Imagine you are me, a girl by random chance of birth as opposed to identification with other girls or disaffiliation with boys, and it is 2004 and you are standing in the girls’ locker room as those around you ready themselves for gym class. They are in various states of dishabille, these girls, and you are both hormonal and going to grow up to become a lesbian. There are many ways this scene could unfold. Perhaps as an angsty parable of desire, the gawky butch-to-be no less aflame with libidinal urgency than a teenaged Alexander Portnoy granted access to a magnificent treasure trove of nude and nubile flesh. Or perhaps as a gay awakening, these bodies finally more than just the narrow little bodies of playmates and sleepover companions that you’ve known for years, suddenly imbued with a complex and mysterious meaning for which there are no words in the fourteen-year-old vocabulary, only overwhelming feelings.
Or perhaps there’s a third way. Perhaps these other girls’ bodies don’t become sites of psychic turmoil for you, don’t suddenly entice with their potential to satisfy your desire. Perhaps it’s that you are standing in this locker room in your crappy hometown in a pair of very uncomfortable cotton-poly gym shorts, and you are struggling into a sports bra to contain your way too big breasts—unappealingly big, to be clear, a matron’s floppy breasts—and the smell around you is not the smell of innocence or daisy petals as certain lecherous mid-century novelists might have you believe: it smells of dank sweat and dirty feet and stale Target perfume. Maybe there’s someone in there who you could possibly have a crush on, but you wouldn’t know, as you’re hunched over in embarrassment of your “fat” stomach (never mind that you are a functional anorexic and weigh only 125 pounds), and you have not yet had an orgasm and will not until you are well into your early twenties, at which point it will be such an unfamiliar feeling that it surprises and alarms you. Your ideas of “sex” and “sexual satisfaction” come from raising your eyes to study the faraway, kind of fluttery look that passes across your boyfriend’s face as you give him blowjobs. Many of the other girls in the locker room with you are somehow thinner and have rounder breasts and have been rumored to give their boyfriends better blowjobs—to even go all the way with their boyfriends. Supposedly, many of them take the pill to do so, an act of romantic sophistication that conjures images of a far-off and dreamlike urban adulthood: one-bedroom apartments and internships and meeting friends for coffee.
My god, you think, pulling an orange Fruit of the Loom t-shirt over the nightmarish cage of your bleeding, stinking, undisciplined flesh. What I’d give to be meeting friends for coffee in a big city right now.
But you aren’t, and by the time you are, you’ll have experienced enough shame and confusion about your desires that these meetings will be less the jubilant exchange of juicy feminine details that you’ve seen on Sex and the City and more complex strategic planning sessions. Your little coffee table will become an ad hoc war room, you and your friends trying to puzzle out the answers to questions that reflect just how in over your heads you all are: How much does the stalking have to escalate for it to become reportable? Why is she calling it selfish if I want to close the relationship while I grieve my dad’s death? They texted saying the polycule is breaking up with me because I didn’t share my Costco card with them, and now I have no housing.
That’s a long ways off, though. Now, in this locker room in 2004, you are feeling no shame about your desires. You’re not even experiencing them, because you’re really not sure what they are. Sex is something that you do for and with your boyfriend (he’s one of the nice ones, rarely asks for it, always acts surprised in a charmingly jocular manner whenever you initiate in the way you know he likes, based not on his words but on his fluttery expressions), and you don’t quite understand that even for him, a fellow AP student and Neutral Milk Hotel fan and genuinely good guy, you are an instrument. For him, of course, but also for yourself—you are self-instrumentalizing all the time, you are performing, you’ve seen the script millions of times before and unwittingly memorized your costume and lines. You want to be able to nail any audition, to walk into any room and strike everyone in it as the ideal picture of femininity, a perfect form that bears no reflection of its troubled content. You hope against hope that you will get cast, but the part always seems to be going to someone else—someone hotter and more unaffected.
You don’t realize two things: First, that the role is never successfully cast, that even Taylor Swift is told she is too fat and Halle Berry is sexually assaulted. Second, that sexually speaking, you are a eunuch: as it is your lot to always and forever be the wanted, the helpmeet, you lack the vocabulary to describe what you want, as well as the episteme about whether you even have wants. And when you’re finally able to identify some of your desires years down the road, you must work to decouple them from their simulacra, which you’ve been exposed to ad nauseam in books and film and porn: the nubile femmes who encounter one another at sleepovers and in locker rooms in various states of dishabille, who grope and kiss one another for the benefit of the men who look on tumescently.
What is it you want? Do you know? Will you ever know, or will you just think you do as you keep donning your Fruit of the Loom t-shirts and gamely sacrificing yourself to make room for the desires of others?
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In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes of By Hook or by Crook, the 2001 butch lesbian buddy comedy her husband Harry Dodge starred in with his best friend and co-writer Silas Howard:
You [and Silas] decided that the butch characters would call each other “he” and “him,” but in the outer world of grocery stores and authority figures, people would call them “she” and “her.” The point wasn’t that if the outer world were schooled appropriately re: the characters’ preferred pronouns, everything would be right as rain. Because if the outsiders called the characters “he,” it would be a different kind of he. Words change depending on who speaks them; there is no cure.
Would everything have been “right as rain” if the whole of late-nineties LA had gendered petty criminals and lost bois Shy and Valentine correctly, as we may be inclined to believe today? Or would it indeed have been a “different kind of he”—the gender equivalent of that paradox that so befuddled me in Intro to Philosophy my freshman year of college: What if you look at that flower and agree with me that it is yellow, but in fact only I am seeing yellow, and you are seeing what I’d call red?
If anyone besides Wittgenstein knows that there can be no private language, it’s Maggie Nelson. Even a queer private language is impossible, though we are sometimes moved to wedge ourselves between signs and their referents, to compel their decoupling for reasons we imagine have to do with things that are essential to us, like safety and desire. And yet I think Maggie and Harry and Silas are right here: when Shy and Valentine say “he” of each other, it’s a different “he” than the passive “he” of, say, the guy in the hardware store where Shy is trying to shoplift. I think we cannot place both instances of “he” within the same semantic category, and I think, were even the clueless hardware store guy apprised of Shy’s situation, he’d be inclined to agree.
There is a “he” who is circumcised shortly after birth, who is exposed as a young boy to stereotypes about whether and how much he should emote, who is encouraged at levels both social and neurobiological to live yoked to his desires, who has “failed” catastrophically if he is not a married property owner by his early thirties. And then there is another “he” who began as a tomboyish she, whose fuckability (and thereby worth as a human being) was frequently in question, whose desires didn’t align with those that men had for and about her, who felt ill at ease in a body that seemed to her almost designed to be rendered an object. The testosterone of the first “he” is glandular and endogenous; for the second “he,” it’s drawn from a little brown bottle with a syringe and injected with a needle.
It’s worth noting that the second “he” has always felt himself to be post-feminine. Here I’ll define as feminine the set of rhythms, norms and cultural expectations arising either directly or indirectly from the possession of a biology broadly and historically agreed upon to be female. Menstruation is one example of this, as is childbirth. Being penetrated is another, which is supposed to connote submissiveness, accommodation and the ability to be possessed. The female biology’s replication of nature’s rhythms is often linked with “women’s intuition,” a kind of a priori knowing about the natural world that ends up reinforcing the idea of women as “elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots,” as Ursula K. Le Guin once noted.
And of course another norm of the feminine is scrutiny, which is a form of possession: the relentless scrutiny of one’s ass and breasts, the endless considerations over whether one has lost or gained weight, the debates over one’s fuckability often followed in short order by attempts to fuck, both consensual and not. If it is feminine to be seen and known in these ways—especially against one’s will—then being stealth ensures one’s status as post-feminine. Sure, maybe it’s Shy’s burden to have been saddled with the feminine at birth, but if he plays his cards right, he can perform a kind of disappearing act: instead of alighting on him and scrutinizing his body and perhaps even making a rude comment along the lines of You just need the dyke fucked out of you, honey, the hardware store guy’s eyes can instead just pass over Shy, register him as nothing more than a small and squeaky-voiced man, a little oddity mercifully beneath consideration. This is perhaps why the semantic collapse feels so important to us, or at least why it felt so important to me. No, trans men must also be men, because if you claim we’re not, then you’re sending me right back to the hell I came from.
“We should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women,” said Judith Butler in 2021, just over thirty years after Gender Trouble’s 1990 publication. “And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of ‘men.’” By now, Butler’s ideas have achieved such cultural prominence that undergraduates who would likely side-eye me if I assigned so much as five pages of Gender Trouble’s impassable prose now write gender is a performance, and I am always performing in their Discord bios, while Ph.D. students retweet photos of Butler’s effigy burned in São Paulo: How do you say “TERFs are embarrassing” in Portuguese??? Though Butler is the widely acknowledged superstar, it’s happened to Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman and more than a few others: you publish a book of queer theory with an academic press to get tenure in an English department in 1999, and fifteen years later Laverne Cox quotes a more-than-slightly askew version of its thesis back at you in an episode of Orange Is the New Black. Or in Butler’s case, young adults quote sugar-high misconstruals of their work to each other on TikTok and Tumblr and Art Fight, exchanging theories of gender and embodiment as readily as they do sketches of their favorite anime characters. If you feel like a boy, then you are one. Gender roles are forced on us by the patriarchy. Being born in the wrong body doesn’t make you any less right.
Defending the metaphysical legitimacy of my manhood felt for a long time like a pleasingly liberal act. After years of accommodating what others wanted of me, here I was at last staking my claims to privacy and self-determination.1 No, you can’t ogle me, and I will ensure that you don’t by joining this category I’ve always wanted to join anyway. As soon as my inclinations became legible to me—not as giant, unmanageable onslaughts of feeling, but as scary-to-think-about preferences that eventually bloomed into full-blown matters of taste—I wanted to safeguard them, to keep the private out of the public and my bedroom for myself and my lovers alone. But of course there’s the dilemma of the feminine, how even in a bomber jacket and unstylish sunglasses and boxy jeans you are still consigned to being a symbol of sex (not to be confused with a sex symbol). And then of course there’s the politicization of the bedroom: Hadn’t I been “born this way”? Didn’t I want the right to marry? Where was my lesbian flag? An impossible catch-22 of 21st-century liberalism: in order to win the right to exercise my preferences in my private life, I was enjoined to speak about and publicly identify with them.
“I’m sick of the world thinking I’m straight. I’ve worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian,” Jess Goldberg’s girlfriend jokes in Stone Butch Blues. Like many moments in Leslie Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece, it’s a bittersweet exchange between women who love women, carried out behind closed doors and away from the sexual panopticon of patriarchy. Bittersweet because the joke names how desires can be socially circumscribed: Jess’s girlfriend, a femme whose physicality doesn’t run afoul of the feminine phenotype (or archetype), feels she is “passing too, against [her] will” and thus losing an important aspect of her identity whenever Jess looks mannish on testosterone. Jess, a butch who has been informed that her very existence runs afoul of all things feminine, really just wants to hide from the particular flavor of masculine bullying she’s subjected to whenever she goes out in public. Whereas her girlfriend is frustrated by the illegibility of her desires, Jess feels helplessly legible: a walking target. She is relieved when she gets a double mastectomy and begins growing a beard.
Like Butler, I too was once joyous to see what I and others like me would do with the category of “men.” But on the other side of passing as a man, it became clear to me that Maggie, Harry and Silas couldn’t be more right: the “he” that I’d become was created differently than the other “he’s” around me. My man-identity had been forged through a highly principled commitment to self-determination, but it was attenuated by material and biographical realities that resisted being reduced to simply politics or performance. I’d gone to all this trouble to change and perform only to realize that there is a ghost in the machine still doing the performing, a being forged by the interplay of biography and biology, by the tireless negotiation of its desires with others’. Call it a “self,” but don’t call it an “authentic self,” as there would be no way for it—for her—to escape co-construction with the world around her. Had fleeing this relationship with the world, this girl-contract I never would have signed if given the chance, not been another form of negotiation? And now that the negotiation was complete, it seemed quite impossible for me to expand upon a category in which I didn’t seem to belong without what would amount to a callous revisionist history of my own life. Gender changes depending on who performs it; there is no cure.
After all, was it not true that I—that she—had desired to become a he? That hers was a desiring self coterminous with his—with my—“authentic” one?
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When I announced my intention to transition, I was surprised by how little resistance it inspired. My parents were bewildered, a few family members were tepidly skeptical, and a friend I’d known since junior high peppered me with questions about whether I doubted my desirability as a woman and if I knew what a drastic move I was making. Otherwise, I was celebrated. Acquaintances and well-wishers were as in support of my bodily autonomy as they felt any lover of personal freedom ought to be. Those who knew me well had the advantage of an extra layer of exposure: if ever there was anyone who was not a man but wanted to be one, who appeared to be at odds with her gender in every possible capacity, it was Rebekah Frumkin.
Not to mention, come on: Who wouldn’t want to be a man? It seemed like the better deal all around, and I’d dreamed of it since childhood. I was bored by girls’ ancillary roles in my middle-grade adventure novels, was a staunch refusenik when it came to the tedious labors of hair and makeup, a fan of putting Ken’s suit on my Barbie and Barbie’s ballet outfit on my Ken (sadly, Ken was too broad-shouldered for the Velcro leotard to fasten in back). For years I wrote stories from the male perspective, shopped in the men’s section at Target, wanted to date women. And now, through the increasingly popular acceptance of sex-change procedures developed by endocrinologists and sexologists in prewar Germany, the disjunction between what was expected of me and who I was could at last be resolved. No more of the tiresome psychic operation of femaleness: I could, as a close trans woman friend of mine once told me, “just be a boy.”
It seemed as if changing gender would be a kind of social and spiritual silver bullet, the long-sought relief to my anxiety and intermittent suicidality, a safe harbor whose permanence, instead of being intimidating, felt reassuring. It was in this spirit that I took my first shot of testosterone on November 20, 2021, my future wife injecting it carefully into the muscle of my thigh. My voice would drop dramatically what felt like mere weeks later, and then a beard would start to grow in: facts about which, my wife told me later, she privately grieved but said nothing about, not wanting to hinder my journey.
But I had not done my homework about being a man. And it was not for lack of interest: it was quite simply homework I could not have possibly done, having never had access to the kinds of spaces and conversations I now did. Granted, I experienced the social relief I’d been so desperate for: I was taken seriously in ways I had never been before; though munchkin-voiced, I still wasn’t spoken over; I was deferred to again and again in matters I both knew about and didn’t, elevated above Le Guin’s “dark roots” and the dehumanizing scrutiny of the male gaze. But having only observed men, lived vicariously through male protagonists and looked on enviously as boyfriends ate whatever they wanted and walked around with an unselfconscious swagger, I had no concept of what it was like to be a man, had no idea what I was getting myself into.
What I learned from my adjunct appointment in the land of masculinity is that men desire intensely, and suffer as a result of their desires. The first half of that claim is a neurobiological fact, one I had difficulty believing at first despite its presence in the growing subgenre of transmasculine memoir: There’s no way testosterone actually causes the stereotypes about men, right? Then I took testosterone and my sex drive suddenly became unmanageable, less like an increase in volume on a car stereo than a rapidly overflowing inbox whose hundreds of emails each demanded a detailed response. Tears became less accessible than anger: I who once cried at the drop of a pin was constantly doing a stony-faced impersonation of Middle-Aged Patriarch Quietly Torn Apart By His Own Rage.
The conversations men have with each other when they believe no women are within earshot reflect precisely both the stranglehold testosterone can have on one’s system and the many social accommodations made for men to hate the world and themselves, but not to love either of those things. There was plenty of the fare I was expecting: jarringly crude sex talk, nihilistic misogyny, braggadocio and desperate one-upmanship. But there were also two themes that showed up in greater measure than anything else, which queer and feminist discourses don’t often take into consideration: self-loathing and shame.
These themes seemed to dominate nearly every “man-to-man” conversation I had, though self-loathing was more often the watchword. The more stereotypically masculine the man, the more potently he seemed to hate himself, the more readily he enumerated his many failures (social, sexual, financial) with the frothy bite of shame-fueled rage—or perhaps it was rage-fueled shame? If I showed up in a cheerful mood, relieved to finally have access to male friendship without the tedious will-they-won’t-they that had haunted so many of my previous incarnation’s friendships, it seemed to strike these men as strange that I should be both male and happy. How was it that ultimate happiness—the peaceable satisfaction of my nagging physical desires, the social “success” of making something of myself in the world—was not always just out of reach for me? What made me so special? Was I a gender traitor? They began to regard me with suspicion, and I never told them my secret: that I was acquainted with this feeling of Sisyphean futility but in the realm of beauty, that I had always been just fifteen or twenty pounds and a face of well-applied makeup away from being perfectly fuckable, that thoughts about this had so consumed me that I was frightened to name them as potential motivators for my transition for fear they’d recolonize my mind.
Back in 2018, before she won the Pulitzer Prize for her acerbic literary criticism, Andrea Long Chu made a splashy debut onto the queer theory scene with an essay in n+1 called “On Liking Women.” The essay comprises both an exegesis of Valerie Solanas’s uproarious SCUM Manifesto and an aesthetics of desire-based transsexualism. “Life under male supremacy isn’t oppressive, exploitative, or unjust: it’s just fucking boring,” Chu wrote, appealing both to the part of me tired of being reduced to my victimhood under patriarchy and the part of me that wanted to become a man. Writing of Solanas’s Juvenalian suggestion that men be “transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women” by means of “operations on the brain and nervous system,” Chu says:
This was a vision of transsexuality as separatism, an image of how male-to-female gender transition might express not just disidentification with maleness but disaffiliation with men. Here, transition, like revolution, was recast in aesthetic terms, as if transsexual women decided to transition, not to “confirm” some kind of innate gender identity, but because being a man is stupid and boring.
And here I’d thought being a woman was the stupid and boring thing to be. How could I have been so wrong? But now I’d begun to see it all around me, not just in conversation but in the shame-filled virtual manosphere, that hotbed of chauvinist radicalization: the alarming dearth of real connection and vulnerability, the negging and maxxing and loathed alphas and hapless betas, the seething incels and tragic cucks, the suppressed emotions and contempt for the feminine and the omnipresent threat of violence. No wonder Chu had been driven to self-loathing distraction by her simultaneous desires to be with women and to become a woman, had spent a torturous undergraduate semester furiously masturbating and decoupaging a broken upright piano with feminist texts. (One wonders what a girl has to do to get some good gender around here?) Indeed, I’d been so wrapped up in my own anxious self-excoriations that I hadn’t noticed that it was just as stupid and boring to live on Mars as on Venus.
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In a 1988 essay in Theatre Journal, Butler argued that gender—a sociological term intended to describe the division of those biologically sexed male and female into the respective cultural categories of “masculine” and “feminine”—is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” Butler would go on to dub this “corporeal style” and explore it in Gender Trouble as a means of social survival: we are all sexed agents “doing” our genders, and enjoined to do them correctly, again and again, for fear of reprisal from any number of cultural authorities. Indeed, it’s this series of bodily acts—gestures, speech, behavior, dress—that either grants us social acceptability or singles us out as subversive flies in the ointment.
And let me say that I took no pleasure in being a fly in the ointment, especially not on the occasions when I couldn’t help it. As gawky teenagers, we’re assured by pitying adults that we’ll “grow into” ourselves, that our bodies with their acne and knobby knees and overbites will resolve with the magic of time into things desiring and desirable. These are your awkward years, the adults say, you’ll outgrow them. But there is no outgrowing the disciplinary power of masculine and feminine archetypes. Once your face clears up and the orthodontist removes your braces, isn’t there still weight to lose, muscle to build, heterosexual vitality to prove? The performance, as Butler suggests, must be kept up throughout one’s life, repeated in new costumes as the performer ages.
I wonder often whether I decided to live as a man less as an act of self-assertion than of dissimulation, like Jess Goldberg first choosing to take testosterone in Stone Butch Blues. But if I took to my new corporeal style with an eager student’s enthusiasm, I was ultimately to realize that there is a limit to the self-understanding that can be derived from artificing. I was happy inasmuch as I got to hide from the strictures of my birth sex’s programming, but unlike Chu, who in “On Liking Women” freely admits to a desire for the “trappings of patriarchal femininity,” I wasn’t interested in submitting to the social disciplines of another sex, in discovering yet more opportunities for personal—that is to say, corporeal—failure.
In a now-infamous op-ed for the New York Times, published several months after “On Liking Women,” Chu writes of the various disappointments of HRT:
Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers—enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.
She says that she was not suicidal before HRT, though now she often is. She holds fast to misery—especially misery resulting from her self-determination—as a human right “as universal as healthcare, or food,” arguing further that “transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it. Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.”
Chu is right: we often do want things that are bad for us, especially living as we do in a society as prone to distortions of the truth as our own. Her op-ed was published in 2018, so perhaps things have improved for her since then. Or perhaps they haven’t, but either way, I think critics who have accused her in years since of being a self-hating woman should give her a break. I, too, have been both a man and a woman, and I can’t say I’d leave particularly generous Yelp reviews for either experience. (I suspect I’d find just as little satisfaction in a neo-penis as Chu claims to in her neo-vagina: having a flap of skin surgically removed from my forearm or thigh and grafted to the most sensitive part of my body via a risky procedure with high potential for a deleterious outcome would no more make me personally happy than would a Maserati its recently divorced, middle-aged driver.)
I also agree with Chu that we have the right to want and choose things that are bad for us. But I take my leave of her there. Did a certain English teacher at my high school, a smarmy groomer with a Jim Halpert haircut who seemed to thrive on teenaged girls’ adoring laughter, have the right to simmer with rage at the handful of us who didn’t find his sitcom shtick cute? Did certain tenured male academics I’ve known have the right to enact what amounted to elaborate immiseration plans against colleagues they decided they didn’t like? Did I have the right to the bitter bouts of shame and anxiety that made me so contemptuous of the life I was living and the body I was living it in that I sought to escape—into substance abuse, into careerist overwork and jealous competition, into a vastly uninformed approximation of masculinity—with varying degrees of success? The answer is yes, of course. It’s only human to want things that are bad for us, things that are good for us and, perhaps most frequently, things that are a combination of the two. But I submit that we have another imperative as autonomous thinking subjects invested in our own mental and physical well-being, and that’s to know why we want these things. Given all the places we’ve been and people we’ve met—all those many inputs that have stuck to the thinking and feeling flypaper of our desiring selves—it would be an act of defeatism to throw up our hands when it comes to trying to understand the relationship between our desires and our happiness.
I’ve always disliked the phrase “it’s more than just a phase.” Popularized by the “born this way” campaign for marriage equality, I understand its political utility, but I object to its determinism, and its dim view of phases. The moon has its phases and I consider it no less captivating; the seasons are phases, and witnessing their change is one of my favorite things about being alive on earth. The adventure of my life has its lunar phases, its book chapters, and I am quite comforted by their impermanence. It’s not that I don’t believe I have the right to misery—it’s that I don’t want misery, and that I’ve found it often accompanies rigid thinking, the kind of commitment to a bit at all costs that leads more readily to suffering than to satisfaction. Self-knowledge is like authorship; it is only you who can answer to the origins of your wants. Yes, it may require some wandering among the dark roots, some candor and surprise, but it’s a worthwhile project. That teenaged locker room girl-eunuch didn’t even know about the existence of those roots in 2004—but twenty years later she knows more, having explored them enough to find the things that make her genuinely happy.
It’s seen as politically expedient to take a phrase like “trans men are men” as tautological, but I see it as a contradiction in terms disadvantageous on levels both semantic and political. Another term for the desiring self might be “narrative self.” As in a subject with a story as opposed to a story with a subject. We gender defectors may alter our speech or behavior or hormone levels in whatever way contents us, but I believe we suffer a great loss in sloughing off our stories. From the Latin, the prefix trans means “beyond,” “across” or “on the other side,” so why say that I’ve gone “beyond” or “across” something to become a man, only to assert that it makes me just like any other man?
Furthermore, what have I gone beyond? My shame. My pain. My story—a human story shaped by the lifelong negotiation of what I want with what the world wants from me. But the story is the one thing that cannot be transcended, nor can it be erased.
Abandoning what felt like the failing enterprise of Rebekah’s life for the brighter shores of Rafael’s seemed to me an incredible, almost magical thing to do. And it was with a nearly incandescent joy that I inhabited Rafael’s life until I realized that one can never make a completely clean break. Even as I felt myself coming alive via cross-sex materiality, I retained my desiring self, and with it the story of my life. I was still the petulant girl scowling at my AP Lit teacher, still the gender-nonconforming lesbian who’d been harassed by senior male scholars. Still running from something toward something else. Meanwhile I’ve found not only what I was running from (shame, perceived gender failure, scrutiny) and what I was running toward (the idealized ease of manhood, fantasies of freedom and autonomy I’d cultivated since childhood, the chance not just to have a wife but to look like someone who has a wife), but also a belief in the post-feminine: the idea that I could be born with a female biology and yet still transcend its rhythms and mores, and that another transsexual could be born without said biology and yet still assume its rhythms and mores in every capacity that she could. I a defector, an ovulating “he” formed by testosterone. She a newly naturalized citizen, a stubbled “she” formed by estrogen.
There are trans people who shred old photos of themselves, who refer to their birth name as a deadname and would hear no mention of it pass anyone’s lips. I understand this process, and certainly blame no one for feeling they must go through with it. I am merely speaking for myself when I say that I could not bifurcate into discrete selves, could brook no amnesia about the life of Rebekah and why she wanted to take up the mantle of Rafael. In fact, I found myself stifled by the polite expectation that I’d have to go along with my doctors and friends and coworkers in “affirming” my manhood, taking the hormones and having the surgeries but then pretending that I’d been a man-born-man all along, tacitly cosigning the erasure of my female past.
Isn’t the self continuous? Aren’t our lives big, unbroken narratives? Isn’t the great beauty of self-determination precisely that it is not deterministic, that we can begin at some square one and then make an informed decision about where we’d like to go next? Shouldn’t this freedom of choice be the very thing that we gender defectors enshrine and celebrate and subject to criticism—personal, political and otherwise? Abdicating from my birth sex is a decision that, like the one made by the woman seeking an abortion or the Grindr guy seeking a hookup, is both motivated by desire (mine for myself, others’ for me) and grounded in bodily autonomy. I have no problem owning up to the fact that the personal is political, but I’m nevertheless troubled by the idea that holding such a view also imputes to one the belief that the personal or private self—the self whose story is known best, if not exclusively, by me—should be subordinate to the strictly “political” or public one.
To be frank, I’ve grown just as weary maintaining the categorical manhood of Rafael as I did the womanhood of Rebekah. The volume of my life contains not a single kind of speech act but a catalog of them, not one instance of drag but a whole wardrobe’s worth; and let’s not forget that my life’s volume is still being written. Which means I’m still becoming, traversing the vast landscape of my desires, my dress and speech and ideas adapting to its ever-shifting topography. I was a girl once, and then a woman, and then a trans man, and now I am what I’ll call a testoform butch lesbian, my gender-nonconforming feminine body halfway engineered into post-femininity. I’m performing—we all are—but that can’t obscure the fact that I’m still a single performer with a past comprised of many different performances. Let’s not confuse the magnificent stage and the elaborate costumes and set and soliloquies with the single story of the actor who takes a bow and then walks backstage to the audience’s applause, who sits in the quiet of her dressing room regarding her mask.
Art credit: Mark Yang, Outing, 2023. Oil and graphite on canvas, 18 × 30 in. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires (VSF).
Imagine you are me, a girl by random chance of birth as opposed to identification with other girls or disaffiliation with boys, and it is 2004 and you are standing in the girls’ locker room as those around you ready themselves for gym class. They are in various states of dishabille, these girls, and you are both hormonal and going to grow up to become a lesbian. There are many ways this scene could unfold. Perhaps as an angsty parable of desire, the gawky butch-to-be no less aflame with libidinal urgency than a teenaged Alexander Portnoy granted access to a magnificent treasure trove of nude and nubile flesh. Or perhaps as a gay awakening, these bodies finally more than just the narrow little bodies of playmates and sleepover companions that you’ve known for years, suddenly imbued with a complex and mysterious meaning for which there are no words in the fourteen-year-old vocabulary, only overwhelming feelings.
Or perhaps there’s a third way. Perhaps these other girls’ bodies don’t become sites of psychic turmoil for you, don’t suddenly entice with their potential to satisfy your desire. Perhaps it’s that you are standing in this locker room in your crappy hometown in a pair of very uncomfortable cotton-poly gym shorts, and you are struggling into a sports bra to contain your way too big breasts—unappealingly big, to be clear, a matron’s floppy breasts—and the smell around you is not the smell of innocence or daisy petals as certain lecherous mid-century novelists might have you believe: it smells of dank sweat and dirty feet and stale Target perfume. Maybe there’s someone in there who you could possibly have a crush on, but you wouldn’t know, as you’re hunched over in embarrassment of your “fat” stomach (never mind that you are a functional anorexic and weigh only 125 pounds), and you have not yet had an orgasm and will not until you are well into your early twenties, at which point it will be such an unfamiliar feeling that it surprises and alarms you. Your ideas of “sex” and “sexual satisfaction” come from raising your eyes to study the faraway, kind of fluttery look that passes across your boyfriend’s face as you give him blowjobs. Many of the other girls in the locker room with you are somehow thinner and have rounder breasts and have been rumored to give their boyfriends better blowjobs—to even go all the way with their boyfriends. Supposedly, many of them take the pill to do so, an act of romantic sophistication that conjures images of a far-off and dreamlike urban adulthood: one-bedroom apartments and internships and meeting friends for coffee.
My god, you think, pulling an orange Fruit of the Loom t-shirt over the nightmarish cage of your bleeding, stinking, undisciplined flesh. What I’d give to be meeting friends for coffee in a big city right now.
But you aren’t, and by the time you are, you’ll have experienced enough shame and confusion about your desires that these meetings will be less the jubilant exchange of juicy feminine details that you’ve seen on Sex and the City and more complex strategic planning sessions. Your little coffee table will become an ad hoc war room, you and your friends trying to puzzle out the answers to questions that reflect just how in over your heads you all are: How much does the stalking have to escalate for it to become reportable? Why is she calling it selfish if I want to close the relationship while I grieve my dad’s death? They texted saying the polycule is breaking up with me because I didn’t share my Costco card with them, and now I have no housing.
That’s a long ways off, though. Now, in this locker room in 2004, you are feeling no shame about your desires. You’re not even experiencing them, because you’re really not sure what they are. Sex is something that you do for and with your boyfriend (he’s one of the nice ones, rarely asks for it, always acts surprised in a charmingly jocular manner whenever you initiate in the way you know he likes, based not on his words but on his fluttery expressions), and you don’t quite understand that even for him, a fellow AP student and Neutral Milk Hotel fan and genuinely good guy, you are an instrument. For him, of course, but also for yourself—you are self-instrumentalizing all the time, you are performing, you’ve seen the script millions of times before and unwittingly memorized your costume and lines. You want to be able to nail any audition, to walk into any room and strike everyone in it as the ideal picture of femininity, a perfect form that bears no reflection of its troubled content. You hope against hope that you will get cast, but the part always seems to be going to someone else—someone hotter and more unaffected.
You don’t realize two things: First, that the role is never successfully cast, that even Taylor Swift is told she is too fat and Halle Berry is sexually assaulted. Second, that sexually speaking, you are a eunuch: as it is your lot to always and forever be the wanted, the helpmeet, you lack the vocabulary to describe what you want, as well as the episteme about whether you even have wants. And when you’re finally able to identify some of your desires years down the road, you must work to decouple them from their simulacra, which you’ve been exposed to ad nauseam in books and film and porn: the nubile femmes who encounter one another at sleepovers and in locker rooms in various states of dishabille, who grope and kiss one another for the benefit of the men who look on tumescently.
What is it you want? Do you know? Will you ever know, or will you just think you do as you keep donning your Fruit of the Loom t-shirts and gamely sacrificing yourself to make room for the desires of others?
●
In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson writes of By Hook or by Crook, the 2001 butch lesbian buddy comedy her husband Harry Dodge starred in with his best friend and co-writer Silas Howard:
Would everything have been “right as rain” if the whole of late-nineties LA had gendered petty criminals and lost bois Shy and Valentine correctly, as we may be inclined to believe today? Or would it indeed have been a “different kind of he”—the gender equivalent of that paradox that so befuddled me in Intro to Philosophy my freshman year of college: What if you look at that flower and agree with me that it is yellow, but in fact only I am seeing yellow, and you are seeing what I’d call red?
If anyone besides Wittgenstein knows that there can be no private language, it’s Maggie Nelson. Even a queer private language is impossible, though we are sometimes moved to wedge ourselves between signs and their referents, to compel their decoupling for reasons we imagine have to do with things that are essential to us, like safety and desire. And yet I think Maggie and Harry and Silas are right here: when Shy and Valentine say “he” of each other, it’s a different “he” than the passive “he” of, say, the guy in the hardware store where Shy is trying to shoplift. I think we cannot place both instances of “he” within the same semantic category, and I think, were even the clueless hardware store guy apprised of Shy’s situation, he’d be inclined to agree.
There is a “he” who is circumcised shortly after birth, who is exposed as a young boy to stereotypes about whether and how much he should emote, who is encouraged at levels both social and neurobiological to live yoked to his desires, who has “failed” catastrophically if he is not a married property owner by his early thirties. And then there is another “he” who began as a tomboyish she, whose fuckability (and thereby worth as a human being) was frequently in question, whose desires didn’t align with those that men had for and about her, who felt ill at ease in a body that seemed to her almost designed to be rendered an object. The testosterone of the first “he” is glandular and endogenous; for the second “he,” it’s drawn from a little brown bottle with a syringe and injected with a needle.
It’s worth noting that the second “he” has always felt himself to be post-feminine. Here I’ll define as feminine the set of rhythms, norms and cultural expectations arising either directly or indirectly from the possession of a biology broadly and historically agreed upon to be female. Menstruation is one example of this, as is childbirth. Being penetrated is another, which is supposed to connote submissiveness, accommodation and the ability to be possessed. The female biology’s replication of nature’s rhythms is often linked with “women’s intuition,” a kind of a priori knowing about the natural world that ends up reinforcing the idea of women as “elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots,” as Ursula K. Le Guin once noted.
And of course another norm of the feminine is scrutiny, which is a form of possession: the relentless scrutiny of one’s ass and breasts, the endless considerations over whether one has lost or gained weight, the debates over one’s fuckability often followed in short order by attempts to fuck, both consensual and not. If it is feminine to be seen and known in these ways—especially against one’s will—then being stealth ensures one’s status as post-feminine. Sure, maybe it’s Shy’s burden to have been saddled with the feminine at birth, but if he plays his cards right, he can perform a kind of disappearing act: instead of alighting on him and scrutinizing his body and perhaps even making a rude comment along the lines of You just need the dyke fucked out of you, honey, the hardware store guy’s eyes can instead just pass over Shy, register him as nothing more than a small and squeaky-voiced man, a little oddity mercifully beneath consideration. This is perhaps why the semantic collapse feels so important to us, or at least why it felt so important to me. No, trans men must also be men, because if you claim we’re not, then you’re sending me right back to the hell I came from.
“We should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women,” said Judith Butler in 2021, just over thirty years after Gender Trouble’s 1990 publication. “And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of ‘men.’” By now, Butler’s ideas have achieved such cultural prominence that undergraduates who would likely side-eye me if I assigned so much as five pages of Gender Trouble’s impassable prose now write gender is a performance, and I am always performing in their Discord bios, while Ph.D. students retweet photos of Butler’s effigy burned in São Paulo: How do you say “TERFs are embarrassing” in Portuguese??? Though Butler is the widely acknowledged superstar, it’s happened to Lauren Berlant, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Lee Edelman and more than a few others: you publish a book of queer theory with an academic press to get tenure in an English department in 1999, and fifteen years later Laverne Cox quotes a more-than-slightly askew version of its thesis back at you in an episode of Orange Is the New Black. Or in Butler’s case, young adults quote sugar-high misconstruals of their work to each other on TikTok and Tumblr and Art Fight, exchanging theories of gender and embodiment as readily as they do sketches of their favorite anime characters. If you feel like a boy, then you are one. Gender roles are forced on us by the patriarchy. Being born in the wrong body doesn’t make you any less right.
Defending the metaphysical legitimacy of my manhood felt for a long time like a pleasingly liberal act. After years of accommodating what others wanted of me, here I was at last staking my claims to privacy and self-determination.11. Notably, the word homosexuality has its origins in a liberal claim to privacy. Observing the immiseration and self-harm befalling his friends due to Prussia’s anti-sodomy laws, Hungarian writer and translator Karl Maria Kertbeny published two anonymous pamphlets in 1869 arguing that “the state does not have the right to intervene in what is happening between two consenting people aged over 14.” Kertbeny coined the term homosexual to replace the popular terms sodomite and pederast, as well as heterosexual (or normalsexual) as its obverse. No, you can’t ogle me, and I will ensure that you don’t by joining this category I’ve always wanted to join anyway. As soon as my inclinations became legible to me—not as giant, unmanageable onslaughts of feeling, but as scary-to-think-about preferences that eventually bloomed into full-blown matters of taste—I wanted to safeguard them, to keep the private out of the public and my bedroom for myself and my lovers alone. But of course there’s the dilemma of the feminine, how even in a bomber jacket and unstylish sunglasses and boxy jeans you are still consigned to being a symbol of sex (not to be confused with a sex symbol). And then of course there’s the politicization of the bedroom: Hadn’t I been “born this way”? Didn’t I want the right to marry? Where was my lesbian flag? An impossible catch-22 of 21st-century liberalism: in order to win the right to exercise my preferences in my private life, I was enjoined to speak about and publicly identify with them.
“I’m sick of the world thinking I’m straight. I’ve worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian,” Jess Goldberg’s girlfriend jokes in Stone Butch Blues. Like many moments in Leslie Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical masterpiece, it’s a bittersweet exchange between women who love women, carried out behind closed doors and away from the sexual panopticon of patriarchy. Bittersweet because the joke names how desires can be socially circumscribed: Jess’s girlfriend, a femme whose physicality doesn’t run afoul of the feminine phenotype (or archetype), feels she is “passing too, against [her] will” and thus losing an important aspect of her identity whenever Jess looks mannish on testosterone. Jess, a butch who has been informed that her very existence runs afoul of all things feminine, really just wants to hide from the particular flavor of masculine bullying she’s subjected to whenever she goes out in public. Whereas her girlfriend is frustrated by the illegibility of her desires, Jess feels helplessly legible: a walking target. She is relieved when she gets a double mastectomy and begins growing a beard.
Like Butler, I too was once joyous to see what I and others like me would do with the category of “men.” But on the other side of passing as a man, it became clear to me that Maggie, Harry and Silas couldn’t be more right: the “he” that I’d become was created differently than the other “he’s” around me. My man-identity had been forged through a highly principled commitment to self-determination, but it was attenuated by material and biographical realities that resisted being reduced to simply politics or performance. I’d gone to all this trouble to change and perform only to realize that there is a ghost in the machine still doing the performing, a being forged by the interplay of biography and biology, by the tireless negotiation of its desires with others’. Call it a “self,” but don’t call it an “authentic self,” as there would be no way for it—for her—to escape co-construction with the world around her. Had fleeing this relationship with the world, this girl-contract I never would have signed if given the chance, not been another form of negotiation? And now that the negotiation was complete, it seemed quite impossible for me to expand upon a category in which I didn’t seem to belong without what would amount to a callous revisionist history of my own life. Gender changes depending on who performs it; there is no cure.
After all, was it not true that I—that she—had desired to become a he? That hers was a desiring self coterminous with his—with my—“authentic” one?
●
When I announced my intention to transition, I was surprised by how little resistance it inspired. My parents were bewildered, a few family members were tepidly skeptical, and a friend I’d known since junior high peppered me with questions about whether I doubted my desirability as a woman and if I knew what a drastic move I was making. Otherwise, I was celebrated. Acquaintances and well-wishers were as in support of my bodily autonomy as they felt any lover of personal freedom ought to be. Those who knew me well had the advantage of an extra layer of exposure: if ever there was anyone who was not a man but wanted to be one, who appeared to be at odds with her gender in every possible capacity, it was Rebekah Frumkin.
Not to mention, come on: Who wouldn’t want to be a man? It seemed like the better deal all around, and I’d dreamed of it since childhood. I was bored by girls’ ancillary roles in my middle-grade adventure novels, was a staunch refusenik when it came to the tedious labors of hair and makeup, a fan of putting Ken’s suit on my Barbie and Barbie’s ballet outfit on my Ken (sadly, Ken was too broad-shouldered for the Velcro leotard to fasten in back). For years I wrote stories from the male perspective, shopped in the men’s section at Target, wanted to date women. And now, through the increasingly popular acceptance of sex-change procedures developed by endocrinologists and sexologists in prewar Germany, the disjunction between what was expected of me and who I was could at last be resolved. No more of the tiresome psychic operation of femaleness: I could, as a close trans woman friend of mine once told me, “just be a boy.”
It seemed as if changing gender would be a kind of social and spiritual silver bullet, the long-sought relief to my anxiety and intermittent suicidality, a safe harbor whose permanence, instead of being intimidating, felt reassuring. It was in this spirit that I took my first shot of testosterone on November 20, 2021, my future wife injecting it carefully into the muscle of my thigh. My voice would drop dramatically what felt like mere weeks later, and then a beard would start to grow in: facts about which, my wife told me later, she privately grieved but said nothing about, not wanting to hinder my journey.
But I had not done my homework about being a man. And it was not for lack of interest: it was quite simply homework I could not have possibly done, having never had access to the kinds of spaces and conversations I now did. Granted, I experienced the social relief I’d been so desperate for: I was taken seriously in ways I had never been before; though munchkin-voiced, I still wasn’t spoken over; I was deferred to again and again in matters I both knew about and didn’t, elevated above Le Guin’s “dark roots” and the dehumanizing scrutiny of the male gaze. But having only observed men, lived vicariously through male protagonists and looked on enviously as boyfriends ate whatever they wanted and walked around with an unselfconscious swagger, I had no concept of what it was like to be a man, had no idea what I was getting myself into.
What I learned from my adjunct appointment in the land of masculinity is that men desire intensely, and suffer as a result of their desires. The first half of that claim is a neurobiological fact, one I had difficulty believing at first despite its presence in the growing subgenre of transmasculine memoir: There’s no way testosterone actually causes the stereotypes about men, right? Then I took testosterone and my sex drive suddenly became unmanageable, less like an increase in volume on a car stereo than a rapidly overflowing inbox whose hundreds of emails each demanded a detailed response. Tears became less accessible than anger: I who once cried at the drop of a pin was constantly doing a stony-faced impersonation of Middle-Aged Patriarch Quietly Torn Apart By His Own Rage.
The conversations men have with each other when they believe no women are within earshot reflect precisely both the stranglehold testosterone can have on one’s system and the many social accommodations made for men to hate the world and themselves, but not to love either of those things. There was plenty of the fare I was expecting: jarringly crude sex talk, nihilistic misogyny, braggadocio and desperate one-upmanship. But there were also two themes that showed up in greater measure than anything else, which queer and feminist discourses don’t often take into consideration: self-loathing and shame.
These themes seemed to dominate nearly every “man-to-man” conversation I had, though self-loathing was more often the watchword. The more stereotypically masculine the man, the more potently he seemed to hate himself, the more readily he enumerated his many failures (social, sexual, financial) with the frothy bite of shame-fueled rage—or perhaps it was rage-fueled shame? If I showed up in a cheerful mood, relieved to finally have access to male friendship without the tedious will-they-won’t-they that had haunted so many of my previous incarnation’s friendships, it seemed to strike these men as strange that I should be both male and happy. How was it that ultimate happiness—the peaceable satisfaction of my nagging physical desires, the social “success” of making something of myself in the world—was not always just out of reach for me? What made me so special? Was I a gender traitor? They began to regard me with suspicion, and I never told them my secret: that I was acquainted with this feeling of Sisyphean futility but in the realm of beauty, that I had always been just fifteen or twenty pounds and a face of well-applied makeup away from being perfectly fuckable, that thoughts about this had so consumed me that I was frightened to name them as potential motivators for my transition for fear they’d recolonize my mind.
Back in 2018, before she won the Pulitzer Prize for her acerbic literary criticism, Andrea Long Chu made a splashy debut onto the queer theory scene with an essay in n+1 called “On Liking Women.” The essay comprises both an exegesis of Valerie Solanas’s uproarious SCUM Manifesto and an aesthetics of desire-based transsexualism. “Life under male supremacy isn’t oppressive, exploitative, or unjust: it’s just fucking boring,” Chu wrote, appealing both to the part of me tired of being reduced to my victimhood under patriarchy and the part of me that wanted to become a man. Writing of Solanas’s Juvenalian suggestion that men be “transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women” by means of “operations on the brain and nervous system,” Chu says:
And here I’d thought being a woman was the stupid and boring thing to be. How could I have been so wrong? But now I’d begun to see it all around me, not just in conversation but in the shame-filled virtual manosphere, that hotbed of chauvinist radicalization: the alarming dearth of real connection and vulnerability, the negging and maxxing and loathed alphas and hapless betas, the seething incels and tragic cucks, the suppressed emotions and contempt for the feminine and the omnipresent threat of violence. No wonder Chu had been driven to self-loathing distraction by her simultaneous desires to be with women and to become a woman, had spent a torturous undergraduate semester furiously masturbating and decoupaging a broken upright piano with feminist texts. (One wonders what a girl has to do to get some good gender around here?) Indeed, I’d been so wrapped up in my own anxious self-excoriations that I hadn’t noticed that it was just as stupid and boring to live on Mars as on Venus.
●
In a 1988 essay in Theatre Journal, Butler argued that gender—a sociological term intended to describe the division of those biologically sexed male and female into the respective cultural categories of “masculine” and “feminine”—is not “a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” Butler would go on to dub this “corporeal style” and explore it in Gender Trouble as a means of social survival: we are all sexed agents “doing” our genders, and enjoined to do them correctly, again and again, for fear of reprisal from any number of cultural authorities. Indeed, it’s this series of bodily acts—gestures, speech, behavior, dress—that either grants us social acceptability or singles us out as subversive flies in the ointment.
And let me say that I took no pleasure in being a fly in the ointment, especially not on the occasions when I couldn’t help it. As gawky teenagers, we’re assured by pitying adults that we’ll “grow into” ourselves, that our bodies with their acne and knobby knees and overbites will resolve with the magic of time into things desiring and desirable. These are your awkward years, the adults say, you’ll outgrow them. But there is no outgrowing the disciplinary power of masculine and feminine archetypes. Once your face clears up and the orthodontist removes your braces, isn’t there still weight to lose, muscle to build, heterosexual vitality to prove? The performance, as Butler suggests, must be kept up throughout one’s life, repeated in new costumes as the performer ages.
I wonder often whether I decided to live as a man less as an act of self-assertion than of dissimulation, like Jess Goldberg first choosing to take testosterone in Stone Butch Blues. But if I took to my new corporeal style with an eager student’s enthusiasm, I was ultimately to realize that there is a limit to the self-understanding that can be derived from artificing. I was happy inasmuch as I got to hide from the strictures of my birth sex’s programming, but unlike Chu, who in “On Liking Women” freely admits to a desire for the “trappings of patriarchal femininity,” I wasn’t interested in submitting to the social disciplines of another sex, in discovering yet more opportunities for personal—that is to say, corporeal—failure.
In a now-infamous op-ed for the New York Times, published several months after “On Liking Women,” Chu writes of the various disappointments of HRT:
She says that she was not suicidal before HRT, though now she often is. She holds fast to misery—especially misery resulting from her self-determination—as a human right “as universal as healthcare, or food,” arguing further that “transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it. Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.”
Chu is right: we often do want things that are bad for us, especially living as we do in a society as prone to distortions of the truth as our own. Her op-ed was published in 2018, so perhaps things have improved for her since then. Or perhaps they haven’t, but either way, I think critics who have accused her in years since of being a self-hating woman should give her a break. I, too, have been both a man and a woman, and I can’t say I’d leave particularly generous Yelp reviews for either experience. (I suspect I’d find just as little satisfaction in a neo-penis as Chu claims to in her neo-vagina: having a flap of skin surgically removed from my forearm or thigh and grafted to the most sensitive part of my body via a risky procedure with high potential for a deleterious outcome would no more make me personally happy than would a Maserati its recently divorced, middle-aged driver.)
I also agree with Chu that we have the right to want and choose things that are bad for us. But I take my leave of her there. Did a certain English teacher at my high school, a smarmy groomer with a Jim Halpert haircut who seemed to thrive on teenaged girls’ adoring laughter, have the right to simmer with rage at the handful of us who didn’t find his sitcom shtick cute? Did certain tenured male academics I’ve known have the right to enact what amounted to elaborate immiseration plans against colleagues they decided they didn’t like? Did I have the right to the bitter bouts of shame and anxiety that made me so contemptuous of the life I was living and the body I was living it in that I sought to escape—into substance abuse, into careerist overwork and jealous competition, into a vastly uninformed approximation of masculinity—with varying degrees of success? The answer is yes, of course. It’s only human to want things that are bad for us, things that are good for us and, perhaps most frequently, things that are a combination of the two. But I submit that we have another imperative as autonomous thinking subjects invested in our own mental and physical well-being, and that’s to know why we want these things. Given all the places we’ve been and people we’ve met—all those many inputs that have stuck to the thinking and feeling flypaper of our desiring selves—it would be an act of defeatism to throw up our hands when it comes to trying to understand the relationship between our desires and our happiness.
I’ve always disliked the phrase “it’s more than just a phase.” Popularized by the “born this way” campaign for marriage equality, I understand its political utility, but I object to its determinism, and its dim view of phases. The moon has its phases and I consider it no less captivating; the seasons are phases, and witnessing their change is one of my favorite things about being alive on earth. The adventure of my life has its lunar phases, its book chapters, and I am quite comforted by their impermanence. It’s not that I don’t believe I have the right to misery—it’s that I don’t want misery, and that I’ve found it often accompanies rigid thinking, the kind of commitment to a bit at all costs that leads more readily to suffering than to satisfaction. Self-knowledge is like authorship; it is only you who can answer to the origins of your wants. Yes, it may require some wandering among the dark roots, some candor and surprise, but it’s a worthwhile project. That teenaged locker room girl-eunuch didn’t even know about the existence of those roots in 2004—but twenty years later she knows more, having explored them enough to find the things that make her genuinely happy.
It’s seen as politically expedient to take a phrase like “trans men are men” as tautological, but I see it as a contradiction in terms disadvantageous on levels both semantic and political. Another term for the desiring self might be “narrative self.” As in a subject with a story as opposed to a story with a subject. We gender defectors may alter our speech or behavior or hormone levels in whatever way contents us, but I believe we suffer a great loss in sloughing off our stories. From the Latin, the prefix trans means “beyond,” “across” or “on the other side,” so why say that I’ve gone “beyond” or “across” something to become a man, only to assert that it makes me just like any other man?
Furthermore, what have I gone beyond? My shame. My pain. My story—a human story shaped by the lifelong negotiation of what I want with what the world wants from me. But the story is the one thing that cannot be transcended, nor can it be erased.
Abandoning what felt like the failing enterprise of Rebekah’s life for the brighter shores of Rafael’s seemed to me an incredible, almost magical thing to do. And it was with a nearly incandescent joy that I inhabited Rafael’s life until I realized that one can never make a completely clean break. Even as I felt myself coming alive via cross-sex materiality, I retained my desiring self, and with it the story of my life. I was still the petulant girl scowling at my AP Lit teacher, still the gender-nonconforming lesbian who’d been harassed by senior male scholars. Still running from something toward something else. Meanwhile I’ve found not only what I was running from (shame, perceived gender failure, scrutiny) and what I was running toward (the idealized ease of manhood, fantasies of freedom and autonomy I’d cultivated since childhood, the chance not just to have a wife but to look like someone who has a wife), but also a belief in the post-feminine: the idea that I could be born with a female biology and yet still transcend its rhythms and mores, and that another transsexual could be born without said biology and yet still assume its rhythms and mores in every capacity that she could. I a defector, an ovulating “he” formed by testosterone. She a newly naturalized citizen, a stubbled “she” formed by estrogen.
There are trans people who shred old photos of themselves, who refer to their birth name as a deadname and would hear no mention of it pass anyone’s lips. I understand this process, and certainly blame no one for feeling they must go through with it. I am merely speaking for myself when I say that I could not bifurcate into discrete selves, could brook no amnesia about the life of Rebekah and why she wanted to take up the mantle of Rafael. In fact, I found myself stifled by the polite expectation that I’d have to go along with my doctors and friends and coworkers in “affirming” my manhood, taking the hormones and having the surgeries but then pretending that I’d been a man-born-man all along, tacitly cosigning the erasure of my female past.
Isn’t the self continuous? Aren’t our lives big, unbroken narratives? Isn’t the great beauty of self-determination precisely that it is not deterministic, that we can begin at some square one and then make an informed decision about where we’d like to go next? Shouldn’t this freedom of choice be the very thing that we gender defectors enshrine and celebrate and subject to criticism—personal, political and otherwise? Abdicating from my birth sex is a decision that, like the one made by the woman seeking an abortion or the Grindr guy seeking a hookup, is both motivated by desire (mine for myself, others’ for me) and grounded in bodily autonomy. I have no problem owning up to the fact that the personal is political, but I’m nevertheless troubled by the idea that holding such a view also imputes to one the belief that the personal or private self—the self whose story is known best, if not exclusively, by me—should be subordinate to the strictly “political” or public one.
To be frank, I’ve grown just as weary maintaining the categorical manhood of Rafael as I did the womanhood of Rebekah. The volume of my life contains not a single kind of speech act but a catalog of them, not one instance of drag but a whole wardrobe’s worth; and let’s not forget that my life’s volume is still being written. Which means I’m still becoming, traversing the vast landscape of my desires, my dress and speech and ideas adapting to its ever-shifting topography. I was a girl once, and then a woman, and then a trans man, and now I am what I’ll call a testoform butch lesbian, my gender-nonconforming feminine body halfway engineered into post-femininity. I’m performing—we all are—but that can’t obscure the fact that I’m still a single performer with a past comprised of many different performances. Let’s not confuse the magnificent stage and the elaborate costumes and set and soliloquies with the single story of the actor who takes a bow and then walks backstage to the audience’s applause, who sits in the quiet of her dressing room regarding her mask.
Art credit: Mark Yang, Outing, 2023. Oil and graphite on canvas, 18 × 30 in. Photo by Jason Mandella. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires (VSF).
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.