Something That May Shock and Discredit You

by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

  It wasn’t just that I resented being asked without warning or preparation to furnish some sort of foundational explanation for a sea of vague, hypothetical-sounding trans-adjacent children—although I did, of course—what I really resented was that, as freshly minted an out trans person as it was possible to be, I was already old news, swept aside within five minutes of coming out in favor of someone younger, sexier, more complicated. My friends were not interested in my relatively late-in-love, sturdy-thirties transition into a full-grown man. I was being traded in for a younger model. Worse, a hypothetical younger model, because no one ever wanted to talk to me about a specific possibly trans child, merely the idea that there might someday be a teeming, seething horde of them, bristling with hormones and furious as the forces of hell.

  Oddly, the same phrase came up over and over, although I don’t think many of these friends had spoken to one another about it: Something irreversible. As in, I’m afraid these kids are going to do something irreversible. But just what that thing was, and what irreversibility looked like outside of the usual irreversibility of time and momentum, I couldn’t have told you, because they were never quite able to explain it to me. “Something irreversible” is to polite people what “self-mutilation” is to impolite people: a quick way to reorient the conversation around their own discomfort with bodies. In both cases it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to have a productive discussion with someone struggling with a reflexive, implicit horror of flesh. Any mention of someone else’s transitioning body sends them into direct and panicked conflict with the prospect of their own transitioning body; since this is a prospect they find unbearable, it becomes immediately necessary for them to unload their own desire and disgust onto the nearest suitable target.

  For whatever reason, whenever these people—who I believe truly cared for me, who actively willed the good in my life, who wanted to support trans people as much as possible—heard that I was transitioning, their very first, preverbal response was to imagine: Well, what if someone had forced me to transition? And whatever their internal response to that question was, usually some combination of horror and relief, would set the tone of the rest of our conversation. In a strange way, I found that rather relatable, since I used to spend a lot of time hoping someone would force me to transition, too, so that I could become a man without having to explain myself or answer any difficult questions. But it quickly snowballed into a rising sense of panic (Wait a minute. If someone had forced me to transition just because I liked playing with boys’ toys when I was nine, I wouldn’t have the life I have today. And I like the life I have today! Why are you trying to take my life away from me?). I’d have to do my best to calmly reason away: “You can keep your life! You’re not like me. Someone would have told you if you were like me! You’d definitely know by now if you were like me. Even though I didn’t know I was like me until quite recently, and it came as quite a surprise. Oh, no—maybe you are like me. Maybe you would never have known that you were like me as long as I’d never told you, but now that I’ve told you you’ve started thinking about it, and once you start thinking about it you can’t stop, and now you are going to have to transition—my God, it is contagious! Get everyone else out of this coffee shop, for the love of Christ, if you want to maintain persistent gender continuity—it’s onsetting rapidly, this gender dysphoria, and I don’t know who it’s going to claim next!”

  A mother, midforties, presents with the distressing case of her son, thirty; an unremarkable childhood gave way to a bog-standard adolescence and showed every sign of developing into an unexceptional manhood until a wedding at Cana (the influence of out-of-town friends?) then, suddenly and without warning (one odd moment around the age of twelve, if we’re being strictly honest, when he had been separated from his parents and other relatives and spent a little unsupervised time talking with teachers in the temple courts, but honestly, nothing since then), full-blown messianic identity disorder, a total change in social groups, all new friends, most of them unattractively dressed, a sudden fixation with fatherliness, miraculous wounds, unexplained twelve-year emissions of blood, unflattering haircuts, unusual new grooming rituals involving feet, hair, and perfume, a tendency to take metaphorical language about abundance, bread, and wine too literally, generally antisocial behavior, etc., etc. Nothing in the child’s behavior between the ages of birth and thirty accounts for this abrupt change in demeanor and habit. Further research is required before a formal diagnosis can be made; however, a number of like-minded parents in the area share a growing concern that underlying issues of depression and anxiety may be responsible. Moreover, many of them report that a disproportionate number of their messianically minded children have espoused similarly eschatological worldviews after coming into contact with one another.

  Of course there’s nothing wrong with trying to understand something a friend is experiencing by imagining, if just temporarily, what it might feel like if it happened to you. The trouble only begins when it triggers an empathy-overload feedback loop and you start to imagine that it’s about to happen to you, that any minute now someone is going to travel back to your own adolescence, seize upon the mildest of gender-nonconforming behaviors (She climbs trees! He doesn’t want his hair cut short!), and drag you kicking and screaming into a forced-transition factory. I never quite knew how to settle that fear in other people, in part because I wasn’t sure what they wanted from me more—permission to consider transition if they wanted to, or permission to enjoy not having to transition. Their fear, as best I could understand it, looked something like this: Had I known transition was possible and available to me at a younger age, I might have been confused into wanting it, because I wouldn’t have been able to understand the difference between wanting to wear a dress and wanting to be a girl, and the underlying implication was I’m worried you’ve been confused into transitioning because you forgot the difference between wanting to wear a dress and wanting to be a girl.

  The best reason for transition, as I understand it, is “because I particularly wish it.” I had not been in the habit of thinking very hard about my own feelings about my womanhood until the day I asked myself if I had any opinions about my gendered future. I was more than a little surprised to find that I did! Such a realization set me on a path of mentally revisiting my childhood for clues, in the hopes that it would somehow endorse or dispel what I was experiencing in the present. My childhood was not especially useful to my adulthood, which I found bitterly disappointing. Some things seemed as if they could be interpreted differently in light of what I was currently debating; others—most—didn’t. One thing that came as a relief to me was the realization that absent any sort of narrative about biological destiny or the magic of chromosomes, everyone’s description of their internal sense of gender, their own sense of themselves as male or female or anything else, always sounded a little ridiculous, always depended on shorthand and substitution. Any attempts to justify or ground said feelings in externalities inevitably resulted in a sort of half-hearted list of hobbies, interests, toy preferences, instinctive reactions to certain forms of dress or speech or address. So this was not a uniquely trans failure of speech, at least, so much as an example of how difficult it is to put any sense of desire or being into words.

  I wanted to transition, or at least I wanted to think about transition as an option, that much was clear. Attempting to retroactively extract my childhood for either justification or foreclosure did not leave me with a sense of possibility. What I wanted, what I needed, was to give myself as much freedom as possible to consider what was available to me, what I wanted, what I was willing to risk, to pay careful attention to myself, to say only: How are you right now? What direction would you like to shuffle in today? What is the next—and only the next—step that you are willing to take? I had to often remind myself that simply because I had not consciously experienced a desire to transition since I was very young, it did not necessarily follow that this was pure foolishness or a waste of time,
a gratuitous bid for attention or distraction. Like my friends, I had to resist the urge to snatch my former-child-self out of the past and demand a permanent account of myself. Like those concerned parents, I had to allow myself a certain degree of fear, uncertainty, and even repulsion as I dealt with a number of feelings, impulses, desires, and ambitions that seemed at one moment totally contiguous with my lifelong understanding of myself and the next moment to be utterly foreign, entirely inexplicable, and—I dare say—of rapid onset.

  My gender was stable, foundational, slow-moving, fixed, deep-rooted, intuitive, obvious, recognizable, immediately legible, and straightforward, until it wasn’t. I believed, I hoped, that any feeling that made its appearance known suddenly and violently would leave in the same way. If I simply sat tight and waited myself out, I would wake up restored to full and grateful cis womanhood any day now, relieved that I hadn’t done anything foolish—something irreversible—during my days of delusion. The cis self was ordered, sensible, calm, had an unsurprising past and a predictable future, a worthwhile place in the world; the trans self was panicked, adrift, without plan or explanation, Nebuchadnezzar scrabbling in the fields among the beasts. I thought often of the book of Daniel in those days, and the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s humiliation before his subjects in chapter 4, promising myself that as long as I held on and resisted transition long enough, I would eventually be restored to myself:

  All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar. At the end of the twelve months he was walking about the royal palace of Babylon. The king spoke, saying, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty?”

  While the word was still in the king’s mouth, a voice fell from heaven: “King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: the kingdom has departed from you! And they shall drive you from men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. They shall make you eat grass like oxen; and seven times shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whomever He chooses.”

  That very hour the word was fulfilled concerning Nebuchadnezzar; he was driven from men and ate grass like oxen; his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair had grown like eagles’ feathers and his nails like birds’ claws.

  It is worth noting, perhaps, that after his seven-year tenure among the beasts of the field, Nebuchadnezzar’s understanding is returned to him, along with his “kingdom, honor, and splendor,” that additional majesty is added upon that which he already possessed as the king of Babylon, that he praises God and once again rules over his lost kingdom; namely, that everything he has suffered, everything he has lost, has been reversible. His king’s body becomes a beast’s body, becomes an ox’s body, becomes an eagle’s body, becomes a king’s body again, but a different kind of king’s body than he possessed before, because this king’s body has experienced madness, bestiality, isolation, language-lessness, the dew of heaven, particulation, abandonment, and restoration. It was only when I was able to relinquish the fantasy of nothing irreversible, of uninterrupted cis-ness, that I could begin to imagine a livable future for myself, a future that did not depend solely on risk management and self-abasement. Ever since I first articulated to myself a certain degree of gender-conflictedness, ever since I openly wondered whether I might have been having some sort of transgender-adjacent experience, the question had remained in my every waking thought. Not always at the forefront, not always obsessively, not even always distressingly, but once the thought had cleared the event horizon of my consciousness, it was never again unthought.

  Once I was able to take the question of regret seriously I was finally, finally able to start moving ahead, to start telling other people about my internal experience, to start asking questions, to start imagining possibilities, to start exploring my options. Not taking regret seriously in the old punitive sense, as in, You probably don’t really want this, and the worst thing that could possibly happen is to start to transition, change your mind, and then stop, so anything else in the world is a better alternative than transition, but taking regret seriously in the sense of saying, If I try it, and I hate it, I’ll stop, and I’ll grieve what I’ve changed or lost; I’m prepared to accept the possibility of regret before I begin. So often, and in so many ways, I tried to act as if I were already regretting something I had not yet given up, asking myself if I wanted to find an immediate transition off-ramp, if I wouldn’t like to give up today, if I wouldn’t prefer to do something easier and less embarrassing than test-driving a new name at thirty-one years of age. The time for plausible name-changing had come and gone in the seventh grade, and I’d wasted all my transition chips on spelling “Mallory” with a single “L.” There was a time and a place for objecting to one’s gender, like waiting to interrupt a wedding in a romantic comedy; if I hadn’t protested my name or my body or my role in the great order of things when I was first tasked with them, then I certainly had no business trying to do so now.

  The problem that a trans person, even the mere idea of a trans person, poses is the problem of time. We either speak up too early (What five-year-old really knows what being a boy or being a girl means? Let’s give kids a few years before forcing sex and gender on them and let them just be kids, for Chrissakes) or too late (I just don’t know where this is coming from.… I never would have suspected—you’re the last person I would have imagined, well, wanting to—), either trying to delay and deny puberty or demand a mulligan and try to redo it. Rapid-onset gender dysphoria: too trans, too fast, too furious. I don’t remember when I first learned that transition was something a person might pursue; I became briefly acquainted with my first trans person at twenty-two, and he struck me as a very nice man with whom I had absolutely nothing in common, such that it never occurred to me that the word “transgender” could possibly include the two of us. I would not meet another out trans person for another seven years. During my career as a woman, no one ever asked me how I understood myself to be one, but if they had, my answer would have been something along the following lines: Trans people are troubled, or make trouble, or feel trouble, and they know something doesn’t work right away. I may not be everyone’s idea of a good or a compelling or an attractive woman, but everyone around me agrees that that’s my job, and that I’m qualified for it, and if I weren’t qualified for it, I’d certainly know by now.

  At the beginning of my flirtations with the idea of transition, I started to keep a journal in order to prove to myself that I did not actually want to transition. I opened with this:

  Part of what I have sought to do in the wake of this sudden awareness of my own distress (in addition to going to therapy for the first time in years) is to pay careful attention to myself. I love distraction, and loathe a lack of resolution, or feeling sadness, or anger, or anything negative that does not seem immediately fixable. I am, I think, quite sensitive most of the time, so it was rather a shock to me to realize how successfully I had alienated myself from an awareness of how I was doing on a daily basis. So I have been writing a bit more, meditating more, speaking aloud what I am feeling on a daily basis more, even if only to myself but hopefully to friends as time goes on, etcetera.

  And this preoccupation popped up almost immediately after that decision to inquire after my own inner state. Perhaps a week after, perhaps a bit earlier, which feels significant. This does not mean I am trans, or that my current comprehension of myself is perfect and permanent. This is merely a catalog of present thoughts, desires, understandings, which may shift at any given time, or give way to new understandings, and any of which may certainly be reconciled with—I don’t know, pick your word, I find them all somehow wide of the mark, cis-ness, woman-ness, female-ness, what have you. My present self. I certainly have no desire to become some sort of dour, reserved, hypermasculine, immediately decipherable man.

  I also believe that, if I considered it to be truly necessary, I would be willing to pursue certain aspects of transition. I reali
ze I am hedging a great deal and overemphasizing how relaxed and open-minded I am about all this, as if the reason I started keeping this journal was merely to have a really interesting thought experiment about how to be some cool, masculine-ish, gender-nonconforming woman. Which is, to be frank, not how I would describe the last few months. What has been most destabilizing, most attention-grabbing, most calling for pause, has been the insistent, provocative, haunting question: What if you were you, but a boy? Some kind of boy—I’m not sure what kind? I don’t wish to be lost in maleness, or to deny some part of my mannerisms or likes or dislikes or vibes or whatever. It feels consistent with me, although I realize that may be hard for those close to me to understand.

  I have been, and sort of am, a good woman. I could be, and sort of am, a good man. Neither option is forbidden to me, and I don’t believe there is an inherent virtue in, I don’t know, “lifelong gender consistency.” One is not better or worse than the other, and I don’t believe that a shifting sense of identity is wrong, or a sign of unwellness. I do not have to do anything I do not want or do not feel ready for.