Jarek Steele | February 2024

I am a transgender writer who lives in Missouri. That statement includes, to many people, what sound like foolish choices. Who in their right mind would opt for a profession with a meager earning potential and a gender presentation that cuts that potential by thirty to forty percent? And who would do that in the state of Missouri, where over 300 books have been banned in the past year, more than half of which were written by or about LGBTQ people or people of color? More specifically, what trans or gender-nonconforming person who dedicates their entire adult life to books and writing would choose to live a short drive from a library that now requires patrons under eighteen to have a parent or guardian present to sign up for a library card, and where over 350 people showed up to fight over LGBTQ issues after a woman complained because “an unnamed worker was wearing makeup, nail polish, and a goatee”? 

Occasionally, I do spend time wondering if I am a fool. I’ve spent more than I’ve earned publishing essays in literary journals. When I applied for ACA healthcare coverage, the website suggested a Medicaid application instead because my combined income as an online writing tutor and adjunct faculty member was low enough to qualify. Even if I wanted to take Medicaid (which I do not), the Missouri Senate passed legislation prohibiting its use for gender-affirming care, which means that I’d quickly burn through the testosterone I hoarded by taking half doses for the last year and wouldn’t be able to fill another prescription. I started transitioning twenty years ago. To say that the consequences of stopping hormone therapy now would be ugly is an understatement.

I am not a fool, though, and instead of lingering in the (tempting) swamp of despair, I try to remember that I don’t choose to live so that others may watch my performance of literacy and gender. I don’t write because people want me to write. As Annie Dillard said, “. . . your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except for you cares whether you do it well, or ever.” I don’t live in this body because people cheer me on. These two identities are, for me, inextricable. They are not caricatures that govern the way people see me; they are the lenses through which I see the people around me, and so is, I suppose, the place I live. 

The first time I moved to St. Louis I was a lesbian. I studied English at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville and wrote fiction and poetry. Most of my time was spent commuting across the Mississippi River to school and living in an airless apartment across the street from Tower Grove Park, but it was an accomplishment. I had finally moved across the border from my home state of Illinois, which I associated with my hometown of Effingham, a small town straddling the convergence of two railways. I thought St. Louis would understand me, and for the most part, it did. Every time I approached the river from the east and saw the arch, I thought it was one of the most beautiful skylines I’d ever seen. The Grove neighborhood was home to several queer bars, and I didn’t worry about sharing a lease with my girlfriend. 

The second time I moved to St. Louis, I had come off the road from driving a semitruck back and forth from Detroit to Laredo and needed a job. I found one at Left Bank Books and stayed there for nineteen years. It was where I transitioned, first tentatively with a slight change to my name, then more confidently with testosterone, then boldly with surgery. It was where I started writing nonfiction, first tentatively with a few bookstore-related blog posts, then more confidently with a few transition-themed essays, then boldly with a departure from the bookstore to study writing at Washington University. Now, here I am, writing more transition-themed essays when I should be writing my book. Really, I should be tutoring instead of any of that. The rent’s due. 

Those three words stop the momentum of many creative writers. We tuck our stories, our poems, and our memoirs into a small corner of our brains so that we may instead teach, edit, create corporate content, serve coffee, file legal briefs, clean hotel rooms, or sell books. All the words we do not write become a persistent interior voice that pulls from every experience and interaction. It builds a story around us. That inner voice is how we learn about the world and ourselves, and even if we aren’t typing pages of notes every night, even if we’re streaming every episode of Grey’s Anatomy instead of finishing an essay (don’t judge me), we are writing. We can choose not to write. We can choose to write and tell no one. But even if we are hidden and silent, we are still writers.

In the trans community, we call that stealth. A person who “passes” as one or another binary gender well enough to blend with cisgender people around them, who never tells a soul that they do not match the gender they were assigned at birth, can live for years with that secret. But that inner voice, that state of being, doesn’t sit in an inert pile in our brains. It interacts. It learns. Trans and nonbinary people watch from a place just removed from themselves in some of the same ways a writer squints through a blinking cursor to make sense of the world around them. Writers feel a certain otherness that is familiar to trans people.

I am a balding, bearded, white guy who can stop for gas in middle-Missouri without worrying because I do not look other. I’m aware of my privilege in a way that balding, bearded, white guys who have given birth to a baby, have had to learn to ignore the urge to pee for eight hours at a time because it isn’t safe to enter a bathroom, and have spent the night in an ICU bed explaining to the nurse that they do not, in fact, prefer the pronoun “it” are acutely aware of their privilege. I can, at any point, fade into the crowds of balding, bearded, white guys who frequent Lowe’s on any given Saturday, and sometimes I do. My writing is a different story. I can’t hide there. I’m a writer of creative nonfiction. Personal essays. Truth. If the truth is faithfully told, it reveals our complicities and our vulnerabilities. I write about my surgeries, my scars, and the complicated mixture of joy and radiant grief about this transition. My transition takes place in Missouri. I take place in Missouri. I am just now beginning to write about where I live, and my feeling of home is complicated by joy and grief, too.

As I was finishing my degree this past spring, Missouri’s attorney general used a consumer fraud law to enact an emergency order requiring trans people to endure over a year of therapy and fulfill other requirements before they could receive gender-affirming healthcare. I’ve been around long enough to know that frantic political posturing is always either a decoy or bait to whip up a frenzied base. Either way, nobody can maintain that heightened state of scandal indefinitely. Sure enough, Andrew Bailey released his grip on his clutched pearls and canceled the order, but the damage was done. It reminded me of when I trained to be a truck driver before I transitioned. My instructor and I drove in shifts, and while he drove, I napped on the top bunk of the sleeper cab. He chain-smoked cigarettes and only cracked his window when he needed to throw out the butt. The smoke and fumes collected at the top of the cab and made me struggle for every breath. I needed the job, though, and I was (at the time) in a female body traveling at high speeds across a dark Missouri highway alone with a man I didn’t know very well. He knew his truck well. He knew I couldn’t breathe. We both knew how much power I didn’t have. He said no when I asked for the bottom bunk, so I hung halfway off the top and waited for a break between cigarettes, hoping he would roll down the window long enough to let me breathe. For many people, it’s easy to hold their noses while the stench of fascism collects and dissipates on a whim. Others are trapped in its lingering cloud.

Sometimes living in this city feels like hanging off the top bunk waiting for a cool blast of night air, and I wonder what I could do, who I could be, and what I could write if I wasn’t trying to fit into a hostile place. Many of the trans people I’ve known have left St. Louis. Some have even left the country. I’ve lost track of others. But lots of us can’t or won’t leave, and this is what political hacks and the moneyed lobbyists who control them and the conservative narrative do not—cannot—understand. We live as if no one is watching, as if, to paraphrase Dillard, our lives are so meaningless, so fully for ourselves alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except for us cares whether we live well, or ever.

There’s a little magic in that. If you Google “Transgender Memorial Garden”, the chances are likely that you’ll find a Wikipedia entry that hasn’t been updated in a while. One person’s dead name (a trans person’s former name) is used, and another person mentioned hasn’t been a member of the board of the parent organization Metro Trans Umbrella Group (MTUG) for years. You might also see dozens of images of the cedar sign planted in the ground, surrounded by mulch and a rose bush with a landscape of trees behind it. I carved that sign in 2015 when sixty or seventy other trans people who lived in St. Louis and I built the country’s first garden dedicated to the lives of transgender people. We dug through city dirt filled with the rubble of old forgotten buildings to plant hackberry trees, which mostly never represent beauty. We created a butterfly garden on the sunny corner. We tended it. On that little patch of land, we had picnics, rallies, and funerals using borrowed bullhorns and cheap paper plates. We marched from that spot to support our trans family and celebrate every body in every shape and every presentation. 

One night, after a rally, I stayed behind to clean up. Hundreds of people had assembled and hadn’t even stepped on a flower. As I loaded my truck, I glanced back at two police officers who had lingered and stared as we protested them. One stood in front of the sign I had carved and peed on it as the other officer watched. We all knew how much power I didn’t have that night, but I did have the power to tend to that sign, to refinish it every year, to repaint the letters that spell out the message: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

The garden isn’t on that corner anymore. It’s the same old story about politics and money. The group moved the garden to a smaller, quieter place, and I haven’t been to it. 

My life as a writer in Missouri is an ongoing task of trying to define whether I am a Midwestern trans person who writes, a person who writes about his trans experience in the Midwest, or a Midwestern writer who happens to be trans. It seems like having the “trans” qualifier before “writer” makes me a one-subject pony, to mix a metaphor, but I am not only one thing. A writer’s task is to peer at all of life through the blinking cursor, and a transgender person’s task is to see all of life, not only the lens. 

I keep writing about this experience because it is mine, because I must, and because I can. Because I am able to write it. It is my obligation to keep trying to learn from it, to keep trying to exist, and to keep trying to see those around me who are also living here and who also have learned to breathe hostile air. At least for now. 

I don’t know if I was a writer before I became a man or if I was a man before I became a writer. That is to say: I don’t know if writing gave me the honesty to transition or if transitioning gave me the honesty to write. What I can say is that honesty gave me the courage to be infinite interpretations of both.

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Jarek Steele (he/him) writes creative nonfiction with themes of family, queerness, gender, nature, and whatever else is happening around him. He and his wife, Barb, live in St. Louis, Missouri. His writing has appeared in HuffPost and Fourth Genre. His latest essays are forthcoming in the Colorado Review (Spring 2024) and Electric Literature (Spring 2024).