Folx of Chattanooga

My name is Calaghan Rudd. I’m a trans man, and I grew up here in Chattanooga. I want to say something about that, if for no other reason than to give some visibility to the many other trans men that are living here. But that’s a lot of pressure.

I also feel like I should have plans to go out for New Year’s Eve, but there’s something nice going on in my apartment. It’s clean, the candles are lit – it looks like me. Everything around me right now feels too grounded for me to have any real sense of FOMO. That’s new. There isn’t a better life out there anywhere that I’m envious of. It’s in here with me. And I happen to not be doing anything tonight.

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I think that’s what is so tricky to share about the outcome of transition – in that sense, it’s not fundamentally different from any other form of maturity. Anyone can understand it. It’s a quantum change to how I’m embedded into my life. It’s as if before, I was a little out of phase, capable of passing through walls and doors without sticking. I passed everything by, leaving behind an impression that I was being pulled along by an attachment somewhere else that you just couldn’t see. But it wasn’t freedom; I wasn’t able to operate anywhere, with anyone. I couldn’t build anything. I lacked substance.

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Two years ago, on New Year’s Eve, I was restless. I was a year into my medical transition, in the early stages of puberty, and my chest was just beginning to heal and settle from top surgery. I saw New Year’s Eve coming but I didn’t have any power to make plans for it. I drove over the ridge, down into Southside, to the club house of a 12-step program where I knew a party was happening. It was loud, and smoky, and I knew maybe 8 people there by name. Someone I hadn’t seen in a while nodded at me and said, “You look good!” and I felt that sincerely – it was a feeling that would become familiar over the next two years. I’d make a new discovery about what clothes to wear or how to wear them, or how to style my hair, or where to find shoes, and gears would clunk into place. I’d have a few weeks of euphoria looking into the mirror as a goofy, happy new man grinned back out at me - masculinizing in slow, shallow steps. After this man told me I looked good, though, I found I couldn’t stay at the party. I didn’t have anything to give. So I drove back over the ridge and headed north, to a storefront where I knew another party was happening. I paid to get in. I sat in a seat. Everyone there was straight and married. I didn’t know anyone there. I hadn’t counted on either. I got a text from a boy I’d started ignoring, because I suspected his attraction to me amounted to a fetish. I blocked him, and drove home to a silent apartment.

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It was a tough night to witness myself have. But I was still more in the world than I had been for the New Year’s Eves before. In preceding years, I lived in China, and I always booked my return flight to Shanghai for December 31. In the early years these flights were spent in a drunk blur; later, they were spent in a sober gloom. 

I think about that now, what that means to have spent the turn-of-the-year each year in anonymous transit, 30,000 feet up. If that was my exterior, it was my interior, too.  There was an anonymous part of me riding passenger, tightly contained, moving through the world but not in it. A lot of my early life was spent ignoring this passenger, or hiding him. 

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Eventually, when I felt I could neither understand nor tolerate my sadness anymore, I got help. I needed help getting clean. I needed help coming home. I needed help learning to name what I was feeling. None of those things can be done alone. If I wanted to quit living my life in transit, that passenger had to come into being. He needed a community to stitch into.

It’s an irony about people in transition. The big visual changes that can be seen are, ideally, an indication of a new, profound stability. That has been the case for me. My life moved from a state of transit to one of growth, beginning with the most basic of things. Who am I? What do I look like? Where do I go with myself? Slow, shallow steps. 

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By last year’s New Year’s Eve, I was still a little worried about being alone. Community was still a new and fragile thing to me, after a lifetime of isolation from people. So I was dating someone – someone nice – but not quite the right person. We went to a New Year’s Eve party at a friend's house. It was warm, and friendly, but it wasn’t quite the right party. I was anxious, and we left at 10.

This year, so many things have changed, expanding rapidly out. My face is more recognizable to me than ever before. My apartment is no longer tiny or sparse; it is full of things that look like me. My small, neat row of shoes makes sense to me. My friends make sense to me. For the first time in my life, I’m surrounded by communities of people who share serious bonds – over their identities, their values, their dreams, their very bodies. I think that I am becoming woven into this community in a way that would be difficult for me to untangle and detach. Being comfortable in my own skin has made me hungry to be comfortable in the presence of others.  I don’t pass through walls anymore. People see me and they call me by name.

I don’t have plans tonight; but community is not a fragile thing to me anymore. I am not fragile anymore. I have a week, a month, a year ahead of me already appointed to be spent in the company of faces like mine. If there are other trans people out there in Chattanooga right now, feeling out of phase with everyone and everything else, I’d want them to know these things; we don’t always pass through walls – we grow solid, when we do it together. Hang in there. Come find me.