolutely stands, how would you know that you can be a certain way and not be shattered by society, unless you actually see someone do it? Even on the most basic level, for me to want to be more masculine I needed to have seen a boy in my life at least once. [Laughter]. It's always referential to some extent, as a social construct, gender was created in the context of society, in relation to other people, so you can't ignore how interacting with other people influences, what they think your gender is and what you think your gender is. So there is the material reality of the body, but then there is the cultural aspect, or the social aspect that just cannot be ignored. Maybe this is less relevant for people like us, but for people who are in medical transition a nonnegotiable part of the experience of gender will be those interactions with others.

AC: I think we’re both feeling the push towards not wanting this to be just a solely internal experience anymore. For me personally, it's getting exhausting being constantly read as a woman, even though I know that if I were to pursue any part of medical transition, it would objectively get harder for me in the world, right? I know the consequences, and yet this current psychological stress is mounting.

KPC: In the last couple of years, I've participated in more queer spaces and spaces where people don't necessarily read me as a woman immediately or people don’t assume that me and my husband are a straight couple. And it's sort of like maybe the person at the grocery store or at work who immediately defaults to “she,” maybe that's not the only option. This has been kind of revelatory.

Someone pointed this out to me recently that when people are asking about “what are you” or ‘what were you born as,” they're sort of telling on themselves, on the fact that they want to treat you differently, that if you say I was born a man or I was born a woman, that that distinction really matters to them. This is also upsetting. It's not just that they don't see me for who I am, but it's like you want to classify me so you can treat me differently. That is just hurtful!

AC: You fall into that category of skinny and androgynous that a lot more people are going to recognize. I think I am actually recognized the most as queer when I'm with you. Because you are very queer looking, and for me, it's partially because I have gigantic knockers, [laughter] and also because I have a lot of femininity in my dressing style that feels internally correct to me but externally read as just ‘woman.’ I feel very masculine, and I also like playing with feminine style.

KPC: I've talked to some of our friends about this too, about how I wear makeup and I don't wear it to look like a girl. I wear it in the way that the fruity boys on the internet wear makeup. There’s this very inherent sense of gender fuckery. I am 100% convinced that had my parents raised me as a boy, I would probably still look the way I look, I would probably still be wearing a full face to work. I think that's sort of more internal and inherent to me than any traditional markers of gender. And maybe this is a separate conversation, but there was an era where famous men and rockstars just wore tight pants and ruffled shirts, masculinity has changed over the years.

AC: I think prejudice has also had different flavors throughout time. It’s kind of a myth that anti-gay sentiment always looked the same, or the anti-trans sentiment. It’s not always been the same battle in some ways.

KPC: Even if you just read about the history of transition, especially for trans women, it used to be offered to them as a way of “fixing them” to be more productive parts of society, to be more “normal” and have a normal job and a normal husband. Now, we call it gender affirming care, but historically there’s a lot more nuance to what was being affirmed.

AC: I think this is where young people shine the most for me, how they’re doing transition in pieces, changing their bodies how they want to and to see what happens. Not necessarily to completely transition into one gender, which I didn't even know was an option. Like people taking testosterone to look more androgynous not necessarily to become a man. I am inspired by that.

KPC: This brings us back to the point that transition is not just about trans people. Access to transition on your own terms is a matter of bodily autonomy, like your body is yours, so you get to do what you want with it. I think this is why trans people upset conservatives so much, because conservatism is about control.

KPC: We’re almost out of time. I think last year I had asked you about what your vibe is for Pride. There's only about 10 days left of pride so this feels a bit more pertinent. [Laughter]

AC: Do you know, Mr. Softee, like the ice cream? I think that's the vibe. The vibe is Mr. Softee. Because of extenuating circumstances, and also, the larger world, I have been sad and gender is maybe a part of that. And I'm finding a lot of solace in sad ugly men, or, like, slightly ugly men. I think part of the beauty of cis men is that they are “allowed” to be ugly in a way that is completely not allowed in womanhood. That's very appealing to me.

What’s your vibe for Pride?

KPC: I think the number one thing I want to do is go out in shorts. Every year I fight this battle with myself about whether wearing shorts make me look like a little boy, which is insane, most people definitely don't see me that way. And I stopped shaving my legs this year, which I've tried to do before, and this year I think I could do it, be hairy and wear shorts. [Laughter]

I also maybe need to leave the house with my shirt off more. I think if I was a “real boy,” I would be very happy to do that. Generally, I may just need to loosen up a bit. How am I gonna think about changing my body if no one's allowed to see my body, you know? If I'm going to be in control of this body, part of it has to be that social, cultural aspect that you talked about. I can't just be sitting at home thinking about my body, and it's just me, being internal and cerebral all the time. For the body to feel good, I think it has to exist outside. That’s the vibe.

Happy Pride!

***

You can read Alex’s writing over on their fantastic newsletter Homage to Lyric 9-1245.

*Fluid dynamics is a branch of physics that deals with how fluids flow, pack energy, transfer momentum, change temperature and every other thing that can happen to them. This is one of the oldest disciplines within physics, and among the most notorious for mathematical difficulty.