A certain line from the introduction of the Penguin Book of Mermaids clung to me like seagrass tangled in hair today.

“At stake in these stories is the female merbeing’s existence between worlds… …her ability to cross the threshold into the world of humans and “pass” there as human while never fully belonging.” Penguin Book of Mermaids, Introduction (p xviii)

I will root my appreciation of this line in Embodied Practice and personal life history– specifically, my thoughts today snorkeling in La Jolla Cove, and my existence as a transgender man.

I feel that the transformation becomes more complete every time I enter the water. I feel the rubber fins become more a part of my body; either I am shaping to them or they to me– my feet no longer chafe, my calves no longer cramp. I feel my skin adapting as well– adjusting to the salt, no longer drying. I feel my ears grow more adept at shedding or accepting water, or air, my sinuses equalizing with less and less effort. In a light wetsuit in warm, sunlit water, I am completely unaware of my body temperature, or the energy I am expending to maintain it– I wonder if it is possible to experience homeostasy as cold-bloodedness (a misleading name; ectotherms have warm blood as often as cold, they just don’t control it).
A part of me feels painfully aware that I am experiencing only a shadow of the aquatic state. My fins are only prosthetic; when I take them off to lend them to a friend I feel amputated, halved. Though I’m adept now at expending very little energy in the ocean, I realize that without my snorkel I would tire quickly, the two hours I spent today might have been quartered.
As advanced as I am in my transition, no surgery can change my chromosomes. I will always be a hybrid.

“We humans do not deal well with betwixt and between- liminality makes us
anxious,” Penguin Book of Mermaids, p xi

Still, I am transfixed by the damning assessment of a proto-avian dinosaur fossil in a short story I read last week–
“What a thing, half bird, half lizard, part one thing, part another, trapped forever between more perfect states” Mkondo, Anthony Doerr

At first I asked myself– is it truly so terrible to be not a man and not a woman. To be in the water but not a fish. Then I asked myself– is it truly a natural state? To be un-hybrid. I feel myself, like the dinosaur, between the initial embryonic femaleness of every human and the eventual maleness of some of them. Between the aquatic past of tetrapods and the eventual aquatic present of some mammals.

Mermaids may be a construct, but hybridity is not. Being of two worlds– that is the natural state. The idea that there are dichotomous, segregated, discreet “perfect” states of existence– that is a construct as well.