“The 21-gun salute, commonly recognized by many nations, is the highest honor rendered.”

www.arlingtoncemetery.mil, “21-Gun Salute”

In acknowledgment of the paradoxical invisibility suffered by the highly visible, and in tribute to comrades lost, wounded, or otherwise scarred on the hallowed ground of the gender battlefield, I offer this 21-gun salute:

1. The pale purple incision lines that begin at my armpits and meet at my sternum. They are a quotidian reminder that I am branded transgender, just like my former breasts branded me female. Although I paid a steep price for these lines, I despise being branded. I rarely expose them to the light of day because I fear that somehow, in their pale purpleness, they will be perceived as a threat by those who feel called to attack, defend, drive off.
2. Wearing a beard not because I prefer to, but because it armors me. It provides the first line of defense against the impalement of misgendering.
3. The scar from the episiotomy my former OB-GYN unilaterally decided to administer while delivering my son. I forget I have this scar until it’s randomly tugged the wrong way and I’m snapped back like a rubber band into flashbacks of pregnancy and childbirth. My mind tries to protect me by telling me these traumas happened to someone else, a false self under societal duress. But the cells of my body and nervous system know the truth and they are seized by a terror every bit as claustrophobic as the day I went into labor in 1999. The contrast between the agony of conception and gestation and the existence of my beloved son explodes like a mortar shell in my chest.
4. Feeling caught off guard when someone calls me “sir,” even though I never felt female. Wondering whether they notice my momentary bewilderment.
5. Continuing to receive mail addressed to the name I was assigned at birth. Six years ago, I launched a painstaking and often demeaning campaign to change both my name and gender marker on all official identification documents, accounts, and records. Despite my thoroughness, somehow this mail continues to find me with disconcerting regularity. It’s as though spores of my former identity drift freely through the air like an invasive species, occasionally re-seeding and sprouting.
6. That I felt incapable of transitioning until I was 47. That, after I realized it was an option, it took me a full decade to make the decision. That I can never get those years back.
7. Basing decisions about whether to use public bathrooms on safety rather than need. Safety extends beyond the threat of physical harm into mental, emotional, and spiritual damage, so what should be an act of self-care often becomes a trek through a minefield. Discernment requires calculating whether the potential dangers of the bathroom are greater or less than those of denying my body’s biological imperative.
8. When eye contact with strangers reveals their struggle with a cognitive dissonance they feel at the sight of me. Their eyes betray a bafflement at the juxtaposition of my facial hair, male hairline, and flat chest with my diminutive frame and facial features.
9. Dealing with a major pharmacy chain’s order that I disclose my “sex at birth,” so they might better help me, should I have an adverse reaction to a vaccine. I comply, and they corrupt my answer, translating it into “gender marker” on all future records. This feels like an ambush, and it contradicts the gender marker on file with my health insurer. When I point this out, the pharmacist deflects my concern with an explanation about it being “just” a systemic limitation, a glitch between disparate databases. Exhausted, I give up trying to explain why it is so much more than that.
10. Being eyed with suspicion by women jogging solo on the bike path who are sizing me up as a potential threat because they have no idea that I have been one of them.
11. Having someone who knew me pre-transition misgender or deadname me in front of a new acquaintance. Watching a shadow of confusion darken the eyes of that new acquaintance as shame spreads its hot sting through each of my cells. Debating about whether I have the emotional energy to dismantle their confusion for them.
12. Learning of yet another legislative effort at preventing trans youth from being who they are. That 2022 saw a record number of bills introduced to specifically target the rights of transgender and nonbinary people. That this trend is only escalating in 2023.
13. The invisibility I feel in conversation with cisgender men and women. Having been socialized as female, I can’t fully relate to the childhood nor coming of age struggles of the men. On the other hand, I have lived many of the experiences of the women. I feel alone in a no-man’s land, mute and disenfranchised from the culturally celebrated aspects of the binary.
14. That I must continually decide whether to debunk assumptions that I have an “ex-wife,” who in fact is an ex-husband, or that my son’s mother is my ex, who in fact is me.
15. Hearing my sister refer to our brother as “my brother” while she refers to me as “my sibling.” Although part of me feels grateful to no longer be referred to as her “sister,” her distinction feels like a reduction in grade. Trying to simultaneously hold space for my siblings’ grief over the loss of their sister and my own feelings of hurt that they can’t seem to budge from merely tolerating my intrinsic sense of gender to embracing me in it.
16. That gender-specific baby showers still exist. How do the parents know they are right? What if they’re not? Do they care?
17. Looking at my high school yearbooks or family photo albums, which illustrate with clear and incontrovertible evidence that I was guilty of self-desertion for decades. That a full review of this evidence opens the door to heart-hammering nightmares in which I am still stuck on the wrong side of the gender binary.
18. Pinning high hopes on an expensive stand-to-pee device that is billed as easy to use, then peeing down my pant leg when I use it.
19. Feeling haunted by the last goodbye I had with my mother. Although in the late stages of Alzheimer’s Disease and no longer able to speak intelligibly, she court-martialed my presentation in a split second. Eyes narrowed and corners of her mouth turned downward, she assessed my facial hair with a verdict of hmmmph, then turned away as I kissed her goodbye. I am seared by the memory and by the immutable fact that neither of my parents could acknowledge my identity before they died.
20. Understanding, deep down, that no amount of hormones, surgery, body- building, therapy, or spiritual discipline will ever completely heal the disconnect I feel between my body and soul; past and present; or aspiration and reality. This thought being the first one I have most mornings.
21. Reading about hate crimes perpetrated regularly against trans people. On the annual Trans Day of Remembrance, hearing the roll call of trans people killed during the year in the most heinous of those crimes. Hearing myself whisper, there but for the grace of God go I.

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Keith Aron is an emerging writer living in Western Massachusetts whose work has appeared in Discretionary Love and in Still Point Arts Quarterly (Fall 2023). His writing focuses on life viewed through a kaleidoscope of vantage points, including both sides of the gender binary, various spots on the class continuum, and along an arc of recovery. Nearsighted his whole life, he marvels at the 20/20 vision of hindsight and the crisp lines edging life’s absurdities.

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