At the beginning of April, I took a ten-day Intro to Buddhism/Meditation Course at Kopan Monastery (near Kathmandu), and this is what I learned:

Taking a vow not to kill is harder to keep than it sounds.

Fiction withdrawal is painful — Ignore the voice inside your head that says “Just one short story. Nobody has to know.”

If you can only read Dharma books, the best escape is to go to the monastery bookstore and read Pema Chodron’s, “The Wisdom of No Escape.”

It’s okay to believe in reincarnation when you live at a gompa (i.e., a Tibetan Buddhist monastery), but when you return to the West, guard this secret with your life, this life.

The Tibetan word “gom” means to become familiar with; to mediate is to become familiar with your mind.

When most worldly pleasures are taken away, tea can turn into a vice.

Excessive body hair is a death trap for insects.

There may be no such thing as a dumb question, but there sure are unhelpful ones, like “Let’s say I go fishing, but I don’t kill any worms for bait, and the fish I catch is for a beggar, so my motivation is right, but the beggar will probably sell the fish to buy alcohol… Will this cause me to have good karma or bad karma?”

When a herd of goats circumambulate the stupa, they sure do leave a mess on the ground.

You can wash vegetables in cow pee-pee because it’s so clean, and cow dung is more useful than human ka-ka.

It is funny every time a nun says ka-ka and pee-pee. And oddly enough, nuns say this often.

Philosophy and religion are interesting to talk about, but practice is what matters.

Practice is what you do when things are going wrong, not right.

If you take a vow not to kill, you may inherently be taking a vow to save.

In a group of 105 Westerners new to Buddhism, allot them only 5 questions about reincarnation. Maybe then, they’ll use them wisely.

They may wear robes, but monklets are naughty little boys. (Which is why they need naps).

The only antidote to the effects of eating too much white bread is to drink too much nescafe.

If you develop a crush on a girl in your afternoon discussion group, it will be hard to concentrate in afternoon meditation.

A prostration is a bow, not to an image, idol, or a person, but to the wisdom it holds.

Regret and guilt are not the same thing. The former inspires change; the latter is useless self-flagellation.

It’s a relief to keep silence for two out of three meals a day.

Rescuing an ant, lady bug, or tiny insect from your body hair is extremely gratifying and very powerful.

You may start to hear a rallying cry in your head before you eat, or practice yoga, or meditate: “Do it for all sentient beings!”

Life is precious.

You may think that spending ten days in a monastery is an escape from reality, but deep down you know it’s bringing you a millimeter closer to reality.

Keeping my back to the filling room, I raised my arm and started to write on the oversized pad, “C-O-U-R…” The letters seemed so small as they fell off to the right. Would people in the back be able to see? I was nervous, uncertain. I  flipped to the next huge white sheet. Be legible, I told myself, not neurotic. Slowly and carefully, I got the full Mark Twain quote on the paper. It was about confronting fear, about courage. It seemed appropriate for a transgender conference, for a writing empowerment workshop, for setting the tone for telling our stories.

This seminar was my idea, my initial reason to attend the 21st annual Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta this past weekend. The rest — the book signing, the discussion moderation and the panel at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Symposium that followed — came once I’d decided to attend. I had no idea what to expect from this trip.

I tried to mentally prepare for the possibility that only a few people would show up at my writing workshop–it was scheduled at 9am on Friday morning, set up against a couple of surgery seminars that are always big hits at these types of conferences. But there were people in my room, almost twenty. They introduced themselves; we had a group discussion about the power of writing; we talked about fears and obstacles, about the responsibilities of representing trans people, about tension and audience. During the prompted writing exercise, the sounds from the next room were distractingly loud–someone was talking about nipple placement in chest reconstruction while a baby cried. Dear god, I thought, I hope they can write through the noise. I hope someone is using this material.

I hadn’t intended for them to share their writing. I asked them only to share the experience of writing. But a latecomer raised her hand. She wore a pearl necklace and a crafty dress with a print of all the NFL teams. She sat up straight, flashed a huge smile, and began to read about searching the card catalog at the library. “Translate, no. Transvaal, no….” She finally came to the word she was looking for: transvestite. She smiled proudly, like a glorious 1950s housewife showing off a freshly baked apple pie.

Another person raised their hand to read. They had distinguished white hair, thick silver hoop earrings, a gender-neutral name, and presented as a man. They started with a flattering description of me, but the piece moved to the recent deaths of friends and ended with a James Joyce quote. After the seminar, they made me promise to “save a dance at the ball for a 280 lbs Canuck,” their words not mine. I nodded in agreement because this person was pretty awesome, and I wasn’t planning to attend the final gala — balls aren’t really my thing.

Two days later, I was milling around the hotel lobby before the big event, and a different workshop participant approached me to say how much they’d enjoyed my seminar, that it was the highlight of the conference. I was floored, both by the statement and by the fact that this person had a beautiful black headband holding back her hair. It took a moment to register, for my eyes to trail down and notice her evening gown. I had mistakenly assumed during the workshop that he was a trans man.

It had actually taken me the duration of the conference to realize that some of the participants were cross-dressers, here because this was a safe space to express and explore that side of themselves. It had also taken me a while to realize that for some of the transsexual women, this was the first safe space they could be in public as themselves, as women, and use their preferred name. I heard stories about how a few of the women had been scared to come out of their rooms as themselves when they’d first arrived and had to be coaxed out by supportive friends who’d encouraged them to attend through the internet. People had arrived from towns or small cities, from other locations in the South. The majority were significantly older than me. Many were white.

This segment of the population, of my community, of the transgender umbrella that I desire to hold up despite our fractured interests, was completely new to me. Due to developmental biology, social stigmas, cultural norms surrounding men and women, and varied desires, the transgender experience is hugely different on my side of the spectrum, the female-to-male side, than on the other side.

Although there were some trans guys in attendance, many more this year than in years past, that wasn’t really my scene either. I don’t relate to the “born in the wrong body” thing, don’t identify as man but as gender-fluid or genderqueer, and connect the most to people–trans or cis–who buck the binary, oppose the concept of normalization, and express themselves creatively. I found myself disappointed that in the only workshop for trans guys not tied to medical transition, we spent the entire time, a whole hour, talking about one guy’s phalloplasty. Don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated, intrigued, curious, and entertained, but there were surgery workshops to talk about this subject. I guess I wanted to talk about things that weren’t so cockcentric. We spend so much time asking the world not to talk about what’s between our legs, and this is what we’re going to go on-and-on-and-on about behind closed doors…?

This conference wasn’t for me as a trans person, someone with an enormous and diverse trans network in San Francisco. This was for people who may never have been in a room with a dozen people like themselves before. And the things I saw, the way people supported each other–gave away their phone numbers and said, “I’m here,” or followed up with anyone clearly struggling in a workshop, or hugged strangers who looked like they needed a hug–was unlike anything I’d seen before. Every look and word and smile seemed to say: “You are not alone.”

But this conference was for me as a person. Much like many others there, I had to leave my home, my comfort zone, my life, to try something new, to stand up in front of a roomful of strangers and lead my first writing workshop. It was only when my workshop participant approached me before the gala, startled me with her evening gown and told me that the workshop was the highlight of her conference, that I understood how important this trip was for me. I took a moment to acknowledge the fears I’d faced, the courage I had summoned, and felt myself at one with my community.

I returned from my yoga teacher training in Mexico to some fun interviews/videos. Here’s a print interview I did with Helen Boyd (author of My Husband Betty). Here’s a short radio interview on Out-FM (I’m about 45 minutes into the show).

Below is a video segment my bro and I are in for the Devote Campaign, a video series rooted in the conviction that the LGBT community will acquire equal rights if we stand together and share our true stories of love, courage, and triumph.

Transgender Author, Nick Krieger, and His Brother, Eric from Devote Campaign on Vimeo.

A couple months ago, I mentioned to my co-worker that I would come as a guest to her book club if they read Nina Here Nor There. I figured that if 10 people outside my typical queer audience read the book, and if they each told 1 person, that could mean 20 potential people that I wouldn’t reach otherwise. In book sales that is nothing. In human hearts it is everything.

We all know how book clubs work: Less than half the women read the book, few people want to talk about it unless it was infuriating, everyone drinks a lot of wine and discusses reality TV. So, let’s just say it was the first of many surprises when everyone in the room had read the book and eagerly wanted to talk about it.

As much as I sometimes forget, I actually feel quite comfortable in a circle of straight women. The night’s group reminded me of my bunk mates from summer camp all grown up. I felt as if I’d returned from a long trip, traveled around the world, and came back with some facial hair and a new perspective. But still, I had the sense that I was home.

My concern for the evening was the potential for “inappropriate questions.” It was something we were all concerned about, although I wasn’t entirely sure what I would consider “inappropriate.” As it turns out, some people think that talking about sex can be, in and of itself, inappropriate. Not me. I operate in a queer culture in which questions like Craigslist or Manhunt, threesome or foursome, front hole or butt hole, are more than appropriate. So, what is inappropriate…?

One of the women said that before she’d read the book, she had questions about my body parts, but after she read it, her questions revolved around how I felt. Many of them spoke about how I went from being a trans person, a curiosity, to a human. I realized then that how a question is asked, the intention behind it, is more important than the question itself. Asking a trans person “What’s between your legs” is the top trans-etiquette manual inappropriate question, and I’ve been waffling back and forth on how I feel about addressing it myself. I’d prefer not to keep secrets, or take on any more body shame through silence, but sometimes people approach this topic with complete insensitivity.

I’ve had people look right through me and ask about my genitals, the nuts and bolts of transition, my sexuality–I can see their file cabinet open, flipping tabs, trying to categorize and put me in my place. While it is only natural for people to classify, there is a huge difference when I am humanized rather than objectified, when it isn’t only about making sense of me, but getting to know me and expanding the sphere of our collective understanding.

The other thing I noticed at book club was that people were truly afraid of offending me and the other trans guy (who came as a guest and whose presence and experience showed what I consider the only fundamental fact of trans identity: we are all different). It is easy for trans people to criticize those who lack information; we use the word ignorant and spit it out with defensive vitriol. But sometimes I think we use our knowledge as a weapon, fighting a war against a society that has hurt us. As hard as it is, it is equally my responsibility to accept others where they are as it is their responsibility to accept me. I can only control one side of that equation, and a couple years ago, I would have been wholly unable to do that.

My story, or at least the one that is bound in a paperback book, is out there for anyone to read. But in some ways it seems as if this is only the beginning of its journey, and mine. A launching point not an end point. Through this book club, I was able to discuss trans issues in a home in the Marina, a neighborhood so foreign I call it “out of town.” And more than that, through the catharsis of the writing and promotion process, I have arrived at a place where I am finally capable of offering something that isn’t rooted in anger, frustration, outrage, and pain. I can work for the progress of transgender and cisgender people, learning what those qualifying words means only so we can dissolve them completely.

This morning on my commute, a guy in a pinstripe business suit took out his iPhone and made a shopping list of what I gathered were his staples:

• Coffee
• Chicken
• Frozen Veggies
• Protein Drinks
• Toothpaste

We were both inhaling stale air, underground in a train,  headed to the financial district to work 9-to-5 jobs. Even though I had on jeans, prefer my vegetables fresh, avoid meat, and find my protein in food, I saw myself in him, and I felt myself suffocating just a little.

I was told I need to write shorter blog posts. So people will actually read them. Come back. Visit regularly. I’m practicing now.

The End.

I show up at an all-weekend Anatomy for Yogis class, and I’m a little nervous when I realize I’m the only participant who isn’t a yoga teacher. Within the first hour, a guy in the class is modeling his anatomy for us, something we’ll all do at some point in pairs. His shirt is off and now I am very, very nervous, too aware of what I’ll reveal when my shirt is off. My concern expands beyond my chest to my entire body. I am an anatomy complication. The potential disasters begin to swirl.

I pray that when the instructor talks about the tightness of a man’s hamstrings, or the small relative size of a man’s hips, I am not the model. I steel myself for the dozens of times he will exclude my body from the conversation. I hope I will be able to tell him that I have scars on my chest before he asks me to take off my shirt, something I’m fine doing, as long as he is aware of the situation.

At the end of class, I approach the instructor with my short speech, tell him I am transgender, take hormones, had surgery. I explain my body is female and male, male built upon female. His eyes are warm even as it takes him more than a few seconds to comprehend. I can tell that in my sharing, I have given him a gift, one that he has absolutely no clue what to do with. I have averted disaster, but I have not taught him any skills to improve the next few days for me.

On my walk home that night, I think about how I used to keep my shirt on because it was the only way I could remain comfortable, and now the only reason I ever keep my shirt on is to keep other people comfortable because that keeps me comfortable. I think about education and change and empowerment, and I know that keeping my shirt on tomorrow isn’t an option. I want to bail on the class by claiming it is too “advanced” for me, and even if it is, I know quitting is not an option. I want to cry, but I can’t.

The next day, I hope for a young and cute partner. Young means there’s the potential for trans awareness. Cute means there’s the potential she will flirt with me. Outing myself can be fun in the right crowd—I was once befriended/cruised in a yoga class by someone because she recognized my chest scars. Unfortunately, today I am stuck with an older woman who arrived in a BMW and is probably from Petaluma.

While my shirt is still around my neck, an “Oh My God, What Happened?” escapes from this woman’s mouth. I am prepared. I may be the only trans person she ever (knowingly) meets but what if there is a second. I must be an ambassador, even though I am not representative. My genes are not so great, my scars worse than most transfolk, I want to say to her. Do not pity us, I want to say. I have seen that look of shock, concern, and near-horror many times before. How I take this in is my choice. Do not pity yourself in her reflection, I think to myself.

“I am transgender,” I say calmly. “I had my breasts removed,” I add for complete clarity.

“I didn’t know. I don’t know,” she says defensively. I tell her it’s okay, mollify her discomfort, as it goes. Then she attempts to clarify, “Wait, you were a___ and now you’re a___?” I did just tell her I had breasts removed, but I realize I also threw her whole universe into a tizzy, and she is spinning. Despite spending the last  four years writing a book about not being a woman or a man, I fill in her blanks, simplifying to an extent that feels untrue, because I know that learning has to begin with building blocks.

“You really do look like a man,” she says. She means it as a compliment, even though it hits about 100 miles off the mark, and she leaves me standing there in my shorts so she can inspect my posture. I try to stand tall, proud, even though she will inevitably say my shoulders roll in, that I shrink into myself, because I do.

I know that when I tell my friends about this incident later, the transfolk will crack jokes about this person’s ignorance, and the ire and rage will come from the women, the ex-lovers who protect me with fierce intensity. I know why some of us do not step outside of our queer ghetto, why I sometimes get funny looks when I invite friends to the yoga studio, and that even to those who practice, a retreat sounds like social torture. I also know that the yoga community is my home, the people I have met and continue to meet an ever-expanding family that extends well beyond the studio walls out and out and out. I know that ignorance is not intentional, that I was once ignorant about the things that I now embody.

My next partner is also an older woman, but I like her immediately because she is Italian and calls herself an “indie” yoga instructor which as we speak more, I come to think means she teaches stretching at an art school. While my shirt is off, she is at my back, watching the shape of my spine as I move from side to side. She is silent about my chest, and I am grateful.

When it’s her turn, I call the instructor over. After a day of evaluating and analyzing and failing to recognize someone’s *obvious* scoliosis, I feel like a bum partner and I want the instructor to help me so I can help my partner relieve some of her pain. He walks me through the exercise and soon my knuckles are pressing ever so slightly into the problem areas in her erector spinae muscles. It’s hard to believe I’m doing anything since the pressure on her back is minimal, but once I am done, she does her stretches and says she feels better, freer.

Then she starts to cry as she tells me that she went to the emergency room a few months ago. She thought she was having a heart attack, but the pain had come from her muscles, so extreme that it radiated from her back and wrapped around her side, her whole chest burning. The ER doctor told her she was not having a heart attack, but had only “worked out too hard.”

She is trying to laugh at herself as she speaks, and yet she cannot stop crying. She is now apologizing for crying, making excuses that are unnecessary, and I try to stay there with her even as I say little, as there is little to say. I think about what was barely mentioned explicitly in the course, but was underneath everything and known by all in the room: emotions are stored in the body.

When we come back together as a group, the instructor turns into a binary-spewing machine. He is addressing us directly, “Ladies, your body does this…” and “Men, your body does this…” He has no idea he’s discounting me completely, or even if he does, he has no idea how to speak about anatomy and separate it from his perception (or perhaps what he considers fact) of how this defines a person. His words are hammering away at me, and as much as it’s not what I want, not what I wish for, not what I’d choose if I felt that I had any strength left to make choices, I know I will not speak until this is all over, that I have gone numb.

At the very end, the Italian woman thanks me for sharing her emotional moment. She’s apologizing again for her tears,  but I am jealous of them. I yearn for my own release, to heave and shake and sob and let out all that is trapped inside me. I must not be ready, and I wonder if I ever will be, or if I’m just building more scars on top of my scars, creating another layer of protection.

I guess I could’ve mentioned this, rather than disappearing…

But the manuscript for my memoir, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender, is due mid-Oct. So, that’s where I am, what I’m doing, what I’m thinking, when I’m not panicking, of course.

Apparently the book will be in stores May 10, 2011. Assuming I finish, that is. I guess I should get back to it.

Check back here in Nov. Something new will be on this site…

It is way harder than writing a blog. And don’t get me started on writing memoir, which is perhaps the hardest kind of book, maybe not to write, but to live with writing. We’ll save that dumb move of mine for another day. But writing a book is harder than writing blog posts because I have to think about things like characters, description, narrative, plot, scene. Not just once, but like, in every chapter, for many, many chapters. Then, there are the words themselves, approximately 65,000. And I fondle all of them, even the little ones—conjunctions and articles–and I’m not talking one-night stand fondle either—I have full-on relationships with each word. My brain feels like mush, like split pea soup. And I can’t tell if that’s a metaphor or a cliche. Because I’ve lost all perspective. Which is why I’m deleting the next five paragraphs or random incoherency I spewed in the past couple days and ending this post. Apparently writing a book is so hard, I can’t even blog. At least not right now.

My To-Do List:

Exhale as deeply as you inhale.

Drink four glasses of water for every coffee or beer.

Make eye-contact with strangers and smile (except in the Castro after dark).

Ride high on the joys of others.

Call or see at least one friend you haven’t spoken to in six months.

Write.

Accept all offerings of fruits and vegetables.

Lie in the sun.

We were in one of my favorite neighborhood bars, a mixed-crowd gay bar, late on Saturday night. Heated in conversation, gossip actually, my friend, a woman, followed me into the men’s room. We were standing in front of the door to the stall, leaving both the trough and urinal open and available, when a dude entered. He literally tried to push his way through us while telling us not so kindly to get out of his way.

My friend started to argue, yelling at him to calm down as she took a step to the side, forced out of the way. I did the opposite, shut my mouth and stepped directly in front of him, prompted by I don’t know what, the confidence that comes from having a new tree-trunk neck or an extra few inches of thickness around my chest.

I stood my ground, until he turned, then I used the stall. When I returned to the bar, my friend was still fuming, prattling on about the asshole. I had nothing to say. I was a jumble of emotions, at the axis of so much conflict, angry at the boy for his bullying and frustrated with the girl for following me in, stripping me of everything I fought for daily.

I’d made a territorial move. I was protecting my right to be in the men’s room, and especially my right to the stall. I was protecting my right to be transgender, my hard-earned identity. Had my friend not been there talking to me, I knew the altercation wouldn’t have happened. But had she not been physically present, her body sort of in the way, I also knew something that scared me, that is still scaring me, that I hadn’t ever thought myself capable of until that moment. I would’ve punched him, of that I’m sure, and I would’ve done it before I’d even had the chance to stop myself.

The other day I went over to a buddy’s house and used the bathroom. The toilet seat was up, as it probably had been, for the most part, since his wife and children left town. If it were a public toilet, I would’ve squatted, but being inside a person’s house, I decided to put the seat down and actually sit. Afterward, I wondered whether to put the seat back up. Generally speaking, I’m not entirely convinced that down should be the standard position. It’s certainly cleaner, nicer, and more respectable, but should a guy really have to do the work of raising and lowering the seat every time? However, that’s not my point. Down tends to be the default position, and having already spent way too much time in the bathroom thinking about toilet seats, I left it down, the way I used it.

Over dinner, my buddy, who hadn’t seen me in several months, said my voice is way deeper and my jawline has hardened. (I was wearing too many layers for him to see the thickening of my chest.) I was a tiny bit on edge since I don’t see him very often, and even though he was the very first person to call me Nick, based on a personal essay I wrote two years before I adopted it, he tends to get caught up in the moment and relapse on the name thing. But all was smooth on the gender front, until he referred to me as “she” to the waitress. Twice.

I felt myself crumble, my whole body collapsing under the slight he didn’t even notice. The pronoun thing didn’t used to bother me as much, and I think that maybe because I’m more certain of myself than ever before, it’s become even more deflating to see my sense of self go unacknowledged. I feel looked through, invisible, and I shrink. I’m not entirely sure why I don’t always correct people, either at the time or later. Maybe it happens too often, or maybe it’s too painful, exhausting, annoying, frustrating, confrontational, and endless. Maybe I’m too weak to bear it, or strong enough to handle it, or I tend to implode rather than explode. Maybe I’m just tired of explaining what I want to be recognized and am relying on a hormone to, eventually, do the work for me.

After dinner, we went back to my friend’s house. This time when I went into the bathroom, I made sure to leave the toilet seat up. As I raised it, I wondered which was more ridiculous: my actions or the lengths that I have to go to to make others see me.