writing – Nicole Roy

November 22, 2023November 22, 2023

Barren

I used to float, now I just fall down
I used to know, but I’m not sure now
What I was made for
What was I made for?

– Billie Eilish

Today, I spent the day driving around the roads outside of Denver, kind of aimlessly. It was an excuse to listen to the audiobook of “Inverse Cowgirl” by Alicia Roth Weigel, a woman born with XY chromosomes and complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (CAIS). I am fascinated with biology, specifically human embryology, and more specifically, human sexual differentiation in utero. You can probably imagine why: I spend a lot of time thinking about, wondering about, and hoping to find some reason that I am the way I am. Arguably, I’m also a kind of intersex person: I was born with what I can only describe as a female brain in a male body.

All humans start off as intersex. Until seven weeks’ development, we have both female and male anatomical parts. What are called “primordial germ cells” migrate into our abdomens and form undifferentiated gonadal streaks. We have a common genital ridge which, left to its own devices, would form a vagina. Müllerian ducts that would become fallopian tubes, uterus and cervix. The gonadal streaks can become either ovaries or testes. Wolffian ducts can become prostate and seminal vesicles. Labia majora and scrotum are the same tissues, as are clitoris and penis.

Then, at seven weeks’ gestation, genes on the Y chromosome which code for specific proteins become active in embryos with that chromosome. These proteins, in turn, form anti-Müllerian hormone. They obliterate the part of the gonadal streaks which would form ovarian tissue, as well as the Müllerian ducts. From that point forward, the embryo develops as a male child, except in certain rare circumstances. In Alicia’s case, she is quite literally molecularly immune to testosterone, so while the AMH obliterated her female reproductive system and gave rise to testes, the testosterone could not affect the rest of her systems. She was born with a vagina and grew up with female secondary sex characteristics.

We still don’t know what causes trans people to be trans. In some cases, it may be another type of hormonal intersex condition, in my case, I suspect a condition which causes my body to be extremely efficient at converting estradiol to estrone. In utero, exposure to my mother’s natural estradiol may have enabled my body to sequester large reserves of estrone, feminizing my brain. Blood tests seem to bear this out. Or, it could be something else.

In any case, when Alicia was born having had an amniocentesis test saying she would be a boy, and popped out with a vagina, everyone was surprised. Doctors advised removing her testes from her abdomen at an early age. Thus, she was sterilized before the age of one, never given the chance to have biological children of her own.

I never had children, either. First, I thought, by mutual choice with my ex-wife, although now I understand that my desire not to have kids was really a desire not to be a dad. I wish I could have been a mother. When I underwent bottom surgery to help alleviate dysphoria about my anatomy (dysphoria I’ve had since at least the age of two), I was also sterilized, but by my own choice. I didn’t want those things in me any more, making a hormone I do not need or want.

Listening to Alicia describe her sex life in her 20s made me so sad. I mean, good for her, but I felt this deep jealousy. I didn’t have sex until I was 26. I’ve only ever been with two people. I was so ashamed of my body. Transition helped, but now I’m ashamed of my transness, specifically my inability to bear children and the fear of being hurt by a partner who may think of me as “less than” or low status. Or be embarrassed by something about me.

I found myself listening to Alicia read her book, and yearning to have been a pretty blonde girl in my 20s, attractive to guys my own age (now, it seems like the only people interested in me are either men 20 years older than me, or 20 years younger than me. Or men who fetishize me. In many cases, both.)

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, which I will spend alone. I am incapable of producing a family with my body. I feel barren and wasted, old and alone. The men I’m attracted to aren’t attracted to me, and I’m not attracted to the men who are. It reminds me of something a girl once said to me in junior high, totally apropos of nothing (or maybe she knew): “Girls don’t like Nick because Nick doesn’t like girls.”

November 9, 2023

Quantum Polynomial Unicorn Sparkles

“I’ve been tryna give it to you all night
What’s it gonna take to get you all alone?
I just want you here by my side
I don’t wanna be here, baby, on my own”

– Kim Petras, “Alone”

Last night, I went to the Kim Petras “Feed The Beast” show at the Fillmore Auditorium on Colfax in the heart of Denver’s gay district. Probably 75% of the audience were very cute gay men, and the other 25% were a mix of cis women, trans women, drag queens in full regalia, and a couple trans guys.

I always feel like a space alien at these types of events. I spent the vast majority of my life pointedly avoiding anything that was remotely queer-coded. I was afraid of the community for the same reason I was afraid of putting on women’s clothes or doing my makeup or painting my nails: Because it felt like an indulgence. A permission-granting exercise from which there would be no coming back. I suspect that same fear is a large part of what keeps so many others closeted, and doesn’t allow many queer-spectrum people to explore parts of their own identities and sexualities.

That room was full of joy and queerness. Acceptance and love and passion and gaiety. Singing, dancing, grinding, kissing, hugging, sweating, waving fans at each other, sharing drinks and vapes and selfies. Shouting along at the top of our collective lungs, hands in the air:

“King of hearts
You gon’ keep on playin’ ’til you go too far
No one in the world could ever be enough for your love
Baby, you keep on playin’, oh, baby, c’mon, ah, ah”

I try to make smalltalk with the kids standing in line behind me in the cold, waiting to get in before the show. I’m probably 25 years older than them. My makeup artist had to cancel my session so I did my own makeup, which I’m terrible at. They all have immaculate drag makeup on. After eight straight hours of zoom meetings at work, I barely had energy for mascara, rainbow metallic lipstick and blue glittery sparkle tears that I put on with my finger in the car, parked on Downing and 14th. We’re talking about what everyone went as for halloween, and I show them my Troye Sivan costume. One of the guys says, “Ooooh cute! Masc for masc” and my heart tries to break for a half second.

Girl, please. I’m in a form-fitting zip-up jumpsuit with my tits out. Yeah I’m not as effeminate as 80% of the boys here, but I’m still undoing decades of suppression and trauma. Anyways, I was cute too.

In the moments between smalltalk and songs, I hit my vape and think about why I have a hard time talking to people. It’s the shame. And the my brain is full of thoughts about OAuth and SAML, the threat that quantum computing poses to traditional cryptosystems, and how to anchor trust in a massively distributed world. Five percent is taken up by knowledge of fashion, hair, makeup and miscellaneous other of life’s most important concerns. So I observe.

I look at how people greet each other, eyes wide, arms offered forward in an invitation to embrace. Couples kissing. Groups exchanging deets. Facial expressions and body language that I can’t even imagine how I would start to make my muscles try to replicate. Hands in my pockets. Look at phone, hit vape, open snapchat and take selfie.

Think about how I’m 25 years older than everyone else.

Get asked by a sweet queen if I’m going to Charlie’s afterwards, I say yes, he says he’ll buy me a drink. I’m his favorite person because I let him hit my vape.

I walk back to my car alone. I don’t have the energy for Charlie’s.

But let me tell you, what I discovered in that room is that everyone has an inner unicorn. Life is better with glitter and sparkles. We all only have one life, so be gay. Do crimes. Grind on the dancefloor. Some day I’ll go to Charlie’s.

June 12, 2023

You Have 30 Days To Buy a Subaru Or Risk Being Able to Find Your Car In a Parking Lot

The weather is like it was the summer we moved here
Not really summer
I tell her

I say to the ghost of her in my bedroom
Truthfully
Wet and cold
Green and lush

The west opens before us
Jill driving our BMW at 100 miles an hour
Out of Nebraska
Welcome to Colorful Colorado

Eight years ago
Most of our marriage
We break into our own house
Celebrate the crime with Illegal Pete’s

I wait for the train on the Sixteenth Street Mall
Wondering if this will be a good life for us
Staring into a future
It looks back with tears in its eyes

Summer begins
Not really summer
I tell her
Without you

May 2, 2023May 2, 2023

A Journal Entry

I remember thinking, back when my voice was changing, “you are going to have to have a lot of surgeries if you want to fix all the stuff that’s about to go wrong with you.” I remember feeling my skull/jaw/back of my head as they changed shape throughout puberty and into college, feeling increasingly sad as I could feel the bumps and change in size of various protuberances.

And, sure enough, yes, I have had to (and will continue to have to, for a while) have a lot of surgeries. I never imagined that I could actually do what I’ve done. I thought it would be impossible. It turns out that it was “only” very, very, very hard.

On top of everything else, yesterday, I was coming back from a post-op at Denver Health for my revision bottom surgery, and someone pulled out in front of me in traffic and I slammed into the side of their truck. I had the right of way.

My brand new (a month old, exactly) bright red, beautiful, 2023 Toyota Crown Platinum Hybrid Max turned its dashboard red and told me it was emergency braking before I even knew what was happening. Klaxons started to sound in the car. I hit the brake but discovered it was already at the bottom of its travel, ABS pulsing furiously. I remember seeing the side of the black truck approaching fast. I was going maybe 30 or 35 MPH. The pyrotechnic hood ejectors on the hinges fired and the hood rocketed itself into a position so that it could cushion the potential impact of a pedestrian, the seatbelt pretensioned itself and as I heard the crunch-thud of the impact, it started to ease out the tension as the airbags (steering wheel and knee) fired. I was dazed. The car filled with gunpowder smell from the airbag deployment. I remember blinking, seeing bright white midday light filtering through millions of little particles of rocket propellant and fiberglass in the air (fabric shreds from the airbag) seeing the asian characters printed in diffuse, hardly readable, red, stamped on the white fabric of the airbag, slightly dingy from soot. Feeling remarkably uninjured, surprisingly uninjured, and then looking down at my wrists and seeing bright red welts raising. Thinking, “huh, I wonder what caused that? Oh, right, the airbag. I hope my boobs are ok” Immediately worried about my breast implants. The car klaxoning warnings very loudly both inside and outside the vehicle. Toyota telematics emergency person on the line. My watch dinging from Megan and Jill responding almost immediately to emergency alerts generated by the impact detectors in my Apple Watch. Me telling the telematics person my name. Them misgendering me repeatedly. In my dazed state, saying, “I’m not a sir, I’m a m’aam!” Getting misgendered again, even after telling the person that my name is Nicole Roy. Telling them, “please, my name is Nicole and I’m a transgender woman, PLEASE call me ‘ma’am’!” And the person apologizing, and then continuing to misgender me because of my voice.

It is amazing, the sci-fi, artificial intelligence, miracles of safety in modern cars. I wish I had not had to find out how amazing they are, first-hand, but I’m grateful for them.

The Denver Police Department 911 dispatcher, and all of the fire/EMT/police on the scene *all* immediately and without asking or prompting, correctly gendered me the *entire time*. Thank you, city and county of Denver.

December 7, 2022December 28, 2022

Manifest

Let me feel the breadth and depth of life
Seeing the path laid before me by my own spirit
Unafraid of the darkness
The moon glittering on the hills and streams

Let me yearn for freedom but not power
Awake in the days when life proves my worth
A scent of sweet pea blossoms glowing in the evening
Smoke rolling in from distant mountain fires

Let me be settled in a time and place of my choosing
A home full of love and joy
A garden of sunlight to bask in
Passion cooking on the stove, a hug and a kiss the fountain of days to come

Let me breathe life into others and they into me
Listening to their stories and joining their path for a time
Divergence becoming a gift, knowing we may never see one another again
Taking their stories with me and spreading them like seeds

Let me cast spells into the lake of time
A rose in my right hand
The iridule of a mussel shell between thumb and forefinger
Intent of my heart to wind a cosmic spring

Let me cast forth my power into the night of the universe
Unearthed and desolate
A span of iron forged in the cores of ten billion suns
Harmonic foam scintillating with the radiation of me

December 16, 2013January 5, 2014

Nearly Winter In State College

Golden hued white against the gradient halfblue
Comet tails of the anthropocene
Jets arc up out of Baltimore and DC
The glint of their skins lost in the crystalline winter southern sky
Over the Appalachians
Altitude so great as to become an abstraction
Passengers plying their way to Chicago, Denver or Los Angeles
Christmas presents wrapped and boxed in the hold
And on earth, at my kitchen table
I look out on the snow-covered lawns, breathing deeply
Banana bread and coffee fill the air

October 13, 2013January 5, 2014

Different Soil

The land heaves to meet the sky
An arch of sandstone and limestone
Washed away by a quarter billion years’ rain

Among the scarred hilltops and ridged remnants
In a green valley in the wilds of Penn’s Woods
I sense the transience of my position

Where I come from I was certain
Of many things which are just as untrue
The words, clinging to the heels of my feet as I tread Iowa Avenue’s sidewalk

As you breathe, there, you feel them
Words pass through the membrane of your lungs
Dissolve in the blood and cross a barrier to saturate your being

Breathing here, the oxygen is the same
Knowledge and wisdom flow through the valley
But I miss the words

July 22, 2013February 3, 2016

The Part of Me That Could Cry

I remember crying easily as a child. When a grandparent or family friend died, I remember crying for a long time. In high school, I remember sobbing in the stairwell because I got a C. I had a long bout with depression between the ages of 8 and 22.

By the time I was 25, I was dangerously overweight, from eating, from the depression. I remember thinking: I’m going to kill the part of me that is sad. I don’t know how I did it, other than to say that through some force of will, I stopped being depressed, and I lost about 140 lbs. I have kept the weight off and have not been depressed for over 10 years now.

Evening summer sky above an Iowa prairie

This afternoon, I came the closest I have since been to falling back into that despair. My wonderful wife is across the ocean doing her research. I have not been able to hug her in over two months, and there is more than a month left before she is back. I’m in a new place, with a new job. The new job is the hardest I have ever had. I’ve easily been able to think my way out of tough spots in jobs before, but this new one challenges me in ways I have never been challenged before. I miss my wife, my parents and my friends.

The sun sets over an Iowa tallgrass prairie

This afternoon, I missed Skyping my wife because of a dumb problem at work that really isn’t a problem. I haven’t Skyped with her in nearly a week. I missed her going to bed by 13 minutes. I know, because I have the Facebook chat record to show it. I was driving home when she messaged saying she was going to bed. I was so angry at myself for missing this chance to see her face. I was so angry and so sad. I felt the welcome point of a dark gray cone of despair¹ puncture my sternum from the outside, the point pressing against my heart. I felt the tears well up inside. I let out a muted shriek of disgust and pity.

And then it was gone. I did not cry. I could not cry. I had killed that part of myself in order to save the rest of me.

1 Dark gray cones of despair are about 8 inches long, with a vertex angle of roughly 10 degrees. They are nicely Gouraud shaded. Yes, I saw the cone. It was a “Donnie Darko” moment.

July 23, 2012February 3, 2016

Bobs I Have Not Known

There are two Bobs who have shaped my life, and I have not really known either of them.

I was born in the center of the Adirondack Park in northern New York. It is, as far as I can tell, the largest state park in the United States. It has mountains, but not like the Rockies. These mountains have been smoothed away by the last bakers’ dozen million years of geologic time, so that they are now soft and round and green. They are not threatening or majestic. They are human-scale mountains. They welcome you home when you first see them peeking through the treeline on the way over from Tupper Lake on route 3.

I was born in these mountains on February 4th, 1978, one of the coldest recorded days in New York state history- three years after my grandfather, George Robert “Bob” Roy died of stomach cancer in a hospital in the city. When my family talks about it, they say he donated his body to science, a euphemism for “he was dissected by medical students.” What’s tangibly left of him is a stone at the old family camp site on First Pond on the Saranac River, hidden a bit back from the shoreline. It reads:

FOR BOB ROY
WHO LOVED THIS SPOT
FROM HIS FRIENDS

If you were to stumble upon this stone (say you decided that this particular spot on the river looked particularly appealing to tie up your boat and have a swim – a reasonable thing to do,) and you went back in the woods to discreetly relieve yourself. You might stub your toe on something and clear away the pine needles accumulated over the last decade (since the last time my family went to see the stone.) You might wonder, “who is this “Bob”? You would then feel a bit of the mystery I have felt my entire life. Who is this “Bob”?

—

November, 2008

I am in New Orleans, Louisiana, and it’s three years after Hurricane Katrina really put the hurt on this town. I’m here because of an Internet2 conference. “What the hell is ‘Internet 2′?” You ask, “I thought we were doing okay with Internet 1.”

Well, yes and no. The Internet, as it exists today, is a piece of 40 year old technology built from a beautiful concoction of luck, human trust, extreme skill and forethought. It mostly works today, when the inherent trust that one network researcher had for all the others on the network at the time of its creation, has been swept aside by the billions of people on the net, because the bad guys need it to work in order to do their jobs. Internet2 is an organization funded by the big US research universities (mostly) in order to do advanced Internet research – to make the existing Internet gradually better. A friend of mine who’s a CIO in higher ed characterizes this work as “replacing the engines on a 747, one by one, in flight over the Pacific.” It seems an accurate metaphor.

So I’m in New Orleans, and I’m doing my career thing, which is that I work on the part of the Internet, at my day job at a big research university. I do “identity” stuff, which is pretty much “who are you on the Internet, and how do you prove it?” This is a new career path for me – I’ve always been interested in electronic identity, but never had a real reason to do much with it in my career until I took a job doing it six months ago. So now I’m at the big conference, hoping to make connections and learn the trade.

I check in – the site of the conference is one of those semi-characterless megahotel conference centers in downtown NOLA (they try to make them have local flavor by naming all the conference rooms things like “Magnolia” and “Bordeaux”,) right across the street from the French Quarter. There are a lot of dudes in Hawaiian shirts with gray beards milling around in the lobby, talking to each other in hushed but spirited tones. They clearly know each other. I’m guessing these are the people who know what’s happening at this conference. They have been here before, many times. Apparently they are all named Ken, Steve, Bob or Keith – they blur together in my head, I can’t keep the names and faces straight.

The next morning – the first day of the conference, I go to a workshop on a particularly interesting piece of identity technology. There’s a ton of these guys in the room – I must be in the right place. The session gets started, and it’s extremely interesting. I start furiously taking notes on my black Macbook. I wouldn’t even know what questions to ask, or where to begin. There’s one of these old guys in the back of the room on a ThinkPad, and he does not talk until the very end, when someone else asks a question. This guy – his name tag says he is RL “Bob” – gets up and speaks about three sentences that are powerfully overloaded with extremely dry wit, powerful metaphor, and seem to magically answer the 20 or so embryonic questions I had about this technology. Who is this RL “Bob”? I need to try to meet this guy.

—

I stole my grandfather’s World War II pilot logbooks from my parents’ house. I spent hours looking at every entry in them.

20 June, 1945 – 20 hours Midway to Tinian Hop

He was on the island where they launched the Enola Gay on its mission to destroy Hiroshima.

His logbooks had the numbers of the units he was assigned to in them – things like VPB-11. I did Google searches for days, trying to find out who else was in VPB-11 – who might know him. It looked like that unit has been disbanded for a long time, and they had stopped having reunions 10 years ago. Who might know him or know about him?

My dad had good and bad stories about him, but they were mostly shaded with his apparently ill temper.

My dad, as a child, had lost a stuffed bunny rabbit out the car window. My grandfather had refused to stop the car to pick it up – he would teach my dad a lesson about carelessness and consequences.

He got so mad at a chainsaw one day, cutting wood, that he did something stupid and terribly inured himself, while caught up in his anger.

But his family and friends had cared – deeply – about him, had put this stone in the mountains he loved. His spirit was there, they knew it and wanted him to be at peace.

—

2010

Who is this “Bob”?

That’s what his personal web site opens with. It is a collection of links to a whole series of different “Bobs” with interesting, short questions asked about their true identities. One of the links is to his blog. I click on it. In the last two years I have learned an enormous amount from “Bob” and his fellow Kens, Keiths and Steves. I am not part of the group – not yet experienced. I am a sophomore in the true sense of the word. I don’t know what I don’t know, but at least I don’t know it. I have no shame. That’s how you learn.

They are all guides in the wilderness of electronic identity. Maybe they can tell I’m one of their kind, or at least I really care about it. They get my boss to somehow agree to allow me to host conference calls and give feedback on policy documents that they’re working on for the community. I love this – I am learning more than I ever thought I could. I’m drinking from the fire hose.

“Bob”‘s blog turns out to be about his ongoing struggle with cancer. I learn that he was recovering from his first round of treatment the first time I saw him in NOLA. His blog is also laced with his amazing skill at metaphor and his dry sense of humor, with common threads of baking bread, watching soccer matches on TV, his wife and daughters and their dutch Kooikerhunde dog. This is a guy with a life. I try to reconcile this with his seemingly endless output of nearly prescient ideas in identity stuff and the fact that he seems to know, be friends with and constantly talk to everyone in the business, and constantly attend conferences in the US and abroad. What is his secret? How does he not burn out? I go home at the end of the day, nearly every day, satisfied but mentally drained and physically exhausted (how? I do IT stuff – this shouldn’t happen.) I’m exhausted and I don’t have cancer. How does he do it? I want to be like him, some day. If I can be a tenth of that, I’ll be amazed.

—

We got in a fight over Thanksgiving dinner – my grandmother was at my parents’ house and could not stop talking about how similar my dad was in voice and action to my grandfather.

I had heard almost nothing from this part of the family about him, over the years, except bad things. He got angry very easily. He slapped people, got into fights, got out the belt.

This was not my dad. My dad is one of the kindest, gentlest people you could know. He is a giant teddy bear.

This slandering of my father made me angry – terribly angry in a way I could not control. I’m not terribly dumb, so I figured out that this rage must have skipped a generation, and now it was boiling up in me. Who was really the just target of this comparison with my unknown grandfather? Probably it was me. This made me even angrier. I pointed at my grandmother across the turkey – “You never say anything nice about him! Well he’s not here to defend himself, so let’s just shut up about him! Screw this, I’m out of here!” I ran out the front door into the park across the street. I sat down at a picnic table in the cold November air, the vomitous orange glow of a sodium vapor light despoiling the terrific darkness around me.

After five or so minutes, my mom sat down next to me.

“I never saw that side of him, you know. He was always kind to me.”

“Thanks – I think I’m too much like him.”

“You’re not like him in the way you think.”

—

2011

I friend “Bob” on Facebook – it’s the kind of thing a teenage girl would do – friend a bunch of people she only kind of knows.

At the fall conference that year, “Bob” does an amazing talk for a packed room on the subject of social identity – the relevance of identity from places like Facebook and Google. That morning, after several months of not accepting my friend request, he accepts it. In the talk, he looks at me and says something like,

“Some of the people on Facebook we know, and some we only just met.” He looks directly at me as he says this last part. I grin back, stupidly.

—

I’m getting married – I have become calmer, I might be starting to see the tip of the iceberg of the things I don’t know about life, poking through the surface of existence. The parts of me that I rightly or wrongly attribute to my grandfather, I suppress. Somehow I know that attributing them to him isn’t fair. He’s a ghost and he can’t defend himself. I got my pilot’s license some years back. The FAA pilot examiner who tests me flew P38 Lightnings in the war – he signs my temporary airman’s certificate with a barely legible, shaky hand.

I’m getting married in three months, and “Bob”‘s cancer is back. His blog says:

Just to clear this up, for all you computer people.

Last time was “re-install OS and restore from backup”.

This time is “install a different OS”.

Next time is “migrate to the cloud”.

Got it?

His wit has not been dulled by the cancer.

She helps me, my wife-to-be. I know I love her because the parts of me that I don’t like, now I don’t blame them on my grandfather and try fight them. I don’t have to fight them – I really try not to do those things around her because I love her and they are ugly. Sometimes I fail and she’s scared by the anger, I know. I feel terrible when that happens, but I’m getting better all the time.

“Bob” is honored and celebrated by his friends and family at the spring Internet2 conference in 2012 – a month or so before my wedding. I suspect I won’t see “Bob” again, it’s a terrible thought but it feels that way. Family is important, I know that and he does too. I decide not to attend the meeting to help prepare for the wedding.

Our wedding day comes and I think of nothing else but my wife and my family. At the last minute, I look at “Bob”‘s blog – he’s been admitted to the hospital after a particularly evil round of treatment. He says: “I’m still alive.” It doesn’t sound fun. I worry about him but the worry is short lived. We have a great wedding and a fun party with friends and family.

There are no more blog entries from “Bob”

A few weeks after our wedding, I find out that he’s died through one of the many identity groups he started. They start a web page where you can leave memories of him. I fumble for words to say what I think he meant to me, but they end up clumsy and kind of embarrassing. Many others knew him so much better. I wish I had known him, too.

My cousin is getting married, and my wife and I get in the car and head out to the Adirondack mountains to visit family and attend the wedding. We will rent a boat and I will show her the stone that marks my grandfather’s existence. As we drive over the bridge on the Saranac River, not more than a few thousand feet from his stone, I roll down the windows. Balsam fir floods the car with its sweet tingle. I pilot the car over the winding road, this scent filling my nose. My heartbeat slows. I let my foot off the gas a bit. We’re in no hurry here.