Opening a new project box 📦️🏳️‍⚧️

And starting to scratch

The distinguished choreographer Twyla Tharp spent an entire chapter of her book The Creative Habit extolling the virtues of a file box. I’m obsessed with this chapter. Whenever I’m in my storage unit rearranging my many tubs of ephemera, which I lovingly call “my archives,” I tell myself that while Marie Kondo might accuse, Ms. Tharp approves. She starts a new file box for every project. Creating the box, writing the project name on the box, and beginning to fill the box—these steps solidify her commitment to work on an idea.

Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box. —Twyla Tharp

I love creating a box and starting to gather materials. I heart research. I like making things, but it is *very* easy for me to stay preparing and never get to creating. For those in/from the South, might we call this the Fixing To phase? As in my case, “I’m fixing to write a memoir about growing up the daughter of a gay father and becoming the trans father to my daughter.” I’ve been in this fixing to phase for some time. And then I hear my mother—a former principal of an Atlanta high school—in my ear, “Don’t fix to do it, DO IT.”

Last year, even after attending a writing retreat called UNSTUCK, my feet stayed mostly planted. Turns out, I am a very verbal person who is a little lost on how to apply language to my own transgender experience. I can’t write about myself without unpuzzling how to write about being trans. And the only way to write about being trans is to—wait for it—write about being trans.

Memoirs are definitionally personal. There are innumerable questions only I can ask myself about my gender transition. At the same time, everywhere I turn, people and systems pose big existential questions about trans people. (Worse, most people ruthlessly give opinions without asking or listening.) Then, there is this gray area where the personal and the political overlap.

Now that I am a parent and of an age where my friends and their friends, are parents, I am also regularly asked questions about trans and nonbinary children. Sometimes, the inquiries come directly from someone I once knew about their child. (e.g. A cis, hetero-married friend I haven’t spoken to in two decades reaches out via Facebook Messenger to the only queer person who was out in high school.) More frequently, people in my everyday life are calling on behalf of their friends who have confessed at dinner to struggling with their child’s gender.

The truth is—I often don’t know what to say.

Parenting is challenging. Situations are specific. Culture changes. Language evolves. Medicine advances. While I was a transgender child—was I?!—I am not an expert in the specifics of how to support one who is growing up now. (Thankfully, many folks are.)

In the years since medically and socially transitioning to male, I’ve focused on other things. I made movies that had nothing to do with being trans. I worked jobs that had nothing to do with being trans. I read books that had nothing to do with being trans. I parented my kid. And most of the time, I passed as a cis white dad (albeit often assumed to be a gay one). I am trans, AND I sheepishly admit that I also feel behind the times.

In a later chapter, Ms. Tharp describes her methodology for developing an idea, an approach she calls scratching: “You know how you scratch away at a lottery ticket to see if you’ve won? That’s what I’m doing when I begin a piece. I’m digging through everything to find something.” Scratching is improvising. Scratching for little ideas helps manifest the big ones.

“Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature—all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won.” —Twyla Tharp

This year, to not get lost merely filling yet another project box, I will use this newsletter to document my scratching as I seek answers to this big question: What does it mean to be alive in a transmasculine body, in an America that constantly debates and dissects one’s existence? These scratchings will shapeshift—expect book recommendations, podcast highlights, profiles of other transmasc folks, wrestling matches with language, journal reflections, drawings, photography, and whatever else might emerge.

My invitation is for you to be in conversation with me along the way. Ask me the questions you are afraid to ask anyone else, poke at my assumptions, highlight my blindspots, recommend other people I/we should listen to, and, if it’s not too much to ask, nudge me to keep going.

Thank you for being here.

xx Kyle