Essays: “a complete family / hstry” by Sarah Cavar

“[Groups] are collections of individuals who mutually recognize significant areas of shared experience and orientation to common goals. In contrast, membership in a series does not require sharing any attributes, goals, or experience with the other members. The members of a series are unified passively through their actions being constrained and organized by particular structures and constellations of material objects.” 

–– Alison Stone, “ On the Genealogy of Women: A Defense of Anti-Essentialism,”  in Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (2007). [author’s emphasis]

Blood is a lineage. It begins in the toilet, rings of icing suspended in liquor. When I stand I hear voices outside. Red-brown marks spin and break into the water below me. Maroons.

I waddle aching into bed, wait for him to arrive. He cis, straight, white, male, at least fifty, probably six feet-something with a hanging belly. I am transgender, queer, and barely-twenty. He is my gynecologist.

He grins at me, extends a dry, warm hand. I shake it. Went great! 

And it’s –– it’s out?

(He laughs.)

That’s my job. It’s easy with someone like yourself. I think you’re the youngest hysterectomy I’ve ever had.

The following morning I am discharged with my age-restricted scars.

*

For several months after my uterus was removed, I continued to bleed from my vagina as the stitches dissolved; they said goodbye in crimson streams. The irony of this stubborn blood was not lost on me. Still, I was thankful, having heard my whole life that this procedure was unthinkable for a healthy young adult—unthinkable to not make my future child, impossible to embody today an already-empty future. Queer theorist Lee Edelman describes in “No Future,” the way in which queerness unsettles and disturbs essentialist understandings of “identity” as well as narratives of reproductive futurism. “Our current captivity to futurism’s logic,” he argues, “[serves] as a bridge between left and right in the American political scene,” casting queer ways of living as unproductive, degenerate, and dangerous. In this present-future I am already useless. I am, as Edelman writes, irredeemable.

I repeatedly heard of the impossibility of the procedure and its demands––all predicated on health, health, health. I became intimate with hopelessness. When I received approval for the procedure, I had to teach myself how to want again. Yet in hindsight, I understand: after two years of biomedical regendering—breasts gone, gelled testosterone a daily application—of course I could forfeit my uterus with relative ease. After all who wants a mother who is actually a monster? Who wants the deviant to spawn?

        I don’t attribute my hysterectomy entirely to trans identity.¹ After all, gender itself is a cultural construction, a set of codes not inborn but prescribed by medical, legal, and other cultural institutions. Nevertheless, it is we as individuals who must pay, literally and figuratively, for our inability to comply with institutional demands. “Gender dysphoria” is a medico-psychiatric racket, a means of transmuting acute suffering under conditions of biological essentialism into individual fault. Yet for years prior I had taken extreme measures to cease menstruation, and even before puberty, I feared and loathed pregnancy. I begged to get my tubes tied the moment I learned of the possibility, feeling existential terror at the sight of a rounded belly, a growth hijacking some innocent gut. This growth would then bear my name, doing with my legacy things I would be unable to control.² 

---

¹ I am a trans heretic.
² I am so frightened of not knowing the future bearers of my name. When I bleed, I cover the wound with a bandage, collecting the excess. To become an ancestor is to bleed everywhere, all over, without end. Must I consent to that? May I unbleed, uncomply?

---

        Even if I were to refuse ³ pregnancy, I would not escape my body. The uncontrollable detritus in red and brown and black that fell from my crotch each month was a reminder that, even in the absence of a fetus, my body was beholden to a hypothetical one, a someday which was my inevitable destination.

*

I bleed in the aftermath of my incisions. I imagine the blood to be my womb’s final salvo, the chaos of fireworks preceding that final explosion and the long black afterward. My body is saying goodbye on the icy toilet seat while my mind is elsewhere, woozy from the painkillers and the folk songs in my headphones. A thin line of blackened goo stretches from paper corner to opposite corner, evacuating momentarily onto my forefinger. I say goodbye to future. Goodbye to period promise. An organ to waste.

*

        The first time, I was at my grandmother’s house. I spent the bulk of my childhood there, walking the same hall as my father and late uncle, passing several generations of family photos mounted on the violet wall. It was July in her tiny teal bathroom that day, I sat on the toilet with her dusty Weight Watchers branded scale beneath my feet. On her counter, decade-old lipsticks and powders and nail polish bottles stood like little armies crusty with disuse. Through a small, square window, I could see her backyard: a wet, mossy canvas beneath century-tall pines. Outside, birds whooped. I heard myself scream. I did not assume that I was dying; I knew the truth to be far worse.⁴ Something wrong was spilling out of me, crawling up the Kotex in shades of bloodbrown ivy. It dried and brushed me like a second skin. Nothing on earth could protect me from my body.

---

³ In a manner of speaking, to refuse pregnancy is to become refuse. To become wasted-woman, which is to say, unwoman, which is to say, myself. My post-hysto blood is the unwoman / speaking.
⁴ My other vivid memory from that bathroom: an afternoon after a day of second-grade. Me, vomiting after holding it in all day, longing to hide my sudden illness but being betrayed by the chunks on my new shirt.This is smaller text.

---

*

Oh, Sarah. Welcome to the club. 

I will never have babies. You say that now. 

I am never going to get pregnant. You will 

want to, given time. No. Sarah, do you understand

how to use the wings?

*

My grandparents and I were about to drive to a restaurant so expensive that its menus (chalkboards held aloft by slim blonde servers in understated makeup) had no listed prices. My grandparents reveled in this sense of prestige; this restaurant on its great expanse of land, its farm whose silhouette gave way only to field and sky. I would steal sips of my grandmother's vermouth cassis. I took bites of warm, buttersoft crackers that melted on my tongue. The pear soup came with a dollop of cream at the center, which I broke with my spoon into tart bits in a sea of sweetness. I tried capers for the first time that day. I tried my best to ignore the sticky wings between my thighs. 

We all made a point of forgetting the period while eating. Just hours ago, I had screamed as if strangled, and my grandmother had found me with my summer dress hiked up and underwear around my knees. After she gave me the pad, I told her to leave the room, wrangling my vagina, this traitorous beast. I forced against it a long white strip of unknown origin. She so badly wanted great-grandchildren; blood relations. I am going to adopt, I told her. It’s not the same as when they come from you, she said, just wait. What she meant was: it’s not the same as when they come from me.

On the way home, my grandmother sent my grandfather into CVS for maxi pads. He emerged with a bag of female products (he mumbled), along with several hasty packages of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Outside the car, he smoked, ate two cups, crumpled the wrappers and drove.

*

My mother accompanied me to the hospital on the day of my hysterectomy, performed exactly one week after my twentieth birthday. Before that, we almost never spoke of matters situated below the waist. She always seemed unfettered by the brutal sensitivity to which I was beholden, a placidity I hoped to imitate. When my grandparents brought me home that day with a box of pads beneath my arm, I told her in an even voice, I got my period today. 

Oh, she said, and with impossible gentleness, asked, Is everything okay? 

My grandparents assured her that all was, indeed, okay, and said goodbye. They disappeared out the sliding glass door. I watched their headlights, until I found I could no longer hold my tears.

That night, I followed her around the house half-blinded, the whole house turning to soup that dripped from my cheeks to the round of my chin. She begged me to stop. I did not stop, because this was my future; the future assaulted my body and left an aching wound too deep to touch. I cried as if damned, because I was. I had been damned by no-one, by everyone, yet there was no one to punish but my own damned body. I threw myself upon my mother’s bed, staring at the loud black paint beside her bedside table. GIRL’S ROCK! I had mis-painted on the walls half a life before. Sic, I thought, feeling sick.

All I wanted at that moment was not to see but climb beneath my mother's skin— to become not a woman, not a girl, but something beforehand without image or grammar. To be unmarked, unheeded, unbodied.

I did not consider the existential ramifications of my sterility until nine months after the procedure was done when I remembered that I am an only child, and my paternal grandparents’ only heir. My father’s brother, whose picture dotted the photo-covered walls, died a decade prior leaving no children. I would never have biological siblings. Someday, I will be the last living Cavar. I was a final girl, left to tell the story. But then I, too, would die, and take my family with me.

At seventeen, I told my grandparents I was a lesbian. My then-partner, not a girl but assumed-to-be, would attend my upcoming high school graduation. My grandfather's heart cracked with pity, even worse than hatred. In “Happy Objects,” Sara Ahmed writes of homophobia grounded in the fear of a miserable future, a push instead for heterosexuality in supposed service to a child’s future happiness. This is why my grandfather grieved for me, believing I would never know the love and acceptance that a heterosexual might. My grandmother, meanwhile, grieved for the child that would not come. I was growing out of the family. My future took a slant they could not follow. 

My grandparents know now that I am, as I translate to them, gender-neutral. They know nothing of my surgeries, nothing of my unproductive sex. Lately they have been speaking only of the past to me. I reminisce with them. I play the icing in its liquor bath, floating frozen in its shape.

*

When I apply the new pad, the blood comes out between my fingers. It’s past midnight. My mother and the night nurse chat blearily outside. I stare at my body beneath the fluorescent light, dry and limp as a half-inflated doll, red, band-aid-sized scars spanning my stomach and hip. A hair-thin needle hangs intimate inside my elbow, piercing a raised blue vein whose immediate surroundings glow red with irritation. It has only been three or four hours since the last pad change, and again, the white between my legs is rich with blood. Heavy. I sneeze hard and feel it fall; blackened slime hits the bowl like sick. It feels so real my stomach lurches, the twisting core-pain so familiar I gasp. In my head I hear my grandmother’s voice: Wrap the sticky parts around the other side so that it doesn’t slip from underneath.

Back in bed, I fidget carefully for fear of leakage. At the feel of another dam giving way to blood, I squeeze my eyes shut and try to laugh at the irony. Here was my heaviest period, unleashed in final protest against the uterus that isn't. My period, a foray into Baudrillard’s hyper-reality. The simulated-organ clenches and releases, pain a singular line from my vagina deep into my stomach, twisting like an arm-burn. I ask my mom for Ibuprofen, carrying on the act. She rings the nurse, who asks about my pain. I tell her, nothing I’m not used to, with a sad half-smile. My pain soon abates and I try to sleep until the next of her thirty-minute rounds.⁵

*

        My last period,⁶ which should be called my final period, which should not be called a period at all, happened in the springtime.⁷ One day, I spotted brown on the thin liner stuck inside my briefs, and then I never did again. I did not know at the time that this would be the end, did not mark the date or time. Without ceremony, it was simply over. My last blood became my final blood, every passing day a closing possibility. The three small scars that mark the procedure—one on my hip, one on my lower stomach, and one hidden at the root of my belly-button—have since faded into near-invisibility.

---

⁵ Thirty-minute rounds raise dead voices inside of me I would rather swallow down. The hospital is a price I pay again and again.
⁶ A nurse in the ER asked me, “When was your last period?” She stares at my body as if it will tell her the answer.
“I don’t have a uterus,” I replied.
“Oh.” Minutes pass. Then: “How did you know? I mean, that you were born without a uterus?”
I explained my trans.
⁷ I was in my undergraduate institution’s library. The fourth floor, which housed the Reading Room and Info Commons, a space so cozy and trusting we could leave our laptops while we peed and got overpriced coffee and return to them untouched. That day, I was taking a final bathroom trip before my work-study job as a writing center mentor.

---

        There is something poetic in scarring the site of the umbilical cord.⁸ In doing so, I deny the very people whose (re)productive efforts rendered me possible, upended the dynasty whose heterosexual whiteness brought them from poverty to vermouth and price-less menus. This, and the refrain: all we want is for you, someday, to do better than us. This is why we have you. When you’re a parent, you will want the same for your children. Now my children die in the biohazard bin. My children are medical waste. My children, like all children, are not children but misplaced possibilities.
        I think often about the difference between “last" and “final,” the way that “last" can be Novocain for existential dread. For every Last Supper, there is a last week; for every last gasp, last-minute redemption. “Last" was recent blood, was when was your last period and is there any chance you might be pregnant? I was only the most recent of a coming-many, an Atlas to my family tree, the most recent of my bodies. "Last Girl Cavar” was bestowed upon me with pride and anxiety. In this instance, the girl is merely the promise of a woman who will make more, more, more. The girl is not an affinity but an obligation.
        I am not a girl but I am the final. I tell the story of a family history that will soon end. Without intending to do so, I have ended history: severing it and slowly, painfully, excreting what remains.

---

⁸ I think that the belly button is a scar in and of itself. Mine is a scar inside a scar, a diagnosis — F — and then a counterdiagnosis (Margaret Price). My counterdiagnosis is not a letter but a dark mark, an erasure. I ungirl at the site of my inside-scar.

---

[from: scraps sheet] 

NOTES –– ESSAY ENDING:

[…] marking up the white page, leaking (silver “linings”?) onto it, in furious flushes and over in loo[ps?]

Perhaps last is simply the resting of a burden, only to be

drug up once more. Perhaps, then, final 

just the broken promise of a last. Final — end of history, of a story 

I did not know I was telling

(a story I today remake in text?) (body/text)

Toilet bowl: clear, white, absence cuts into presence

but the irony is im leaking, birthing in my way. here im leaking […] im still 

leaking onto white

Notes: 

My opening quotation comes from Stone, Alison. “On the Genealogy of Women: A Defence of Anti-Essentialism.” Third Wave Feminism, 2004. doi:10.1057/9780230523173_8.

I very much enjoy Ann Reardon, the incredible baker behind the popular YouTube channel “How To Cook That,” for her insightful and entertaining baking videos. In this case. I owe my knowledge of suspending frosting in alcohol to her video on creating chocolate dessert garnishes. [Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgqOn_mAwsY, 0:52-1:37]

My comments on homophobia grounded projections of queer unhappiness and non-futurity are indebted to Ahmed, Sara. “Happy Objects.” The Affect Theory Reader, edited by M Gregg and G J Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 29–51.

My discussion on the refusal of reproductive futurity, and of children as symbols of hetero-familial continuation, are grounded in Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press, 2007. 

About Sarah Cavar

[sarah] Cavar is a PhD student, writer, and critically Mad transgender-about-town. They are Editor-in-Chief at Stone of Madness and swallow::tale literary presses, and their work is found or forthcoming in Bitch Magazine, Split Lip Magazine, Electric Literature, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their latest chapbooks are OUT OF MIND & INTO BODY (Ethel Press, 2022) and BUGBUTTER (Gap Riot Press, 2022). Cavar lives online at www.cavar.club and tweets @cavarsarah.