Hell Yes to Softness!

Praising the Gentle in the Age of the Cruel

A month or so after I finally told my father I was trans and had transitioned, he came to visit me to see for himself how I had become this person he could not fathom. The universe being the joker that it is, as we sat there watching TV, my dad flipping channels incessantly until his attention span, at last, settled for a moment, he happened to stop on a documentary about a trans man. (This was 2010…how many such documentaries even existed then?!) The trans man in question was being shown mid-top surgery, operated on by none other than the surgeon I had gone to the year before. Cut to a later scene where he was shown dressing up to perform as a drag queen, and my father breathlessly said something like, “What a shame, to go through all that, and then you’re trying to be feminine?!” I didn’t try to explain; what would be the point? But I didn’t think it was a shame at all.

Transition is not a process of discarding one set of strictures for another. Or it certainly wasn’t that for me, though it took some time to discern that it wasn’t just that I was a softer kind of masculine but that I wasn’t all that interested in aiming for masculinity at all and kind of just needed to be a (largely) gentle bearded person (incidentally, I’ve come to care not one whit about the concepts of masculinity and femininity. I feel so free!).

Once the more activating phases of transition settled, I’ve more and more come to embrace the softness in me, the deep capacity for emotional experience (yes, even on testosterone! And not just anger!), for empathy (yup, T doesn’t eradicate it!), for being moved by the world around me: the trees, creatures, art, human brilliance and resilience (again, T is not incompatible with being a fully human person, go figure!). It’s far from a shame to care more for softness than for masculinity. It does not mean I went through all this for nothing. Figuring out how to exist in my skin helped me discover with more clarity the deeper layers of self that matter far more. And I still quite love how I’m existing in my skin now!

Tragic Masculinity

“Obviously not a real man because…never did I or any man ‘celebrate the joy I feel in my body.’”
	—cis dude on the internet attempting to mock a trans man

You’ve really given up
the game, haven’t you?
Your joylessness naked
to the world, your helplessness
to be anything more
than what you’re told.
How dare we
define ourselves, take
agency, risk ridicule and not
relinquish our full humanness,
even the courageous 
softness of our joy?
How dare we not 
be like you, in your
masculine obedience?

As Pride month comes to a close, I’ve found myself pondering softness as a way of being I am especially proud of, even more in the context of a world that so misunderstands and maligns it. Here we are in this political culture in which aggression and cruelty are viewed as the ultimate strength, softness as almost a diseased state. Kind of less so for women, who are expected to contain softness, but they are no less maligned and punished for performing the expectation. Stupid sexist bind. And in a bearded person, softness is a crime against their God of Patriarchy and against reason itself.

So today, I celebrate committing the crime of softness. (As an aside, I will keep on committing it even as Pride month ends. Don’t you love these trolls on social media who think that we’re all going to slink off sadly into obscurity once Pride month is over, only emerging at the start of the next June? Do they not get that we are constantly queer? Even when I am just a soft bearded person walking around telling trees that I love them. Still emanating queerness!)

So grateful for the softness in me, the softness in you. Grateful that we just keep on flaunting it no matter how they target us. Grateful for the ways in which softness can be a covert strength. It is what allows us to love one another, to be moved to care about what another goes through, to know what needs tending in ourselves. And when we do the hard work of tending to that tenderness in us, we can show up more tenderly and with more groundedness for others, instead of, say, violently kidnapping people over petty paperwork nonsense, taking away their healthcare or bodily autonomy, dropping bombs on them (ellipses to the power of infinity…).

Resilience

The trees are built 
to withstand
the wind’s assault.
Enlivening to watch them
sway their way through
coercion, bending, usually
not snapping. We try
so hard to be unchanged
by what is done to us.
So rigid, so 
afraid to be soft
that we break
so easily.

What I’m saying, in essence, is softness is required in order to not be a terrible human being. Not all softness all the time, of course. We need rage and rigidity—and dissociative toughness even—to get through hard times or enforce essential boundaries that others try to trample or to find the energy to fight a fascist regime. But if we stay in that space of hardness (just as if we stay only in the softness at all times), we cease to be present and connected to ourselves or to each other. We cease to be fully conscious and alive. I contend that it’s a balance, and some of us inevitably need more of one side of the spectrum than the other to find a sense of equilibrium or authenticity, but we are currently living in a world that is dominated by brute domination as the only valid path. A world that is vicious to softness and misses its crucial wisdom and beauty.

And so, hell yes to softness! Hell yes to the capacity, the courage even, to feel your feelings and to be gentle enough with yourself to properly move through them. This is a relatively new discovery for me, this softness I can have toward myself: I can heal so much more than I thought possible if I can just give myself softness when I need it. I can be kind to the pain that arises, and when I am, when I embrace it like an inconsolable child who needs my gentle calm rather than telling it in one way or another to “man up,” the pain finds its way back to calm or otherwise transforms more often than not. Even the oldest wounds can budge, particularly those born of not enough softness, too much harshness. And having allowed softness, I grow stronger. You can’t break me if I know how to be with my broken places.

Softness Disobeys

Perhaps I am
too soft for a world
that loves to crush 
soft things. And still
I refuse
to harden. My softness
will not acquiesce
to your brutality.
Perhaps you
did not know
that hardness is
the weaker substance.

Alternately, meeting pain with meanness or mockery at best takes much longer for it to pass through, or at worst, it dives for safety underground, accumulating tension there like a loaded spring, until…look no further than the entire leadership of the executive branch or most of Congress or two thirds of the Supreme Court for a glimpse of what interpersonally violent explosions might spew forth from all that suppression of softness.

So in answer to all the cruelty and the toxic individualism: hell yes to the capacity to feel into others’ pain, the tender humanness in them. To care about what is happening in the world to people who don’t look like you or share your identities or circumstances. To care even for beings that aren’t people. To provide some softness to others whenever it is possible for you to muster it. It might be our secret weapon. These human ways of being and behaving catch our fascist enemies by surprise. They have cut themselves off from the fullness of their humanity so entirely that they can’t predict what we will do, how we might organize and nurture a world that is more powerful than brute force can even begin to conceive of. I hope we catch them even more off guard than my father was by the thought of a trans man being a drag queen!

Portal

I wouldn’t vote
for turbulence, but the trees
present another view: may the wind
shake loose
these twisted branches
like open arms
to reveal
a portal to another world
of unforeseen spaciousness
with gentler hands
and sequins for stars.

Thank you for reading! May you also find softness within and around you in these times of glorifying cruelty. May you know the strength that resides inside softness and let it nurture and fortify you.