“You’ll be better and you’ll be smarter”
I really, really loved being a woman. That’s a sentence I always end up overthinking: It sounds like an apologia for the fact that I’m not one, or not one anymore, depending on how you define these things, and I don’t mean it as one. It sounds a little bit like an argument against transition, which is the last thing I mean. It also sounds like an expression of regret, and it isn’t that either, though I suppose it has a touch of grief. All I mean is that I found just an immense amount of joy in being a woman in the world and a woman among other women, although I couldn’t tell you now what that means. I used to think that womanhood was predicated upon solidarity, an us-against-the-world kind of kinship, but that’s never been true — in theory, perhaps, but not in practice. Womanhood as a structure, like all the other component structures that make up a macrocosmic society, just replicates the same inequalities on a microcosmic level. It is Zeno’s paradox: Though we push ourselves ever closer and closer to one of equality, there is always that last half-molecule’s worth of space, always that last unaccountable gap between the real and the ideal, a margin of error precisely the size and shape of human nature.
As of the last time I paid attention to particle physics, there is a limit to the number of times you can split an atom, to how infinitesimal a unit you can derive as a basis for matter. This is true of gender as well. You can divide it into as many subheadings, as many factors as you want — presentation, pronouns, social and cultural norms, preferences and interests, internalized bias — and you’ll still never find the mythical subparticle that defines identity, that means some people know they are women and others know they are men and yet others know that they do not fit into a binary system of categorization. I never did figure out what made me identify as a woman for so long, and from the moment that I realized I didn’t know, I did not stop thinking about it for years on end. I still don’t know what makes me identify as a man. I do still think about it. But it feels less like having my skin scraped off a millimeter at a time. When people describe me using “he” and “him,” it doesn’t feel like sandpaper on a barely healed scab, the way it did when people used “she” and “her.” It hurts much less, most of the time. Sometimes I don’t even think about it at all. I don’t know why this is different; I only know that it is.
That still leaves the problem of the subparticle. Since I came out and began to transition, I’ve altered my presentation in ways that are not consistent with social or cultural norms of masculinity; I’ve sustained habits and hobbies that are not consistent with social or cultural norms of masculinity; I’ve experienced transphobia at least as virulent as the worst misogyny I ever encountered. I continue to work on making sure that I don’t perpetuate any, which is more complicated now than it used to be. When I thought I was a woman, it was easy to pass off any number of toxic traits as acceptable because other people did not think of or see me as a man. Now, because I see myself as a man and other people largely concur, the same traits come across quite differently. I was always aware that I held men to different standards than women for any number of reasons. Sometimes it was because I was so angry, and still am, about the way that misogyny is enmeshed in almost every aspect of daily life. Other times it was because I assumed the presence of those traits was the result of privilege, or due to certain lived experience I did not have, or due to the absence of certain lived experience I did have. Sometimes I was correct in those assumptions and sometimes, I increasingly think, I was not. Either way, I am constantly aware of the fact that other people, for their own reasons, likely hold me to those same standards, and I want desperately to meet them.
Part of me wants to say that it is right for me to spend more energy now policing my behavior and language than ever before, which I do anyway. But part of me, I also know, thinks that I have committed a terrible wrong by not only being trans but admitting it and acting on it. That same part of me thinks that it is right that every part of my life should be more difficult now, because this is what I deserve for betraying every woman who thought of me as a sister, every family member who thought of me as a daughter or niece, every friend who thought of me as a woman, who expected womanhood of me, whose expectations should have mattered more to me than something I ignored for a very long time, and which I thought (at the time) I’d be able to ignore forever. The fact that something in this case turned out to be small but fundamental, a subparticle whose observation did not change who I was but did change a great deal of how I understood myself and the world and my place in it, comes as an afterthought in this line of reasoning. It’s hard to say whether that is the result of internalized transphobia or the same conditioning that has told me for my entire life that other people’s needs matter more than my own — which is to say, internalized misogyny. I think there is very little difference between the two, rendering the point largely moot. The real issue is that I can’t tell whether my increased vigilance is warranted or simply another way for me to enact consequences upon myself. I don’t know yet how to differentiate between the two.
This particular three-body problem has another complicating variable, which is that I know the conundrum I’ve just laid out is one of the ways people justify narcissism to themselves. They say, isn’t it unfair to ask me to do extra work just because of who I am? Isn’t it unfair to make me jump through all these extra hoops just because I’m white, just because I’m straight, just because I’m a man? And then they don’t do the work, and they never realize, because it only has consequences for other people. I’ve been those other people. I never want to make anyone feel the way I did. If we’re being specific, I never want to make anyone feel the way men have made me feel. I don’t want to use being kind to myself as a pretense for being cruel to others.
Almost all of the people who have hurt me, historically speaking, have been men. From that lived data, I extrapolated that there was no way to be a man without hurting other people, without being entitled, without enabling or committing rape or abuse or assault — “yes, all men.” For a long time, I joked that the only reason my personality wasn’t unbearable was because I wasn’t a man. Then, of course, I found out that I was what I feared and hated most in the world.
If I had stayed that angry and afraid, that committed to hating what I was, I would be dead. That isn’t a rhetorical flourish. A few months ago, I read an interview with Tamsyn Muir, who put it the only way I have ever found relatable: “I was very ready to have a hot date with a length of rope, a date I have arranged and cancelled multiple times over my life.” There is a hole in the corner of my mind, a deep empty place, and when I get close enough to it, though that takes me a long time and a lot of unhappiness, it whispers to me like the edge of a roof. By the time I found out that not only was I a man but I had to do something about it — to make it real in my life and to my friends and family, to start frantically building a new future when one had just crumbled in front of me, to start recouping the sunk cost of decades — I was miserable, afraid and in pain and furious at myself for ruining it all. I did not have much room for error.
Just as I’m not sure why people no longer identify me as a woman, I’m not sure what changed. It was not my history of mistreatment at the hands of men. It wasn’t that I forgave the people who hurt me, because I never have and never will. It wasn’t that I suddenly became okay with and agreed with their actions. It wasn’t that I became less angry about misogyny and the men who perpetuate it. It was just startling to realize that I was a man too, and that I didn’t feel like a different person at all. At first I thought that must be because I was trans, not “real,” not like other men, not born and raised into it, but — wasn’t I? Haven’t we all been raised into hating women and the universal traits that are arbitrarily associated with womanhood? Haven’t we all been taught that the only way to avoid punishment for non-compliance is to view those traits as weakness and root them out in ourselves?
(Sidebar: Transphobes claim that it is child abuse to validate a trans child by letting them dress as they want and choose a name and pronouns, by allowing them to delay puberty and have some say in their bodily development. Is that not the definition of love, to care enough about somebody to embrace them even as they change? Is it not abuse to separate children by their genital configuration and then restrict their development accordingly?)
A few months after I started masculinizing hormone therapy, or T, I read “You Don’t Have to be Afraid of Me,” a pay-what-you-can comic by Victor Martins about what it’s like to be a transmasculine person who has been hurt by and is afraid of men. It made me feel a lot less alone and much less lost. It helped me get over myself, to put it bluntly — to sit down and look directly at the great contradiction of fearing and hating men while growing to love the fact that I was one.
ME: I hate men but I don’t hate the fact that I am one, except in all the ways that I feel like it’s a burden on my friends and family and how it makes my life harder in a million new ways that I’m not good at dealing with yet and I feel like I deserve that because I’m a terrible person, specifically for being trans.
ALSO ME: But you’re aware that’s the internalized transphobia.
ME: Oh certainly.
ALSO ME: But that doesn’t seem to make any difference.
ME: Oh certainly not.
ALSO ME: But you wouldn’t believe that about anybody else.
ME: No.
ALSO ME: Great. Next point.
ME: I hate men because all men are predators and rapists and abusers, and this is something I truly and earnestly believe, not just in the way where people say that because they mean too few predators and rapists and abusers are ever held accountable, and not just in the way where people mean that anybody can be a predator or a rapist or an abuser because people are so unwilling to believe survivors, but in the way where I walk down the street and I look at men and I think, you look just like the man who paid $500 so he could have an extra hour to rape me. You could be just like him. I’d never be able to tell.
ALSO ME: But you’re a man.
ME: Yes.
ALSO ME: And you’ve never done that.
ME: No.
ALSO ME: And you don’t think that about trans men.
ME: No, because trans men have a personal experience of misogyny that is often more similar to women’s lived experience than it is to cis men’s.
ALSO ME: But trans men are men.
ME: Well, it definitely depends on whether you mean “men” as in, uh, people who’d describe themselves as men or what I assume most people mean, which is “predators and rapists and abusers who believe they are entitled to the bodies and the attention of others, for whom toxic masculinity and the concept in general are synonymous.”
ALSO ME: And you think that meaning is more real than the other one.
ME: Uh, yes.
ALSO ME: But you’re aware that’s the internalized transphobia.
ME: I truly fucking hate it when that’s the answer, which is about eight million times a day.
ALSO ME: Do you think, just maybe, there is truly no fundamental difference between people of all genders?
ME: Even though I want to say that there is and that men are fundamentally thoughtless and selfish and incapable of understanding, in the process of formulating that sentence I’ve recognized that would be a biologically essentialist and fucked-up thing to say, so now I have to say that no, I think there is no fundamental difference, and that maybe I should just try to spend less time pretending I know anything about other people’s experience of gender since it’s all just a total crapshoot and the gender binary has absolutely broken society.
ALSO ME: Do you hate yourself?
ME: Oh absolutely.
ALSO ME: Please go back to therapy.
I kept waiting to turn into a different person, but I never did (at least that I know of — change is funny that way; you almost never know it when it’s happening. You only realize when you look back, and realize that things are different now). I’m still learning how to be the version of myself that is a man. I’m better at it than I used to be. Mostly, I am trying to forgive myself all over again for being the person I am. That’s the point of being trans, for me, when it’s all said and done.
There is a word, by the way, for the trans version of the women’s code that says: do not be stingy with your Advil. Torrey Peters describes it iconically in Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones:
“It’s not a gang. It’s a promise. You just promise to love trans girls above all else. The idea—although maybe not the practice—is that a girl could be your worst enemy, the girl you wouldn’t piss on to put out a fire, but if she’s trans, you’re gonna offer her your bed, you’re gonna share your last hormone shot.”
“That sounds like some kind of trans girl utopia.” I’m so rattled, it’s not even sarcastic.
She laughs. “Please. You’ve met a trans woman before, right? Do you think the words trans women and utopia ever go together in the same sentence? Even when we’re not starved for hormones, we’re still bitches. Crabs in a barrel. Fucking utopia, my ass.” She glances at me. My nervousness must show plainly. I can’t tell if I’m safe or not.
“Here’s what it is,” she says, a little more gently, “We aim high, trying to love each other and then we take what we can get. We settle for looking out for each other. And even if we don’t all love each other, we mostly all respect each other.”
After a pause she says, “I remember how I used to be before the contagion. Embarrassed to be seen with another trans woman, for fear that her transness would reveal my transness and we’d both get clocked. T4T is an ideal, I guess, and we fall short of it most of the time. But that’s better than before. All it took was the end of the world to make that happen.”
Prescient, I hope.
—R.