Drowning in a femme register
I went swimming for the first time in a long time today. I haven’t been swimming since my diagnosis with multiple sclerosis seven years ago, and I haven’t been to a public swimming pool in the UK since transitioning some fifteen years ago. There are certain places considered fairly high risk for a transgender woman to tread, and the showers at a UK public pool definitely feature in the upper echelons. I looked it up in the transgender handbook and the level of risk is slightly above ‘aaare you sure about this?!’ and narrowly below ‘maybe we get our affairs in order first’.
I drove to the pool and sat in my car outside. My heart was racing in my ears. Strange that if I was presenting to a few hundred people in there I’d feel totally comfortable, but using a public shower breaks me out in a cold sweat. In my car I practiced my voice with my voice analyst app. It resonated at a comfortably femme 200hz. I reminded myself to keep the resonance in my head rather than my chest, to ease into the start of harder vowels, to be softer, lighter. If you experience a guttural flinching at the notion of making my voice more stereotypically feminine, hastening to remind me that women sound different to one another and that my voice, my natural voice, shouldn’t impede my being in this world, know that you’re in good company. It sits weirdly with me, too. But if I didn’t do this, every time I opened my mouth someone in the vicinity would question my gender and in this place, in the showers in particular, someone ‘clocking’ me could quickly become unpleasant. When keeping hidden is how you stay safe you do what it takes to remain invisible, and stereotypicality is a hell of a cloak.
I headed inside.
I got changed in a cubicle, took a shower, and was shit scared the entire time. I don't even know what I was afraid of. I wasn't singing baritone. I wasn't even speaking. And all evidence points to people seeing me wholly as a girl like any other. And I know that there is no secret to discover, not really. When people think of me as a girl, I am in a truly fundamental sense exactly what they see. But somehow I still feel only ever a heartbeat out of place from discovery. That I used to be visibly a different gender is somehow still a really big deal, and someone working it out feels like a Benoit Blanc level of revelation, like they’re discovering you're the head of your own religion, or that you were once the Secretary General of Nato, or that you are really three attractive ferrets in a trenchcoat.
I stayed quiet, slunk my disabled ass out of the showers and sunk myself into the slow lane of the pool. I pushed off. My arms now strong enough to power the water behind me in one long stride and I glided through the water like a nymph.
And it was at this moment that I remembered that my legs don’t work.
I can walk. My legs can keep me upright. But I’m a manual wheelchair user because they are weak and uncoordinated, and moving them is a little like trying to conduct an orchestra of toddlers. There is for sure movement, but it is only vaguely deliberate, and always on the edge of chaos.
One of the fun features of spinal cord lesions is that they don’t quite know how to respond to physical sensation. The impulses travel up from the legs toward the brain like a courier taking a delivery to the President. It gets intercepted by the secret service somewhere on the front porch, the White House goes into lockdown, and despite her protests the President is pushed into a security bunker long before anyone realises she’d ordered Uber Eats and there’s now an innocuous burger and fries strewn about the manicured lawn. The impulse hits a lesion and the legs go into lockdown, cramping, flinching, spasming. They totally ignore my signals to relax, much less to do the walking thing, or indeed the swimming thing.
I found that the water essentially communicated a constant stream of sensory impulses that traveled up the legs that they couldn’t interpret. I realised, while gliding through the deep end, that I needed my legs’ cooperation to swim forwards, or to keep myself upright in the water.
My arms are strong, and I used them to pull the water back in a form of breaststroke, doing my best to keep the legs outstretched behind me to offer at the very least aerodynamic support. It was hard to stay afloat with just the power of my arms but I managed it… barely… while inhaling a little water with my much needed air.
I coughed and spluttered as I caught my breath.
And amazingly I took the effort to ensure that I coughed and spluttered in the right vocal register. The thing that I thought immediately wasn’t that I needed to avoid dying here, but rather that if I did start to drown, I’d better make sure my last moments were femme enough. If I suddenly awoke from unconsciousness receiving mouth to mouth on the side of the pool, you can be damn sure my first gasps of breath would be recognisably girly inhales.
This is intersectionality.
That vigilant part of me drew her sword… donned her flippers? And we got to work, pushed the water aside and threw ourselves forward with force, hurtling us onward and surfacing with each stroke. I found my rhythm. I found my resolve.
600 metres later I tried to get out of the pool and remembered that my legs get weaker with use, and though they had quickly become little more than glamorous floatation devices, they were still technically in use. I climbed out of the pool and my legs could barely keep me upright. No Rocinante poolside I shuffled my way to a nearby bench and sat my collapsing ass down to wait for the legs to recover well enough to be able to do the extraordinary work of… leaving.
Getting showered and dressed was nearly as much of a workout as the swim was, and took forever. My foot wholesale cramped while I was trying to put my sock on, and the soreness from the cramp caused it to cramp further as I spiralled toward the event horizon to a black pain hole doctors have warned me about. Trying to put socks on a cramping foot isn’t too tricky, it’s kind of the right shape, but trying to put a sock on while the other foot cramps requires Olympic levels of gymnastics. You play a game of footwear chicken, trying to get the sock past your heel before you tip over like a felled redwood, with a similar likelihood of being able to get back up. Slowly I got myself into clothes, got my detritus organised, and shambled my way back to my car.
In the car I put on my music and cheered my success. A thing that would have been easy to the point of being casual before, a task so simple you can get distracted while doing it, is suddenly one of the most difficult things I will do today. And we haven’t even talked about how I needed to refrain from drinking too much water beforehand to avoid needing urgent visits to the toilet, and how I hid a few catheters in my towel poolside in case I did.
But today was a huge victory. Today I went swimming. And it’ll be hours before I can competently walk, and days before my leg soreness stops causing them to cramp and curl. But MS doesn’t take a difficult day off, and neither can I.
This was also… a lot. There are many moments in my life now where I can almost forget that I’m disabled. I can go miles in the Rocinante, I can muster leg strength enough to manage nearly any incline, pushing the Roci ahead of me, and I can self-catheterise nearly without thinking. But there are still moments where I’m reminded just how disabled I really am. When I get a fever, when I’ve walked too far, and now when I’m swimming, my abilities become far more limited and I’m exposed to the full scale of the damage my brain and spinal cord have sustained. I was hoping to swim in the medium speed lanes, but just getting across the slow lane without drowning was more an ambition than a plan. And I am suddenly unrecognisable to myself.
But here I am, someone new. And maybe this new person doesn’t swim so well. But maybe the measure of this new girl isn’t in how easy she finds things, but in how she reacts.
So come and get me MS. Your girl is strong. And while she knows she will ultimately lose this fight, she’s going to make you earn every inch of progression you seek to take from her. Eventually, this will be my end…