“Maybe God made my brain funky,” I tell Mami in protest when she argues with me as to why I didn’t wear the dress she laid out for the family party. I don’t have the words to explain to her that wearing that dress feels like torture. So, instead, I respond with a lie and some sarcasm, as I usually do when I feel vulnerable. I’m 13 during this ride on the long corridor stretch of I-4, driving back to our home in Daytona Beach, Florida, like Mami and I often do. I stick my arm out of the window as if it was my wing, look up toward the blackberry sky, and pretend I am flying. My mind is my magic, where I can escape the awkwardness of the moment and my body, where I can finally feel free. Every time Mami and I try to talk, I fail at being understood because I don’t have the language to explain how painful puberty is, why my body just doesn’t feel right. When you have no language, when you don't know the words transgender or nonbinary, you start to imagine.
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As a child, I was fascinated with fantastical stories of epic journeys, and daydreamed myself into one during a car ride just like this one. “Ay Nikki, tu siempre he tenido grande sueños,” I remember Mami telling me, dismissing my reveries. She wasn’t wrong. My imagination has always been the place where I would create my biggest dreams. I was 6 when I wrote my first book. With Crayola crayons and construction paper, I scribed “How The Scorpion Got Its Sting Tale,” a coming-of-age, hero's journey, where a tiny scorpion searches for a part of its body (the stinger) to feel whole. The cosmic irony doesn't escape me that my gender journey has often felt like a searching for bodily wholeness. My child self used storytelling to make sense of my own curiosities around identity, origin, and finding the parts of ourselves we need to feel “whole.”
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"My child self used storytelling to make sense of my own curiosities around identity, origin, and finding the parts of ourselves we need to feel 'whole.'"
Nic Rodríguez Villafañe
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Through storytelling, I could ask the questions I wasn’t allowed to ask in my Pentecostal house fixed in a state that has never been safe for queer and trans people. Through church, school, and home life, I grew up believing two things about my body and self: My existence was a sin and my body didn’t belong to me. Fanciful daydreams were where I imagined another possibility of being, another world. I needed a safe place to explore the expansiveness of what I was feeling; I needed to see someone mirror my experience. But more than that, I wanted a world beyond gender. I hated being told what I could or couldn’t do.
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I left Florida when I was 18 years old. I grieve that I had to spend so many years away from the state, but I could never become the person I am if I didn’t leave and search for the worlds I imagined in my mind. I had to take my own epic journey. And it took most of my adult life to begin to self-actualize my gender as a nonbinary transmasculine person. In the beginning of my 30s, after years of intensive therapy, I diligently prepared my family over emails and offered to talk if anyone wanted or needed. I even provided links for resources and welcomed the discomfort of the unknown. Few people responded.
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"I had to take my own epic journey. And it took most of my adult life to begin to self-actualize my gender as a nonbinary transmasculine person."
NIC RODRÍGUEZ VILLAFAÑE
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So during yet another car ride when Mami asked me if I started taking hormones, outing me without my consent to my older brother who was riding with us, I was shocked into a pained silence. Mami’s question surprised me because of how she asked me, more accusation, as if I had betrayed her. And before having time to answer her, my brother started to philosophize, asking me if my family should alter their memories when referring to me in the past, quoting a book he has just read. Could he still refer to me as his little sister if referring to memories of the past? I didn’t have an answer then. Somedays, I still don’t. I struggle with my own rememory of my gender and body. Couldn’t I just have a chance to be in my body before having the answers as to what my changing body meant to other people? I looked at Mami and quickly noted the sorrow on her face. I apologized profusely; I knew how sad I was making her. She responded, “I don’t know if this is the feeling, Nicole. The feeling is more worry than sad.” The echo of that statement has felt like a haunting.
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We are witnessing some of the worst years of anti-trans discrimination in U.S. history. In 2023, 45 states have proposed anti-trans bills, few as aggressively as my home state. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and the Republican-led state legislature have attacked trans people young and old with legislation that bars minors from receiving gender-affirming treatment, bans trans girl athletes from playing on sport teams with other girls, prohibits schools from asking students about their preferred gender, and forces trans people to use the bathroom designated for the gender they were assigned at birth. Today, someone like me, who has gone through all the required “necessary” psychological, medical, and legal steps to “fully transition” my gender in alignment with my body would still be forced to use the women’s restroom under this law. Politicians cite safety for passing these laws, yet none of them seems to care for the actual trans children that will be most adversely impacted. Through smear campaigns that instigate moral panics and incite violence against trans people to distract from real issues, like rising economic inequality and climate change, politicians have found a nefarious strategy that endangers trans lives as well as freedom and democracy.
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"We are witnessing some of the worst years of anti-trans discrimination in U.S. history. In 2023, 45 states have proposed anti-trans bills, few as aggressively as my home state."
NIC RODRÍGUEZ VILLAFAÑE
”
As dangerous as it is to be trans in Florida, I was called to return when I was 33. While taking a cross-country trip, I prepared myself to visit family and places I hadn’t seen since I left as a teenager. This trip was a necessary step in my gender journey and healing. I needed to be me, my whole self, in the state where I first imagined what being whole felt like.
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Once again, I was on I-4, but this time I was driving solo to my uncle’s house in Fort Myers. When I arrived, Tío Julio and his husband, Uncle Chris, greeted me in the garage with a cold beverage, while they took their nighttime cigarette. We spent the rest of the evening talking and watching the sunset. “Look at the sky; it's the color of love,” Tío Julio sung a melody of Sade. My joy for contemplative platicas on porches comes from this southern campesino practice of pause.
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"My gender journey, and the return to making my body feel like home, has meant mourning the memories of growing up in a state with beautiful memories of the land but also surviving the suffering of its human consequence. "
NIC RODRÍGUEZ VILLAFAÑE
”
Florida’s heat and humidity mirrors that of the Caribbean, and in that moment, my body moved happily in the slowness. During our conversations, Uncle Chris, a natural historian who was born and raised in Florida, lamented how the state’s natural waterways have suffered centuries of industrialization. With exceptions, he said if you looked at Florida from a map, you can see one of the untouched rivers: Peace River, which runs through the southwest of the state like an incision. As he told me about the mystic beauty of the river, I reveled in its defiance, a body of water that refuses the consequences of the human condition. I ran my fingers across the scars of my own chest. I felt like I understood the movement of that body of water, in defiance. My gender journey, and the return to making my body feel like home, has meant mourning the memories of growing up in a state with beautiful memories of the land but also surviving the suffering of its human consequence.
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Some days, I mourn memories and grieve the loss of places that I have to physically distance myself from in order to survive, places like Florida. Other days, I feel hyper-cognizant about visibility, or how people are perceiving me. Throughout every physical change of my body while on T, I’ve noticed it is harder for Mami to look me in the face. I swallow those moments of disappointment and bury it deep inside. Her own mourning is visible, as the daughter who once held the promise of her dreams and expectations is no longer recognizable. And in her worst fear, looks more like Edwin, my father, the man who caused the most of her suffering. How could I betray Mami, and our memories, in this way? How could I purposefully pivot our relationship away from the sacredness of mother and daughter?
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"The more I prioritize my joy over other people’s shame, or my embodied reality over other people’s projection, the more I return to the childlike wonder that I once had. This is not something new. Healing is a return to what was and what will be again — it was imagined on all those car rides."
NIC RODRÍGUEZ VILLAFAÑE
”
While I don’t always have the right answers, we love each other through the discomfort. Some days, we are caught in the misfires of untranslatable feelings or memories. I work to share with her through my gender journey that I have learned that this struggle is against all gender oppression. In this country, whether we are fighting for access to safe abortions or trans comprehensive health care, we are all fighting against a world that dictates our lives on false ideas about gender and the body. We need a new imagining of what it means to be a woman, a man, or a person in the contemporary world. This is where the possibility of imagination comes in; this is the power of my youthful fantasies. Nonbinary people have imagined our worlds and can teach the rest of the world to imagine different realities as well. We need a world that practices an ethics of bodily autonomy, a trans politics. We get to choose what we do with our own bodies. We get to choose how we adorn our bodies. We get to choose what our bodies mean to us.
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Despite history, culture, patriarchy, religion, and family expectations, I defiantly choose myself — and this has given me the opportunity to ask myself, “Who am I outside of Mami’s fear?” “Who am I outside of what other people want me to be?” The more I prioritize my joy over other people’s shame, or my embodied reality over other people’s projection, the more I return to the childlike wonder that I once had. This is not something new. Healing is a return to what was and what will be again — it was imagined on all those car rides.
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"Being trans, being nonbinary, expanding the possibilities of my masculinity, is a firm protection, a dutiful loving, and a conscious resistance and rejection to any word, grammar, or state of being that aims to flatten me into one-dimensional sameness."
NIC RODRÍGUEZ VILLAFAÑE
”
Being trans, being nonbinary, expanding the possibilities of my masculinity, is a firm protection, a dutiful loving, and a conscious resistance and rejection to any word, grammar, or state of being that aims to flatten me into one-dimensional sameness. I am a million lives of becoming. My healing, my spiritual growth, and my physical gender transition have all happened simultaneously with one another, through one another, around one another. They are all part of my own embodiment. My experience with bodily transition has been so much more about finding new words before naming my experience. Transition is an active verb. I love that our cultural refrains as Puerto Ricans in the diaspora include “sigue pa’lante, pa’lante sigue,” an active verb, a call from the Young Lords Party, of the fight to keep going forward, forward we will continue to go. We may not have the road map, but we don’t need the details — we have the open road in front of us.
It is nighttime. I am driving home from a late night of rehearsals, and I hear my cellphone ping. I see a congratulatory message from Mami on social media for another creative project. She signs her comment with “Love you, Nic” — a small but grand gesture.
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