Introducing Abby Ross

The Transition Continues

I was talking the other day with my older son, Day. About retirement and death. I am doing a year-long Zoom class through Spirit Rock, a meditation center in California, called “A Year to Live,” keying off a book of that name by Stephen Levine. It is a moving class, profound, and sometimes difficult. At nearly 82, I have found it profoundly meaningful.

The Buddhist Five Remembrances remind us that we all grow old, get sick, and die.  All that we treasure and hold dear will fade from us. In the end, we are only responsible for our actions, which create our karma and leave their mark on those we touch who are still alive – family, friends, the world.

So much becomes more important with this growing awareness of death. The centrality of family and friends. The people one touches in life. The beauty of the planet, and the tragedy of its current state. The birds that peck at the sunflower seeds I put on my balcony post every day. The joy a three-year old takes in seeing the elephants at the zoo and riding the carousel.

Facing death brings me face-to-face with life. How am I living now? Am I fully present as who I am. In my life, in my relationships, in how I meet the world?  Sheathed Sword is a big part of that, for me. It is a place for contemplation, for writing about how I engage the world. It is personal, more personal than anything I have ever written, outside of journaling.

I want to be fully present here. So I am introducing many of you, my readers, to the author of this column - Abby Adam Ross.

I am Abby; Abby is me. Abby is a trans, gender fluid, non-binary person. My pronouns are they/them. Here, in Portland, Oregon, where I moved a year ago, most everyone knows me as Abby. Portland is a very Queer friendly place. Even my health providers ask what name I choose to be called and deal with the occasional confusion because my legal name has not changed. (Just check out what one has to do to change a legal name, especially at my age.)

This column is not about the history of my transition. Suffice it to say that for many decades, something did not fit for me. I couldn’t have told you, until recently, what the source of that discomfort was. Looking back I can see what it was, but mostly it was just discomfort because in some profound but mysterious way part of me was hidden, dissatisfied, uneasy, unreal, not present.

Until the day it was. Several years ago. As it was revealed, Abby appeared. As Abby appeared, I began to feel more complete. More present. More real. Yes, more authentically who I am.

Bringing Abby into the world is like walking through a looking glass. I see things I never saw before or see what I saw differently. The dominance of the cis-gendered, binary framing throughout our society. What men are expected to do and be - strong, silent, repressed. The challenges women face in stepping out of submission and into their power. How language reenforces the binary in every setting. Changing pronouns becomes a radical act, frequently challenged, and profoundly important. Talking to a friend here in Oregon, whom I was about to visit, he said to me, somewhat dismissively, “good, maybe you can explain this damned pronoun thing to me.” I did. I loved Barbie - subtly undermining the dominant binary cultural narrative. There is so much more to say about this; I will be saying some of it here, as it continues to reveal itself.

I have also found a new world; one that was unfamiliar to me before Abby.  The world of drag, of queerness, of burlesque, of gender transition, of gayness. The Queer world is a rich, diverse, creative, challenged, effervescent, sometimes troubled place, not unlike the rest of the world. It is nothing like the unidimensional perspective portrayed in so much of the media or public consciousness – Queer people are troubled, the dominant mantra goes – especially trans people, who are very sad. A Kaiser/Washington Post poll I wrote about recently in Sheathed Sword revealed the truth: trans people who come out are almost universally happier as a result, including children.

“You’re not one of those people who thinks they are trapped in a man’s body, are you?” one of my acquaintances said to me a couple of years ago.  That angry assertion completely fails to understand the trans world in its diversity and richness. More on that to come, too.

This world is also dangerous – personal safety becomes an issue that was previously minor to me, as a white, cis-gendered, male person. Safety was just the air I breathed-gendered male; all was good, except being sure I walked down a well-lit street at night in Manhattan’s West Side in the 1970s. As gay and lesbian Americans, like my brother, have known for years, being who they are is dangerous, potentially life-threatening. Thank the goddess, that has changed in a major way for gay and lesbian Americans in large parts of America, though aggression against them continues to riddle American culture.

For trans Americans, today the challenge and dangers are explosively real.  Forces of reaction and fascism are on the rise and trans adults and especially children are a very prominent target in the political and cultural wars we are in. (See the Human Rights Campaign and the ACLU for details.) I am not going to go into those aggressions now, but I experience the threat as a personal issue, follow it closely and speak out when I can.

This column is intended, instead, to introduce you all to Abby, who becomes the writer. I do not intend to change what I am interested in, what strikes me, what I write about. I will feel more free to write about my world in ways that inform and to be fully present. I am curious about a lot of things, as you have read here over the past two years, and I continue to be – some culture, some politics, some poetry, what occurs to me. Your presence here and your responses are important to me; I hope you will remain readers and bring your truth to these virtual pages.