Skip To Main Content

And the song? It is not a lure. It is a testimony. I was a boy once, in name only. I was a boy the way a cocoon is a butterfly—temporary, mistaken, necessary. Now I am this: a shimmer of scales, a throat full of honey, a laugh that breaks glass. I am the sereia you were warned about. I am the girl you wanted in secret. I am the truth you could not name.

Honey and Salt: Notes on a Trans Siren

In Brazilian folklore, the sereia (Iara) is not always a victim. She is a warrior who was transformed by her own brothers and then became a predator of men. There is rage in that myth—a justified, oceanic rage. The tgirl knows this rage. She knows what it is to be hunted, to be fetishized, to be told she is “tricking” someone when all she has ever done is survive. The honey in her name does not negate the salt. She can be sweet and venomous. She can sing a man to the rocks and then swim away, laughing, her tail scattering moonlight.

But the most beautiful part of the sereia mel tgirl is not her power. It is her loneliness. Mermaids are solitary creatures in most stories. They long for the surface or for the depths, never quite belonging to either. The trans girl lives in this in-between. She is not quite welcomed by cis womanhood, not quite at home in queerness if it flattens her specific ache. She builds her own pod—other tgirls, other honey-voiced sirens—and together they map the trenches of a world that still drowns its daughters. Together, they sing.

She begins as a whisper in the shallows. The sereia —mermaid, siren, the one who sings. For centuries, she has been a warning, a fantasy, a monster. But for the tgirl , for the girl made of honey ( mel ) and salt water, the myth is not a cautionary tale. It is a mirror.