Sadly, the voice said, this vision of harmony ended (sudden silence) when people discovered that the universe was vastly greater than the solar system, with the earth a speck at the edge of a mundane galaxy. Now the image shifted to swirls of color, red and green, but also blue, yellow, purple, all rushing away and replaced by new explosions of light.
Has the music ended, the voice asked, and answered itself no. A different kind of music has emerged, more subtle and far stranger. A deep hum sounded—the background radiation of the Big Bang, the voice explained. Higher electronic notes followed, a supposed version of the radio waves given off by stars and far away galaxies, followed by staccato sounds that represented pulsars. The universe sings to us all the time, the voice proclaimed. We are not equipped to hear it but we know it is there.
No, Kara thought. We can hear it. We have to open ourselves, not just our ears but our whole bodies. We have to become something … no longer human? No longer Red or Green, or any fixed color at all. But the singing, the voices, the invitation, is always there. It never stops, ever.
She was shaking now. The teenage girl next to her edged away, whispered to her friend who looked over at Kara and giggled. Kara didn’t care. She knew at last what she’d heard that night at the Palace. It was the universe itself, singing to her. The people she saw were the ones who had gone through, and they all sang to her through the deep longing in the curve of space, the passionate love that spiraled through galaxies. And they didn’t just sing of the vast cosmos. Her own cells, the mighty civilizations of molecules and atoms that made up her body, the leptons and baryons and all the patterns between them, they were all held together by music, the song of songs of desire.
She had to leave. She stood up, ignored the grunts and whispers of the teenagers. With just the slightest shift she could pass right through their bodies. Like her, all they were was music.
She rushed out of the building, stood among the trees outside the museum. She closed her eyes and realized she didn’t know if the trees were red or green. She held her arms out slightly from her body, the hands opened, the fingers pointed at the ground. She realized now. She’d never stopped hearing it. She could hear it right now, she’d been hearing it for thirty-two years. She’d only pretended to herself that it ended when she ran down the stairs. It never ended, she heard it in her fingers, in the breath of everyone around her, in the leaves, the trash in the street, the dirt, the electrons that surged through the concrete.
And something more. She was still there. Still at the top of the staircase, still staring through the Beatrix Gates. She’d never left.
Oh, she knew very well that her body, middle-aged and green, stood upright on a street, outside a building of steel and concrete and glass. This was real, and the cars were real, and the pigeons (she could hear the clumsy flap of their wings), the shoppers and commuters, the automatic doors that hissed open and closed. It was all real. But so were the Gates at the top of the stairs. In every moment, whatever she did—drinking green coffee at her desk, talking on the phone to another helper from the Caravan, making precious Green love to Devra (did that too go on forever and ever?), crying outside her mother’s red door, half-asleep in her bathtub after a long workday, praying for death when she was nine years old—at every moment she also stood, shaking and frightened and newly Green, at the top of a spiral, before a woman who was old and young and colorless and every color at once, and beyond her the forever open Gates.
Could she will herself there? Right now? Vanish from the street and reappear at the doorway? Eyes still closed, she drew her body into herself, arms across her chest, feet together, chin down. She tried to let the music fill her, expand her, make her a pulse of sound. No. The songs were real, and the Gates, and Beatrix, serene and patient, but so were the buses and the museum building and the couple arguing down the street. She laughed and opened her eyes. All right then, she would do it the old-fashioned way.
She set off down the street towards the garage with her little green car in it, and with every step the universe surged alongside her. A block before the garage entrance she saw a Green boy, about seven, crouched down in a doorway. He was playing intensely with a two-inch-high action figure. “Captain Red,” it was called. Kara’d seen it once on TV. Every few seconds the boy’s eyes flicked up, then back to his toy. Heaven pulsed in his chest.
Kara bent down in front of him, watched him cringe and hide the toy in his pocket. She knew it was the most precious thing he’d ever owned. “It’s all right,” she told him. “You’re a good boy.” She wanted to say, “The sky loves you,” but he wouldn’t understand. Very carefully she said, “When I was your age, I was Red.”
He stared at the ridge over her eyes, the rich green of her face and hands. “Yes,” she said, “it’s true. You can change. It can happen.” Now she got out a pen and a scrap of paper from her purse and in green ink wrote down a phone number. “Hide this somewhere,” she said as she gave it to him. “And memorize the number in case you can’t keep it. When you’re ready call them and say that Kara the Travel Agent wants them to guide you. Do you understand?” He nodded. Kara said, “You need to say it.”
He whispered, “Yes.”
Kara smiled and gently kissed the top of his head. Galaxies swirled under his scalp. “We have been here forever,” she said.
Kara’s second journey to the Alchemist’s Palace took less than a quarter of the time for the first. She knew the way, and she had a car, and people to help her. She arrived on a chilly winter afternoon, with the faded old cloak—she’d saved it all these years—once more wrapped around her.
The tiger and the leopard were waiting outside the building before she arrived. She stood before them, arms up and welcoming. “I’m ready,” she said. But instead of mauling her, they just rubbed her legs like kittens, then urged her around the corner to a yellow door she’d never seen before. When she opened the door, there it was: the spiral staircase.
All along the journey she had imagined herself running up the stairs, lifted by the music and her own joy. Now she moved very slowly, each step deliberate, for she wanted the entire experience. She first saw Beatrix about halfway up. The spiral turned her towards and away and she would twist her head to try to keep the woman in sight, as if she might vanish, and the singing stop, the moment Kara lost sight of her.
When she reached the Gates they looked duller than she remembered. There were no flashes of light or sudden flares of color, no mysterious figures waiting for her, and she panicked that she might have made a mistake. It was the music that sustained her. It thrilled her, vibrated her veins and stretched her skin, so that she thought she might break apart at any moment.
Then she realized why the Gates seemed dull, or empty. She was staring at colors she’d never known existed. There were tones and brightnesses for which she had no words, and so her mind had tried not to see them. She closed her eyes, opened them, and waves of color swamped her. She could see people in them, and animals and landscapes, all of it shimmers of impossible color.
At the top she took Beatrix’s hands, so thin and translucent. “I’m sorry,” she said. “For staying away so long.”
“I was always with you,” Beatrix said.
“Are you coming now? Through the Gates?”
Beatrix shook her head, and for a moment the silver hair became all those colors beyond color. Then it was once more ancient silver, as Beatrix said, “You are not the last.”
Kara leaned forward and kissed Beatrix on the lips. Suddenly she discovered she was on the other side. The Gates are my own body, she thought. She was here, and Green, and Red, and every color possible and not possible, surrounded by lovers and worlds as strange and wondrous as Kara herself.
She was every color, and she was nothing, nothing at all. Nothing singing. Nothing filled with the music of everything.
Could she have gone to this place without all the struggle to change her color? If Green and Red were so limited, couldn’t she just have jumped p
ast them? No. She knew the answer immediately. She had to become who she really was before she could become nothing. The key that opened the Beatrix Gates was passion.
And with that understanding, once upon a time ended, and she lived happily ever after, forever and never.
Something That Happened Long Ago
For two years in the last century before the world changed, I wrote a comic book. It was called Doom Patrol, and it told of a group of superheroes who all had terrible problems with their bodies. There was a head with no body at all, and a robot with a human brain, and a couple who were pure energy contained in bandages to give them a physical form, and a girl who was so ugly no one had ever loved her so that she created imaginary friends, each with its own super-power. Into this mix I introduced Kate Godwin, a.k.a. Coagula, a transsexual lesbian superhero. Kate could dissolve and coagulate any form of matter (the result of sex with an alchemist) but her real super-power was much simpler. She accepted herself. She became the team’s emotional leader, guiding them through various close calls with the end of the world (the book was prophetic) because she trusted desire.
After several months of Kate’s stories, a letter came to us from a reader in England. She called herself M.A. She wrote, “You have given me the courage to realize I do not have to feel ashamed of who I really am.” And, “For as long as I can remember I have been miserable and only carried on living because I was too afraid that death would hurt too much. I did not realize that I was dead all the time. When I was a child I would pray to God every night that when I woke up in the morning I would have changed, of course I never did.” And, “Thanks to the message you have conveyed using ‘Kate,’ and the support I have gotten from friends since I told them, I now feel that I can do something about my situation, that before I never really perceived I could alter.”
Several years later, I went to a movie called A.I. in which a woman rejects her android son. Imprinted with love for his mother forever, the android remembers the story Pinocchio, in which a Blue Fairy changes a puppet to a real boy. The android boy thinks how if he became real then his mother would love him. He travels across the country until he finds a statue of a woman in a sunken amusement park. The woman is blue, and the android sits in front of it, underwater, for a thousand years, saying, over and over, “Please, Blue Fairy. Make me a real boy. Please, Blue Fairy. Make me a real boy. Please, Blue Fairy. Make me a real boy.”
I sat in the movie theater, and I watched the child, knowing it didn’t matter whether it was boy or girl, the prayer was to become real. And I thought to myself, The Blue Fairy couldn’t do it. God couldn’t do it. I did it.
The magic formula to make someone real is very simple. Trust their desire. Believe in passion.
This is a true story. It is all a true story, and a very old one.
Trans Central Station
Some words that did not exist when I transitioned
Some words that no longer (or almost no longer) exist
transition
sex change
transgender
transsexual
cisgender
transvestite
gender binary
real woman
gender nonbinary
real man
gender fluid
genuine girl (GG)
sex assigned at birth
genetic girl (GG)
gender assigned at birth
shemale
sex reassignment surgery (SRS)
he-she
gender reassignment surgery (GRS)
she-he
gender confirmation surgery (GCS)
female (or male) impersonator
trans woman
a woman trapped in a man’s body
trans man
a man trapped in a woman’s body
EACH OF THE LISTS above contains thirteen entries. Thirteen is the traditional number of a witch’s coven, a place where spiritual outlaws perform magic, often in the service of—or maybe alignment with—the ancient Goddess of the moon, the hunt, mountains, and wild animals, especially bears, Artemis/Diana, a figure so old that no one actually knows the origin or meaning of the name “Artemis.” We will return to Artemis—and bears—later in this essay.
When I was growing up, the idea that I should ever tell anyone of my desires—to wear girls’ clothes and somehow, in some vague way, be thought of as girl—was unspeakable. I do not mean something vile, as in the old horror cliché, “an unspeakable evil,” though there were people who might have thought that if I indeed had ever spoken of it. Nor did I mean something sinful, that which must not be spoken—though there certainly were people who would have thought, and said, that.
No. I mean something much more basic. What I felt, what I desired was unspeakable because, for me at least, the words did not exist. Or rather, the telling did not exist. Let me go further. To speak of such things, to anyone, was in fact, unthinkable. The mind could not form the thought. I did not wish to tell people and didn’t dare. I simply could not imagine doing it.
Let me be clear about something else. By “doing,” I do not mean wear girls’ clothes. I did that, with bits of my older sister’s wardrobe, or even my mother’s, when I had a reasonable certainty I would not get caught. No, I mean speaking, sharing, as the Twelve Step people say, with myself, God, and another human being. I certainly “spoke” with myself. I was very aware of my desires.
Oddly, I did not concern myself very much with God. I grew up in a Jewish family, members of an Orthodox shul, and considered myself religious until about fifteen, when I became an atheist. (Happily, that phase didn’t last long—I now think of myself as “a radical, Goddess-loving Jew” or simply describe my religion as Heresy.) Somehow, it did not occur to me that God might consider my desires, and secret actions, as sinful or something to arouse “His” anger. Of course, nor did I expect God to approve. It simply seemed outside God’s purview. Perhaps if I’d known about Artemis—but that came much later. I might add, however, that when that time came, and I had begun to explore the ancient roots of transgender, I came across places in the Torah that forbid both cross-dressing and castration. Oddly enough, I did not feel guilt, shame, or even anger. Rather, it excited me, because it meant people like me existed in Ancient Israel. You do not forbid what doesn’t exist. But as I say, all that came later.
Growing up, I did not worry about God knowing my desires. But other people, even that proverbial “another human being,” that lay beyond even imagination. This silence was not something that began, say, in adolescence. My earliest memory, from around four or five, involves that intense, conscious desire to wear girls’ clothes, and that equally powerful, yet somehow mostly unconscious, conviction that absolutely no one must ever know. Not my parents, not some mythical best friend to whom I could tell anything—quite simply, no one.
People used to say of “transsexuals,” by which they mostly meant transgender women, that they were “women trapped in men’s bodies.” (Some people attribute the expression, and the term “transsexual” itself, to a psychiatrist named Harry Benjamin, but I’ve seen that claim contested.) But that does not describe me.
When I came out, as a woman and a lesbian (this was 1971, and remember, the term “transition” did not exist then), I realized that I was in exactly the right body, for my body told me what it—what I—wanted. In the early ’90s the activist Riki Wilchins came up with the wonderful slogan, “I’m not trapped in anybody’s body.” And Nor Hall, brilliant writer on mythology and the psyche, wrote once, “Abandonment to the body’s desire is in itself a form of revelation.”
No, I was not trapped in the wrong body. I was trapped in the wrong universe. In order to become who I was, I had to break the world open. I had to embrace a kind of science fiction life. Or maybe a magical life, by which I mean the ability to experience the world, and connections, and myself, in ways that did not fit the standard model of reality. I use that term, “standard model,” ironically, for it re
fers to Niels Bohr’s description of quantum physics as disconnected from the everyday world.
But of course I am not talking about “entangled particles,” or quarks, or whether electrons are waves or particles, or even Schrödinger’s long-suffering cat hidden inside a box and both alive and dead at the same time, until the famous “observer” opened the box and looked. Or maybe the cat is exactly the right metaphor, if we think of the box as the closet, and the experience of so many trans people—and queer people in general—as alive and dead at the same time, until they themselves open the box and allow the world to actually see them.
And even more—to see ourselves. For many trans people, this moment of seeing, of discovering that the cat is very much alive, comes as a kind of revelation. For me, it came in 1971. I had already taken small steps to open up. The radicalness of the times, especially the examples of women’s liberation and the new gay liberation movement, encouraged me to tell my partner of my need to dress, secretly and only occasionally, as a woman.
To be fair, it was not so much the times as my own inner need simply getting worse when I thought it would get better. I married a wonderful woman named Edith Katz. This was not uncommon for people like me, who were in serious denial about how deep a part of our lives these needs were. We would sometimes convince ourselves that once in a “fixed” relationship all that “nonsense” would go away. And of course, it was indeed non-sense, a desire and yearning that made no sense, at least in the universe of fixed categories. So we would dismiss it, only to discover that the need intensified. I told Edie and experimented in very small ways, but things remained tense. Schrödinger’s cat was not yet alive, but certainly not dead. To extend the metaphor, I had pried open the lid but had not dared to actually look.
The Beatrix Gates Page 4
