TRANSFORMER

As told to fayemi shakur | Images by Akintola Hanif

This story was originally published in HYCIDE: The Sex issue, which features stories about sexual exploration, sex crimes, sex work and artists whose work deals with topics of sexuality and gender. You can purchase it here.

Gender and sexual identity can be a perplexing thing. We try to be flexible and still some definitions confine who we are and how we express ourselves. But the social dictates of gender are even more complex for Anu Ra. Although he was born as a woman and identifies as a transgendered man, Ra, 36, still strives to retain aspects of his femininity. He shares with HYCIDE his unique story of what it means to be masculine and feminine at the same time.

My coming into being transgender didn’t happen by me studying it. I got chased out of a womens locker room by a woman who demanded to know what I was doing there. I told her I was a woman.

When I was little I was always playing with the boys. You get to puberty and people tell you what you are supposed to do as a girl and you try to fit in. I probably started to identify as bi when I was 11. I started making out with girls when I was like five.

I began to feel more like a boy than a girl when I was about 25. A guy I was with at the time said that he could see it. He commented that some of the things he liked about me were the more masculine things about me, like my muscles and my facial hair. I messed around with guys until my mid 20s but I identified as a bisexual woman.

I don’t feel like a gay man. I act like a gay man sometimes. But my heart has always been with women. The type of women I attract are feminine and like masculine energy. When I started being with women, my walk changed, my desire to be penetrated left. I would wake up and reach for my dick and it’s not there, remembering that I’m in a female body. It happened constantly for a year. I would wake up constantly with a hard-on. It’s like when people have an amputated limb but they can still feel it. I didn’t understand my energy as a man or communicating that with a woman’s tools.

I recognized that I am a big chauvinist, which is stupid because I’m 5 feet 1 inch and 104 pounds with no balls. I was arrested for domestic violence and I raped a woman once. I was gang raped when I was eight on my babysitter’s porch by a group of boys ages eight and 11. In the Hawaiian meditation called Ho’oponopono, it says everything that happens to you, somewhere in your consciousness you created it. I don’t wish the experience of rape on anyone, but my journey is my medicine.

I’m still attracted to all types of men, as a gay man, as a top, but I no longer have sex with men. I only want to create relationships with women. I married a woman when I was 27 but it was too much for me to handle emotionally. Everything I got was from the clubs. Everybody was just going for lust. I didn’t have the proper understanding about what it takes to be a man in a relationship, run a household and be that strength and backbone, being attentive to your partner and making sure she feels cared for.

Then I started learning about this Indonesian tradition, which says there are five genders: masculine man, feminine man, masculine woman, feminine woman and bisu – which is a mixture of male and female. Gender is not a polarity of male and female but a spectrum and this helped me understand myself. I learned to see myself as sacred and beautiful and not base myself or my relationships around sex. I was celibate for five years just to make sure my reasons weren’t based just on sex.

The idea of understanding these polar opposites and the mentality of a man, having a monthly cycle, having breastfed my daughter, being a mother–it’s a shamanic initiation to me, a call to be a bridge. I can understand why men and women don’t understand each other, the part that’s been missing, because I understand both sides.

Even though I’m in this experience where people think people would treat me bad, I actually always encounter kindness. Even with my high-pitched voice, people just assume I’m a man and I vibrate as male. I was kicked out of the spiritual circle that I called home because I am transgender. It destroyed my relationship with people that I loved.

I tried to commit suicide about six years ago. After that, it got better. My family kept calling me “she” for a long time. Now they avoid pronouns or they correct themselves if they call me “she”: they call me by my name and say “you know what I mean.”

I was teaching at an outreach program for a long time and my students saw me go through my transition. It was uncomfortable for everyone. I had to learn to carry myself in a way that they could understand and they just had to deal with it.

The biggest challenge is having confidence in myself because I’m tiny and very feminine. I don’t want to get rid of my feminine energy, I just want to be respected as a man and I think I’ve found that space. Most people get cut up and do all this external stuff to prove that they are a man. I’m not doing that. I want to deal with myself first. I’m not against the use of hormones. I’m jealous actually of the changes that I see my brothers go through but I’d rather have a doctor’s input before I do that. I don’t know how it would affect me chemically. I feel like there is a divine reason I’m supposed to be in this female body and learn how to be a man.

Transgender people should be free like everybody else. Free to marry like everybody else. I think it’s important to find a group of people who are seeking oneness with God and find sanctity in that, if a church doesn’t support you. I shouldn’t have to have surgery or put hormones in my body to qualify as transgender and we need to see more of us on TV and in the movies, but like normal humna beings not a side show spectacle. aThese aren’t rights that I would protest to have–it should be about natural inclusion.