Something That May Shock and Discredit You

by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

  (I know I do!!!)

  And feel super free not to even teach our daughter my name.

  It would save time, right?

  That’s all I want for you, is just for you to

  have a lot of time on your hands, to really THINK.

  About whatever it is that you might need to think about,

  anything that your conscience might suggest to you.

  I’m not bothered either way, I’m honestly not.

  I mean, she might GUESS my name, and if she ends up looking like me

  (which, objectively, I think we can both agree would be great for her),

  IF she ends up looking like me people will probably say something about it to her

  so she’s going to end up learning my name eventually.

  I’m not trying to rub anything in, it’s just that quantitatively

  MOST people know my name, and what I look like,

  I don’t know if that qualifies as being “famous,” just—

  most people know about my whole deal, and they’re probably going to put

  two and two together,

  so even if you don’t teach her my name,

  somebody will, and that’s not my fault.

  If she does end up like me I hope you are a little nicer to her than you were to me

  but that’s not my business!!!!

  N O N E of this is my business at alllll, which should be just such a relief to you!!!

  or who knows,

  who honestly knows what you consider a relief!

  you’re HARD TO READ.

  Anyhow, I just wish you the absolute BEST.

  I hope SO MANY good things for you, and that

  your next boyfriend can figure out how to make you happy,

  if that’s possible, I sure hope that’s possible,

  and there’s no point in talking about any of the other things I could say,

  so I won’t.

  Consider it my last gift to you!

  (I’ve given you a lot of gifts, you probably forgot about them.)

  Anyhow I’ll probably be dead soon,

  or at least I can’t imagine hurting worse than this!

  Anyhow I’m thirty-seven now, I have to, like—oh my God,

  thirty-seven, and I need to take that really seriously.

  No one is even in love with me right now,

  which is outrageous (okay, some people are, obviously, but none of them count).

  What if I’m too old for sex, I’m almost F O R T Y.

  Are there even ages you can turn after forty? or do you just turn into a tree

  oh my God, my body is like autumn,

  where all the leaves are falling off the trees

  only what’s falling off me is hotness

  maybe I will just move to Greece

  honestly I could just move to Greece and die

  and then everyone would want to have sex with me

  only it’ll be too late

  because of how dead and in Greece I’ll be

  oh my God my life is a mess

  I need to just be more like Greece

  and then I’ll be fine

  or dead

  or both

  This is happening to ME

  being thirty-seven and embarrassed is the worst thing I can think of

  the hottest thing in the world is not caring

  and then being like, seventeen

  a seventeen-year-old who’s never had a feeling is the only acceptable way to live, sexually

  and if I’m not careful I’m going to end up being thirty-eight

  better just go die in a field

  in Greece or wherever, stabbed by some Ottomans

  and you can all just live with your own embarrassment when you see how dead I am

  Okay byyyye, I truly wish you all the best!! ALL OF IT, the absolute MOST BEST!

  CHAPTER 4 Reasons for Transitioning, in Order

  Want to show up good-looking ex

  Want to impress good-looking ex

  Want to upset good-looking ex

  Want to replace good-looking ex

  Bored of existing wardrobe, looking for excuse to buy all-new clothes that don’t fit in a new way

  Clothes don’t fit/don’t feel like driving to store

  Younger siblings getting too much attention

  Accidentally got accepted into Deep Springs, until recently one of the only remaining all-male colleges

  Branded advertisement

  Neoliberalism??

  Want to sing both parts of a duet at karaoke

  Important part of upcoming Halloween costume

  Empath / “Just a really supportive friend”

  Fulfill a prophecy

  Nothing good on TV

  Too many good shows on TV; feeling overwhelmed and in need of a change

  Specific codicil in eccentric, wealthy relative’s will

  Snuck into the Bohemian Grove by accident and needed a plausible cover story

  Something about upper-body strength

  Grabbed the wrong badge at one of those mandatory pronoun-name-tag events and felt too embarrassed to admit mistake

  Sick of feminist infighting

  Intrigued by feminist infighting

  Took one of those quizzes, felt obligated

  To get more attention from men

  Misread brain scan

  Forgot about self-acceptance

  Thwart a prophecy

  Ring finger longer than index finger or something

  Excited to reinforce a different set of sexist stereotypes

  Cheaper haircuts

  Hoping to spearhead a revival of gnosticism

  Profoundly misunderstood Freud

  Just love layering shirts

  Never saw one of those Dove commercials about loving your body

  Want to spend more time on the phone with insurance providers

  Can’t distinguish between good attention and bad attention

  Sick of losing at tennis

  Forgot that women can be strong

  Forgot that men can be sensitive

  Deep-seated hatred of chromosomes

  Hoping to catch management in a big sexism sting

  Got carried away during Breast Cancer Awareness Month

  Avoiding something else, like vacuuming

  INTERLUDE IV If You Can’t Parallel Park, You Have to Get a Sex Change

  Something a lot of people don’t know about me is that my transition started the day I failed to parallel park correctly in front of a man standing outside my apartment complex. This is more common than people think! Something like 38 percent of trans men cite the inciting incident of their transition as being watched while failing to parallel park correctly. There’s no shame in it, and I wish we made more room for that conversation in our community.

  I’d parallel parked in front of my apartment complex hundreds of times at that point. It was, in fact, a point of pride with me at the time that I was a pretty reliable parallel parker, and I’d even volunteered to help a friend struggling to parallel park once or twice in the past by hopping behind the wheel and finishing the job for them. “It’s no problem,” I’d say, with neither excessive self-regard nor unnecessary self-deprecation. “I’m pretty good at parallel parking.”

  But something happened this particular day. I don’t know if I’d just gotten stuck in my own head, or if the spot I was backing into was a little narrower than usual, or if the curve in the road made the angle more challenging, but I couldn’t make it work—halfway into the spot I’d have to admit I was about to run over the curb, or was far closer to the other car’s bumper to maneuver any further, and I’d spin the wheel back left and have to pull out into the middle of the street to start again. Line up your mirrors—get a little closer first—not so close you’ll scrape their door—wait until your mirror reaches the middle of the other car to start turning the wheel—

  So I’d had to start over a few times. What of that? It could have happene
d to anybody. I wasn’t sweating yet. I merely turned up the air-conditioning prophylactically. Soon I’d be at home with a nice cup of tea, ready to enjoy the rest of my long and happy life as a woman.

  Eventually I noticed a man across the street casually taking in my attempts to park. He wasn’t yet watching me, you understand, so even at this late point I still held out hope. He was just out scoping the neighborhood, and I happened to be a part of the neighborhood at that particular moment. He wasn’t really watching me yet. The council would understand if my case came up for review.

  A fourth attempt failed. Then a fifth. The man began to take a more specific interest in my parking and wandered over. “It’s no problem,” I said to myself. “There’s no need to panic. You can just drive off and park somewhere else.” But I knew, even then, that as soon as he’d seen me, I’d had only two options left to me: park properly, or start transitioning immediately.

  When I’d been assigned my particular district as a resident Woman, the local council members had done their best to put me at ease. We’re not looking for reasons to get rid of you, they said, smiling reassuringly during orientation. Everybody has the occasional slipup. That’s understood around here. But at my most optimistic I couldn’t imagine explaining a nine-time failure in front of a man over the age of fifty to the meter maids.

  It got worse. The man knocked on my window, and I rolled it down.

  “It’s a tough spot, huh?” he said cheerfully, and my heart sank in me as I realized he was trying to be nonjudgmental and friendly about the whole thing. He didn’t even realize what he was doing.

  “Sure is,” I bellowed, hoping to mask the quiver in my voice. “I’m having the darnedest time of it!”

  “Anything I can do to help?” he asked.

  “No, no, I’m fine, thanks,” I said. Neither of us believed it.

  “You might want to swing a little farther out and try cutting the wheel over a little later,” he suggested.

  “I’ll try that!” I trilled. And I did. What was there to lose at this point? What on earth would the sisters want with a woman who couldn’t park her own car on her own street on a sunny day with no time constraints?

  So I tried again, this time swinging a little farther out and cutting the wheel over a little later, as the man stood on the sidewalk and called out friendly encouragement. It hardly felt real—I swung the wheel out, then swung it back, all the while trying to remember everything I’d ever heard about transition. I was going to have to buy a whole new wardrobe, and acquire upper-body strength. While we do think of ourselves as reasonable people, they’d said at orientation, obviously we still have limits. And an image to maintain. What we want, of course, is for all of you to be completely successful, and to have all the support you need in maintaining your presence as women in your districts, but within reason. It’s one thing to need to circle the block and look for an easier place to park—we’ve all been there—but if, say, you were to try and fail to parallel park in a place you’d parked hundreds of times before, and you failed ten times in a row, and a man saw you do it—well.

  Has that ever happened? someone asked.

  Anything can happen, was the only answer. It’s just an example.

  The man got friendlier and more helpful, and I got closer and closer to tears. Eventually I turned back out into the middle of the street and then gunned it, driving as fast as I could until he disappeared from my rearview mirror. I ended up parking on an empty street about a mile away and walking home, all the while knowing what was already waiting for me.

  By the time I made it upstairs I found a little vial of testosterone cypionate on the bed, along with a few eighteen- and twenty-two-gauge needles, a pamphlet from a nurse practitioner, a bottle of finasteride, some isopropyl alcohol wipes, and a note that read, simply:

  YOU UNDERSTAND, OF COURSE. WE WISH YOU ALL THE BEST IN YOUR FUTURE ENDEAVORS, BUT YOUR SERVICES ARE NO LONGER REQUIRED.

  Anyhow, I heard about your trouble parking yesterday and some of the guys sent me over to let you know it happens all the time, and nobody blames you for it. We have a sort of unofficial trans parallel-parking club, as it happens, and if you ever want to join us, we meet in the Safeway parking lot down by the marina most Sunday nights. It’s not such a bad life. Most of us have a little trouble with spatial reasoning and splitting the check if there’s more than three people at the table, but on the plus side we can park anywhere we want.

  CHAPTER 5 Unwanted Coming-Out Disorder

  I could not possibly have known I was trans as a child. When my friends and I went through the normal developmental stage of trying to set household items on fire during eighth-grade sleepovers, we always used Bath & Body Works cucumber-melon spray as an accelerant. What could have been more womanly than that? If pressed to think about the subject further, I imagine I might have considered it a net positive for female representation among pubescent firebugs and nascent arsonists. The closest I came to expressing anything remotely along the lines of a desire to transition was trying to open a savings account in the fourth grade under the name “Savannah Hall,” and later spelling my given name with one “L” instead of two on all of my seventh-grade homework assignments. The savings account never took, but Savannah received promotional mailers from the Bank of America well into high school.

  I spent the majority of my adolescence longing to be an adult, and the joys of being not-a-child (living independently, leaving mugs in the sink, the freedom to treat my body and possessions with indifference as a response to stress of any kind) have always outweighed the attendant difficulties (bills, aches and pains, losing the ability to recover quickly from a sleepless night). Being a grown-up is a joy that has never lost its shine, so you might imagine my frustration, upon arriving at an understanding of myself as a transgender adult, to find that the national conversation was shifting almost immediately—almost as if in direct response—to questioning the existence of transgender children. It felt rather as if I had walked into a party and started to introduce myself only to hear, “I’m sorry, we’re looking for someone younger,” especially because I spent no brief amount of time asking myself why I wasn’t younger, why I’d spent so much of my life carefully avoiding any questions about gendered directionality.

  * * *

  I don’t pretend that this is a uniquely trans problem, of course; anyone who arrives at their thirties still profoundly self-centered might feel similarly let down. But the sting remained nevertheless, not least because I felt personally indicted and shoved into a conversation about children I would greatly have preferred to have about myself. “But I don’t especially want to talk about trans children,” I protested. “I want to talk about me. I wish the trans children all the best, but don’t make me share my debutante ball with them.”

  In August 2018, the following things happened in the following order: I flew to Dallas to have top surgery, I marked the fifth anniversary of my sobriety, and the open-access scientific journal PLOS One published a survey by Lisa Littman about “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” a term coined by a group of parents of trans and questioning children. (I have a constitutional dislike of being upstaged and felt, quite sensibly, that this was a transparent grab for attention targeted at me personally. Here I was, brand-new chest hot off the press, still in its original factory packaging, and it was already old news.) More specifically, the term had been coined by parents who frequented one of a handful of trans-antagonistic forums like Transgender Trend and Youth Transcritical Professionals. There was the expected controversy on publication, of course, not least because the type of parent who posts regularly on a website called Transgender Trend might not be especially inclined to describe their child’s coming-out process as particularly balanced or worthy of respect. “Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timeframe. Parents also repo
rt that their children exhibited an increase in social media/internet use prior to disclosure …” Rapid-onset gender dysphoria might more aptly be called, then, “unwanted coming-out disorder,” where parents belong to a peer group in which one, multiple, or even all their friends might self-describe as “a pretty open-minded person, most of the time, but don’t you think this is taking things a little far?”

  The article was eventually updated and republished as what PLOS One editor Joerg Heber characterized as a “survey of the parents,” rather than a “clinically validated” study, which seems like a fair assessment. Littman herself wrote that “ROGD is not a formal mental health diagnosis at this time,” which holds the sort-of-charming implication that it might make it onto 2018’s list of informal mental health diagnoses, something a busy doctor might offer at the end of a fifteen-minute remote consultation over video conferencing. “I’m sorry I can’t offer you something as reassuringly traditional as ‘hypertension’ or ‘gender identity dysphoria,’ but we have a ton of ROGD lying around after the last pharmaceutical rep came through the office. If you’d like to take some with you, you’re more than welcome to it. Take some for your friends, if you’d like, it’s perfectly safe and over-the-counter, and I’d be happy to give you all a diagnosis en masse, if your parents are comfortable with the idea. Now, at this time, the diagnosis lacks formality. I’m speaking less as a doctor and more in the style of a slightly officious work acquaintance, or a chatty fellow passenger on a train. Consider this the athleisure-wear of medical opinions: affordable, comfortable, easy to slip into, acceptable at a certain kind of last-minute happy hour, if you don’t have time to run home and change into a diagnosis with a fitted waistband.”

  I was surprised how frequently this came up when I was doing the social transition rounds. I’d come out to a friend, we’d talk broadly about what I’d been contemplating, what I’d been afraid of, what I expected for my future, and after a few minutes, with a mildly pained expression on their face, they’d say something along these lines: “What do you think about those kids who make a lot of trans friends in high school or college, and they’re all sort of sad and change their names at the same time? What’s that about?” To which I would not usually have much of an answer, since I don’t know a lot of teenagers. When pressed (“What are these teenagers doing that you think they ought to be dissuaded or barred from doing? What procedures do you think they have access to? What outcomes do you fear? What futures do you hope for? By the way, do you have a general sense of what hormones do and don’t do?”), said friends would rarely be able to point to anything more specific than a vague sense of concern. Lord knows I can relate, having spent plenty of pre-transition time myself letting I dare not wait upon I would, but I could only muster up meaningful levels of concern for specific situations with concrete details, not the mere idea of some teenager somewhere buying a binder.