An Untitled Eggsperiment

by Nelle Tankus

Hi. This is an eggsperiment (egg as in baby trans person) of transfeminine proportion. It is somewhere between a body awareness exercise and a performance score from me: a playwright who is not a bodyworker or a performance artist. This piece draws on my own experiences, as well as the anti-Zionist Ashkenazi Jewish ritual work of Dori Midnight, particularly her

Queer Morning Blessings project. I wrote the first draft of this in 2017, when I’d been out as a trans woman for less than a year. It has since undergone many revisions to the version you are currently reading.

I originally did this for myself because I needed to make meaning out of the absurdity of hormones, an undiagnosed mental illness, and distance from my community in Seattle whilst living in Albuquerque. This score helped me come back to my body when I was ungrounded and bitter, and move towards a semblance of acceptance. Perhaps you are in similar circumstances, perhaps not

Either way I’m glad you’ve picked this up.

What you have in your hand is a script, kind of. It’s meant to be done in private or with (a) consenting loved one(s). It takes however long you need it to and finishes when you want. This continues from a performance to internal processing and can be repeated as many times as necessary. When you perform this on your own, I encourage you to insert dialogue into the spaces provided. You are welcome to share this out loud, with consenting loved ones, or simply to yourself. Even if they are as simple as making sounds, a breath, expressing yourself however you feel, maybe even commenting on what you said, even commenting on the piece (it’s fine I won’t take it personally), simply pause the recording, say what you need to say, and continue. When you are done speaking your truth, just hit play.

●      Take your shirt off - let your tits fall free from your chest.

●      Let them rest there a moment.

[Share your thoughts out loud, or to yourself                                   .]

[And here                                                                                          .]

[And here                                                                                          .]

●      Touch them. If you want to touch them sexy, do so. If you prefer them to be meat in your hands and nothing more, do that.

●      Feel how the tissue from your breast is different from that of your areolas and nipples. [Share what you notice here .]

[Share a memory that you're reminded of                                         .]

●      Smoosh your tits together.

●      Smoosh to one side, then

●      Smoosh to the other side.

●      Try to touch your chin with them. 

●      Your elbow,

●      Your shoulder;

●      Try and make noises with one of them.

●      Give them names,

●      Give them personalities,

●      Give them nightmares,

●      Then release them and let them rest.

●      Play the Penis Game, i.e., see if you’re brave enough to say “penis” out loud, increasing in volume until you’re saying “PENIS” as loud as you feel comfortable. Anywhere from a whisper to a shout.

●      Play The Penis Game while messing around with your tits for way too long, then stop.

●      Say this however many times you need: “Blessed are you, transforming body.

The way you are now is a part of how you’ve always been:

Alive because you are, living to love again.”

●      Think about your gender.

●      Are you thinking about it?

●      Don’t think about it too hard. But think critically: what does it mean for you to inhabit this body?

●      Think about all the other identities you have too, then ask yourself again: what does it mean for you to inhabit this body?

●      Talk about something that has changed about you recently that you are having a hard time accepting. It doesn’t matter what it is. What are you avoiding?

[Share your thoughts here                                                                                  .]

●      Go back to the beginning, repeat as necessary.

●      Share with a friend.

Here are a few eggsamples ~

●      Let them rest there a moment.

[           I look at these all the time lol they go with me everywhere I am.]

●      Feel how the tissue from your breast is different from that of your areolas and nipples. [         My breast tissue is denser than I thought it would be.]

●      Talk about something that has changed about you recently that you are having a hard time accepting. It doesn’t matter what it is. What are you avoiding?

[           Have you ever witnessed a pissed off New Yorker scream at an oncoming city bus, demanding that they stop, even though said pedestrian is in the middle of the intersection on a red light? Imagine that, but compacted into a miniscule white Jewish woman with a violet walking stick and platform orthopedics. She was my emergency contact, my first mentor, my dearest frenemy: my grandma Trudy.

She was not a tender person. She kept her weapons of grit and volume shoved deep in her fanny pack. Dulled over time, she could still make you bleed if you cut in front of her in line at The Old Country Buffet, or interrupted her when she was crocheting on the bus. She told me she loved me once, only because I shared it with her first. She patently disliked being touched, and although I received a handful of kisses on the cheek with a sprinkle of Yiddish pet names, physical affection was not her forté.

I would be lying if I told you I didn't take it personally, but not all care comes through sweet words, embraces, and apologies. To her, protection came in the form of fitting me with armor.

Once, I asked my father why she was so averse to expressing her sweetness in the ways I understood as loving. He hissed between his fangs a tale of how her ex-husband attempted to stab her to death with a kitchen knife when she left him for the last time. That I should look to him to teach me father to daughter.

Truthfully though, his touch always disturbed me. His fingers were wide, scaly, and cold like boa constrictors. He only addressed my grandmother by her first name, which he said she approved of. Perhaps she raised him with more of a focus on survival than ease, a luxury reserved for the middle class. But I digress, I posit her feelings skipped a generation, passing my father’s heart to make way for his entitlement. He swallowed them in the serpentine ways they afforded him, regurgitating the fragments when he had nourished himself. I did not pry further, but I was always curious.

This was all, of course, my observation of her. She had no awareness of this. Why would she? If nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong. Her affection would take the form of slapping my hand away from my nails as I chewed them and bellowing, “Don’t bite your nails, you’ll get arthritis,” in a voice and timbre not unlike Harvey Fierstein. Or by teaching me to crochet prismatic patterns with brightly dyed yarn. Vibrant magentas, vermillions, and baby pinks twisted together into a warm wool blanket, or a granny square in my case. Of all the women I looked to at the beginning of my medical transition, she was the person I embodied most. I’d taken on the quick tongue and barbed delivery she’s taught me, adopted her understanding of living as painful, of paying debts and little more. Of her dislike of the intimate connection between a lover's fingers entwined with my own, while simultaneously believing that I had to perform societal expectations of touch.

I lived this way for the vast majority of my twenties, a snakepit of anxiety and massive self-expectation that no one could penetrate. I would peddle the vocabulary of radical love but refuse tenderness if it was not on my terms. I was not alone, and yet physically I was farther from home than I’d ever been. I felt deeply forgotten by the theater community, by skinny middle class queers I believed were more beautiful than I, and most importantly by touch. When you are raised with daggers at your waist, who has time for silk against your cheek?

This was subconscious white supremacist investment in a singular way of being, an undiagnosed disability, and my grandma’s pain attempting to root in my heart and rot me. The truth of the matter was that I’d romanticized her qualities without fully understanding the life that made her. A life I had some similarities to, but a life that was decidedly easier than hers. I was attempting to bridge the gap between us by performing what I thought she would have wanted me to be. I carried the parts of her that made me, but refused to take her weapons from my throat and lay them down. If my then-chosen sister had not performed consistent wellness checks on me over the phone, I likely would be dead.

When my desire for spiritual transition drew near, I knew why. I knew it was because she was dying. She would forget my name, our last conversation, where I was. I dreamt of mapping the distance between her memories of us so we could find each other in any plane. To sing a song in tandem that calls us to the world to come, where we can create it together with everyone we need. Our pain would come with it along with our tenderness as opposed to supplanting it. If I could know our pain, then perhaps it would hurt less. Or not less, but more knowingly.

I am not afraid of death. I am afraid of pain I have never felt before.

The last several years of her time in this world, we didn’t see each other in person. Even prior to the pandemic, my transition was hard for us. It wasn’t that she forgot my name and pronouns. She did, but that didn’t bother me so much. In many ways, she accepted me better than my parents because she didn't pretend to understand. The difficulty lied in that I heard the cracks open in her heart after telling her again, and again, and again that I wasn’t the person she thought I was. Even when I returned to Seattle, I didn’t answer her calls. Selfishly, I didn’t want to speak to her.

I got on life-saving medication. I turned thirty. I was finally my own person. My aunt, who I had not seen since I was nineteen, reached out to me over

Facebook to inform me Grandma had a stroke, and that I needed to come say goodbye to her. My brother tried to contact me. My father did as well. I blocked all of their numbers and shut myself away in my room from my then-best friend. A week or so later, at work, I felt a drop in my stomach, the same I had felt when I had fallen from a great height. I knew that she had transitioned. I swallowed these feelings so I could finish my shift, then promptly went home and bathed in my numbness. I checked the internet to make sure. A photo was taken of her in hospice and she was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, more joyous than I’d seen her in years. She was gone a few days shy of her 93rd birthday.

Honestly, I don’t wish I was there. Imagine sharing grief for the woman who protected me from my father’s jaws whilst in his twisted presence. It would cause anyone to choke on their feelings. I was closer to her than any of my blood, and I didn’t care who knew and who didn’t. Regardless of how badly they wanted me, they did and do not love me, they employed my empathy.

I knew that grief would carry my weapons with warm and supple hands, no matter how I longed for the cut. Though I could not cling to her as she left, I could feel the malleability of my body, and her frailty through me. When I was ready, her loss would open up a vision of the world to come. I would scry the entrails of her memory and dote on myself and my loved ones in ways she would not share, but that I knew were true. I would weep, weep, weep. To grip the memory of the little one she had raised, and to make a different choice and use softness as an armor.

But to know that, in her own way, she imparted sweetness onto me by never wanting to protect me. She wanted me to protect myself.