Something That May Shock and Discredit You

by Daniel Mallory Ortberg

  There’s no transmasculine equivalent of forced-femme fantasy (“HELPLESS college freshman FORCED into a pullover and called LITTLE BUDDY by older brother’s COOL BEST FRIEND: BECOMING A BOY FOR MALE ATTENTION”), at least not that I ever came across, so my daydreams always took the shape of being forced to travel back in time to an era where I’d finally have to be a woman as hard and as long as I could. The plan was always (after stepping through a ley line or mysterious portal): keep my head down, wait for other people to start talking before opening my mouth and giving myself away with an out-of-place accent or vocabulary, agree with everything I’m told instead of trying to advocate for modern behavioral standards, look for context clues, start a lot of conversations with, “Oh, hello, you,” get a low-level job and act so normal for decades that everyone leaves me alone, respond in kind to anyone who refers to me as “darling,” immediately stop making references to air travel or television or anything that might sound like magic (if in the future, refuse to ask “What does this do?” about anything), immediately abandon every single value of my own for contemporary ones so that whatever this culture approves of, I approve of, and whatever this culture abhors, so do I, make no waves, ask no questions, come up with a decent explanation for my clothing before getting changed as quickly as possible, let other idiots try to avert the Battle of Hastings or invent feminism eight hundred years early or whatever, and either get home safely or find a way to live as comfortably as possible. The most cherished and longstanding of these counterproductive fantasies involves the court of Henry VIII.

  The really nice thing about imagining yourself as a wife of Henry VIII is that you got to deal with every single male authority figure imaginable all at once, because he was everybody’s god and pope and dad and husband and boss, so if you wanted to fight or resent or betray or fuck or suck up to any one of them you could get it all done at once with the same very tall person. Moreover, I had the benefit of hindsight and knew that his daughter Elizabeth I would later invent feminism, so I didn’t need to feel guilty about abandoning mine for her father, or for never imagining myself accidentally time-traveled to her court.

  I knew enough about the futility of changing a man (or worse, trying to change a man in order to try to change myself) that I thought it best to confine such fantasies to the distant past. Henry VIII married everyone in the home counties, invented Christmas music, and was winning enough to make Anne Boleyn swim across the Channel to introduce the blow job to England; both sufficiently charismatic and sufficiently dead to hang a lifetime of maladaptive fantasies on. It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight and roughly two television specials per year, to feel superior to Catherine of Aragon. Twenty-four years spent in the company of God’s representative on earth, yet that still somehow wasn’t enough time for her to learn that he was as easily soothed as he was irritated. Henry was a simple man: he wanted literally everyone to love him without reserve or criticism, and he believed God invented England so he could have sons in it. That was it; that was the one thing to remember about him. When the king of England, who has been trying to divorce you for years, offers you the chance to say, “My lord! I see now what a mistake I have made, and that I have never truly been your lawful wife. I see it all now! I must have consummated my marriage with Arthur and forgotten, and consider you my dear brother, and will never bother you again with an attempt to assert my wifely rights,” you say it with a smile on your face and accept your consolation castle in Coventry. Stick to your guns, and where does it get you? A handful of servants who were willing to call you the queen, a hair shirt, and nothing, plus whenever they make movies about Queen Elizabeth they always make up the actress who plays your daughter Mary to look like a nightmare.

  The problem with all these fantasies now—not that Catherine of Aragon would have ever welcomed advice from me at any age, in any form, and obviously Henry VIII would have been lousy at helping me get into a pullover—is how to explain a transitioning body to the friendly peasant woman I assume will lend me a cloak and a loaf of fresh brown bread after I stumble disheveled and disoriented out of the Portal; I have enough trouble passing in 2019 Berkeley, California, without wondering how I’m going to get read by early modern courtiers. But the fantasy persists, and there are at least two reasons why the Tudors are such an important component of it: One, because it helps to make obvious the ridiculousness of similar questions that try to pass themselves off as legitimate concerns, like “What if you start to transition and then society collapses, and you’re artificially dependent on something society provides for you, like hormones?” The answer to that, of course, is that if society collapses, I’ll die and so will you, even if you have a second freezer and some MREs in your basement and know how to do push-ups. I am artificially dependent on everything from electricity to antibiotics to refrigeration and indoor plumbing. Taking up the hobby of survivalism will not extend my life another five minutes past the end of human civilization, and there’s no good reason to put off present happiness, usefulness, and meaning to prop up the fantasy of being able to survive without depending on anybody else.

  * * *

  The second reason the Tudors are important is because the backdrop I choose for my maladaptive fantasies tells me something about what I’m not prepared to articulate or ask for myself. Put me back in time where gender roles were more strictly enforced, give me a body I’ve got to account for to some greater authority every second of the day, throw me into a high-stakes fertility-and-death cult centered around the tallest man in England and keep me sufficiently distracted with high stakes and high demands and let me get the job of fulfilling an unpleasant man’s expectations done. I suppose the real problem is—as it’s always been—that once you bring up the possibility of time travel in relation to transition, the natural first stop is going to be puberty, not the Tudor court, to increase the possibilities available to one’s own future rather than restrict all options outside of “giving an heir to Henry VIII.” But if you look at the past just right, you can almost picture it.

  CHAPTER 14 “I Love Your Vibe,” and Other Things I’ve Said to Men

  Something I used to do in my life as a woman was to occasionally, and under very controlled circumstances, shout encouragingly at groups of young men on the street, like “WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IS YOUR FAVORITE MONTH OF THE YEAR IF YOU HAD TO PICK ONE?” or “I LIKE THAT YOU ALL HAVE DIFFERENT-COLORED SHORTS ON, YOU SEEM LIKE YOU HAVE A REALLY FUN FRIENDSHIP DYNAMIC,” or “I HOPE YOUR NIGHT IS MAGICAL, AND DON’T LET COACH HASSLE YOU TOO MUCH.” Invariably their reaction would be one of astonishment and delight, and I treasured it, although it did not stop other men from occasionally saying things to me on the street I did not particularly like hearing. I had a sense that whatever I was getting out of this, whatever function this habit was performing in my life, had an expiration date, and the last time I shouted across the street to a man I didn’t know was a few months before I started transition. I’d been driving around Oakland with a friend of mine one night and we spotted a cyclist across the street waiting for the light to change. Lots of cyclists in Oakland wear headlamps at night, but this one was completely Tronned out: his entire bike, his jacket, even his backpack were outlined in green and blue LED lights, but the best part was his helmet, which slowly changed colors every few seconds. I was about to make an unprotected left, and I rolled down the passenger-side window and shouted, “I LOVE YOUR VIBE” as we passed him, only I wasn’t sure that he heard me because it was a relatively noisy intersection and I didn’t want to yell too loudly and distract him.

  Later on—we were just cruising around, not going anywhere in particular—we saw the same cyclist again about to cross a different street in front of us, and my friend said, “You should tell him that you like his vibe again, because I’m not sure he heard you the first time.” I couldn’t bring myself to do it again, even though I did love his vibe, and I did want him to know it, and I wished I could have told him.

  “I don’t want to yell too
much,” I said, “and I don’t want to distract him when he’s trying to cross the street, and I definitely don’t want to say it when I’m stuck behind a red light and can’t drive off.” So I didn’t yell anything, and eventually I took my friend home, and then I went home, too.

  I never did yell at groups of men very often. Conditions had to be perfect, and I wanted to make sure I never did it where somebody might look up suddenly in surprise and get hit by a car while they were trying to cross against traffic, or when they were in the middle of a serious or painful conversation, because hollering ought to be offered judiciously. But it was important to me, maybe crucial to me, because the moment of bewilderment always gave way to joy in a sequence I was never able to re-create in any other area of my life. I wanted very much for men always to be gently delighted, even though they so rarely were, and I wanted always to be the one surprising and delighting them. I was also of course aware that this was not the normal order of operations when stuff gets yelled on the street and groups of men are involved, but that didn’t stop me from wishing all men were on bikes and beautifully lit up and riding around changing colors, and that the rest of us could all tell them how much we loved their vibes, and that I was always driving my friends home at the end of a really good night.

  I think it’s also good not to yell at anybody, and that it’s probably better not to yell at all than to try to change the dynamic of public yelling.

  * * *

  It was around that same time that I spent most of my days working out of a coffee shop near my apartment. There was a jaunty sort of barista there who once came out from behind the counter to talk to me about my shoes with the most undisguised, unselfconscious joy and ever after that conversation we would have the following back-and-forth when I came into the shop:

  PEACEFUL MALE BARISTA: Hey, man!

  SELF, GLOWING AND TERRIFIED: Oh, hey, man!

  PMB: How’s it going?

  SG&T: Awesome, awesome. [Or alternately: Great, great.]

  PMB: What shoes do you have on today?

  SG&T: These ones!

  PMB: Oh, nice, so nice for sure.

  SG&T: Right on, right on, for sure.

  PMB: Thanks, man!

  Sometimes I called him “sir” or “young squire” and he seemed to really get a kick out of that. I got a real kick out of it, too. I hope he has a drum kit, or plans to get a drum kit someday.

  Whenever I see a pack of young guns out on the street who seem like they’re having a good time with one another—I mean really seem to enjoy one another’s company, and know how to be in a group together well, and have figured out the line between joyful ribbing and straight-up hassling, and delight in the former and eschew the latter, the kinds of dudes who are mostly big headphones and big shoes and backpacks and ears and friendliness—part of me really believes that if I ran up to them and said hello, their square-boy, gung ho faces would light up with recognition and delight and they’d say, “Oh, hey, man! Hey, man, it’s so good to see you! We were wondering where you were at. We’re so glad you’re here, man.” And then we’d all walk around together, and maybe try to see if the Denny’s by the overpass was open twenty-four hours or if it was the other Denny’s that was open for twenty-four hours, and we’d drive around until it was time to go home.

  INTERLUDE XIV House Hunters

  MAN: We have come to buy nothing.

  WOMAN: We are here to buy NOTHING.

  REALTOR: I stand as witness! Here is NOTHING.

  MAN: NOTHING. GIVE US NOTHING.

  WOMAN: FILL OUR HANDS AND MOUTHS WITH NOTHING.

  MAN: THERE IS A WARM CAT THAT DWELLS IN MY HEART AND BATS AWAY MY THOUGHTS. HE MAKES ME DIZZY. I WOULD HATE HIM IF I COULD.

  WOMAN: I. I. I. I PROHIBIT CLOSETS. I ABJURE THE ENHANGMENT OF CLOTHES. I BANISH THE BARRIERS BETWEEN DOOR AND WALL, BETWEEN SCONCE AND HALL. I WILL SLEEP IN MY OWN HANDSHAKE.

  REALTOR: I REFUSE TO PRODUCE. I COME GIFTLESS. I COME OFFERLESS.

  MAN: PUT ME NOWHERE. LIST MY ADDRESS AS NULL.

  WOMAN: NULL.

  REALTOR: NULL.

  HOUSE HUNTERS II

  WOMAN: [angrily] We told you not to bring us inside of a house to visit. Our budget was nullification, wrack, and slaughter. I am enwalled. Get us out at once.

  REALTOR: [trapped outside on a ledge] I am sorry. I am sorry. I don’t know how this happened. The house has chosen us, I think. I had no part in this.

  WOMAN: YOU MAY NOT WASH YOUR HANDS OF US. There were no stars the night I was born. I was born without a sign.

  MAN: I feel the neighbors can see me. I fear the neighbors can see me. I must, I must, I must—[he becomes impossibly long and thin, then crawls inside of the crown molding]

  REALTOR: [slipping, despite herself] I had a mother once. I had a nightmare once. Forgive me.

  WOMAN: We will buy nothing, spirits! Do you hear us? Send torment, defeat, ruin—we came here to purchase nothing and you will not sway us from our path. And I do not forgive you, house-lackey.

  MAN: [weakly, from inside the walls] I am the house now. I do not forgive either. ENMITY.

  WOMAN: ENMITY.

  REALTOR: [brokenly, resignedly] Enmity, then. [She falls.]

  HOUSE HUNTERS II INTERNATIONAL

  WOMAN: We have traveled long and far, without sleep and without bread, to tell you this: we do not need two sinks. We are already drained.

  MAN: [dully, without opening his eyes] Do not give us two sinks. I must not—I must not look at the sinks.

  WOMAN: [alarmed] Do not look at the sinks!

  MAN: [pained, desperate] I must not look at the sinks!

  REALTOR: [throwing herself across the bathroom counter] There are no sinks here! There are no sinks! Brother, all is well! Brother, all is well! Brother, all is well, and—

  MAN: [shrieking, eyes lidless]: I MUST NOT LOOK AT THE SINKS.

  HOUSE HUNTERS III

  The WOMAN and the REALTOR stand trembling in the BATHROOM. The room is silent. So are they, for a long while.

  REALTOR: Perhaps—

  WOMAN: Do not say it.

  REALTOR: I only—

  WOMAN: Please.

  REALTOR: I’m sorry.

  The WOMAN slides down against the wall and leans against the toilet.

  WOMAN: How long, do you think, before the school district arrives? Before we are Zoned?

  REALTOR: It does not always come. We may not be Zoned.

  WOMAN: Please, now, after all this—do not lie to me. I do not wish for the last thing you say to me to be a lie.

  REALTOR: Everything I have said to you has been a lie. [She slides down against the wall as well, and leans forward until her head is resting upon the WOMAN’s knees.] If we are not Zoned, we will be Partitioned, or left to lose our minds in the gibbering emptiness of the Open Floor Plan, or—

  WOMAN: I hope it is not the Walk-In Closet. Perhaps that’s weak of me to say. I should not be so afraid, and yet, I fear the Walk-In Closet above all else. Do you think he—[she jerks her head in the direction of the SINK, which is growing slowly but steadily larger]—do you think he suffered a great deal?

  The REALTOR spreads her hands and smiles helplessly.

  WOMAN: Do you think he is still suffering?

  REALTOR:You have asked me not to lie to you.

  The WOMAN begins to cry in earnest this time.

  WOMAN: I choose, I choose, I choose—I choose the third house, I choose it, I choose the house within walking distance of the shopping district, with the too-small kitchen, with the windowless in-law unit, I choose, I purchase, I offer, I hunt the house, please. I have brought this on myself.

  The WOMAN idly runs her hands through the REALTOR’s hair.

  WOMAN: I offer myself as budget. I am willing to—to go over.

  REALTOR: I can feel his suffering. Even now.

  WOMAN: I forgive you.

  REALTOR: Do not. Please. [She retches, but cannot bring herself to vomit.]

  The WOMAN kisses the REALTOR. The REALTO
R melts into the kiss and runs a feverish hand along THE WOMAN’s jawline.

  REALTOR: [wonderingly, helplessly] You have such—clean lines.

  A horrid shuddering sound comes from just outside the BATHROOM DOOR. The WOMAN and the REALTOR cling to each other. The SINK gurgles, and a MAN’S HAND emerges from it.

  SINK: NOT TO GO ON ALL FOURS. NOT TO SUCK UP DRINK. NOT TO CHASE ONE ANOTHER. ARE WE NOT MEN?

  WOMAN: God, God. God, God. God, God.

  SINK: HIS IS THE HAND THAT MAKES. HIS IS THE HAND THAT WOUNDS. HIS IS THE HAND THAT HEALS.

  The MAN’s voice joins the SINK’s.

  MAN: OUR BID HAS BEEN ACCEPTED, DARLING. WE MUST GO INTO ESCROW. WE MUST SIGN. YOUR NAME NEXT TO MINE.

  The SHUDDERING SOUND intensifies. The WOMAN buries her head in the crook of the REALTOR’s neck.

  WOMAN: If you have anything in your pockets—if you have ever loved me, or him—you will kill me, you will do it now—

  REALTOR: I—

  The DOOR opens. The HAND IN THE SINK waves in greeting. The REALTOR looks down at what she is holding in her arms, and screams.