Something That May Shock and Discredit You Read online

  I don’t mean to suggest that either the doctors or my parents behaved thoughtlessly at the time. Had I voiced any objection to the treatment, I have every reason to believe I would have been listened to, but it had not yet occurred to me that I might object at all. In fact, had someone asked me every day and every night of my life, “What are you?” I would have said, “I’m a girl,” every time. There were many ways to be a good woman, I knew, and having grown up in the 1990s meant I’d heard sufficient variations on the sentiment that women could do anything—I had not been so covetous of boys’ toys or men’s jeans that I grew confused and assumed that meant there was nothing for it but to start a regime of masculinizing hormones and change my name. Women could do anything they liked. We all of us lived in a world where transition was unthought of, so we did not think of it—I could no sooner blame them than myself. I disliked sexism, admired and liked women, had been given a girl’s name, and found it very easy not to think about my body; surely this made me a girl, and certainly no one had ever suggested this was anything less than sufficient. Other people occasionally liked my body (plenty objected to it, but again this seemed like proof for, rather than against, my womanhood), I liked it when others were pleased; to me this was the same as liking the thing itself.

  But the reasoning did not hold, the distance was unsupportable, the ruse susceptible; there came a point in my life when I could no longer pretend that I wanted nothing. As soon as I allowed myself to consider the possibility of transition, not as it related to other people but as it related to me, I had to fight not to transition every day. Then there was a long and tiresome fight against myself; eventually the fight ended. (For more details on the fight, turn to chapter 6.)

  The first practical question to be settled once the matter of transition became inevitable was exactly how much testosterone to take, and for how long. There is sometimes a tendency, at least among the trans men I have known, to treat testosterone therapy at the outset as if one were the first to order french fries at the table: tentative, looking to others for guidance and support, a half-frantic desire not to be the only one. If I have some, will you have some? I know you’ll have some—is it possible to get a half order? This is for the table, not just for me What’s the smallest actual amount of testosterone that you can medically offer me? I’ll take that, but can you put half of it in a to-go box before you bring it out? I’m sharing with friends. There is a number of excellent reasons why a person might want to do so, but for me it was only a hope to whittle down my transition to the absolute bare minimum. Whatever trans was, I was ready to accept it as a part of myself, but I was not unwilling to pay more than the cover charge. Do you have trans on the menu? Is it possible to get a cup instead of a bowl? What’s the smallest amount of trans you have available? I’ll take that. I wanted to transition; I had become convinced that it was essential to my happiness and well-being, but at the same time I remained sure that it was simultaneously going to ruin my life. My most desperate desire was not that I would be assisted in my transition but that someone would either force or forbid me to do it, because I could not take responsibility for annihilating my own life. Having finally admitted to wanting something was bad enough; the least I felt I could do was want very little of it. None of which is to say that there is, or ought to be, a transition continuum running from “lots/most/maximal” to “least/less/minimal,” merely that I have only ever admitted what I hunger for under duress, when all of my other options have been exhausted and my escape routes cut off, and even then seek to downplay the nature of it in advance, the better to ward off disappointment. (And after all that, it turned out it was possible to get a half order of testosterone for the transitioner with the moderate appetite.)

  So there was a great flurry of agitation and argument in the days before I took testosterone. I feared that it would not work at all; I feared that it would work too well; I feared that what I thought of as “working” actually meant “feeling good all of the time,” an impossible request of any hormone, sexed or otherwise. I made bargains with my will and my endocrine system; I hedged; I placed bets; I predicted; I agonized; I demanded reassurance and implausible promises from everyone I knew who had ever picked up a prescription. I could not imagine a worse condition for myself, so it cheered me somewhat to imagine that starting testosterone would confirm that I did not in fact need it so that I could all the sooner shake myself from this delusion and find something else to worry about.

  What happened instead was the discovery of what I might call vocational clarity—not an unassailable certainty founded on decades of unwavering identification, nor yet a preternatural calm, but an ever-deepening, ever-widening sense of peace and purpose and delight. I might have mistrusted certainty after such a prolonged period of turbulence. The will of God when the time comes to apportion tasks is not always fixed, at least not in the tradition of the people of God. So Mary asks, “How can this be?” of her messenger, so Gideon lays out a fleece on the threshing floor, so Sarah laughs at the impossibility of her body, so Saul hides himself among the supplies. In everything give thanks, do not quench the spirit, do not despise prophecies, test all things, and hold fast to what is good (1 Thess. 5:18–21). Transition had not always been true of me, but I found that the more place I allowed it in my life, the further back it cast its roots. Whether or not the birthright had been mine to begin with or ever intended for me, I found the burden easy and the yoke light.

  After the settling into vocation always comes the awkwardness of growth. I took a new name based primarily on how well it sounded when called out in a coffee shop; where I’d once had a fairly unique woman’s name (shared only with the older sister from Family Ties), I now found myself with a relatively commonplace one for a man—moreover, that there was already a writer named Daniel Mallory, who had recently made headlines for signing a million-dollar book advance and, apparently, fabricating stories about his personal life in order to inflate his professional reputation. Having my cis doppelgänger called publicly to account for charmingly committing lightweight fraud while I was in the early stages of transition sums up a whole host of transmasculine anxiety! Then, too, there was the testosterone-born neck acne to be dealt with, which demanded its own attendant rituals and acts of soothing. Always there was the suspicion of my own peacefulness—yes, this brings me joy and energy and clarity today, and yesterday, too, but tomorrow is certainly the day the legs are swept out from under me, and I’ll have to run home begging for forgiveness. It is difficult for the mind to unlearn certain anxieties.

  The other day I was talking with a friend about the gradual but profound change testosterone has had on my voice, and I found myself saying something I say a lot nowadays: “You know, I used to have a lovely singing voice.” Which is mostly true, but “lovely” is fairly subjective, and it was only lovely by singing-in-the-shower or gathered-round-the-family-piano standards, not church-solo or sudden-appearance-at-an-open-mic standards. I sometimes worry I sound like I am making claims to having been a great beauty or the king of the Franks, the passing of time being sufficient for everyone to accept the polite fiction. And how will I know when I’ve dipped into fabulism if I don’t keep in constant contact with my past selves? Who is going to oppose me: “No, you always had limited breath control and sounded obviously strained the moment you strayed out of your comfortable half-octave range, you acne-ridden deceiver”?

  Some of it, I think, is self-conscious cover; starting testosterone did not mean I immediately left the house looking like a full-grown man in his thirties, I mostly just looked like myself, only hairier and slightly puffier in the cheeks. Generally, there was a mild social cost to be paid for going out in public looking that way. And some of it also comes from an urge to prove that I didn’t transition out of necessity but desire: Being a woman is hard, but I was good at it, I think is the underlying anxiety. Nobody fired me; I quit I know I’m not trying to look pretty anymore, and I apologize to all those who have to look at me, because I us
ed to try and I’m not enough of a man yet for it not to be a problem. I promise to work very hard to look like Victor Garber so you can look at a handsome man in three years’ time minimum. If my appearance was a common resource held in public trust, the least I could do was hang up a sign: Please pardon our dust during refurbishment. We’re working hard to update the site you’ve so often enjoyed.

  But there’s also a slightly perverse pleasure to be taken in speaking so proudly about the past, and it’s a pleasure I’ve seen other trans people take for themselves, mentioning—possibly even exaggerating slightly, as our past selves are unlikely to walk through the door in contradiction—how good we used to look or whatever it was that people thought we were. It may be in part because we are so often accused of simply misunderstanding gender stereotypes that we can take pleasure in reminiscing about how well we have sometimes fit in. Kids, Daddy used to have the greatest rack in the tristate area. I find this habit very endearing; transitioning often makes room for fondness where there was no room before. Pride without ownership, affection without desire, that’s what I’m trying to communicate when I say something like “I used to have a great ass.” Maybe, too, an attempt to say I’m a rational actor. I can see things as they are; I can assign proportionate value to things; I’m making these decisions with a sound mind and an accurate view of reality. It may be nothing more than an attempt to forestall that kindest and most painful of denials, But you used to be such a _______. But you had such a beautiful _______. I know, don’t remind me. She was lovely, and she had such nice hair.

  One of the things women do well as a group—I speak broadly here but not definitively, many women don’t, and plenty of women do it well sometimes and in some situations and not at all well in others—is layer relationships one on top of the other, doubling back and reinforcing and looping multiple ties into one. In this way transitioning can sometimes feel like pulling apart an entire web, inconveniencing (at the very least) a number of other women who had relied on your position in order to maintain theirs. This may be a very self-centered way to regard one’s transition; I’m sure many people who transition don’t feel this way at all. Nor do I mean to suggest I’ve toppled any woman out of her own life by taking testosterone or changing my name. But I’ve spent more of my time than I ought to preparing for an exit interview with womanhood that will never happen. No one is calling me to account or asking why, after thirty years in the position, I was moving into a different role in the company.

  But most of my growing-up was spent being trained for a job I no longer have, and I never quite knew how to express my love and gratitude for the ways I was treated as a woman, by women, while no longer continuing to be one. I had a lovely singing voice once, nothing special but quite pleasant to listen to. My range has narrowed now, and my voice cracks on most notes above middle C, but I have reason to believe it will settle into something mellow someday, both different and continuous. Nobody is asking me to apologize for anything, but I still want to, if only for the pleasure and the sweetness and the release of being forgiven.

  I tried apologizing to my mother when I told her I was not just “figuring some things out” but transitioning. It was one thing to be a man, or wish to be a man, or live as a man, in a coffee shop or with a friend or alone in my apartment or out in public, but to be a man in relation with my mother meant being not-her-daughter. A person is not-a-daughter in their own right; they are a daughter to and of someone else, and as much as I knew my gender was my own, that my vocation was assured, that self-determination mattered more to me than external validation—still if I could have transitioned while remaining her daughter, I would have wanted to do so. I wanted to promise I would not change in relation to her, that I remained grateful for the girlhood she had given me, that her affection for my former embodiment, my former name, would not hurt me, that if I could have stayed a woman a minute longer I would have done it.

  I wanted to promise that this would be the last change, that I would never make excessive demands on the people who I believed were bound to love me, believing as I did that their loving and my changing was somehow a rupture or a violation of the agreement I had entered into by being born. I thought often of Jacob and Esau. Of all the brothers in Genesis who deny and disinherit one another, they are the first to reconcile. Cain flees from the body of Abel, Isaac and Ishmael are parted as children and never meet again, but Jacob and Esau make peace. Before they make peace, Jacob changes his name.

  Jacob arose that night and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed over the ford of Jabbok. He took them, sent them over the brook, and sent over what he had. Then Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. Now when the man saw that he did not prevail against him, he touched the socket of his hip; and the socket of Jacob’s hip was out of joint as he wrestled with him. And he said, “Let me go, for the day breaks.”

  But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me!”

  So the man said to him, “What is your name?”

  He said, “Jacob.”

  And the man said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

  Then Jacob asked, saying, “Tell me your name, I pray.”

  And he said, “Why is it that you ask about my name?” And he blessed him there.

  So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.” Just as he crossed over Peniel the sun rose on him, and he limped on his hip.

  This part of Jacob’s story begins abruptly. The angel does not appear or announce himself—in one moment he is not there, and in the next moment he is there and wrestling with Jacob. He refuses to name or explain himself; the two are alone as they struggle, on the far side of the river from the rest of Jacob’s family. Jacob is not overcome, but his body is marked by the encounter, and he moves differently throughout the world forever after. Jacob is given a blessing and a new name but never an explanation; the angel is gone as abruptly as it came; Jacob never walks the same. Trying not to transition was the hardest work in the world. The nicest thing about transition was letting go.

  After Jacob crosses the river, he is reunited with his brother, Esau, for the first time in years—Esau, whose birthright he maneuvered out of him; Esau, whose forgiveness is not assured. Jacob bows to the ground seven times, uncertain of his welcome, but Esau runs to meet him “and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” Jacob offers Esau gifts, and Esau refuses on the grounds that he already has more than enough. I was as desperate to remain legible to my family of origin according to their terms as I was desperate to change, as desperate for permission as I was for autonomy. I could not rid myself of the idea that my body was in some fixed and ultimate way the property of my parents, a collective asset of the family unit. More unthinkable than the idea of transitioning was the idea of transitioning outside of my family—of failing to become a son, if I asked sweetly and often enough and worked very hard to earn it. As a child I sometimes attempted to bargain for bigger and better birthday presents by promising “It will be my birthday and Christmas present combined—I’ll never ask for anything else again—this is the only thing I’ll ever want, I swear.” There is a limit to gift-giving, and there is a limit to gift-getting, and I sensed myself getting dangerously close to that boundary. So Jacob offers his gifts to Esau again: “ ‘Please, if I have now found favor in your sight, then receive my present from my hand, inasmuch as I have seen your face as though I had seen the face of God, and you were pleased with me. Please take my blessing that is brought to you, because God has dealt graciously with me, and because I have enough.’ So he urged him, and he took it.” Jacob and Esau do not meet again after this; less a gift exchange than a formal buyout of shares in the family business.

  INTERLUDE II Help Me, Brother, or I Sink

  John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Pr
ogress is one of the bestselling books of all time; there was a moment where Protestant households could be reliably counted on to have a copy of the Progress and a copy of the Bible, if nothing else. I received a copy of my very own for my eighth birthday. Near the end of the first part the man Christian and his companion Hopeful find themselves at the very gate of their destination, the Celestial City. After passing through every possible trial, they come to an unfordable river.

  Now I further saw that betwixt them and the gate was a river; but there was no bridge to go over: the river was very deep. At the sight, therefore, of this river, the pilgrims were much astounded; but the men that went with them said, “You must go through, or you cannot come at the gate.”

  The pilgrims then, especially Christian, began to despond in their minds and looked this way and that, but no way could be found by them by which they might escape the river. Then they asked the men if the waters were all of a depth. They said, “No”; yet they could not help them in that case, for said they, “You shall find it deeper or shallower as you believe in the King of the place.”

  They then addressed themselves to the water; and entering, Christian began to sink. And crying out to his good friend Hopeful, he said, “I sink in deep waters, the billows go over my head; all his waves go over me.”

  Then said the other, “Be of good cheer, my brother; I feel the bottom, and it is good.”

  Then said Christian, “Ah! my friend, the sorrows of death have compassed me about; I shall not see the land that flows with milk and honey.”

  And with that a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him; also here he, in great measure, lost his senses, so that he could neither remember nor orderly talk of any of those sweet refreshments that he had met with in the way of his pilgrimage. But all the words that he spake still tended to discover that he had horror of mind, and hearty fears that he should die in that river, and never obtain entrance in at the gate; here also, as they that stood by perceived, he was much in the troublesome thoughts of the sins that he had committed, both since and before he began to be a pilgrim.