Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ribs Like Starfish

2018; Wiley; Volume: 68; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cro.2018.a783478

1939-3881

Katie Horowitz,

Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

Ribs Like Starfish Katie Horowitz 1. I am in the ocean with my transmasculine partner when the tide comes in, bringing with it thousands of starfish. At first, it’s enchanting. Elijah picks one up, and we inspect it, stroke its sandpaper arms. A beautiful novelty. I feel a second starfish underfoot and reach down to take it in my hands. Then in a moment the spell is broken. The seafloor is suddenly a solid blanket of starfish. I can’t take a step without spilling my weight into one. I start to panic—I’m crushing them—and in my haste to get back to the shore I forget the one in my hand. I hear the plunk of something hitting the water at my side and look down to realize I am grasping a vivisected starfish arm. The body has broken off. I have broken it. I shriek in horror at my careless violence. Elijah looks me in the eyes and says softly, “It’s ok. It’ll grow back.” 2. When my six‐year‐old comes out to me as transgender, it is the simplicity of the wish that cuts the deepest, and then the empathy: “Mommy, I want to be Olive. I know Oliver is a good name, but I want to be Olive.” She doesn’t have the language to call herself transgender, but she knows she wants to be a girl. She has been contemplating it long enough to have decided on a more suitable name. And she acknowledges the attachment I might have to the name I chose for her, even as she insists that we let it go. This complicated, life‐altering transformation compacted into two syllables: Olive. As the weeks pass and we undertake the work of social transition, I am struck by how little she has actually changed. There are new clothes and new pronouns, conversations with teachers about reintroducing her to the class as Olive, conversations with friends and family about how to support and respect this perspicacious, self‐aware child. But for the most part, changing her gender does not open the floodgates to other changes. She remains her rough and tumble self, a child happiest playing in the dirt and exchanging video game strategies with friends, none of whom seem the least bit fazed by her becoming a girl. When my mother tells Olive she’s not sure what to get her for Christmas because she’s changed so much, Olive responds, “Grammy, Pokémon!” exasperated that her grandmother has seemingly forgotten the trading cards that have been her singular obsession for the last year and a half. At a parent‐teacher conference, Olive’s teacher tells me how she has thrived since transitioning at school. She is more patient and less easily frustrated. She listens to instructions and seems more present in general. I run into Elijah, now my ex. He remarks that while Olive has always been a silly, joyful kid, she looks positively jubilant in the pictures I’ve posted recently on social media. She is exactly the same. She is entirely different. She is more (of) herself than she ever was before. 3. In her moving essay “Lessons from a Starfish,” Eva Hayward () makes the persuasive case that the Antony and the Johnsons () song “Cripple and the Starfish” is a treatise on trans embodiment. She devotes special attention to imagery that, on her reading, evokes surgical transition: Mr. Muscle forcing bursting Stingy thingy into little me, me, me… There's no rhyme or reason I'm changing like the seasons Watch, I'll even cut off my finger It'll grow back like a starfish A propos of this simile, Hayward asks, “Is transsexual transformation also re‐generative?...In being transsexual, am I also becoming ‘like a starfish’ as the song suggests?” (255). For Hayward and, she speculates, for the singer‐songwriter, the removal of a finger (which she reads as a substitute for the transfeminine penis) represents not an ending but a beginning. Since gender affirming surgeries form new genitalia out of existing tissues, the surgeon’s “cut is possibility…My cut is of my body, not the absence of parts of...