Dispatches by K Ho, 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest Winner
Excerpt
Every morning before my online creative writing workshop, I take a black handheld device, about four inches long and one inch wide, and line it up next to my laptop. It looks like an old-school cellphone, not unlike an early-aughts Nokia mobile on which many eager hands played Snake. The device has a red button and a mouthpiece of scattered dots for soundwaves to slide through. I press record and wait for class to begin.
( )
When I first start testosterone my doctor asks about my goals for physical changes. Goals. I stumble over that word. It seems to connote that gender is a destination at which to arrive. I understand that goals can be important investments for one’s experience of transition, but I am unsure if the language is right for me. I am not trying to aim my body at a target so much as inhabit it more expansively. I am too hesitant a person to point at something and say mine.
( )
There are both reversible and irreversible changes for people who start testosterone. Reversible changes include increased muscle mass, redistribution of fat, hair growth, and masculinization of facial features. Irreversible — permanent — changes include potential scalp hair loss and lowered pitch, the latter of which occurs through thickened vocal cords. I think my goals are similar to others, I say timidly, gripping the phone. A bit of redistribution, a bit of masculinization. I don’t want to pass, I add. The doctor pauses to write this down. And voice? she asks me. How do you feel about voice?
( )
In literary circles, the question of voice is notoriously difficult to pin down, slipping between style, tone, rhythm, syntax, culture, persona, and much more. To explain voice, essayist Susan Bruns Rowe reflects on a moment when she encouraged a young Vietnamese writer to show more and tell less, a technique that has long been critiqued for Eurocentrism. After several revisions, she confesses, the piece went flat, like the air let out of a balloon. I like this, understanding a concept through omission; it appeals to the part of me that believes in ghosts. Drained of voice, the young writer’s story lost its beating heart — a husk of its former self. We perceive something by the gap it leaves behind.
( )
By ghost I don’t mean a phantom from the afterworld but the movement of a body through time — how a person accumulates multiple versions of selfhood in the span of a life. I suppose this could be called renewal or growth, but what I mean to say is that every layer we accrete, every identity we shift into, also requires transforming through, and to some extent, out of, the previous version we inhabited. I think of my current self as the autobiography of the hundreds of ghosts I’ve been. Sometimes I walk into a day as one gender and walk out as another. Sometimes I am all my genders at once. The problem is when I want to leave certain ghosts behind but can’t.
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My friend N has the type of voice that a person can hear through walls, between rooms, down corridors. It’s not loud, it just has a specific effect. N is aware of this. They can’t help it. Once, outside the breakroom, N overheard their colleagues whispering about them. It just carries, the colleagues said.
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I make sure to wear earphones when I’m on Zoom, so that the recorder only picks up me. It would be unethical to document my peers, though our conversations are often so interesting that I wish I could play them back in full. Once class is over I categorize the files by date and subject: 10.22.20 plenary writing prompt. 02.23.21 fiction reading week debrief. I live alone in a studio apartment, a single room with a bed, a couch, two bookshelves, and a fruit bowl that seems perpetually empty. I listen to the recordings as I clean my desk and put my papers away. The recordings consist of static space with occasional moments in which I speak. Sometimes I make listening noises like hmm, or ahh. The static space is filled with the absence of my classmates’ voices. I find myself impatient with these lapses, these transitional silences, eager to return to sound.
( )
My friend G starts testosterone around the same time I do. Their base voice is higher in pitch than mine, but they’ve chosen a greater hormonal dosage. Despite both of our voices lowering, theirs will eventually slide past mine. We speak on the phone twice a month and I can already hear the difference. Their changes are more and more pronounced with each interval of time, amplifying in the gaps between our lives.
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You sound so handsome, I say to G on the phone. They laugh and change the subject. I swallow, unsure if I’ve used the right word to compliment them. G is dysphoric about their voice in a way I don’t experience, at least not to the same degree. I worry that if I tell them they sound better than before, I might disparage their old voice or trigger lingering discomfort. I am unsure if I am supporting G well. I do not know if they want to bring the past with them as they forge into the future. I know I could ask, but somehow I can’t bring myself to.
( )
G hasn’t told their family that they started testosterone. It’s too unsafe a conversation. Lately, on the phone, their mother peppers them with questions. Are you sick? she asks. Have you just woken up from a nap? Yes, G responds, I’ve just been really tired. G knows that at some point their lies will no longer work; they can only nap and be sick so often, and their voice will only continue to lower and become more gravelly. I ask how it feels to be unable to tell their family. It’s hard, G says. It’s so hard I can’t even talk about it.
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