Sehnsucht or The Night I Shattered

Just a heads up: In this post I am going to be talking about queerness, about God, and about my own emotional/mental health experience in relation to those subjects. There will also be some C.S. Lewis.

I want to get back to blogging regularly. I am not going to promise that that will happen but it might. One thing that has been in the way of frequent posting over the last few years was the fact that I was not out about my identity. I have known I was trans since mid 2017 or so but for three and a half years I had this idea that I could just know that I am a woman but continue to live a life pretending to be a man. There  were reasons I tried to do that, but it didn't work. During that time though, I did not think of trans-ness as a bad thing, and certainly not as something sinful or evil, mostly I think I just thought of it as excessively inconvenient to the life I wanted to have. The result was that I had a lot of thoughts about how transness and queerness interacted with or shone light on the rest of my life and the ideas I was playing around with. I tried to write some of those thoughts into blog posts but I just couldn't bring myself to write as though I were removed or detached from them. So mostly I didn't write them at all.

And now I am out and there is nothing really stopping me from getting to work on this backlog of ideas and thoughts I have been kicking around for four years. So here we go:

In his sermon The Weight of Glory Lewis (without using the term) describes the experience of sehnsucht: 

In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both.

Now in The Weight of Glory, as well as in the many other parts of his writing where Lewis explores this experience, Lewis identifies it with the desire for God and usually ties it to an apologetic argument. In fact I find the use of sehnsucht as a  broader theological fact far more interesting than as a bit of apologetics. Still, sehnsucht does an admirable job of describing a certain invaluable facet of my experience of God. 

But theology, much less Christian apologetics, is not really what I want to write about today. I promised queer content and I intend to deliver.

Ashley and I watched a movie a few weeks ago. It was Tick Tick Boom and for the purposes of this story I only need to say that it is a musical about Jonathan Larson, the man who wrote Rent, and that the AIDS epidemic features heavily as the context for the musical. After the movie we started getting ready for bed. I wandered into the bathroom and, still discussing the movie but intertwined with other parts of our lives in that way that we do after a compelling film, Ashley commented to me "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer". It staggered me—literally. To my recollection I have never physically staggered just from hearing something before, I had always though it was more of a metaphor. That night those words made my knees go loose for a second and I had to catch the towel bar to keep from falling. 

It actually took a few minutes for my mind to catch up with my body (my subconscious). My immediate response was something along the lines of "wow that is definitely true...wow" but as we kept talking I realized I was grinning like a fool. Then I was feeling overwhelmed. I started to brush my teeth but just as I was putting toothpaste on my brush a great, indistinct something came rushing towards a barrier in my mind that I hadn't known existed. For a second I saw it looming and gasped "Oh..it's going to happen" then it hit and I shattered.

I have mentioned this before but I grew up Evangelical. That means a lot of things for who I am and how I experience the world, and one of those things is that I grew up believing that queerness is sinful. It was a nebulous belief at first. I didn't know what "gay" meant until I was accused of being it at a summer camp once—I had been sitting with my legs crossed in a way that I only later found is associated with femininity in US culture—but somewhere around middle school my Christian education ensured that I found out about homosexuality and that it was sinful.

At the same time I was starting to notice a particular note that would appear in certain stories, or around some people. In Surprised by Joy Lewis, again discussing sehsucht, says that one of his early experiences of it was the longing for something he called "northernness": 

Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity… and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago. …And with that plunge back into my own past, there arose at once, almost like heartbreak, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country, and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together in a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss 

That thrill was something I started to treasure and to look for and for a while it existed in me together with the evangelical belief about the sinfulness of queerness without the two meeting... for a while. It couldn't last though; the draw I felt towards queerness—the fascination or longing—eventually showed itself to be too often present in the company of the homosexuality I had learned to call sin. Now this was confusing at first; Evangelical children are not, as a rule, taught about umbrella concepts or the nuanced and complicated ways in which trans identities overlap and differ from sexual orientation. I knew I wanted to be a girl and I knew I wasn't into guys, and I knew homosexuality was sinful and I knew I was drawn to this thing and knew that the thing often showed up around homosexuality and it was all just very confusing. The result though was that I distanced myself from that longing. I told myself it was sinful, or at least that it would lead to sin, and I worked hard to mimic the reactions to of those around me. "This—This thing," I told myself "is not for me, it is not about me, it is bad for me".

A friend of mine posted recently that post-Evangelicals have a complicated relationship with our own desires because we are taught that we need to reject our desires and replace them with God's desires. It takes a long time to figure out—and longer to integrate—that what that has often meant is that we need to replace the desires God has actually given us with the desires that straight white male Church leaders have for us. I think about that a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing that queerness is sinful. 

For a while I thought that it might be a sort of tragedy that befell some people, but that didn't last long. I came to think, then accept, then believe, and now I know, that queerness is beautiful and holy. 

But the thing about growing up, the thing about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop believing that queerness is sinful without remembering why I had decided that it is not for me, not about me. Queerness was beautiful but I was not queer. And of course that is the other thing: I could decide as a 12 year old that queerness was not about me but I was never able to stop the longing for queerness. The soul broken off from itself cannot stop wanting to be made whole no matter how well we bandage it. 

I was magnetically drawn to queerness but I was a cis-het dude; there was no way for me to connect. Not that I didn't try; I read books about queer people and queer theory, I studied LGBTQ+ history, I sponsored my high school's GSA, I made friends with LGBTQ+ people, I advocated, I watched movies, I went to pride parades, I volunteered, I debated with people online, I wrote blog posts, I got kicked out of my church. And it was all satisfying—sort of; it all scratched at an itch—but though a heavy coat. Anyway though, it didn't matter; here was a community that was on my heart—a community whose holiness I could see even if so many Christians around me couldn't seem to—and I was going to atone for my past and, far more importantly, I was going to be towards them the way we all should. I wanted to badly to be a good ally. I think about that a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing that I was cis or het.

For three and a half years I lived in this in-between space: publicly a cis-het guy and knowing myself to be a trans lesbian. But see the thing about how we develop as people, about our lives being a story in time, is that I could stop thinking I was a straight man without remembering, or at least without knowing what that meant for who I am. I wanted to be part of the trans community; "You are valid" is a phrase I saw applied to me and to people like me all the time. And it was true, and it is true, and every trans person is who they are and I could still struggle to ever really feel like that was true. 

That was the stage in my life where I stopped crying. I have never been a really big crier, but I haven't worked to avoid it either. There is this thing that happens when people think you are a boy. From the time you are little you get told in a million loud and quiet ways that growing up means getting control of your emotions; you need to master them. Then if you are the sort of person that most people tend to assume is a boy, in you teens you get these floods of testosterone. My experience on testosterone (and I have heard similar things from other people who have been on the hormone, both voluntarily and involuntarily) is that it makes your anger super accessible. I have seen this overstated as though T turns people into hulk-esque rage-beasts but it is really more like anger is one book on your shelf of emotions and T just pushes it out a little so that it's easier to grab. But, you see, this becomes kind of a whole thing for people who believe we have to master our emotions because now the consequences of not mastering them is that people get hurt, maybe people we like or even love. There is a reason that self-control is a virtue and it isn't a bad reason. And I did have a temper and I did have to learn to control it. 

Anyway I got good at controlling my anger. Then I learned a neat trick. It turns out that if you try, you can turn nearly any negative emotion into anger. Sadness, depression, shame, and embarrassment can all be turned into anger. I developed a go-to method for handling negative emotions: turn them into anger and then control the anger. During those three years I would sing the virtue of my method. "Anger," I would say " is the only negative emotion that moves you forward. I turn my sadness into anger because it drives me to change the circumstances that made me sad." 

I am now convinced that this is a perspective which is really only available to the sort of white men who can comfortably assume that their own channeled anger will result in positive change in their circumstances; it often doesn't work like that for the rest of us. I mean let's be real, it didn't work that way for me. I had plenty to be angry about and I channeled it into doing all sorts of good things but nothing I was willing to do was going to change the pain of not being myself.

The thing nobody warned me about (I mean culture sort of warned me about it but not in that "this applies to you" sort of way that might have worked) is that turning your negative emotions into something else is called numbing; really that's any form of trying to not experience your negative emotions. And you can't selectively numb. 

So I stopped crying. Then I stopped really laughing. I really missed it too. I would think about it a lot.

Eventually I stopped believing I could save the life I had built by pretending to be something I wasn't. Eventually I realized that the attempt to be him was going to destroy everything I wanted for him. 

And I told my wife that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told my family that I am trans—I am a woman; and I told the world that I am trans—I am a woman. I started laughing again about three months after I told Ashley. But I still didn't cry; I still couldn't cry. 

See the thing about healing, the thing about growing, the thing about sewing back on the chunk of your soul that got torn away the day you realized that you couldn't be—weren't—the girl you knew you were* is that it takes time. Imagine sewing a hand back on after it has been severed for 39 years. You can connect things back together—the skin, the bones, the muscles, the blood vessels—but until the nerves connect, you aren't going to be feeling much from that hand. But what if those nerves heal too? What if they grown back together. What if your wife says from the other room "...that's the thing, you actually really want to be queer"? 

And then your body knows that you are queer and that you are healing a step before you conscious mind does. And then you are about to integrate with your own experience—the experiences you were always having and never letting yourself have because you couldn't only now you could and now you did and here it comes, here it comes, here it comes. And then the toothbrush clatters into the sink and then you are crumpled up on the bathroom floor sobbing and you don't know why yet but you are starting to know why and you already always have known but you are also about to find out. And then there is snot and there are tears and your wife is holding you while you shake and you weep because life cannot be this good, and your own self cannot contain this much beauty. But it does and it already always has and now you know that—only it isn't that you know that, it is that you are knowing it right now. 

And then I was breathing and laughing and crying a little less and I wanted to tell Ashley how good this was and how grateful I am and we moved from the bathroom floor to the couch and she grabbed some tissues on the way and I opened my mouth and then the next wave hit and I was always already queer and I was always already everything that I had only known from behind glass and under the gauze that I had wrapped around my mind and then there was no them in queerness there was us. And every emotion I had had about them were altogether in one moment emotions I had already had/was having/will have about us. And of course I am sobbing again, I am shattered but I am born and breathing and held and whole.

So anyway yes. Sehnsucht. That is a little bit what I think it means to yearn for being united with God.

I am me now.

*Ok it is a lot more complicated then "I knew". I have written a lot about that Here and Here

Hidden

I want to give some context for this piece (apparently I am more concerned about being misunderstood than I used to be). This is a work of creative writing that began (about 90% of it) in the late summer of 2017, the year I had realized that I am trans and also decided that I was "not going to do anything about it" which is to say I had decided to know/admit/acknowledge my gender identity to myself but not to come out, not to identify publicly as trans, and certainly not to transition. Of course that is not how things turned out (and you can read about that process HERE).

I decided to share this piece (once I had edited it, cleaned it up, powdered its nose and corrected the typos) for a couple of reasons: First I hope that this might be helpful to other people who are struggling to figure out whether or not they are trans. Second I think it gives some insight into what figuring out who we are can look like for some trans people and I have a hope that if more cis people have a better understanding of us, that will contribute to a better and more beautiful world for all of us. And third, I am rather proud of it as a piece of creative writing and I want to share it with the world.

And now some important caveats: In this piece I am using a very specific conceit to explore the process of coming to know myself more fully. That conceit involves splitting my self into two sperate personas. Doing that is fraught for a number of reasons. For one thing it risks giving the impression that I (or even worse, trans people in general) suffer from some from of dissociative identity disorder. That is not the case, and I do not at all want to give the impression that it is. I want to point out that this conceit has been used numerous times by cis authors and artists to explore the relationship between the conscious and the sub-conscious or between two strong desires which happen to be in tension, or to explore any number of ways in which we humans experience internal conflict or dawning awareness. And I am certainly not the only, much less first, trans person to use it. A few years after I had written the core of this and while it was still sitting in a journal folder, I ran across this terrific series from Mae Dean at Real Life Comics and more recently Robin Brooks gave a charming treatment of it for similar ends. For another, this conceit risks giving the impression that I do not consider myself the same person as who I was for 39 years. This one is a little more tricky because there are trans people who prefer to establish a hard distinction between their past and current selves and that is certainly reasonable and works well for those it works well for. In my own case the experience has been much more one of continuity. I have always been me but up until last year I was me-with-constraints now that I am out I am still very much myself but I no longer am limited by the restrain of false-male-ness. Put another way, I have always been my true self, but now I get to be my full self; and that is glorious.

Also I dealt with some pretty significant internalized transphobia so if that isn't something you are comfortable reading you might want to skip this piece.

So with all of that having been said, here is Hidden:

Hidden

I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together

I am told, and I believe, that most people were created by God. I imagine it must be really nice. There must be a comforting solidity to it, being created by God. I mean... God, the Fundament of all Being. There is God and then God makes stars, galaxies, water, sunsets and you. You are right up there with galaxies. Do you ever stop and just stand there feeling solid, and grounded, and real?

I'm not really like you in that way. In a lot of ways I am a lot more like Frodo. I guess that is pretty cool too on some level—Frodo is the hero after all—but it has its drawbacks. J.R.R. Tolkien thought that one of the glories of humans was the work of sub-creation, that humans get the dignity of being creators and creatures at the same time; humans create within the scope of the everything that is already made by God. And that is great and all but did you ever stop to think how Frodo might have felt about it? Sure he gets to be the hero, he lives something like forever beyond the sea, but all of that is because he was created by a geeky philologist who had a hankering for writing British mythology. There must have been something a little unsettling about all of that for him.

You were probably made by God so maybe you don't understand. I was made by a confused little girl living in North America in the 80s and I really feel for Frodo. I don't think the little girl really even knew what she was doing at the time. And from my creation forward I probably grew and developed in a way that is a lot like the way you did. Things came at me and in response I developed, I changed, I grew. A personality emerged; it has preferences, ticks, tastes, little things that drive it up the wall, and stories, songs, poems, and dreams that make it weep—or at least they used to have that effect, it hasn't been crying much anymore. It longs—I long—for home. But what is home, what does "home" mean when the mind you sprang from belongs to a little girl who forgot her own self? What is "return" for a derivative being, the product of a self-forgetting sub-creator?

I think she was happy for a while—before she made me. I remember that she was a tomboy with a couple of boy best friends before gender and "ways of being in the world" complicated existence. She can't have been perfect and there is no way I can be avoiding some fairly monstrous hagiography here (is it really "hagiography" when you are talking about your own creator?) but I don't remember her being sad at first—well, not before the anguish—not before me. I don't think she knew she was a girl back then, she didn't really think of herself as a boy either or if she did I don't think she had much of an idea what that meant. Her friends were boys, her life was fun, her parents loved her, she could do pretty much whatever she wanted. At least that is how I remember it.

Then came the anguish. I don't really know what brought it on—I know she didn't have the foggiest idea. One minute she was sitting at a little desk working on her school work and the next she was sobbing having what I can only retroactively diagnose as an acute panic attack. In one arbitrary moment her whole world had suddenly skewed wrong.

Everything felt wrong. She felt wrong—profoundly wrong. Her hands were wrong, her hair was wrong, her stupid clothes were stupid wrong. Her face was wrong. I remember that the wrongness was a very physical thing. For a while I described the whole thing as a sense of being irredeemably dorky. Imagine that you woke up tomorrow to find that, in your sleep, an enormous purple and orange flower had grown out of the side of your head. Imagine knowing that it could never be removed, and that for the rest of your life people would see you as "that person with the ridiculous flower"; no outfit will ever look right, you will never achieve a "look" at all because everything will always clash with the flower, everyone will always notice the flower.

The little girl's parents (and they are lovely and loving people) were, of course, concerned. They didn't know what she was crying about and she didn’t really know how to tell them (six year old children do not, as a rule, have particularly well developed psychological or social vocabulary). All she could say was that she felt like nobody would ever like her.

Her parents tried to comfort her. They promised that people would like her, they reminded her about all of her friends and her loving family. She knew they weren't wrong, but they were barely communicating. It wasn't about being liked, not really, that was just the closest language she had, it was about being right; it was about the stupid giant purple and orange flower growing out of the side of her head that no one else could see and was also all anyone could see of her. All that her parent's managed was to calm her down a bit and convince her that she was perfectly like-able just the way she was. But by doing that, they cut the cord binding her grief to her language. The anguish didn't go away, only her ability to talk about it.

She accepted the comfort (she had already learned enough to know how to comfort the people trying to comfort her) then retreated to her bed for a while and lay there with the agony. It was a real thing. She knew, she just knew, that the wrongness would not be going away. And so she did the only thing she could. Drowning in the wrongness she clutched at the only life-line she could reach. Combining her pain with her determination to live, she created me. My creation didn't feel magical to her. I was not her inspiration; my birth was hardly spiritual or transcendent. No, I began to exist as she chose to make peace with her anguish. She took all of the wrongness and she accepted it; she took it into her own self. She made a boy for whom all of that wrongness could be rightness. Taking everything she liked about herself, she cut and shaped a boy who could hold as much of it as possible. He couldn't hold it all of course, but she managed to fit a lot of it into me—at least I think she did. This boy—me—was still raw and only barely formed; he, I, was nothing more than a person who could comfortably wear the weight of her wrongness and preserve as much as possible of her own self. Last she took her consciousness, her memory of her whole self, and she gave them to me, and I became alive for the first time.

We were always together after that. Have you ever gotten into a relationship so much that you sort of forgot where you ended and your friend started, where "she" became "we" and for a moment you couldn't remember which one of you it was that loves hot chocolate and who it was that finds grasshoppers offensively pretentious? We were like that, my creator and me. On me, her wrongness wasn't wrong and so I handled most of the interacting-with-the-world for us. Don't judge, wouldn't you want to protect a little girl like that? The thing is, though, being in the world is sort of how people grow and work out who they are. So the more I got to be in the world the more we found out who I am, the way I deal with friends and with bullies. So many of those little bits that together form a personality, grow out of our experiences in the world. I might have started out as a barely formed lump of pain and determination—albeit one that looked a whole lot like my creator but then don't you claim to bear the image of your creator as well—but it didn't take long for me to start developing into a more and more distinct person.

We very rarely disagreed. I don't know if we disagreed at all until recently, but that comes later I think. Mostly we wanted the same stuff, liked the same stuff, hated the same stuff. We don't like bullies, we hate feeling awkward, we learned that anger is the armor you can put on sadness if you want to fix your problems. We learned that laughter is how you breathe and that friends matter a lot. She was always helping me out too, she has always been better at seeing who is hurting and she cares enough to make me care. Together we studied the world and together we figured out just what sort of boy she thought was cool, and together we worked and worked to turn me into that boy. We goofed up sometimes; it's hard to build a real person out of a hodgepodge of archetypes and pop culture images—we (she?) figured out the trick is to build in some personal touches and quirks. I don't really have any of those of my own, so the only way for me to be real was for her to give them to me.

I don't really think we forgot about her. If you look at it one way, we never really even knew she existed—or that she wasn’t me—or that I wasn’t her? I mean, her existence definitely turned out to be a huge shock to me; I think it surprised her too. I came along so early in her life, and everything hurt so much when she made me. I don't think she thought of me as another person, I was just the version of us that didn't hurt so much. I am the one that could survive in the world. I am not wrong.

I'm not perfect though (have you ever wondered what it would feel like to realize that you couldn't perfectly protect your own creator, that you can't quite properly perform the one role you were made for?). Sometimes I wasn't strong enough or solid enough to protect her. While we were kids—elementary and middle school mostly—this generally manifested as a wistfulness. We would see some girl. I remember this one girl; we played on a youth baseball league for a couple of years—we weren't great but we weren't terrible either; we got by with humor and an infectious smile—and this girl was on a team which played adjacent to our field. She was fast and confident with long black hair and an athletic build. We always felt strange around her—sort of happy and sort of sad. I told my friends I had a crush.

There were other times like that. I remember she sort of wanted to play with some of the girls in my fourth grade class. They were doing more and more impressive games with jump ropes which looked like fun. I found those girls sort of intimidating though, and playing those jump rope games would have been wrong on me; at least back then I really thought it wouldn't quite work with who she wanted me to become, not in public anyway. So I waited and we played the same games with my little sister and her friend when we got home.

Neither of us minded being friends with the boys anyway. We weren't really great at the sports side of things but we love giving everything to a competition or a fight; I have believed for a long time that sufficient passion covers over a lack of talent to at least some significant degree. And when our group moved away from sports and started playing games with our imaginations—pretending to be the Ninja Turtles, or making up our own superhero personas to defeat imaginary bad guys—I really got to shine. We both love stories and imagination. Those guys were fun and they were good friends.

Stories were a big thing for us; they still are. When we read stories we stop existing in this world altogether and instead we exist like a ghost floating over the world of the story. I have always been able to forget my worries, stresses, and pressures when I am reading. Some days I don't think that I have ever actually read a story—I think she reads them. When we are reading stories I stop existing; she has no body, no context, no social location. It's how she escapes from me. I don't mind though, I like the stories too and we have had a lot of fun thinking about them over the years. By high school we were reading five or six novels a week. It was a stressful time and I think she needed time away from us to breathe. But that is getting ahead of myself.

Some time in early middle school I read The Tin Woodman of Oz. For a portion of the book, the main characters get transformed into strange animals and forms for the amusement of a giant witch. She adds something to the enchantment that causes them not to mind the transformation. We found it overwhelmingly arresting. I clearly remember something happening inside of us when we read that passage. It was a new thing but it contained echoes of other experiences. There were hints of the agony and hints of the wistfulness but

Tip

there was something more, something new, something urgent. And there was shame too. I had borrowed The Tin Woodman from the library and I must have read and re-read that passage dozens of times in the two weeks I had the book. After the first time I read it at night, under the sheets of my bed using a flashlight as a reading light. I had no idea why I couldn't let anyone know that I was fascinated by that passage but I knew I had to keep it secret. Having someone find out about that book would be like having someone see me naked. It is a strange thing to be ashamed of something you don't understand and don't have any language for.

I think now that The Tin Woodman of Oz must have given her hope. I do know that after that I read all of the Oz books that I could get my hands on. Did you know that in Ozma of Oz we find out that Ozma, the princess of Oz spent her childhood magically transformed into a boy named Tip? L. Frank Baum had a hell of an imagination and those books are way stranger than most people realize. Did you ever notice that almost all of the protagonists are girls?

Ozma

She really liked Pippi Longstockings too, and Nancy Drew. One of the cool things about having a reputation as a voracious reader is that adults, and even other kids, eventually stop questioning your choice of reading material. Everyone knew I would read almost any story I could get my hands on so I was able to supply her with Pippi and Nancy and Beezus almost as much as we read Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and Henry.

She must have had some idea of what was going on during all of this time. I don't think she ever vanished into me entirely. I think now that that might be why we had such an aversion to male-female boundary crossing when I was young. One time, probably around late elementary school, I visited some friends. Two girls and two boys all around my age. Well, the girls were close to my age, the boys were younger. That day the sisters decided to dress one of their brothers up as a sister. It was... fascinating? I remember not knowing how to feel about it but knowing that I should not let on how strong my internal reaction was. The kids I was playing with all clearly thought that the whole thing was silly and fun, so I went along with that reaction but I freaked out when they suggested doing me next. I think she was afraid someone would see her. I have always experienced a measure of fear anytime I encountered public gender play. There were other emotions involved too and I think they probably changed from time to time but the fear was always a constant.

I don't want to give the impression that I interacted a lot with my creator over the years. Most of the time we didn’t much notice each other—either because our interests were identical or because she left me on autopilot—and sometimes she would cheerfully advise me in the form of an inner monologue about what sort of man I ought to become. I think sometimes her dreams would slip through and I would catch myself day dreaming about how cool it would be to be a certain type of girl, but I knew that I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about that so I didn't. Well, no, there was one time when a friend of mine spent the night and, while we were in our beds chatting before falling asleep he blithely informed me that sometimes he thought it would be cool to be a girl. I think she told him that I agreed but maybe not. He did say it though.

In a lot of ways puberty was a pretty decent time for us. Our body developed in a way that seemed to satisfy her; just like she had planned, it was just right for what she was designing me to be. Or it was pretty close anyway. She never really minded—at least at the outset—that our body was increasingly wrong for her. She was pleased for me as my voice cracked and deepened and when I got to start shaving; I think she was amused, excited, and impressed with how well these developments all worked to make our body more and more into a fortress which would hide her from an unfriendly world. In fact, it helped me to defend her (or hide her?) more effectively.

Girls became fascinating in middle school, or rather that is when they became fascinating in that way. There was a cover of Elle magazine which had a picture of a woman with prominent cleavage. I was fascinated by the woman on the cover and couldn't figure out why, but I did know that I would be embarrassed or ashamed if someone caught me looking. The magazine was at a tutor's house and I remember working to sneak covert glances at the woman on the magazine throughout the lesson that day.

I need to stop for a second here and remind you that she is really smart, and a pretty keen observer. By high school, she had definitely worked out the most effective way for me to live into her wrongness. She had figured out what sort of guy I needed to be in order to maximize my own realness and to give her a chance to express as much of herself as possible in the world without ever being seen as herself. Humor, wit, a love of reading and critical thinking, loyalty to friends and family. We know that the best deceptions incorporate an element of truth (the more the better really) so outside of a few failed and humiliating experiments, she never made any serious effort to make me into some sort of macho hulk. I was never the soldier or jock type, but I also learned quickly how to avoid being seen as effeminate. It was the 90's and the funny-but-passionate kid was an easy role for her to slip me into.

I should also clarify that for all of this time—the cracks won't start to show till much later—I was just who we are. She never thought of any of this as deception or playing a part; were just learning how, and what kind of man we would be able to be in this world. We knew our options and she was living within reality. Neither of us had made a connection between the old anguish, the wistfulness, or our desires, and the possibility that she might exist.

I don't really remember whether the stories or the cross dressing came first. It was probably the stories though. People grow during puberty. That stage in life is certainly a physically liminal one, but it is psychically liminal as well. I think maybe she stopped fitting into me quite as well around puberty and that only makes sense doesn't it? It can be hard to tell a little boy and a little girl apart but once they become teenagers they differentiate a lot more. As my sexuality developed along the fairly typical "straight, red-blooded, male" lines we discovered together the special wonders of the female form. She wasn't struggling to get out exactly, I think maybe a better statement would be that she began to wake up, or at least to stretch around that time.

Seen another way, I stopped being right in the world around the time I went through puberty. I don't really remember how it was that I discovered the genre of gender transformation erotica on the internet but discover it we did. Here was a sexuality which felt comfortable, which "fit", in critical ways for the first time—the problem was that it didn't "fit" for me at all. It made all the sense in the world for her—at least it would have if either of us had realized that she existed at that time—but for the first time we had stumbled into a way of being in this world for which I was the one who was wrong. We both want to be with women, it's just that we both want to be with women as women. We resolved the tension by deciding that I am a pervert.

It is easy to convince yourself that you are a pervert when the things you want feel so shameful. I think puberty and the feelings that go with it were something of a godsend to us really, I think they kept me around longer anyway. Sexuality gave us a box to put our experiences in. If they didn't fit perfectly, they at least fit into that box better than they did into anything else we had. I think she must have decided that I am a pervert—sure that's a problem but it's a manageable one. Most perverts are perverts in secret anyway aren't they? And besides, there is nothing odd or unusual about being ashamed of your perversions. I think she likes girls too. I know I do and that made a lot of things straightforward for us; with a little forcing and a little forgetting, it could contextualize all (or at least most) of the

strange feelings I had ever had when I encountered femininity. Clearly, we decided, I was just hyper-sexual and so incredibly straight that my healthy sexual interest in femininity must have somehow overflowed and caused some perverse desire to enter into it myself. There is the one writer, C.S. Lewis, who said that we don’t just want to experience Beauty, the deep longing of our soul is to enter into it—to take part in it; but I don’t think he meant that the way I experience it.

So I also started cross dressing in high school. I am not proud of it (I am not built to be proud of it) but it is a fact. I am beginning to wonder whether she might actually be proud of that. After all, cross dressing probably marks the first time she asserted herself powerfully enough to dictate my actions. I didn't do it a lot—only when the mood struck, the family was asleep, and I was sure I wouldn't get caught. I would sneak into the bathroom with my stash, lock the door, and turn into... a girl. You have to realize that this was a fairly confusing thing for a teenage boy to find himself doing. It wasn't really sexual—which would have also been confusing if I had let us notice it—it just felt good for about 10 minutes looking at myself in the mirror. Then I would take everything off and try to erase any trace of what I had done. Then I would get in bed and fall asleep praying that I would get caught so that someone would stop me from doing that ever again.

My senior year in high school, my family found my stash. So that was awkward. They are a pretty cool family and I think they were more confused than anything else. I think they just threw it all away and confronted me about it when I got home from school. I kind of apologized, they made it clear that "it" wasn't cool but everything stayed pretty vague and nothing further was ever said about it. I think I ran across the term autogynophilia* on the internet around that time so at least I had a name for my perversion.

I went to a small religious college and those don't provide many opportunities for cross dressing so I managed to stop that behavior after high school; she was relegated back to my fantasy life and only dared to hint at her own existence when I was especially aroused. Sexuality had become the only context in which she could emerge safely because it was the only context we had for making any sense of her.

After college I got married. We both really love my wife. I should probably mention at this point that our whole upbringing and background was both religious and conservative. So it shouldn't surprise you to hear that we were hardly affirming of LGBTQ folks. I was definitely on the side of Team Conservative Christian. I don't know the extent to which shaping me towards being a "Big Hearted Conservative" type person was her decision or just the natural consequence of my surroundings as we grew up. But that is definitely what I was trying to be all through high school and college. At the same time, this meant that everything relating to her was something I spent a lot of my early adult life categorizing as "sin". I don't think she really had any problem with this since she had created me as a way of righting a wrongness she originally sensed within (without?). To the extent that she manifested in me, we both assumed that she was, herself, a wrongness (and yes I realize that there is some inversion and circularity involved there, people are complicated OK?). I didn't have any qualms about getting married. We were, we are, in love. Sure I was a pervert but I was pretty sure I had that under control and I was totally up front with my wife about the fact of my perversion as I understood it at the time. Well I was mostly up front anyway. I didn't get into specifics, I just talked about how I struggled with "sin". At the time it just seemed inappropriate and distasteful to talk about what type.

Our outlook on LGBT people changed over time. Someone once asked me whether I believe that souls have gender. It occurred to me that I do but I have been struggling to find some proof or strong argument for that conclusion ever since. It just sort of seemed obvious to me at the time. Bodies are bodies. They are shaped in different ways and have different functions. They fit our purposes more or less well. The stoic philosophers used to argue that, since we have limited power to shape the world, the only way to become happy was to shape our desires to conform to the world; I get what they were saying but I think they were full of shit. Souls also exist. My whole experience of life tells me that souls can be and sometimes are gendered in a way which just doesn't fit the body. Some bodies just don't naturally function in a way that allows the soul to express itself fully. Anyway, we were affirming of transgender identities several years before we were affirming of lesbian, gay, and bisexual relationships; but it was the latter that led to the big change for us.

Sometime after I had changed my take on LGB relationships (and we try to be a good ally now) someone—a gay man—asked on social media why it was that straight cis people who do ally work are so often assumed to be queer; can't people just be doing that work because they are decent human beings? I think it must have been a Saturday morning because I hadn't taken a shower yet. I cheerfully agreed with the person and said something or other as an encouragement to him. But as the day wore on I started to think about his question more and more. I was (I am?) a straight ally after all. But then I have always had that niggling thing in the back of my mind reminding me that it would be pretty cool to be a woman—but that was just my perversion wasn't it? I decided to take a minute and really properly examine that niggling thing so that I could get a proper grip on it, understand it, and move on.

The thing is that, by then, I had learned a lot—a whole lot—more about LGBTQ folk than I had known back in high school and college. I mean I have always been drawn to queerness. I would never tell a trans person that their sense of a gendered self is a perversion. By then I had, she had, we had made quite a few LGBT friends, We, I, she, had read so much more. We know, I know that autogynephilia is utter bullshit—most cis poeple find it arousing to be in their own skin with their own bodies. But we hadn’t take that experience out and looked at it in a long time.

When I really need to concentrate on a problem or a question I think about it in the shower. It's a quiet environment, the water provides just enough of a physical stimulus to allow me to concentrate at maximum efficacy, and I am relatively unlikely to be interrupted mid-ponder by one of my children.

So I asked myself as I stood under the flow of water do I actually want to be a woman? What is really going on with this? Until I asked the question I genuinely expected an answer in the negative and to be able to get on with things. Instead I suddenly felt like I was falling: I couldn't answer "no". I could not, when being honest with myself, honestly say that I don't want to be a woman. Cis people do not want to be the opposite sex, cis people do not want to be another sex, cis people are happiest being the gender that they are; that is what makes them cisgender . But, the more I thought about it, the more I turned the thought over and over in my head, our head, her head, the more I found I wanted—no desperately wanted—to be a woman. And then it was like a bomb going off in my psyche. Everything was wrong again—I was wrong again. The next thing I knew I was curled into a ball, shaking under the water from my shower. I couldn't answer "no"; I couldn't answer "no"; I couldn't answer "no”. Oh God, oh God, I want to be a woman. What does this mean? What do I do with this? Am I a woman? What even am I?

 

Even existential panic can’t last forever though and eventually we managed to pull myself together enough to finish my shower and get dressed. After all, I had almost half a lifetime's experience repressing—protecting?—this thing inside me; I was practiced at it; I knew that this shower experience was not something that the life I had built would be able to survive, and I have built a good life. So I concentrated on pushing, crushing, ignoring the whole experience. At least that is what I decided to do. It isn't what happened.**

Footnotes:

* This was my experience of what is called Autogynophelia theory. The theory has been thoroughly debunked but managed to hurt a lot of trans women and is still pulled out and weaponized against us by bad faith and misinformed people.

**When I returned to this theme after processing all that shows up here and ultimately deciding to come out and live as my full self, I planned to write a sort of sequel from "the girl"'s perspective—and I may end up doing that some day—but what I ended up writing was this poem and honestly I think it is a great follow up.

You really should read this wonderful series by the incomparable Mae Dean

Lazarus

 LAZARUS

Jesus said, “Remove the stone.” Martha, the sister of Lazarus, said to Him, “Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.

I am here and I am me 

and, I was always me. 

Now though, 

I am learning to un-learn 

the rough ruts I carved into my mind 

when I carved him out of pain and fear. 

When he first found me 

I could only be 

in the form of thought and longing 

but, 

I was me, 

and he was me 

finding myself, and now

I am myself, and he is not dead, but we 

because he was always me. 

The love, the life, the pain we lived; 

my loves, my life, and my pain. 

And when I was him, 

and when I was only just remembering to be me, 

and when I was only just learning how to not be him 

but to have been him, 

I told him to tell me that if I just let him 

suffocate me a little longer, 

then the air would not burn so sharp 

nor the light pierce so bright

as I emerged, 

but now I am a little stronger, 

and now I cannot tell myself that this coat is my skin, 

and now I want the air to burn if it means that I get to feel the light. 

I want to breathe,

and I am breathing, 

and maybe now 

these are shallow breaths

but, 

the dead skin of this mask is sloughing off,

and every day it gets harder to plaster it back on to my face 

and to use his visage to smile at the world. 

When Lazarus heard the call to wake and to come out 

he did not take a shower, or change his clothes before he sought the sun, 

and I do not want to wait in this tomb until the stink wears off 

and Martha brings me a clean set of clothes.