Dysphoria is in the Water: Transgender and the Environment

"Splash, play and learn in this sensory based program 
all about water. We’ll even hike to the pond 
and check out what lives in water!"

The Morton Arboretum
Advertisement for 'Wonderful Water'

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Life at the Arboretum

Turning off of the express way, around a narrow curve, suburbia disappeared behind a high hedge as I pulled into work at a local Arboretum. The sun hadn't risen yet and only one gate was open, where a sleepy-eyed guard waved me by. Cutting across the parking-lot, which would soon be filled to capacity with families and summer-camps, I parked next to the loading dock and dumpsters that served as the headquarters of this private park system. Punching in with my time card, I waved at the few cooks and other service staff tasked with getting the cafeteria ready for the day. Walking into the service area, I tucked in my uniform and joined another young woman and guy already counting the registers. While some folks disliked having to wear a uniform, I didn't mind it so much. For one, there are much worse uniforms to wear. A green shirt and black slacks were not very flattering on many of us (although some seemed to look beatific regardless) but nonetheless they were at least designed with some intention for aesthetics. But the main reason I liked the uniforms were the same reason many didn't like uniforms of any kind: it made us all look alike. Over the years working at this job, I was coming out as my authentic gender. This meant that during these years, there were times when I was effectively in drag, wearing clothing associated to the gender I had mistakenly been assigned. These prescribed clothes divided me from my gender tribes and lumped me among a gender with which I didn't identify. Yet at work, some of these distinctions, if not went away, were diminished. True, the women looked more like the men but so too the men looked more like the women. For a transitioning transgender woman, I appreciated the company and flexibility of shared androgyny. Although, despite uniforms, gender still asserted itself.

Once the doors opened, morning light streamed in (we had missed the sunrise) and so did the day's first customers. Mostly the initial guests were all staff looking for coffee or a quick meal before going off to dig, guide, guard, or administrate. They bought their food with minimal but politely familiar communication. Most Arboretum staff knew the value of keeping the people managing your food happy. The next wave was the avid nature people, bird watchers and the like. Then came the families and baby-sitters looking to fill a school-free summer day at a location covered by a pre-paid season pass. This is when things got interesting. On any given day, once things get busy, most guests are distracted. They fumble for credit cards while trying to locate one child while yelling at another to put the $5 cookie sandwich down. At this point, if they said thanks or good bye (or some other acknowledgement that it wasn't a machine taking their money), usually some form of gendering would begin. As stated, because of the androgyny of the uniforms we all kind of look alike (which some workers overcame with overt markers of gender, including keeping their pants as low as they could get away with, showing off boxers, or done up with large earrings and as much make-up as they could get away with). And in my case, at this point in my transition I looked especially androgynous. Put me in a dress and I was an obvious girl. Put me in a suit and tie and you'd likely call me a guy. In this uniform, however, it really was all in the eye of the beholder how they saw my gender. I would get, "thanks miss." I would also get, "thanks sir." Or even, "thanks miss... I mean sir." In the last case, some people would get really embarrassed and apologized profusely for gendering me as a girl. I would then have to try to calm them down, saying, "it's okay." Sometimes I would be more emphatic, "no, it's REALLY okay."

Cashiering was not terrible, as I would find ways of exercising my mind by making lists or creating stories in my head, but the constant human interactions and misgenderings would wear on me. That is why whenever the supervisor would ask who would be willing (they never said "want to") go out and clean tables, I would volunteer. The management and my co-workers admitted this confused them. The job of cleaning tables was generally despised. Often it would go to the one with lowest seniority. For a while they hired people specifically to clear tables because everyone else would avoid it. But for me it was a sweet relief. Now, I'm as disgusted as anyone by how many people (especially but not always children) leave their tables. That part I could overcome, however, not through force of will but by turning off the part of my brain that keeps my mild OCD in check. In Chicago, where the population of Eastern European Catholics is greater, I could simply say, "I'm just embracing my Polish heritage." My grandfather cleaned. So did much of my extended family and other Polish ancestors who came to the United States fleeing the World Wars and needed jobs. But more than anything, what I liked about cleaning tables was that I was able to escape my body. More to the point, I was able to escape how others regarded and gendered my body. Now, I was not invisible while I cleared trays and wiped surfaces, but I was usually ignored. Folks would bump into me and jump, as if I had just materialized out of thin air. In a sense, I had. While I worked in the dining room, my body was not man or woman. My body was a part of the machinery of the space. On the whole, this tendency dehumanizes service staff and is to be trained out of ourselves, our friends, and our children. But at this time I took advantage of their lack of regard of my body as a way to escape my body. I let my body become-machine. It would operate, clean, and order without having to be engaged by others or even myself. My mind and soul was free to wander. While at the cash-register my body had a debated gender, in the dining room I was free (to an extent) from gender and a body.

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M.W. Bychowski while working in food service

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Dysphoria is in the Environment

The flight from people may be diagnosed as "introversion" and may in some ways reflect a certain discomfort I have around humans (especially in large groups) but was for me a trained response to the dysphoria I feel in social environments. Even years later, when I feel much more at home in my skin and present more unequivocally female, the constant interrogation of my gender enacted by others' stares, comments, or behavior is enough to exhaust me still. Indeed, what evidences how much dysphoria is in the society is the degree to which I am at home in my body and my body is at home in my home. In the privacy of my home, among family and friends, my gender is not under question. I am a woman and am regarded as a woman. I am not confused by my gender. Dysphoria lowers to a barely audible hum when I'm in my office grading or writing. Where gender confusion happens is when I am out in public. The confusion and dysphoria in the world is not my own and does not live in my body but cuts across my body, lashes at my body, stings my body and deposits its poison so that I will go home and itch and itch; it may leave a rash or scar if I do not apply some balm at night. Some places are better than others. However, in restaurants when I am out with my family, where folks at the next table won't stop staring or pointing, the dysphoria gets so loud I can almost not hear. "Say that again," I will tell my partner, when her words get drowned out by the open-mouthed gawking of a man a few tables down. The hum will make it hard to read the menu when the waiter asks, "and what will you have, sir?" There is dysphoria that lives in my skin but I live with it like a room-mate that has learned not to eat my food and listen to loud movies with head-phones. But the dysphoria that lives in the environment can be so exhausting, rattling walls and knocking pictures from the studs, that I can feel when I begin the flight out of my body. My mind and soul wanders, like it did in the dining room at the Arboretum, until the noise quiets down and I can again occupy my body.

The affects of the environment's dysphoria are noticeable by those who are close to me and have become attuned to its frequencies. My partner notices, sometimes before I am consciously aware, of when my spirit begins to vacate the location. She will take my hand with a pulsing squeeze that conveys, "the pain you feel is real and we can share the burden." Or with a look in eye as if to say, "they may only see a fantasy or fetish projected on your body, but I see you. I." Sometimes this is enough to pull me back into my body. Other times the best I can do is angle my mouth into an acknowledging smile, like a ghost pulling the strings of my face muscles from far away to show that some connection remains. If she can, my partner will address the immediate source of the dysphoria. She will correct the wait-staff's pronouns or stare back at the offending table until they get the message that their rudeness is registered and not accepted. But when the dysphoria gets bad enough that I have begun to fall (not into myself but out of myself) it is not just because of one small mix up or odd glance, it is because of a general widespread tone that makes it clear that such staring, anti-trans behavior, or misgendering is not an individual rudeness but an environmental standard. This is how places (restaurants, classrooms, workplaces, churches, etc.) articulate and enforce a standard that I am not welcome here. This message is not written on signs by in the eyes, mouths, and touch of its human occupants. As a result, the message is usually not received until I am deep in the environment. I may taste the dysphoria in the water but by that point I am already waist deep and have drunk enough for its toxicity to affect my body. No matter how quickly I spit out the poison and leave the space, by the time I walk out the gate, my mind and soul is long ahead of my clambering, dysphoria drenched flesh.

Increasingly, in my work and in my life I have been able to articulate dysphoria not as something that lives in the body, or rather only in the body, but is a thing that lives in the environment. I do not know what dysphoria tastes like to cisgender people. I cannot even say for sure how other trans, intersex, and non-binary folk register its diverse flavors and affects. What I can guess is that most cis people, and some trans people, don't notice the dysphoria in their water supply; or only notice it too late when someone has gotten ill or died. That dysphoria has gotten into the ground water all over our country and world seems evident. Some places seem worse than others certainly. "How did the dysphoria get into the water," is a question that a growing number of scholars, parents, and social justice movements are daily mapping and historicizing. The number of questioners grow but there is not many or many enough of us to give widespread answers. This is in part because there are those who do not want to know that there is dysphoria in their water. They do no want their wells tested and do not want to be told the results. Still others like the taste of the water, dysphoria and all. For some, dysphoria may have a sweet taste. The sweetness may come from the fact that the dysphoria does not seem to affect them but others cannot handle it. They call those who ask for dysphoria-free drinks or even dysphoria-free restaurants, "delicate snowflakes" or "liberal snobs." They drink dysphoria like hard liquor, to show their strength and to get drunk on it. If the intoxication leads them to lash out verbally or physically, well, "boys will be boys." In the end, as much as I abstain or find other establishments to eat and drink, all it takes is for some knowing or unknowing person to come in soaking with dysphoria for the poisoning of the well to begin. No environment is a closed system, water and dysphoria flow through the world ecology, creating "introverts" who stay at home and drink only from filtered-faucets as it passes down stream.

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View from the Arboretum cafe without customers

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"Why is that Boy a Girl?"

As a transgender person who is currently still able to live in this world, I have found and maintained ways of surviving in places where dysphoria can be tasted in most interactions. Getting out, in mind if not in body is one tactic. When getting out is not possible, there are sometimes an oasis where the water is not so polluted or else there are folks who have adopted filters in their home kitchens and are now able to taste the difference when they go into public. At this point it is worth noting that I was fortunate in my coworkers and managers at the Arboretum. Not everyone was a treat but during my half-decade at that particular food-service, I found some company where I could hide out and who created an environment where I could come back into my body a bit more. Sometimes, they seemed more conscientious because they gave signs of having experienced enough sexism, racism, or homophobia themselves to make them aware that water and environments are never neutral, demanding some level of awareness and care for others in the ecology. Other times, they touched on dysphoria by way of some other education or interest, political, philosophical, or artistic. Of course, being oppressed or educated does not always guarantee that one will make the environment better for all (or any) others. Sometimes folks that maybe should have known better did worse and sometimes folks who seemed to have no particular reason to be doing better nonetheless did. In any case, I remain grateful to those with whom I could find safe haven. Even momentary breaks in the grind and noise of the day allowed me to come back to myself enough to push through the rest. While five years is a drop in the bucket compared to some, I wouldn't have gotten through it without some colleagues who made the environment a place where my life could take root and find nourishment.

Moving back down from the systematic scale, there were also funny, precious, accidental moments that would fill me up with goodness (or something closer to goodness) for the rest of the day. An occurrence that happened more than once was one instigated by curious children who were usually more aware than their parents or guardians. Take for instance the summer day when I was pulled back from the dining room into the cafe. I was there not because of a coffee rush but because it was the most visible location where ice-cream was sold. Families and other groups boasting children would come in sweating from a day walking around through the children's garden or among the trees. Like magnets to iron the kids would zone in on the ice-cream and come running over. Even without kids a line to the door would form on these hot summer days. During such rushes the cafe would be filled to capacity with workers taking orders, handing out ice-cream, and taking cash. On this day I was at the cash-register. By the time they had gotten to me, the parent were over-heated and over-whelmed by the ordering process. Most handed me cash without looking at me or much more than a grunt. Such was the case with one mom who was counting out cash for her kid's ice-cream bars. Yet while she thumbed through $20's for smaller bills, ignoring me, her young boy couldn't take his eyes off of me. At the time I had shortish hair, almost a pixy cut, pearl earrings and similar necklace in addition to my uniform. Some called me elfin or a fairy; fitting considering our arbor surroundings. The boy took it all in, took me in, and then grabbing his mom's arm (who was still double-fisting her purse), he asked, "Mom, why is that boy a girl?" To her credit and perhaps explaining the child's extraordinary awareness and articulation of gender ambiguity, she replied, "I don't know, why don't you ask them?" I beamed at the question (and not just the light from the outside which was beaming so hot I would leave work with a mild-tan). "That," I told the child, "is a good question!"

Over my time in the food service, I received many such questions, asked with varying degrees of interest, consideration, and meanness. Whatever the intent and affect towards me, my hope is that prompting such inquiries did something in moving more folk at the Arboretum to be a bit more aware of the dysphoria in the environment. Because while I went home with the dysphoria drenching my uniform worse than the sweat, for a moment or maybe longer guests and coworkers would become mildly unsure, curious, or disturbed about gender. Whether it tasted good, interesting, or revolting they would suddenly become aware that in our social ecology there was something in the water than was not neutral. I now call the often rude, sometimes dumbfounded, sometimes rejoicing tizzies racing across the faces of many of those who encounter me in such a way, "transgender moments." This is not to say that they will become more trans or that they even fully understand what I am or what is going on as "transgender" but that for a moment (if only a moment) they experience a degree of the dysphoria that I do. This is not a revenge fantasy. Unlike some, for good and bad, I do not get pleasure or even reassurance by other's discomfort, confusion, or pain. Usually I go out of my way to make things comfortable, clear, and even enjoyable for others. But if others taste the dysphoria in the environment, they may begin to be able to do something about it. No one wants someone else to drink contaminated water. But the more of us that can detect pollution, hopefully the sooner and better we may become at repairing the damage done to our world. 

The language of environmental crisis being used in this case is not accidental or merely metaphorical but deliberate and real. Just as our world is not only at risk but actively and rapidly accelerating into environmental crises at the level of climate, water, air, earth, heat, plants and animals, so too we are witnesses a crisis that sees the daily damaging and yearly deaths of an alarming number of trans, intersex, and non-binary persons. Those at the intersections of transgender and the marginalization of race, disability, class, and sexuality show signs of swifter population decline. This was a personal story but no environment is closed off from the wider ecology. The thing about water is that you must drink or die; even if the water is tainted; even if you die a little in order to live. The dysphoria in the water I drank at the Arboretum ran through the workers, the guest, the food, the trees, the local economy, the neighboring towns and schools, and went back to camp with the kids who asked questions and those who only stared. The toxin was in the environment before I got there and is there after I left. The problem is big but is made up of millions of tiny pieces and participants. So too the potential for change exists within and is compounded within each member of the ecology; each with a chance to drink the water and leave the water a bit better than they found it. It all turns on a taste, a question, a story which shifts the flow just a bit, just enough.

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Taking our gender queer child out into the waters, literally and figuratively

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Read more on transgender and the environment

Environments of Hate: 

the Anti-Transgender Politics of Bathrooms

Toxic Environments: 

the Place and Genre of Transgender Suicide Notes

Losing Home: the Rape of Transgender Lives in Exile and Pride

The Island of Amazons: the Medieval Place of Transgender

Stories of Saline: Gender Fluid Love in Twelfth Night

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Don't get me wrong, water can be fun. But it can be dangerous too!

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Reclaiming Home: the Pilgrimage of Transgender in Exile & Pride

"In queer community, I found a place to belong 
and abandoned my desire to be a hermit"

Exile and Pride
Eli Clare

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Queer Loca Sancta

"But just as the stolen body exists, so does the reclaimed body" declares Eli Clare in the conclusion of "Stones in my Pocket, Stones in my Heart" from Exile and Pride (132). Oakland, California is not so far away from Port Orford, Oregon to boast such a fundamentally different climate that one could expect a radical change in lifestyle based merely on geography, yet because of the distinct social climates which defined them each Eli Clare became reborn when he left the woods to attend Mills College in the city. "Queer identity, at least as we know it, is largely urban" claims Clare (37). "The happening places, events, dialogues, the strong communities, the journals, magazines, bookstores, queer organizing, and queer activism are all city-based." Certainly, there were physical features, buildings, roads, and the density of population that made the experience of walking down a road in Oregon and California distinct, but it is how these spaces were uses that made the difference in allowing Clare to begin the process of reclaiming a sense of home in a community and in his body.  "For me the path from stolen body to reclaimed body started with my coming out as a dyke" (132-133). "I went to dyke events, read dyke books, listened to dyke music, hung out at my first dyke bar, went to my first dyke dance." Were there buildings in Port Orford that could have been used for dancing? Yes. But the social controls over the town would never have allowed it. "Queer people - using the narrow definition - don't live in Port Orford," Clare states simply (30). To understand this statement it is necessary to follow the social definition of identity and place. Clare once lived in Port Orford but he could not be queer there. He could not be himself. And so, even when he occupied space there, and his body was occupied by the force of others, he, a queer, did not live there. For these reasons, to follow how one toxic place can take lives one must next examine how another place give life again in order to get a fuller worldview of the social divisions of space and how bodies may move and be moved through it.

An examination of Clare's sexuality in rural and urban places could be undertaken, mapping his relations to other bodies, yet his world puts gender and the love of self rather than desire for others in the forefront. The claim that Clare discovered himself as a dyke complicates this reading by using highly sexualized and woman-oriented gendered language yet he insists that this was for him the first stepping stone out of a rigid cisgender definition of gender towards a pluralistic mode of categorizing genres of embodiment.  "Simply put, the disabled, mixed-class tomboy... didn't discover sexuality among dykes," clarifies Clare, "but rather a definition of woman large enough to be comfortable for many years" (133). The invocation of space here is critical. The physical place of the dyke bar was "big enough" for him both because it allowed him be materially present but the greater shift was that the lack of patriarchal controls allowed him to be present in other ways. He was able to feel "comfortable." "Comfort" comes from the Latin "com-" meaning "together" and "-fort," meaning "strengthened." It was a place where Clare felt able to extend towards other possibilities for embodiment and desire and in turn others extended toward him. Lynne Huffer calls this social form of subject formation "coextension," the unregulated and undetermined flow of vital energies that all for new mad, queer, erotic forms of life to emerge. "And somewhere along the line," observes Clare, "I pulled desire to the surface, gave it room to breathe" (134). In response to the desire of others for him, he learned how to desire himself and in time to desire these intimacies to touch. There is, in Huffer's sense, a folding together of queer space and bodies. The place gave Clare room to breath in it and in response Clare was able to make space inside himself to allow in the vitality of the queer environment. The power of the place worked on him perhaps more than he had yet power to act on it or, in certain senses, the power to act on himself.

"In queer community, I found a place to belong and abandoned my desire to be a hermit," recalls Clare (134). The structuring of free space into a defined place can be a tool of violence and oppression, walling in bodies from traveling or changing. Places like Port Orford can sustain systems of violence in its system of making genders and sexualities which have a place in its schema. Yet not all places are so toxic that queer and transgender persons are forced to become hermits in order to survive. In places like Oakland, in dyke bars and bookstores, Clare was able to breath in his body and in his space. Over time, he was able to come out of the shell that he built to protect himself and begin the process of reoccupying himself and building a life around him. It was in such a place that Clare built himself back up from the wreckage of Port Orford and began to feel pride in what he found and what he made. Thus armed with dignity and confidence, Clare became better able to make connects, explore desires, and freely identify with others. The shape of this unfurling could be seen in the transformed image of himself. Clare recalls the joy of watching himself dress in the clothes that helped him feel at home in his body, "in the mirror, dressing to go out, knotting my tie, slipping into my blazer, curve of hip and breast vanishing beneath my clothes" (123). Through the support of queer loca sancta, dyke bars, Clare was able to reclaim a sense of home in himself and his environment, including all the others who shared the space. He had places to go out, had people he wanted to see, and had a body he wanted to be seen because at last he was able to dress and determine the modes by which his body would be accessed (or not) by others. This is the power of queer and transgender loca sancta, they can affirm for the bodies who occupy them that they are sanctified and desirable.

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The Cost of Travel

Yet this relocation, losing and finding home, would not have been possible without the ability to travel between places and identities. Not all potential hermits are able to escape places like Port Orford in order to come to breath the free dyke air of Oakland. Clare admits the particular circumstances that gave him the slippage he needed. "I think about my disabled body, how as a teenager I escaped the endless pressure to have a boyfriend, to shave my legs, to wear make-up," writes Clare (130). "The same likes that cast me as genderless, asexual, and undesirable also framed a space in which I was left alone to be my quiet, bookish, tomboy self, neither girl nor boy." This asexuality is for many people yet another oppressive part of disability. They are denied the gender and sexuality they work to express. Yet for queer trans men like Clare, the asexuality imposed on him by his environment because he has CP was room enough to be liberated from many of the compulsory demands to be a heterosexual girl. It is in this between state of being a hermit that Clare came to Oakland.  "I was 18 and had just moved to the city," he writes (132). "I didn't want to be a girl, nor was I a boy. I hid my body, tried as much as possible to ignore it." Although this asexual identity kept Clare's body at a distance from himself and others, this gave him the safety to escape the attention and touch of unwanted aggressors. By going less noticed, he did not develop the deep roots in Port Orford which would have kept him from leaving. These clothes that hid his body functioned in one place like the robes of a gender hermit and became in his escape the garment of the transgender pilgrim.

The ability to travel is a power of the exile that not all are able to attain. The circumstances of Clare's life, the often intersecting but sometimes competing oppressions of disability and dysphoria gave him the distance from prescribed gender norms to be able to slip away into an asexual hermitage for a time and later to become a pilgrim to the city. "But listen, if I had wanted to date boys, wear lipstick and mascara, play with feminine clothes - the silk skirts and pumps, the low-cut blouse, the outrageous prom dress - I would have had to struggle much longer and harder than my nondisabled counterparts," confesses Clare (130). The lessons of Port Orford was that Clare's gender and sexuality was not his own. They were prohibited, prescribed, and enforced in violence on his body. His recollections of living as a hermit in his home and his body were not merely that he was walled off from his later destination of queer and transgender masculinity but that he was walled off on the other side from normative feminine gender and sexuality. Had he desired rather than begrudged the dresses he described as being like bondage, he might have never have felt at home in them because the markers of disability dismissed his power of femininity. Disability and the disabled are not supposed to be desirable and so are not supposed to flaunt their gender. He was forced at times to submit to the sexual dominance of others but would not be allowed to embrace his own even if he had felt normative desires. Furthermore, notes Clare, the demands of such high femme attire are largely not made with the particularities of his CP embodiment in mind. The precision needed to put on make-up and the delicacy of the fabrics demonstrate that much of feminine standards of beauty are intended for non-CP persons. For Clare, the environment offered the hermitage of asexual and agender as the path of least resistance. It was a place he was willing for years to hide out until he could plot his escape but it was after all the beginning of exile.

The narrow paths that lead to Clare's escape from the place that wasn't home for his body or transgender society only emphasized for him the contingency and high cost of moving from exile towards pride. Clare found among the anti-loca sancta of the city, the dyke bars, room enough to allow him to sit in a queer and trans environment. It gave him the freedom to share space without being put in any specific place in the community. He could be or not be, move and change, all essential powers for growth and free breathing. "And what if that definition [of gender] hadn't been large enough, what then?" asks Clare (133). "Would I have sought out hormones and/or surgery?" The space of city did not make demands on Clare to immediately claim an identity even as he eschewed the chains of Port Orford. Now that he could have a sexuality, he was not pressured to affirm an allegiance as a lesbian. Now that he no longer had to be a girl, he was not forced to be a man. Yet not all alternative queer and transgender spaces are so free. There are places, many places, where transgender persons are only embraced if they defined themselves according to one of the two binary positions: a transgender man or a transgender woman. Often in such cases social assistance is only given to transgender persons to transition if they undergo the full range of treatments for gender identity disorder, now called gender dysphoria. Such treatments include hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery (now called gender affirmation surgery), legal name and gender change, as well as psychological diagnosis and therapy. Such care is usually very expensive, running easily upwards of $100,000 and above. Transgender transitions are often mapped like roads with these treatments as waymarkers that authorize access to an alternative gender. The cost for transitions becomes the price demanded if people are allowed to escape the gender and sexual confines of their home but denied free access to alternative transgender spaces and modes of being.

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The World of the Pilgrim

Transgender is for Clare not a destination nor any other fixed place but a mode of liberating movement. Indeed, in referencing "the trans movement" Clare seems to suggest both the political drive for change and the hard personal wanderings. "The trans movement suggests a world full of gender and sex variation, a world much more complex than one divided into female-bodied women and male-bodied men," explains Clare (128). The road for a transgender person at the terminus of transgender man or woman but criss-cross with a wide range of possibilities, some of which are not yet named. The wide open road and unmarked footpaths of gender and sexuality can seem like chaos. Those who are most invested in the structures of power that order specific places and forms of embodiment express such queer and trans alternatives as empty or completely unorganized. The fear may be sincerely felt or it may simply be a scarecrow, yet another boundary marker, to keep people in their place and from exploring the free world beyond. Yet Oakland is a place with structures and systems of its own, only with space enough to allow queer and transgender bodies to breath. Indeed, the transgender movement is not aimed at destroying the loca sancta that are home for many who live there. Rather, transgender simply gestures to the road and offers assistance on the way to other places. "Many trans activists argue for an end, not to the genders of woman and man, but to the socially constructed binary" (128). Tearing down the walls that enforce strict gender norms or forcibly enact sex on subjugated bodies are not the same as living in a world without a place to call home. Rather it turns such walls into bridges, it opens gateways, breaks chains, and also makes maps, founds cities, and offers resources to wayfarers who might want to enter the wilderness of gender where few have yet trodden. 

In the conclusion to "Stones in my Pocket, Stones in my Heart" in particular, and Exile and Pride in general, Clare returns to the metaphor of the walls that define gender and sexuality, that section shared space into places of home and exile. Yet this time, Clare imagines himself not as a hermit but as a pilgrim. The wall becomes a bridge that he can cross or one that he can straddle, hanging his legs on both sides at once or just dwelling on the in between space.  "In the end, I will sit on the wide, flat top of my wall, legs dangling over those big, uncrackable stones, weathered smooth and clean," writes Clare (138). Yet ever the social critic, Clare's pilgrimage is not offered only as a personal story but as a map for others to join him on the wandering hike through the deep woods and urban alleys of gender. Clare imagines and invites others to imagine themselves on the wall next to him, reveling in multiplicity and the liberty to change. "[I] Sit with butch women, femme dykes, nellie men, studly fags, radical faeries, drag queens and kings, transsexual people who want nothing more than to be women and men, intersexed peple, hermaphrodites with attitudes, transgendered, pangendered, bigendered, polygendered, ungendered, androgynous people of many varieties and trade stories long into the night... Bold, brash stories about reclaiming our bodies and changing the world" (138). In the end, Clare positions his story as just one among many shared in a wider community. Each place in the spectrum of gender he crosses and occupies are but nodes that connect with wider queer and trans networks of possibility. "The stolen body, the reclaimed body, the body that knows itself and the world, the stone and the heat that warms it; my body has never been singular" (137).

The world of the transgender pilgrim is one that invites a change in how we view our environments and the bodies that occupy, shape, and escape them. On one level, the movement seeks to reveal the diversity of wildlife living in our backyard, the other forms of gender and sexuality turned into hermits and exiles. "Trans people of all varieties say, 'This is how we can be men, women, how we can inhabit all the spaces in between,'" writes Clare (132). The revelation of Exile and Pride is not that Port Orford is a straight cisgender place and Oakland is full of queer and transgender people. Rather the world we live in is a love wilder and dynamic than we expected. The ground shifts beneath our feet. On another level, such pilgrims demonstrate that places, rural and urban, straight and queer, cis and trans, are socially constructed. The problem when a queer or trans youth finds themselves lost, alone, or violated where they grow up is not that the child is broken and needs to be fixed. Nor is it that the child needs to be taken from toxic environments to safe spaces. Care both for the person and their location may need to occur. This is where attention to personal stories and scars are critical. "Harder to express how that break becomes healed, a bone once fractured, now whole, but different from the bone never broken," writes Clare (132). "How do I mark this place where my body is no longer an empty house, desire whistling lonely through the cracks, but not yet a house fully lived in?" Yet these scars can be used to tell tales and incite social change. Importantly, toxic environments are not set by nature and unchangeable. More often, the problem is in the social environment and not in the individual, the place and not the person needs to be transformed. This may mean physical changes need to be made to bodies and buildings but it also means that social changes need to be made in who and how the world is allowed to be used and shared.

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More on Eli Clare

"Losing Home: the Rape of Transgender Lives 

in Exile and Pride"

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Losing Home: the Rape of Transgender Lives in Exile & Pride

"My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile"

Exile and Pride
Eli Clare

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The Place of the Hermit

Growing up in Port Orford, Oregon, near Route 101, Eli Clare felt at home with the land but alienated from the society that defined the place and those who lived there. A coastal town, it is located near Siskiyou National Forest that provided logging jobs for Clare's family and many in the area. As he walked home along a road following the Elk River, Clare would watch logs gloat down the waters and fisherman dipping in their lines. These walks through the woods or up mountains were among the moments where Clare felt most at home in the place where he was being raised. Yet among the community of the logging town, the young transgender youth often felt like an outsider. "I watched and listened to the girls in my school talk about boys, go behind the equipment shed to kiss them, later in algebra class about fucking them," recounts Clare of his school days, describing his emotions as like a metaphorical wall between himself and the the girls of the town, "I watched from the other side of a stone wall, a wall that was part self-preservation, part bones and blood aloneness, part impossible assumptions I could not shape my body around" (124). Although he lived in the same forests as his schoolmates, he was unable to feel welcome in the space because of the cisgender and heterosexual norms of girlhood that organized the lives in the town. Clare puts these feelings into metaphors drawn from around him. Walls, especially made of stone, were all around him. They defined the physical place. Yet it was his  social place, being raised as a girl, and his work to relate to his body and his environments in ways that his body resisted. As a result, he felt alone and without a place in Port Orford. 

The effect of these stone walls was to turn this small Oregon town into a kind of machine that produced and housed proper cisgender heterosexual girls. Despite feeling alienated in his social environment, Clare recounts trying to survive in the town by allowing himself, to degrees, to submit to its production of straight feminine girls. "I pull out an old photo of myself from the night of my high school graduation," Clare recalls looking at on old album of his childhood home, "I wear a white dress, flowers embroidered on the front panel, the plainest, simplest dress my mother would let me buy. I look painfully uncomfortable, as if I have no idea what to do with my body, hands clasped awkwardly behind me, shoulders caved inward, immobilized, almost fearful beneath my smile. I am in clumsy, unconsenting drag. This is one of the last times I wore a dress" (136). While the physical space of Oregon make no special demands of femininity on Clare, the place he lives is defined by such rules imposed on bodies it marks are female. Once described as a wall, the physical and metaphorical boundaries that Port Orford places on Clare's body become as close to him as an flowery dress. The wall metaphor placed Clare on the outside but the dress makes him feel alienated from his surroundings within an encircling embroidered garment. Inside the linen walls that wrap him in girlhood, Clare feels like a foreigner in his own body. Often transgender experiences are compared to drag. Usually this is a conflation of a trans person's post-transitioned inability to pass and a Drag performer's intentional performative gender that emphasizes its own points of failure to create a sense of shock. Yet Clare turns this around and suggests that the transgender person does not point to the artificiality and failure of their gender after transition but before transition, to reveal the socially constructed walls placed around them.

Being put in the place of a girl, Clare began to feel his body was taken away from him. Port Orford did not feel like a home to him and in time neither did his body. "I do understand how certain clothes make me feel inside my body," explains Clare (135). Certain clothes marked Clare as automated as a girl, as though Clare was not resident, at home, or in control of his body. Meanwhile, other clothes marked his body as in his control, free to move and dress as he will; but these were the clothes marked for men. "For me, Vogue and Glamour held none of the appeal that Walt Maya did, dressed in his checkered shirt, cowboy boots, and wide-brimmed hat," explains Clare (136). "I joined the boys in their emulation. I knew early on the feel of boots and denim, knew I would never learn to walk in a skirt." Just as Clare could watch girls from the other side of a figurative wall, so too he could watch boys from the other side of a  paneled dress. He was trapped in the place, the physical clothing and the cultural associations of girls while he watched boys living the life he wanted on the other side of a gender divide. Had the strict cisgender mechanisms that produced girls and boys had more lubrication, allowed for parts to move more freely, then perhaps Clare could have had an easier time moving from one social position to another. As it is, he experienced a lot of friction as he tried to transition and became marked as a failed girl rather than as a trans man. "I tried to wear skirts my mother sewed for me... I failed," admits Clare. "I loved my work boots and overalls long after the other girls had discovered pantyhose and mini-skirts. But failing left a hole in my heart; I wanted to belong somewhere." (124). Rather than be allowed to move from one place, one gender designation, to another, he became marked as defective and felt as though he lost his body, his home, and his place in the world

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Losing Home

Stating that gender and sexism is in the environment can bring subtle aspects to the forefront, such as clothing, but this does not discount personal agents in the ecology of household that persons in their place (or disrupting a place's sense of comfort) can directly and violently control a life. Indeed, in naming what gave Clare the deepest feeling of "losing home," he names the rape and sexual abuse he received from his father. "I could start with the ways my body has been stolen from me," writes Clare. "Start slowly, reluctantly, with my parents. My father who raised me, his eldest daughter, as an almost son. My father who started raping me so young I can't remember when he first forced his penis into me." (125). In the grim details of his father's rape of his body, Clare marks a point in which the loss of a sense of home moved from a distant wall, to intimate apparel, and through the threshold of his body as his father violently penetrated him. The father who gave him a place to live, and room to explore his masculinity, chose instead the most direct and penetrative way to vacate Clare's power from his body. In each way, the rape demonstrates itself as an assertion of ownership and power. "I could start with the brutal, intimate details of my father's thievery, of his hands clamping around my neck, tearing into me, claiming my body as his own" (128). However he allowed Clare to wander towards masculinity in his public presentation, in privacy he put Clare in the place of a girl; a girlhood defined by sexual violence and submission. To be put in the place of a girl, in the Clare house, was to have one's body taken.

Although the theft of his body is direct and personal, Clare nonetheless views the rape as a part of the wider environments sexist system of taking control over bodies. In these details, Clare fears the mechanisms of such power can be forgotten. "I lose the bigger picture," worries Clare, "forget that woven through and around the private and intimate is always the public and political" (128). By examining the rape not as isolated incidents of an unusually violent man, Clare opens up his story to wider questions of gender and sexuality. "How did my father's violence, his brutal taking of me over and over again, help shape and damage my body, my sexuality, my gender identity?" asks Clare (126). This process worries him because such discourses around the relation between rape and queer gender or sexuality usually take the perfunctory form of cause and effect. "Will my words be used against me, twisted to bolster the belief that sexual abuse causes homosexuality, contorted to provide evidence that transgressive gender identity is linked directly  to neglect?" (125).  Rape is taken as the cause of a girl fleeing femininity to live as a man or else to be sexually engaged with only women. This conclusion however depends on an arrangement of the facts only in a particular flow of causation. This is the "twisting" that Clare fears. Such a twisting begins by assuming cisgender and heterosexuality is the natural starting position and transgender and queerness as the artificial, rather than normative manhood and girlhood as one the the chief products of such highly gendered structures of power. Indeed, this irony is evidence by the contradicting supposition of cause and effect. Non-normative gender and sexuality is supposed to come from too much (even violent) impositions of gender, concluding it as a kind of failure or overcompensation. Yet transgender and queerness is also supposed to come from neglect, as though they are the natural state that has not been properly imposed out of the life by such over-acting parents.

Yet by allowing such questions, asserting there is a relation between sexist environments and rape, Clare can ask other questions as well. "How did his non-abusive treatment of me as an almost son interact with the ways in which his fists and penis and knives told me in no uncertain terms that I was a girl?" (126). Opening up the conversation, Clare is able to turn the tables on sexist assumptions about queerness and rape. Rather than assume that rape causes non-normative genders and sexualities, Clare asks the necessary question if rape is intended to form or fix straight men and women. The masculine behavior came before and around the rape, it was during the rape that Clare was put in a humbled female position. By admitting these questions, Clare points to the lack of easy answers and thus the evident lack of stable genders in the environment where he lived. "How did his gendered abuse - and in this culture vaginal rape is certainly gendered - reinforce my sense of not being a girl?" adds Clare. "How did watching him sexually abuse other children - both boys and girls - complicate what I knew of being a girl, being a boy?" (126). Rape is a performance and an act which speaks of power dynamics in the environment. Fort Orford was not simple a place for cisgender heterosexual boys and girls, nor simply the place where they were made into normative men and women, but a place where gender was always already unstable and unraveling. The need to put Clare in the place of a girl, emphasized how he was not at home in that place. Taking away Clare's power revealed that he had power to take. Likewise, it teaches the lessons that straight, cisgender male supremacy needs to take power from others in order to maintain its dominance. It needs to police the borders of gender because those who live in the space are not naturally bound by the sexist social laws of place and position. 

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The World of the Exile

"I wanted to be a hermit," declares Clare on recalling his overall feeling during his childhood, "to live alone with my stones and trees, neither boy nor a girl." (124). For all the difficulty that his physical body and environment posed for him, it is his social body and environment that made him feel alienated and not at home in either. The matter of his body remained relatively the same but their meaning for him was continually being defined for him by his father and the patriarchy. "My father raped me for many reasons," analyzes Clare, "and inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy as well" (129). The woodlands and the flesh are spaces where many different sort of lives could have been explored by Clare but in the toxic social environment of Port Orford life was continually being put in its place. Indeed, Clare lived a life full of of contradiction, as both boy and girl, but overall was the command that whatever or whoever he is that he learns his place under the power of men. In the end, the rape did not assert for Clare was not the stability of masculinity or femininity, heterosexuality or homosexuality, but the lack of stability and security in his body and his home. "I lived by splitting body from mind, body from consciousness, body from physical sensation, body from emotion," writes Clare (131). "My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile." In the end, the gender dysphoria Clare felt, the alienation from his body, in some ways points to the violence and instability of gender in the place where he grew. To be clear, it is not Clare's masculinity or attraction to women that came from this toxic environment but rather the suffering that walled off his transition to these places and yet also painfully made sure he never felt at home in femininity or attraction to men. The suffering did not put him in the place of a man or a girl but took from him the power to feel at home in any place. It made him an exile. 

If the imposition of walls, coverings, and bindings are the tools that cause the loss of a sense of place, what then are such exiles and hermits left to imagine the world? Upon considering the lessons of force and repression, Clare decides that putting up such blocks in the discourse of his own body and environment will likewise fail to describe his experiences. Clare writes, "this strategy of denial, rejecting any possibility of connection between abuse and gender identity, abused and sexuality, slams a door on the messy reality of how our bodies are stolen" (125). Theft does not mean the annihilation of the valued objects, be they bodies, land, or power. Rather the loss of home is a rearrangement and cordoning off of objects in the space. Certain bodies are not allowed to interact with other bodies, such as women sexually with other women or trans men with boots and overalls. Instead, they become jealously guarded by certain bodies from other bodies, such as the violent force of such men to claim sexual access to these young girls or to the right to wear such masculine trappings in public. The logic of claiming or stealing a place is not about creating or destroying lives but about controlling them. "We live in a time of epidemic child abuse, in a world where sexual and physical violence against children isn't only a personal tragedy and symptom of power run amok," concludes Clare, "but also a form of social control"(128-129). Putting up walls, around land, a community, a person, or a story, does not fundamentally change what is being contained or excluded, rather it attempts to control them by making them submit to personal possession. Such a possessor sets the manner and possibility of how people and the world relate to one another. For Clare's father, it seemed less important whether Clare was a boy or a girl, but rather that he could determine when he could claim himself as a boy and when Clare's father could violently claim him as his girl.

There is nothing in the woods or the water that make Port Orford a place for straight cisgender girls and men, but not queer transgender youth. Nor is it simply that things, like social progress, move slower there by nature. Often when such places are shrugged off by urban queers or defended by locals as obviously conservative, what is meant is that these are places where violent male supremacy, the isolation of gay men and lesbians, and the hatred of trans persons dominate. Such places exist because they are occupied territories and the people living there are subject to patriarchal control. The rejection from female community and the occupation of Clare's body by his father evidence how these places are defined by such power dynamics. "What a better way to maintain a power structure," asks Clare, "than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children." (129). Such overt acts of violence may or may not rare, Clare was subject and witness to many of them, but the lessons of them serve more than personal ends. Rape or the fear of rape, exclusion or the fear of exclusion, are one of the chief weapons that keep men and women, boys and girls in their place in Port Orford. Those who step out of line become targets for abuse. "And here is the answer to my fear: Child abuse is not the cause of but rather a response to - among other things - transgressive gender identity and/or sexuality" (129). Clare lived as a boy before he was put in the place of a girl by his mother's dresses or his father's rape. His transgressive gender and sexuality did not come from abuse. Although Clare admits, "I feel safer, somewhat buffered from men's violence against women, walking the streets after dark, knowing my night time outline and stride are frequently read as male." (127). Rather, for young Clare, the abuse came in response to his gender transgression. The abuse may have come regardless. Walls are not only put up for those who would climb over them but to make a statement not to try. This is how any why hatred inscribes itself in the environment and the bodies of a place like Port Orford.

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More on Eli Clare:

"Reclaiming Home: the Pilgrimage of Transgender in Exile and Pride"

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Tiny Corporealities: Eyes of the Poor (Animal's People)

"All things pass, but the poor remain...
Tomorrow there will be more of us."

Animal's People
Indra Sinha

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The Tiny Corporealities project is aimed at intense analysis of the body as matter entangled with meaning. Frequent observations will be journaled, tracing how "body," "thought," and "narrative" function as apparatuses by which corporealities emerge. Critical attention will be paid to how particular embodiments are formed and inform their social environment. 

This project arises from an engagement with a seminar 

“Alternative Materialisms” led by Prof. David Mitchell at G.W.U.

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"Tell me about the pressure in your head," a doctor in a white-coat tells me as I sit in his Chicago office. He hardly looks up from his clip-board when he speaks. As I try to express to him how my sinuses feel on a given day in April, he jots down notes and asks me leading questions. By the end of our interview, I have articulated a narrative that fits within a certain definition of seasonal allergies. Mold and pollen are marked as causes. The pain and inflammation in my sinuses the effect. The result of my ability to give him to story he wants, he writes a prescription for nasal spray - a kind of steroid - that would make my tiny corporeality more docile. 

Through this exchange, there is an enactment of power against disability/debility. The demand for a certain kind of able-bodiement directs the doctor's search for pathology in my body and the arrival at a chemical corrective. Likewise, the same drive brought me into his office and sends me away with the slip of paper. It is a system run on the force of narrative and capital. 

1. My ability to analyze literature has given me access to a job and healthcare.
2. The insurance money has given me access to the doctor so that I might present a narrative of my own body.
3. The effectiveness of my story produced a prescription which will allow me to spend money on pills.
4. The pills will manage my sinuses so I can better analyze literature.

At first glance there is a circuit being enacted, but it is not a system found in nature. Rather, I have entered into this exchange of body, language, and capital through an ascendence to my Ph.D fellowship. Before this time, if my sinuses were in pain, I would have to consider whether or not I had the money on hand to buy a box of allergy pills. Going to a doctor and getting a prescription for something stronger was not at all possible on my budget. Living on loans and hourly wages, during my Master's program, I could not always afford the luxury of medicine. Thus even though the arrival at a fellowship did not radically change my quality of life, it continued the process of moving towards a certain kind of upper-class model of life - premised on certain kinds of able-bodiment and self-care. My entrance into the doctors office then signaled not only a disavowal of debility, the arrival at an ownership of my own body, but also a distinguishing move through which I disavow my former position among the poor. From this position as an insured Ph.D of literature, I assert an independence that affords me the power to look back at this poverty from the outside, as an object of society, of memory, of story.

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In Indra Sinha's 2007 novel, Animal's People, a victim of an American industrial accident in India, calling himself "Animal," comes to articulate his voice to a wider readership (imagined simply by the speaker as  "Eyes") through a series of recorded/transcribed tapes. In the process, Animal distinguishes himself both from the pre-scripted narratives of trauma insisted on by western journalists and from amalgamation with his community members and fellow victims. The result of being distinguished, Animal is given the benefits of an exemplar of his people, offered up for charity and surgical intervention. Despite a longing for treatment that would allow him to walk on two feet, to be "an upright human," the novel concludes with Animal's refusal of the restoration narrative. In remaining Animal on "four-feet," he comes to acknowledge the tense relationship between being in community with the poor and coming to find his own particularity within it (366).

Animal, and his book, remain suspicious of readers. Already a victim of American industry, he insists that his story be told in his own voice, so that his narrative does not become a victim of the press, pressed and flattened into a broad overarching image of his people. Animal will be animal, his body and his story will be his alone. To facilitate, he is given a tape-recorder, allowing him to speak in his own voice. To help the process, Animal is told to consider the tape-recorder like a silent friend, listening to him talk. Twisting this metaphor, Animal calls the imagined audience "Eyes," the ones that watch him and read him like a book. Not only does this assertion turn the attention of readers back on themselves, their bodies, as they physically look at the text, it gestures to reading's larger psycho-social enactments of power. "Eyes" will gaze upon Animal and Animal's People, seeing them like a dark mirror, an Other, divested of humanity (e.g. animals) simultaneously reflecting their worst selves and staring back at them. The homonym between "Eyes" and "I-s" deepen this reading. The reader is the "I" and the Others become the image of the world, an amalgamation to be understood and mastered. In short order, the book names a central dichotomy to be overcome in the novel: the Eyes/I-s versus Animal's People.

What does it mean then that Animal's tale has been heard? He is given money and the offer of corrective surgery. Through the power of story, Animal has gained entrance into the world of the Human. He can become an I/Eye. At this point, Animal's violent and successful narrative opposition reveals itself as a power-play that has distinguished him from his People and put him in leagues with the Eyes who silently consumed him and his story. By trying to be the opposition of the Eye, he made himself into the Other, reflecting and staring back at them. He can be an individual, made like them, acceptable into society, but always dependent on them as a kind of lesser creation. "If I'm an upright human, I would be one of millions, not even a healthy one at that," Animal considers (366). The repetition of the word "one" signifies that he has become a singularity, but singularity is the very language of Neo-Liberalism, of the I-s/Eyes, where every one is a solitary and more manageable one. Everyone is special, so no one is especially threatening. Animal is separated from his community in order to stand in for his community. He is taken, they are left behind.

The decision to "Stay four-foot," and proclaim "I'm the one and only Animal," requires that the story come to an end. "Eyes" he says, "I'm done" (366). To conclude the narrative with his restoration would be to cover over his People's continued suffering with the balm of Western charity. To continue the narrative would be to cover over his People's continued suffering with the acid of Animal's looming personality. The project of the novel has failed. The novel must fail if it is to avoid easy resolution. In a narrative sense, Animal is "done" insofar as his story passes away so that his People's can continue. This is one critical sense that we can understand the final declaration, "All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us" (366). The Eye/I of Animal's story is replaced by the "We" of the People of the Apokalis. The particulars and individuals come and go, their stories, their bodies, but most of all their sense of individuality. What remains is the sense of community and the dependencies of living through the political and material environment. One person's story cannot vanquish poverty, but the refusal to tell the prescribed story of victory or defeat might yet allow the poor to survive the conquest. 

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While Animal's twisted spine and my Tiny Corporeality's sinus pressure are distinct materialities, the drive of the industrial medical complex which alienates both of us from our embodiments (as debilitated) also alienates both of us from the poor (as disabled). We are mutually caught in an image of able-bodiment and independence that powers the flow of story, medicine, and money. In accepting the one, moving towards a certain form of body, we accept the other. We come to claim our bodies not as a shared material condition with others in our environment (e.g. chemical waste or air-born mold) but as a personal possession which we (as neoliberal citizens) manage and others fail to manage. Walking upright with clear heads, we distinguish ourselves socially from those who remain bent. Rather than helping to fix the problem in the environment, as a part of that eco-system, by pinning the problem and solution on our particular bodies we have joined a system aimed to separate ourselves from our environment and our society.

In choosing to stop his personal narrative, and thus end his novel, Animal encourages us to remain suspicious of our own participation in systems of power that exploit and marginalize the poor. What stories do we tell with our bodies and with how we narrate our bodies? How does our success as story-tellers move us from the exploited to the exploiter? This does not mean that we all should refuse treatment in the form of surgery or allergy-medication, but it does mean that we should resist the pressure to take this access into the sphere of industrial medicine as an exit from our environment. When the pain in our backs or faces are not so pressing, can we keep feeling the whip of capitalism or the weight of human sovereignty on our heads like crowns of nature? How do we resist telling the I's/Eye's story and instead tell the story of our People?

How has my tiny corporeality come to stand as a synecdoche for a whole ecology of embodiment?

Animal releases Animal's People from the cage of his narrative by ending his story. As I move towards the end of my Tiny Corporeality project, I too release the flow of allergins from being directed through my personal story. This is not a call to shut down story. Animal's People had an effect on me (as an Eye/I), just as I hope the Tiny Corporeality had an effect on you (as an Eye/I). The effect of story in each case, I hope, is an opening up. Instead of a conclusion, this move should be seen as an invitation to tell stories together. I become quiet for a while so that others may speak. I allow my voice to join a chorus of voices calling for social and environmental justice. I turn my voice to tracing our collective stories. Returning to Animal's final words, we might restate them: 

One point of view passes away, but the eyes of the poor remain. We are the people of narrative. Tomorrow there will be more stories to tell.