Arachidi Girl: Trans Man Art

A humble attempt to share my latest artistic concept. It's a visual image and, when I explain it, a sort of poem. I'm still mulling it over, but the idea is pretty simple.

I'm grateful to be able to share it on Gender Identity Today, as you are the right audience for it. It might be, or might become, an in-joke for trans people. Often, in my writing, I'm trying to communicate something to cis people, but this is not that.

Prelude

Arachide is French and Italian for peanut.

In French, the plural is arachides; in Italian, arachidi.

Hear it pronounced in French and in Italian. It may help you to hear it, now or a bit later. I don't want to write "sounds like..." because it'll spoil the joke.

Jaguar and peanut

Jaguar pelts have round-ish, square-ish shapes painted black on orange.

Peanut shells have similar small, irregular indentations.

Animal and plant, yes. Both alive.

I'm not allergic to peanuts, so the lethality of jaguar and peanut didn't immediately come to mind for me (though it might for someone else).

Symbol 1: Where I am and where I'm from

The jaguar reminds me of Colombia, where I live now, and the peanut reminds me of the United States, where I'm from. Not because I ever encountered a jaguar in Bogotá (they don't live in cities) nor a peanut plant in Massachusetts (they don't grow that far north). They remind me of these places because of other things they mean to me.

Symbol 2: Seizing and letting go

A jaguar seizes its prey in its claws. It does not let go if it does not want to. It represents knowing what you want, taking it, consuming it, being it.

The peanut, for me, suggests a different motion: letting go. I'm reminded of Jimmy Carter putting his peanut farm in a blind trust before he assumed the U.S. presidency so he could be free of financial conflict of interest. Because of this story, the peanut, to me, represents divestment. Carter's rural upbringing in Georgia meant a lot to him, and he left that place behind for a few years so he could take an important job. The peanut was his childhood, then a letting go, then a return.

In this regard, jaguar and peanut could represent political approaches or personality traits.

Symbol 3: Survival and longevity

Jaguars are threatened by habitat loss. May they survive another hundred years.

Former President Carter recently turned 100. He wanted to cast his vote for president in 2024, and he did so during early voting in Georgia. If he still wishes to keep busy, I suppose he'll have to set another goal.

Symbol 4: Trans and trans

This last explanation will be just a bit longer. Bear with me.

Trans jaguar

A South American jaguar is sometimes called a tigre, among its other names in Spanish. It's not the same as the Asian striped tiger, of course, but it is a big cat.

I recently learned that some trans people in Japan have embraced the tiger as a symbol, as the Latin prefix trans becomes toransu in Japanese, which evokes the Japanese tora (tiger).

One of the Spanish words for jaguar is tecuán, deriving from a Nahuatl (Aztec) word for people-eater. The Nahuas, by the way, had terms for feminine men and masculine women.

Tecuán sounds like "take one."

("Take one what?", he asked, alarmed.)

Take what you like, I guess. Sometimes we have to. Taking, too, is part of life.

Trans peanuts

Which brings me back to peanuts: arachidi in Italian.

When I was small, I wasn't especially excited about being a girl, but I was grateful to be exempt from roughhousing with boys. I wasn't a tomboy. When I was 12 or 13, it occurred to me that I was a girl who felt more like a gay boy. A year or two later, I matched myself with the label transsexual or transgender. At first, I thought I might be just about the only transsexual of any sort, in which case I'd have been lucky there was even a word for what I was. Anyway, it turns out that not all trans boys start off as tomboys; some of us are just pretty gay.

Not too long ago, a trans-unfriendly person proposed that, when parents are surprised to learn that their girls identify as boys, what those kids must have is rapid-onset gender dysphoria. Allegedly, our eggs cracked too rapidly for our gender identities to be true and valid; since we were never even tomboys, we just have overactive imaginations, we come to falsely believe we're trans boy teenagers, and we spread our gender by "social contagion." The person who wrote this hypothesis is linked to an anti-trans organization who doesn't want anyone to transition until age 25, lest we regret our lives. They pretend to protect us from ourselves.

That trans-unfriendly understanding of teenage gender dysphoria is abbreviated ROGD.

For me, it's personal: My egg cracked in my early teens, I transitioned in my late teens, I'm now in my mid-40s and I regret none of it.

"ROGD girl" feels like a highly targeted insult that perpetually infantilizes the trans man I grew up to be. If someone invalidates me as a man because (as a girl) I was never a tomboy, they're judging me by who I was as a child instead of by who I am now.

"Arachidi girl" inverts it. It feels like a secret joke, a way of referring to my specific trans frustration with other people's deliberate misunderstanding of my gender. At least I came up with the term. "Arachidi girl" is mine. I'm sharing it with you, and I'm not afraid to do so, because no one can take it away from me.

Anti-trans is nuts. For better or for worse, resisting anti-trans lies is part of who I am. It makes me a little nuts to have to deal with it. Who looks at me and sees ROGD, that person is arachidi. The peanuts are partly mine and partly theirs.

Now you know what these patterns mean to me

As visual art, I'm working with these shapes.

They're not circles and not squares. Their meaning is ambiguous. They're sort of opposites to each other, but not quite. They complement each other.

These patterns look and feel like what trans is to me: a trans man who was never a tomboy. Jaguar and peanut. Soft and textured, strong and fragile, someone who lives in threatened habitat and someone whom presidents oughtn't touch.

Soon, I may have Big Trans Art to show you, based on these patterns.