[Commentary] [USA] Trans, but not like you think

[Stephanie Stevens]

Salon, USA


Monday, Aug 6, 2012 08:00 PM EDT

Trans, but not like you think

As gender transitions become more visible, it's tempting to think all
our stories are the same. They're not

By Thomas Page McBee


Just last week I got a birth certificate from North Carolina Vital
Records that put a state seal on a tale that began before I could
talk. “Thomas Page McBee,” it says, under “Certificate of Live Birth,”
and then, there’s the word I spent thousands of dollars, a major
surgery, two trips to probate court, two physicals, a doctor’s letter,
plus the 80 oily milligrams of testosterone self-shot into my thigh
every week to achieve: male.

When I tore open the envelope it took my breath away, much like seeing
my reflection every morning — the growing pronouncement of my jaw, the
square sideburns, the scruff on my cheek, the pecs and biceps
ballooning steadily with each workout — I tear up sometimes, I’m so
floored by the rightness of it all. I held my birth certificate, my
heart galloping, and I felt born again at the age of 31.

Maybe you think you’ve heard my story before: I knew I wasn’t a girl
before I knew much of anything. There were the years of private,
simmering mirror-hate; the jealous glances at men, the coveting of
facial hair and biceps. As trans people become more visible, our
stories have narrowed into a neat narrative arc: born in the wrong
body, pushed to the brink of suicide/sanity/society, the agonized
decision to begin hormone treatment/surgeries for the reward of ending
up ourselves and looking “normal,” which ends in a lesson about the
tenacity of the human spirit, the gorgeous triumph of believing in
yourself.

This is all true. But for me, and many others, it’s also more
complicated than that.

I don’t think I was born in the wrong body. I am not “finally myself.”
I’ve never spent a day being anyone else. Mine is another story, a
real and complex story, and one, by definition, that’s not as easy to
tell.

---

I’ve been thinking about Lana Wachowski since she released a video
clip <http://www.salon.com/2012/07/31/lana_wachowskis_quiet_coming_out_party/>
promoting her new film, “Cloud Atlas,” last week. In an age when Chaz
Bono yuks it up with David Letterman and the frontman for rock band
Against Me! created a frenzy when she came out earlier this year as
Laura Jane Grace Gabel, Wachowski surely knew that the video clip
would garner attention, requests to be interviewed, before-and-after
photos, fans’ gushes of loyalty or turncoat transphobia. Even for
those lucky trans folks not facing a daily threat of violence, this is
a strange time: one where we find our portrayals hovering between
soft-focus empathy and tawdry headlines.

Despite reportedly being several years into her transition, which has
been discussed in print and gossiped about openly since the
early-2000s, the famously tight-lipped Wachowski has never addressed
her gender identity publicly, even when “raising eyebrows” at
red-carpet events in pearl earrings and dresses.

So here she is, in this promotional behind-the-scenes video, meant to
address the making of her new film. “Hi, I’m Lana,” she says simply,
seated beside her directing partner and brother. It’s a
blink-and-you-miss-it moment, a wide smile and that’s it. No baby
picture montage, no recounting suicide attempts, no bloody footage of
surgery.

Hers is not that kind of story. She goes on to get down to the
business at hand. When she describes the new film, her pink dreads
shake like flags in the wind.

“I’m Lana,” she says.

I hope that’s the sound of a tide turning.

---

Don’t get me wrong. Some trans people feel that they’ve suffered a
birth defect, tantamount to a missing limb. For some folks, “trapped
in the wrong body” is a precise description. I don’t fault anyone
their language or their vision of themselves. I don’t tell anyone
else’s story.

But I do think that the typical trans narrative — the one you see on
talk shows or in long human-interest stories in popular magazines — is
dumbed down for your consumption because it’s presumed that people who
aren’t trans don’t think about their gender identity. Even more
darkly, there’s an unspoken assumption: that trans people are strange,
untranslatable. There’s something so fundamentally confusing about the
trans experience, the logic goes, that we need to make our stories
really, really palatable for you to understand us.

But I’ve found the opposite to be true. I write a column for the
Rumpus exploring themes related to my transition, and the people who
email me or the friends who start conversation over drinks about their
own genders are almost always not trans. We talk about the ways
expectations of masculinity and femininity inform and stifle us, or
how we’ve all grown from teenage bravado informed by those concepts
into unique adults, unafraid to be who we are.

Because of that sense of dialogue (inevitable Internet trolls and
ignorant menace aside), I’ve come to believe that non-trans folks are
not only capable of metabolizing more than the schlocky softball
celebrity interviews and stark mirror-in-a-mirror documentary shots,
but are hungry for real conversation. Gender is part of everyone’s
life, we’re all negotiating the line between what we’re expected to be
and who we are.

In that spirit, then, I’ll tell you the whole story.

---

I believe I was born in the right body; transgender, yes, but there’s
nothing “wrong” with me.

For 10 years I was a boyish, short-haired kid, as equally interested
in skateboards as poetry. As a teenager, I cultivated a guy-but-better
gallantry that won me girlfriends and a few manageable bullies. There
were signs that the center wouldn’t hold: the way I felt caught
off-guard if my reflection materialized in a window, my insistence on
getting a hot shave at the barber, the ace bandage flattening my
chest.

Like a lot of people, I understood even at a young age that gender was
a spectrum, with “hyper-masculine” and “hyper-feminine” on the extreme
poles, and a million shades of potential expression between them. I
knew I was masculine, but saw myself as artistic, rebellious,
indifferent to alpha posturing. I loved the ruggedness of James Dean
and the romanticism of the Beats. For the most part, I felt OK about
myself. Anyway, in my baseball hat and jeans, I looked like all the
skinny boys I was friends with.

I knew I wasn’t a woman, not like my girlfriends or sister or mother.
Not like my friends, even the tomboy punk-rock straight girls or the
swaggering butch lesbians. But I looked at most of the men in my midst
and didn’t see myself in their jockeying power dynamics or aversion to
hugs. Even later, as I befriended guys just as baffled by masculinity
as I was, I didn’t connect my growing discomfort in my body to the
reality of their physical differences. I didn’t feel like a man
exactly, and I figured, once I knew trans men in college, that
hormones weren’t for me. It was easier to imagine dressing like the
fantasy guy I saw in countless mirrors than it was to imagine an
actual life of men’s rooms and shoulder claps.

It was my breasts that troubled me the most: they were lost pilgrims,
afloat on my frustrated body. My attempts to hide them grew more
elaborate by the day, and my frustration with their shape made getting
dressed an angry hurricane of discarded, too-tight T-shirts.

By the time I’d moved to Oakland in my early 20s, I’d decided I would
have chest-reconstruction surgery as soon as I could save up enough
money to do so. Maybe, I figured, that would fix the growing reality
that I no longer “passed” as a teenage boy, that every “ma’am” thrown
my way tarnished my sparkle. So, one foggy June morning in 2008, a
surgeon sculpted pecs where there once were breasts. I lost, in the
process, five pounds of flesh; I awoke feeling a much heavier burden
lifted.

But something was wrong. I thought maybe I could find peace by lifting
weights, jumping rope to keep trim and hide my hips, wearing V-necks
that showed off my flat chest. I went swimming shirtless in the
Caribbean, trying to occupy some unicorn space. I tried, with growing
desperation, to both love my body and be myself. I even wrote about it
for Salon: I’m not a man or a woman
<http://www.salon.com/2011/03/14/neither_man_nor_woman> , I said.

But pronouns made me bristle, and I didn’t understand yet that I could
look like a man and be whomever I wanted on that grand spectrum. I
didn’t think that, just like you, I have a gender identity that’s
growing and evolving, that I’m tasked with finding my authentic place
in a jumble of stereotypes and expectations. What makes a man? I
thought, looking at myself.

It was my body that showed me. They call it dysphoria, but it feels to
me like watching yourself become a stranger. Maybe you’ve known you’re
making a mistake: a bad marriage, the wrong career path, something
that becomes clearer and more potent daily. My reflection seemed to be
going in the wrong direction: rounding where it shouldn’t have been,
thinning where it should have thickened.

Every trans person has a breaking point, and mine came two years after
top surgery, when I expected to see myself and found a woman standing
before me, instead. As much as I didn’t connect with the cultural
expectations of Being a Man, I knew that I’d grown up and become one.
I was going to have to figure out how to bridge the gap.

I’d done so many sit-ups and spent so much time in quiet reflection,
tailoring shirts to fit my bird chest that I knew, in that
last-puzzle-piece way of an epiphany, that loving myself meant
allowing my body to change. I had a primal sense of home, and I knew
exactly what it looked like. My body needed me.

A few months later, I began injecting testosterone.

---

Here we are, over a year later. I love the way my face has blended
into something familiar, how I’ve met the guy I saw every time I
squinted at the mirror. I am indeed the male-bodied version of myself,
the same romantic, tattooed guy. I wish I could explain to the
23-year-old looking in the mirror that I needn’t have worried: my body
knew. My gender hasn’t changed since I was a teenager.

I’m very much my own man.

I don’t know how Lana Wachowski feels, but I hope that the relative
quiet of both her “introduction” and the reaction to it signal a
growing awareness that we’re entitled to our stories, however we want
to tell them. Maybe we don’t need to hand out sugar pills anymore.

“I’m Lana,” she said, and smiled. It was an act of faith to leave it
there, in two words and a shake of that hair. Consider the story told.

Close

Thomas Page McBee pens a guest column on the Rumpus, Self-Made Man,
and his nonfiction has been featured recently in the New York Times,
among others. To learn more about his memoir-in-progress and to reach
him directly, visit thomaspagemcbee.com.


Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2012/08/07/trans_but_not_like_you_think/