Best of Month: AotY #2: Beach Bunny's "Emotional Creature" via Mom+Pop
I knew I was a girl when I was six years old. I can remember living in the first house I have real memories of and a nice woman mowing our grass and picking our weeds every month or so. My father told me she used to be a boy and when I asked him to confirm if “people could really do that” he said they “can but shouldn’t” a sentiment he would also use on changing your name a few years later. I asked my mother too, only this time it was worded as “can a boy grow up to be a girl and a girl grow up to be a boy.” She looked very confused at this and just shook her head with a no.
Then I got a little older. I had recurring dreams of being a girl. The most normal things happened in these dreams, just living my day-to-day being comfortable in my own skin. When I had my own computer I tried to find out for myself if it was a possibility for me. This led me down a horrible road, one that had me stalked by a pedophile-chaser hybrid from ages fifteen to twenty-six, one that had me believe the only way I could be who I wanted to be was to be pretty, quiet and compliant, because if I wasn’t I would be made a spectacle on the internet for all my classmates to laugh at until my family was forced to move. A family, I might add, that still wasn’t helping. My brother came home one day to tell my father about the “boy who wanted to be a girl” and was miserable because the school says students cannot dress in a way they are most comfortable. My father’s response was to say the school was right and when my brother disagreed he gaslighted him into being transphobic. Now I was eighteen, still disguising as a boy, forced to watch my entire family be made to hate me. For the next ten years every time I saw my father and step mother they would complain about those pesky “men pretending to be women.”
In college I go to my mother's house for dinner. There is a transwoman in the news. She says if you’re “going to do that you shouldn’t have children” because “what are they going to call you?” Then she looks at me and my youngest brother and warns us never to “do that to her.” Eight years later I have a real panic attack remembering this because the dream I have to be my mother’s daughter will never be fulfilled. I consider cutting all ties with both of them, with all of them. I don’t do it. I finally come out to my mother and she says she accepts me but is so angry with me for seven months that I take back her right to choose my middle name. I take on the one people on the internet know me as instead.
I come out to the rest of them and it all vanishes overnight. It gives me whiplash, it gives me panic. I time a review of a record to come out the day after and make it about my lived experience. My former-terf step-mother is texting me about how happy she is for me, my father calls me his daughter and my mother tells everyone about hers. I still don’t understand this, I don’t know how this happened so fast. I still don’t. Maybe three-thousand miles away means I don’t have to.
Originally that's where this ended. If you've been keeping track you know this is now one week late. This project almost stopped this blog in its tracks and I think in a real way it stopped even being about the music. That's only the beginning of this story. Here's the rest.
When I was a cracked-not-yet-transitioned-baby trans (as they say) I also allowed myself to fall back in love with music as a whole. The first time I heard Beach Bunny I was the most impressed by a band I had been since being a high schooler. I fell in love and I fell hard. Lili Trifilio became a voice that consoled me through those days. They were dark, living alone in an apartment that scared me half to death with a partner who, given the chance, would probably finish the second part of the job. I don't want to say these lyrics totally understood me, I don't want to say her music was about me because it wasn't but it did speak to me in a big way.
I kept listening. I listened to every song available to me on every shift at work for months. When the EP came out last year I loved it so much I started a music blog. When they came around my city I went to a show. It wasn't the first show I went to as a woman but I was reborn there. I heard twenty Beach Bunny songs live before my eyes. I danced, I sang along as loud as I could. I even heard songs from this record long before it was out.
Then it finally did come out. I listened to it with my partner and her partner. I was speechless for the entire half an hour. There's a song on it; "Eventually." The main line of it haunts me. I can't hide forever even if I am thousands of miles away.
There's another one; "Scream." It talks about being yourself but keeping a guard up. About how that's its own form of letting those who would judge you have control over you. I listen to it everyday for weeks to give myself strength.
The thing is that those weren't written for me either. While I did find hope and meaning in them they were written with her struggles in mind. While I find catharsis in her words they're not about a trans struggle.
And I think, ultimately, what I learned as this record's final message, is that none of that matters. Art is made to be consumed and used as a tool for survival.
Lili's words gave me light in an eclipsed place. Her music reignited a passion I had beaten out of myself. Finally, the record she put out this year gave me the strength to be myself.
There is a song that closes the record out. It reminds me of why I love this band. It reminds me of why I love music and writing about it. And at the end of it; the end of the entire body of work, it repeats the words that made me pull the trigger.
It all comes out eventually.
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