Transformation Soup: Identifying My Body’s Gender

This article was originally published in print in LILIPOH Magazine's Culture Pulse Pages in the Winter 2013 issue. This is my first published article.

BIG thanks to my friend and editor of this article, Leslie Loy for this wonderful opportunity to share my story in LILIPOH Magazine. Another BIG thank you to the editor of LILIPOH Magazine, Christy Korrow for including the article in the Winter 2013 issue. Thank you both for this opportunity!

In Light and wellness,

Ewan

Transformation Soup: Identifying My Body’s Gender
Ewan Duarte

My body—this porcelain skin, these green eyes that can see the beauty of the world as well as the challenges and harsh realities of life. My auburn, curly hair that used to be red. Red as my beard. My body is always changing, growing, regenerating, experiencing, and aging. From sunrise to sunset, with the circadian rhythms as the Earth traverses around the sun. The sun, the moon, the stars, and my time here on this Earthly plane in this temporal, physical form.

When I think of my body, I think of a gift—a divine gift that I chose. I chose to be born this way, in this skin. One of my greatest challenges and blessings was to slowly learn, unravel, and discover who I authentically am, and am meant to be, within this physical form. This is my temporal gift, one I am always with: my body, a beautiful dysphoric body. These muscles, these strong bones, the blood coursing through my veins remind me of my ancestral ties: Eastern European Jews, Mexicans, and German people—a real diversity soup. I am a culmination of my ancestors, their existence, sacrifices, and lives. My blood, my bones, my body connect me to them all. I am proud of them for simply being and existing.

When did I realize that I was uncomfortable in my body? That the word “girl,” that “woman” did not fit me? Was it when I was a child playing on the all-boys football team at my elementary school in Clovis, California? My Dad picked me up after one of the games or practices. He asked me in the car, “Rachel, do you know the difference between boys and girls?” I got instantly upset and reactive. I yelled, “Yes!” That was the end of the conversation. It was quiet in the car as my Dad drove us home. Writing and reflecting upon this now, I thought that my Dad was referring to anatomy. I had the body of a girl. Yet, I wanted to play on the boys’ football team. It would take me until nearly a decade later, while attending college at UC Santa Cruz, to begin to question my own gender identity, to be exposed to and become part of a queer/transgender community.

My body. My soul. My spirit. It was during one of my meditations in my Portland, Oregon apartment that I realized, was able to receive the clarity and guidance, that I was a boy. I felt so happy and elated to finally know. I wanted to tell the world “I’m a beautiful boy!” To express it out loud—to shout with joy! Boy! After years of inquiry, personal examination, taking queer/transgender studies classes, reading books, articles, viewing film/media, going to lectures, and having conversations about queer/trans themes and experiences, I now had the experience. All of my studies and inquiry were the foundation to prepare me for this unfolding clarity—that I am a transgender guy.

I was simply, me, Rachel at the time. A unique individual with a feminine voice and laughter. I had felt androgynous for years—in between the “gender binary” of boy and girl. I was neither. I was a gender-fluid being. With this new clarity, I was continuing on my personal path of truth and authenticity. I was beginning to externalize the way that I felt internally. I now had a name for the way that I had felt for so many years: transgender.

The spaces my soul has travelled, traversed, and experienced thus far on my path as a transgender man are colorful, infinite, and spiral-like. Wow! I have come so far from where I have been, having experienced both soul and physical shifts. I have physically transitioned to become a man socially and holistically while living in San Francisco during graduate school.

I am in the transformation soup. How many fires must I go through? How many initiations to become the man that I truly am? Expressing myself holistically—this is my truest, most authentic form that I inhabit. This body that transcends gender, rises above it. Yet, I claim the identities of transgender, FTM (female to male), transsexual, and man. I am a man. I was a beautiful boy and I have become a beautiful man. An integrated man who honors his divine femininity and masculinity. A man who has lived this journey and continues to live it every day.

To continue to walk one’s path with personal truth, conviction, clarity, and empowerment. I choose to continue to be and express myself in a way that is most resonant and authentic. Today I am an empowered man, comfortable in my skin. I am grateful to be here now. Grateful that I know that my essence is a timeless being of love and light. Temporally, in my human form, I am Ewan, a transgender man; and so much more.

Ewan Duarte is an artist, writer, and award-winning filmmaker. He was born and raised in Fresno, California and received BAs in American studies and film/Digital media from UC Santa Cruz. Ewan studied and practiced Waldorf education at the Micha-el Institute in Portland, Oregon and recently graduated from San Francisco State University with an MFA in cinema. Ewan’s most recent films, Spiral Transition (2010) and Change Over Time (2013) have screened nationally and worldwide at film festivals, conferences, and art events. To receive updates about film festival screenings, join his newsletter, or to inquire about exhibiting his work, email Ewan at ewanduarte@gmail.com.

VISION
Culture Pulse is a pursuit in understanding the attitudes, questions and manifestations of human creativity in co-cultivating a community that nourishes lives of meaning.

EDITOR’S THOUGHTS
In the last Culture Pulse section, we explored our relationship to spaces, particularly the spaces around us, and how they are mirrored in our experiences of them. What if we begin to recognize that we physically inhabit not only spaces such as rooms, gardens, and so forth, but that our bodies and even aspects of our soul experiences are also spaces? In this issue, we invite Ewan Duarte, a California filmmaker, to reflect on his relationship to his body as he transitioned from a female to male body, and documented the process of what it means to relate to the one space we can never separate ourselves from, and yet which we largely identify with as aspects of ourselves—our bodies.