MEN’S RITES

DECIDING TO GO THROUGH A GENDER TRANSITION ISN’T EASY FOR ANYONE. BUT THE HARDEST PERSON FOR JOURNALIST DANIEL MALLORY ORTBERG TO CONVINCE WAS HIMSELF

before I began to transition, I tried my very best not to transition, for the following reasons:

• It might be well and good for other people, but I was uniquely unqualified.

• I could not trust either my knowledge of myself or my own desires.

• I could not trust my own happiness, such that if transition were to produce a new kind of peace or serenity within me, it would merely be further evidence of my capacity for self-deception, just another set-up before an increasingly long fall.

• I was too old, had in fact been too old since the age of 12.

• I was used to being a woman, and I liked women and couldn’t imagine my transition as anything other than an act of – at the very least – impoliteness towards women.

• I would lose my family.

• Cis men would be indifferent and cruel to me if I did.

• I would lose my sense of self and my place in the world.

• Transition wouldn’t work on me anyway.

I had worked out a sort of tortured mathematical equation in favour of never making a decision or sharing my feelings with anyone – I was just susceptible enough to the rhetoric of transition to make my continued existence as a cis woman unbearable, but insufficiently trans to guarantee that actual transition would bring with it any relief, which meant that my only option was to suffer in silence. The more I longed to transition, the stronger the evidence that I should not do it; the very fact that I desired it to the exclusion of all other desires meant that I was being stubborn and irrational and in need of restraint. I knew I could not trust my own feelings, because I have not always been aware of a desire to transition, so I could not allow myself to make a decision now on the basis of any feeling, however strong. I also had the sense that there was something distinctly impolite about it, like agreeing to go out for pizza with

a group of friends and, just as we were being led to our table, announcing, “I think I’d rather have birthday cake for dinner. Does anyone mind if we leave now and go bake a cake somewhere?” And my friends might agree out of politeness and affection, but their hearts wouldn’t really be in it, and I would in fact have trespassed on their good natures by asking, making such an outrageous, selfish request.

To which the obvious response, of course, is that the body is not a pizza, except for when it is, and I was not wrong to fear that other people would take my body personally, as indeed some people always have. For so many years I was easily able to dismiss the question of whether I had any particular opinions or preferences when it came to my own body under the comfortable rubric that most women disliked their bodies, because of sexism and through no fault of their own, and that the best thing one could do in that situation, if self-acceptance seems overly ambitious, was to keep it to oneself since everyone else was suffering in the same way. At the age of 11 or 12 I had become dimly aware that something had stalled with my pubescence: I had been taken to a doctor, diagnosed with a common, treatable hormonal disorder called polycystic ovarian syndrome and placed on a regimen of feminising hormones I would take without questioning for the next 18 years. I had grown comfortable at the thought of my body as a public resource that I was responsible for holding in trust. I had been charged with its maintenance and general upkeep, and on the strength of such a relationship had been able to develop a certain vague fondness for it, while also maintaining a pleasant distance. Don’t ask me; I just work here, was my attitude. I can let the supervisors know when there’s a problem and they tell me how to fix it.

I don’t mean to suggest that either the doctors or my parents behaved thoughtlessly at the time. Had I voiced any objection to the treatment, I have every reason to believe I would have been listened to, but it had not yet occurred to me that I might object at all. In fact, if someone had asked me every day and every night of my life, “What are you?”, I would have said, “I’m a girl,” every time.

There were many ways to be a good woman, I knew, and having grown up in the 1990s meant I’d heard sufficient variations on the sentiment that women could do anything – I had not been so covetous of boys’ toys or men’s jeans that I grew confused and assumed that meant there was nothing for it but to start a regimen of masculinising hormones and change my name. Women could do anything they liked. We all lived in a world where transition was unthought of, so we did not think of it – I could no sooner blame them than myself. I disliked sexism, admired and liked women, had been given a girl’s name and found it very easy not to think about my body; surely this made me a girl, and certainly no-one had ever suggested this was anything less than sufficient. Other people occasionally liked my body (plenty objected to it, but again this seemed like proof for, rather than against, my womanhood), I liked it when others were pleased; to me this was the same as liking the thing itself.

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

The first practical question to be settled once the matter of transition became inevitable was exactly how much testosterone to take, and for how long. There is sometimes a tendency, at least among the trans men I have known, to treat testosterone therapy at the outset as if one were the first to order french fries at the table: tentative, looking to others for guidance and support, a half-frantic desire not to be the only one. If I have some, will you have some? I know YOU’LL have some – is it possible to get a half order? This is for the table, not just for me. What’s the smallest actual amount of testosterone that you can medically offer me? I’ll take that, but can you put half of

“I was able to dismiss the question of whether I had any particular opinions when it came to my body under the comfortable rubric that most women disliked their bodies”

it in a to-go box before you bring it out? I’m sharing with friends.

There is a number of excellent reasons why a person might want to do so, but for me it was only a hope to whittle down my transition to the absolute bare minimum. Whatever trans was, I was ready to accept it as part of myself, but I was not willing to pay more than the cover charge. Do you have trans on the menu? Is it possible to get a cup instead of a bowl? What’s the smallest amount of trans you have available? I’ll take that.

I wanted to transition; I had become convinced it was essential to my happiness and wellbeing. But at the same time I remained sure that it was simultaneously going to ruin my life. My most desperate desire was not that I would be assisted in my transition but that someone would either force or forbid me to do it, because I could not take responsibility for annihilating my own life. Having finally admitted to wanting something was bad enough; the least I felt I could do was want very little of it. None of which is to say that there is, or ought to be, a transition continuum running from “lots/most/maximal” to “least/less/minimal”, merely that I have only ever admitted what I hunger for under duress, when all of my other options have been exhausted and my escape routes cut off, and even then seek to downplay the nature of it in advance, the better to ward off disappointment. (And after all that, it turned out it was possible to get a half order of testosterone for the transitioner with the moderate appetite.)

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

“I wanted to transition... but at the same time I remained sure that it was simultaneously going to ruin my life”

What happened instead was the discovery of what I might call vocational clarity – not an unassailable certainty founded on decades of unwavering identification, nor yet a preternatural calm, but an ever-deepening, ever-widening sense of peace and purpose and delight.

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

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

Some of it, I think, is self-conscious cover; starting testosterone did not mean I immediately left the house looking like a full grown man in his thirties – I mostly just looked like myself, only hairier and slightly puffier in the cheeks. Generally, there was a mild social cost to be paid for going out in public looking that way. And some of it also comes from an urge to prove that I didn’t transition out of necessity but desire: being a woman is hard, but

I was good at it, I think is the underlying anxiety. Nobody fired me; I quit. I know I’m not trying to look pretty anymore, and I apologise to all those who have to look at me, because I used to try and I’m not enough of a man yet for it not to be a problem. I promise to work very hard to look like Victor Garber so you can look at a handsome man in three years’ time minimum. If my appearance was a common resource held in public trust, the least I could do was hang up a sign: Please pardon our dust during refurbishment. We’re working hard to update the site you’ve so often enjoyed.

But there’s also a slightly perverse pleasure to be taken in speaking so proudly about the past, and it’s a pleasure I’ve seen other trans people take for themselves, mentioning – possibly even exaggerating slightly, as our past selves are unlikely to walk through the door in contradiction – how good we used to look or whatever it was that people thought we were. It may be in part because we are so often accused of simply misunderstanding gender stereotypes that we can take pleasure in reminiscing about how well we have sometimes fit in. Kids, Daddy used to have the greatest rack in the area. I find this habit very endearing; transitioning often makes room for fondness where there was no room before. Pride without ownership, affection without desire, that’s what I’m trying to communicate when I say something like, “I used to have a great ass.” Maybe, too, an attempt to say I’m a rational actor. I can see things as they are; I can assign proportionate value to things; I’m making these decisions with a sound mind and an accurate

“There was a suspicion of my own peacefulness – yes, this brings me joy today, and yesterday, too, but tomorrow is certainly the day the legs are swept out from under me” This is an edited extract from Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s

Something That May Shock And Discredit You

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view of reality. It may be nothing more than an attempt to forestall that kindest and most painful of denials, But you used to be such a ____. But you had such a beautiful _____. I know, don’t remind me. She was lovely, and she had such nice hair.

One of the things women do well as a group – I speak broadly here but not definitively, many women don’t, and plenty of women do it well sometimes and in some situations, and not at all well in others – is layer relationships one on top of the other, doubling back and reinforcing and looping multiple ties into one. In this way, transitioning can sometimes feel like pulling apart an entire web, inconveniencing – at the very least – a number of other women who had relied on your position in order to maintain theirs. This may be a very selfcentred way to regard one’s transition; I’m sure many people who transition don’t feel this way at all. Nor do I mean to suggest I’ve toppled any woman out of her own life by taking testosterone or changing my name. But I’ve spent more of my time than I ought to preparing for an exit interview with womanhood that will never happen. No-one is calling me to account or asking why, after 30 years in the position, I was moving into a different role in the company.

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

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