Bareface Revisited: C.S. Lewis and the Identity Claims of Transgender People

Prologue to the Second Edition

This is an update to a piece I wrote 4 years ago. Think of it as a second edition. When I wrote the original (which is still available HERE) I knew that I am a trans woman but was not yet out. Writing about this topic under those conditions was always complicated for me. On the one hand it was a topic I felt almost compelled to write about and to weigh in on and at the same time, recognizing my own apparent social location and not wanting to betray truths I was not yet ready to share meant writing with a sort of artificial distance from my subject matter—I had to write as though my first hand knowledge were second or third hand instead and as though those concerns which impact me directly instead applied to "those I care about". Certainly it helped that I had read a lot on the topic (and have read more now) and that I do care a great deal for all of my trans siblings who are affected by this topic, but that distance led me to feel that, as much as I like this essay—and it is one of my personal favorites—it was never as strong as it might have been. 

Recently a friend of mine brought my attention back to this piece mentioning that he had found it helpful in relating to trans people in his life and, on a whim, I re-read it and found that while I still believe the the core argument is strong, I wanted to re-write it so as to fully own its contents and form. Thus I have chosen to edit and re-formulate to my hearts content, in some places bolstering lines or reasoning that some readers found thin and in other places merely updating the language and the phrasing to more accurately represent my own relation to the subject matter. I hope you enjoy it. 

On Historical Method

To my best knowledge C.S. Lewis never directly interacted with an out transgender individual or commented on the validity of the identity claims of transgender people. Because he lived and died before much of the current understanding of transgender experiences and identities had been developed it would be anachronistic to claim that he supported (or would have supported) transgender people in our identity claims. And because even the most logical of individuals is likely to be influenced and limited by the prejudices and beliefs of their own context it would be foolish to claim with certainty that Lewis—if he were around today—would affirm transgender people's identities. The "what would this person think of this if they were alive today" game generally not worth playing and I do not intend to take it up here. Instead, what I do think I can demonstrate is that there is ample material in Lewis' work to construct a strong argument in favor of the validity of the gender identities of transgender individuals—an argument which Lewis, if he had been consistent to his own professed assumptions and beliefs—would have been compelled to accept. That is not to say that his thinking is easily compatible with the different models—there are more than one, and for many of us theory only comes after experience and attepts to fit itself to what we already know—which transgender people put forth in defense of our identity claims; in fact Lewis' thinking doesn't quite map on to any one of the dominant models today. What his ideas and methods do establish, however, is a model both for conceptualizing transgender gender identity claims from an orthodox Christian perspective, a structure of reasoning which recommends (demands even) trusting the gender identity claims made by transgender people, and a perspective on the denial of those claims which frames them as a particular sort of sin.

It is probably worth stating here that Lewis did comment on homosexuality generally and on lesbian and gay sex specifically in his published and unpublished writing. While he was arguably less condemning than some of his contemporaries, he was not affirming of gay and lesbian sex and (in That Hideous Strength) did engage in what can, at best, be described as queer-coding at least two of his villains. As I have written elsewhere, I do not intend any apologetic for this view on Lewis' part—I believe he was wrong—and anyone who might hope to "recruit" Lewis as a post-mortem advocate for LGB acceptance should be aware of his views, though I would be very interested to see an analysis of his overall thought which might contextualize his stated position as contradicting his philosophy and theology as a whole.

Vocabulary, Terminology, and Background Theory

This essay makes regular reference to much terminology which is specific to the contemporary (2023) conversation around or about gender, transgender people, and transgender identities. Readers unfamiliar with that conversation, or who just want to review/refresh their understanding of the relevant language will find a helpful glossary HERE. While I will occasionally be nuancing some of the contemporary definitions (particularly the theory behind the word gender) in order to bridge the linguistic gap between Lewis life and our current moment, these definitions should fit my general usage.

To be clear, I do not at all mean to suggest that Lewis was saying the same thing that contemporary transgender theorists, gender theorists, and queer theorists are saying. I am hoping, here, only to develop a particular argument out of what C.S. Lewis can be demonstrated to have thought based on his published work and which arrives at the conclusion that we ought to affirm the gender identity claims of transgender people. While I certainly do hope that this argument will convince those who share many of Lewis' assumptions and beliefs to take that conclusion seriously, I am not suggesting that transgender people need the affirmation of Lewis' thought or argument structures. Transgender theory and philosophy is already being done effectively by transgender academics, theorists, theologians, and advocates. I have provided links to some of their work throughout and at the end of this piece.

Some Background on The Identities of Transgender People and Reality Enforcement

In her essay Trapped in the Wrong Theory: Rethinking Trans Oppression and Resistance trans philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher identifies an impulse for reality enforcement as the primary motive behind transphobia generally and anti-trans violence in particular. She claims:

While there are many features associated with reality enforcement, it has four essential ones: identity invalidation, the appearance-reality contrast, the deceiver-pretender double bind, and genital verification. Identity invalidation is the erasure of a trans person's gender identity through an opposing categorization (e.g., a trans person sees herself as a woman, but she is categorized as a man). This invalidation is framed in terms of the appearance-reality contrast (e.g., a trans woman may be represented as "really a man disguised as a woman"). And this contrast is manifested in one of two ways that constitute a double-bind for trans people—namely, passing as nontrans (and hence running the risk of exposure as a deceiver) or else being openly trans (and consequently being relegated to a mere pretender). Genital verification can be a literal exposure (as with Brandon Teena, Gwen Araujo, and Angie Zapata) or else a discursive reveal through euphemistic comments like "was discovered to be anatomically male." These disclosures anchor identity invalidation in the notion of genitalia as a kind of concealed reality.

The core problem for trans people here, according to Bettcher, is fairly straightforward and entirely insidious. The on-the-ground fact for trans people is the regular denial of our experiences of themselves, reality as we experience it. Though different trans people articulate it in different ways, the experience of a denied identity is a constant. Reality enforcement as Bettcher explains it is the dynamic by which transgender people experience oppression and opposition in the world. The four ingredients which make up reality enforcement begin with a direct denial of the transgender person's gender identity claim. To use a transgender woman for an example (this would be a woman who was thought to be a boy when she was born and therefore assigned "male" initially): In the face of the transgender woman's claim that she is really a woman, identity invalidation occurs when someone else (the denier) insists on categorizing her as a man—the denier says, in effect, "no you are not really a woman". The denier explains the situation (using Bettcher's "appearance-reality contrast") by claiming that the transgender woman is really only disguised as a woman. The fact of this assertion and explanation means that the transgender woman is always in the double-bind of either being open about being transgender, which results in deniers labeling her as a pretender, or passing as nontrans/cisgender, which risks being "found out", having deniers label her a deceiver. In both of these situations the denier generally references the transgender woman's genitals as "proof" of her "real" status.

Pixabay

Of course there is a danger here that in referring to this dynamic as "reality enforcement" we might give the impression that those who engage in it genuinely are on the side of reality and that the complaint is only that they are being unkind in enforcing it on the affected trans person. But that would be a total misunderstanding of Bettcher's work and of the case of transgender people overall. In Trapped in the Wrong Theory Bettcher begins by acknowledging that reality is fundamentally contested in the interaction between a transgender person and someone who denies the trans person's gender identity. Thus the term reality enforcement does not refer to someone enforcing reality as it is(1) but to someone enforcing what they believe reality to be.

One implication of this for any third party observer is that, like it or not, they are shunted into the position of referee or judge in the case of the transgender person. Short of ignoring the conversation entirely—a choice which comes with its own, fraught, consequences—the  observer, cisgender(2) or not, is left having to choose first which version of reality to endorse and only second whether or not they will enforce it.

C.S. Lewis and Obligation to Reality

Now it is clear to me that C.S. Lewis would have recognized a preeminent duty obligation to Reality insofar as he was able to know it. In his essay Man or Rabbit he reflects:

The question [Can't you lead a good life without believing in Christianity] sounds as if it were asked by a person who said to himself 'I don't care whether Christianity is in fact true or not. I'm not interested in finding out whether the real universe is more like what the Christians say than what the Materialists say. All I'm interested in is leading a good life. I'm going to choose beliefs not because I think them true but because I find them helpful.' Now frankly, I find it hard to sympathize with this state of mind. One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing [emphasis mine].

Given that Lewis thought that the drive to know reality is one of the things which distinguishes humans from animals we must conclude that he would have applied this drive to the question of the contested reality between the transgender person and the denier. Thus we can safely conclude that he would have rejected the possibility of simply walking away from, ignoring, or refusing the question. He would also have refused to side with one reality-claim or the other based only on what would have made one or another party most comfortable or even safest. Lewis would have insisted on confronting the question straight on: Is the transgender person who claims to be a woman really a woman or really not a woman? Is the transgender man who claims to be a man really a man or really not a man? Only after answering that question, or deciding that it is finally un-answerable, can we approach the further question of whether or not reality ought to be enforced.

And I want to comment that as a trans woman and a fan of C.S. Lewis I find this remarkably comforting. A little too often I find that we end up consigned to a sort of "second class womanhood" by people who shy away from rigorous exploration of the claims of transgender people in favor of sort of provisionally accepting that the polite/pc/nice thing to do is to "treat us like" women without ever recognizing the ontological weight of our claims. 

The Core Question

Let us, then, look at the claim through as Lewis-ian a lens as possible: A person (the transgender person) is claiming to be a woman. A second person has denied the claim. When a transgender person makes a claim to a particular gender identity we generally cite our own experience of ourselves in relationship to the world. The evidence that the trans person cites (our own experience of the world) is subjective insofar as we are the only person with direct access to it but it is also a claim to an objective reality (we are claiming that we really are a particular gender). Against that the denier, depending on their background and inclination, will generally cite the transgender person's body as evidence against us. The irony here is that a transgender person's body is an objective reality which both the transgender person and the denier likely agree on. Our disagreement has all to do with the meaning of the transgender person's body as it relates to their claim, a fact which is worth at least commenting on to observe that this is all very awkward for trans people for the same reason that is is awkward for anyone to engage in significant discourse with someone over the contested meaning of our own body—we are talking about what is intimately ours while they are not talking about what is intimately theirs.

In any case, Lewis clearly outlined his process for thinking through apparently unlikely claims (claims which entail what Bettcher calls the "appearance-reality contrast") in the opening passage of Miracles:

If immediate experience cannot prove or disprove the miraculous, still less can history do so. Many people think one can decide whether a miracle occurred in the past by examining the evidence "according to the ordinary rules of historical inquiry." But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are [emphasis mine]. For if they are impossible then no amount of historical evidence will convince us. If they are possible but immensely improbable, then only mathematically demonstrative evidence will convince us: and since history never provides that degree of evidence for any event, history can never convince us that a miracle occurred. If, on the other hand, miracles are not intrinsically improbable, then the existing evidence will be sufficient to convince us that quite a number of miracles have occurred.

Following this outline, Lewis would first want to know is whether the gender identity claims of transgender people are intrinsically possible. If he believed that they were, indeed, possible he would then have gone on to ask how probable those claims are.

Possibility and the Sex-Gender Distinction

Would Lewis, then, have thought that the transgender person's claim is possible? A person who is claiming that they are five foot eleven inches tall and also that they are forty seven feet three inches tall must be wrong—not because I have never encountered a forty seven foot human before—but because being two different heights at the same time and in the same sense is a contradiction in terms. The transgender person, however, is not making a contradictory claim (here we head off one ridiculous accusation which is routinely directed towards the trans community). The transgender woman acknowledges (though she likely finds it more than a little rude for people to keep harping on it) the fact that, in some aspects and depending on whether or not/to what extent she has medically transitioned, her body aligns more with what most people expect from men than with what people expect from women. Read carefully, the transgender woman's claim is that she is a woman in spite of the fact that her body was identified as typically male back when she was born. Her appeal is to something (her gender) over and above her prominent sex markers. Therefore, so long as Lewis was willing to grant a distinction between sex and gender, we must conclude that he would have found the claims of transgender people at least possible.


As it turns out, Lewis not only recognized the sex-gender distinction, he positively endorsed it. In his novel Perelandra Lewis explores, among other things, the possible nature of angels. In that context he concludes that angels have a gender but not a sex, and he goes on to theorize about the relationship between the two.

When Ransom, the protagonist of Perelandra, encounters the angelic Archons (referred to in the text as Oyarsa) of Mars and Venus, Lewis describes those spirits (he is very clear that they do not have physical bodies but that "when creatures of the hypersomatic kind choose to 'appear' to us, they are not in fact affecting our retina at all, but directly manipulating the relevant parts of our brain") in a way which reveals much of what Lewis understood about sex and gender. It is worth noting that Lewis published Perelandra in 1944, well before the contemporary distinction between sex and gender gained any popular currency(3).

Both the bodies [of the Oyarsas] were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try—Ransom has tried a hundred times—to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra [the archon of Mars] was like rhythm and Perelandra [the archon of Venus] like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with the palms towards him. But I don't know that any of these attempts helped me much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and others feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine [emphasis mine]. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity... he of Malacandra was masculine (not male); she of Perelandra was feminine (not female). 

There is a lot here so let me break it down in to three specific observations:

First, Lewis clearly thought that there is a meaningful difference between sex and gender(4). The legitimacy of this distinction forms the core thesis of this passage. While Lewis seems to define sex in nearly the same way that contemporary sex and gender theorists do (as a physical phenomenon linked to reproduction, body morphology, etc...) his definition of gender is noticeably different—so much so that his definition is the subject of my third observation. Still it is clear from this passage that Lewis would have granted the fundamental plausibility of a claim which relied on distinguishing sex from gender.

Second, Lewis insists that gender, rather than sex, is the more fundamental property. Notice towards the end of the passage that he refers to gender as "as reality" whereas he calls [biological] sex "merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity [gender] which divides all created beings". For Lewis gender is a metaphysical property whereas sex is a physical property. Lewis understood humans to be composed of both a material and immaterial/spiritual/metaphysical part. As he says in The Screwtape Letters:

Humans are amphibians...half spirit and half animal...as spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time, means to change. 

The distinction between "spirit" (which Lewis understood to be, among other things, the location of gender) and "animal" implies the possibility that a given individual in a world of imperfect and changeable bodies might very well find that the aspect of them which is body does not correspond, or in Lewis' words "properly reflect" the gender of their immaterial aspect. In an attempt at rectifying that incongruity, Lewis would necessarily have privileged the immaterial gender as determinative and recommended correction of the body. Further, since Lewis locates spirit in "the eternal world" he would not have seen gender-corrective therapy as a real possibility for anyone. Sex, as an aspect of body, is potentially subject to change. Gender is not(5). 

To anticipate an objection that has become all too common among Christians over the last decade, yes this is all rather platonic. That is because Lewis was, in addition to being first and foremost a "mere Christian", rather an ardent Platonist who was eager to accept what Platonism had to offer philosophically so long as it did not contradict his Christianity. While there are certainly worthwhile conversations to be had about the place of platonic philosophy in Christian theology it should be accepted across the board that some degree of Platonism has never been understood to be disqualifying to orthodox Christianity. Further for any Evangelical reader it will be important to recognized the the much loved Lewis/Tolkien understanding of Christianity as "myth become fact" is an equally (and relatedly) platonic concept, one which Lewis enunciates most famously only a few pages from this selection on gender in Perelandra.

Third, Lewis' understanding of gender was unusual both in his own time and today. In broad strokes contemporary gender theory attaches two distinct meanings to the term gender and those two meanings are, in some cases, both affirmed by individual theorists. In the first meaning gender references a socially constructed set of conventions. Here gender (often disambiguated as gender expression) means the set of social expectations and roles which a society attaches to women, men (and potential third + genders as well). The whole concept of gender as a performance is rooted in this view and has its origins in second wave feminism. In the second meaning gender is as an identity (in this usage gender is often paired with the term identity forming the two-word term gender identity) or a deep seated sense of self. Here gender or gender identity is something that each person has or possesses and which is rooted in the experience of the self. This meaning is a later development, associated more with queer theory and third wave feminism. Lewis' usage is distinguishable from both of these. He understands gender to to be a metaphysical reality which pre-exists sex and is, in fact, something which biological sex must reference in order to find meaning. In Lewis' view, Masculine and Feminine gender are the realities which male and female(6) sex are images of. There is much that could be said about this and it is probably not quite a comfortable stance for any of the major participants in the contemporary discussion over transgender identities. His usage and understanding probably gets closer to Julia Serano's Intrinsic Inclinations model though, unlike Lewis, Serano locates the property in question (Serano's closest equivalent to Lewis' gender is her coinage subconscious sex) in the psyche or subconscious rather than in any clearly metaphysical or spiritual part of the human person(7). For our purposes the key implication of this is that Lewis clearly believed that a person's gender was something more true, more lasting, and more definitive of that person that their biological sex (organs, hormone levels, body shape, etc...). 

In this usage I am still trying to work out whether or not Lewis can properly be called a pioneer. J.R.R. Tolkien (who shared a writing society and informal philosophy club with Lewis) seems to reference a similar view of gender in The Silmarillion where, speaking of angelic beings he says

the Valar take upon them forms some as of male and some as of female; for that difference of temper they had even from their beginning, and it is but bodied forth in the choice of each, not made by the choice, even as with us male and female may be shown by the raiment but is not made thereby

and I have found some intimations of the same view in Owen Barfield and Charles Williams but I have not yet worked out whether this was something that they collectively arrived at, one convinced the others of, or something they all received from their shared love of medieval and romantic literature and theology.

From Possibility to Probability

So Lewis would certainly have seen the transgender person's claim—to be really a woman in the face of the denier's claim that that the transgender person is really not a woman—as possible. The next logical question then is: given that the claim is possible, is it probable? Just because a person makes a claim which is possible does not mean that we are under any obligation to accept the claim as true. If someone tells me that it is snowing in June, I can accept that snow is a possibility without having to believe that it is actually snowing in my vicinity at the moment. If I am told that someone has graduated from Yale, I can believe that Yale exists and that people do graduate from that institution without accepting that this particular person has really earned a diploma.

What should stand out almost immediately when we imagine how C.S. Lewis might approach the question of probability is the fact that Lewis was remarkably clear headed when it came to assessing relative probabilities of events insofar as he had a keen grasp on the distinction between something which is uncommon and something which is improbable. It is improbable that a given individual, chosen at random, will be or become the president of the United States of America specifically because there are very particular requirements one has to meet in order to achieve that status; that is to say that being the president of the United States of America is an exceptionally uncommon experience. However, it is not at all improbable that, at any given time, there will be some person who is the president of the Unites States, quite the contrary. Since transgender people generally claim that our experience of our own gender is a minority experience, Lewis would not have seen the fact that transgender claims are uncommon as an indication that they are, in any way, improbable. Again from Miracles:

How could they [miracles] be surprising unless they were seen to be exceptions to the rules? And how can anything be seen to be an exception till the rules are known? If there ever were men who did not know the laws of nature at all, they would have no idea of a miracle and feel no particular interest in one if it were performed before them. Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known.

The overall probability of a particular person being in a situation which runs contrary to the way things commonly occur in nature would, for Lewis, depend on the particularities of the exceptional situation. Here things become a little more difficult for us. Transgender people do not claim a gender identity on the basis of the miraculous. Rather the claim of a transgender person is that of the minority report. Transgender people specifically claim that the experience of gender incongruity (having a gender identity which is at odds with the sex they are assigned by others on the basis of anatomy) is a natural but relatively uncommon phenomenon. The only way to test this claim would be to have objective third-party access to each transgender person's gender identity. But gender identity, as Lewis understands it, is not available to this sort of empirical observation. As Bettcher and other transgender theorists (notably Julia Serano) have pointed out, the major obstacle/double bind that transgender people face in the realm of reality enforcement is that those who successfully alter their bodies to align more closely with the gender identity they claim are discounted as "deceivers" whereas those whose bodies do not reflect the social-construct expectations of the gender identity they claim (or who claim a gender identity which is not familiar to the popular imagination) are discounted as "mere pretenders". From Bettcher's Appearance, Reality, and Gender Deception: Reflections on Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Pretense

To the extent that it is within the power of a transperson to generate a convincing appearance, then, they will be confronted bu the no-win option of trying to pass (and running the risk of being exposed as a fraud) or else revealing themselves (and coming out as a masquerader or deceiver). And to the extent that it is not within the power of a transperson to generate a convincing appearance or, if it is to control the information that is circulated and available about their status, they may still find themselves represented as a pretender. In effect, because gender presentation and sexed body are viewed in this way (namely as correlated appearance and reality), in all possible permutations, they will have their identity relegated to a mere appearance and find themselves either open to charges of wrongdoing or relegated to somebody who plays at make-believe

Thus both Lewis—who sees gender as a metaphysical reality—and contemporary transgender theorists—who mostly see gender as either a social construct or as a personal identity—end up categorizing gender identity as something objectively real but ultimately only subjectively knowable(8) and therefore un-testable given the current state of our technology(9).

From Probability to Credibility

To recap then, Lewis would likely have seen the reality claim of a transgender person—to be really their identified gender—as possible but he would have been unable to determine whether the claim was probable. This, though, does not imply a dead end to the question. In fact, some of Lewis' most famous material demonstrates the approach he took to claims wherein there was no way for external observers to objectively examine the evidence. He would look to the credibility of the source: In his most famous novel The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe Lewis deploys a piece of reasoning (the logical tri-lemma) which mirrors one he uses to argue for the divinity of Jesus in Mere Christianity . In the novel the older Pevensie children (Peter and Susan) approach the professor in whose house they are staying because their little sister, Lucy, has been making claims which run contrary to their own experience and expectation of the world and which they have been unable to objectively verify. Specifically, she has been claiming—accurately as it turns out—that a particular wardrobe in the house is, under some conditions, a portal to another world. To further complicate matters, their brother Edmund has specifically claimed that Lucy was "only making it up" after she asks him to corroborate her claim.

The degree to which this scenario parallels the reality enforcement scenario described in Bettcher's essay is really astounding. Lucy, like the transgender person, has made a claim which, at face value, seems to be contradicted by general experience. Edmund, like Bettcher's denier, has specifically contradicted Lucy's claim. Peter and Susan, standing in for society at large, find themselves engaged in reality enforcement and are initially inclined to enforce Edmund's claim against Lucy(10). In this analysis, we should understand the professor to be a mouthpiece for Lewis' own analysis of the situation. When the children bring their questions to the professor, he asks them which of their two siblings is usually more trustworthy and they respond that they would generally trust Lucy and that the only reason they don't now is due to the apparent implausibility of her claim and their subsequent inability to independently verify her experience. The professor responds as follows:

‘Logic!’ said the Professor half to himself. ‘Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.’ [emphasis mine]

Or in Mere Christianity Lewis uses this structure of reasoning to argue that, contrary to popular expectation, Jesus of Nazareth was really God:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this mans was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

Again we have a situation where someone is making a claim which, at first blush, flies in the face of popular expectation, which is not (at least not anymore) subject to external verification, and which is roundly denied by people who cite popular experiences of the world in defense of their denial. We are, therefore, perfectly justified in concluding that Lewis would have applied this specific logic tool to the question of transgender gender identities and reality enforcement. Specifically he would have told us that there are really only three possibilities: the transgender person is either lying, insane, or telling the truth.

What do they teach them in these schools?

Before I apply Lewis' trilemma to the question though I want to head off one further suggestion that the transgender person may actually be mistaken. I do not think that Lewis would have granted this possibility on the grounds that we are specifically asking about something (gender identity) which Lewis believed people have and which he thought could be perceived directly. Still, even if the possibility is granted (expanding the trilemma into a tetralemma), the fact remains that the transgender person in question—being the person with the most data regarding their own gender—is in a better position to know their own gender than any outside individual. If they are mistaken, then they are more able to know that than anyone else and must therefore be treated as the authority on the subject.

The idea that transgender people are lying about our identities is not one that I think Lewis would have entertained for long. The simple fact of the difficulties trans people face and the suffering we endure in order to live into our gender identities ought to undermine any serious suggestion that we are lying about it. People rarely—if ever—lie consistently, insistently, and persistently when the consequences of being believed is increased suffering on their part. In the instance of transgender identity claims, the claim only benefits the person making it if it is true since the concomitant suffering is only worthwhile if it purchases a deeper, more fundamental, satisfaction.

The suggestion that transgender people are simply insane is suggested more frequently, most often by conservative pundits who most often latch on to the fact that gender dysphoria is often (though not universally) experienced by transgender people, and is a listing in the current version of the  Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5). However, the association of gender dysphoria with insanity—and specifically a form of insanity which would prevent a person from accurately experiencing reality—is misleading, sloppy thinking at best and a deliberate misrepresentation at worst. A person who experiences gender dysphoria is not delusional(11) they merely experience discomfort (sometimes to the point of anguish) based on the incongruity between their gender and the sex they were assigned at birth. As the professor says of  Lucy "ten minutes conversation will tell you she is not mad".

It is worth pausing before moving on to the third option (that transgender people are telling the truth about who we are) to notice that in fact those most prone to engage in programmes of reality enforcement against transgender people seem forever trying to have it both ways. They want to accuse us of being insane ("deluded" is form of the charge with the most currency today) while treating us as though we are liars. The hate and vitriol with which anti-trans pundits ranging from TERFS to white Christian Nationalists attack and condemn transgender people would be entirely out of place when dealing with someone who was deluded or insane; they make accusations of insanity but behave as though we were liars.

Having ruled out the possibilities of lying and insanity, the inevitable conclusion, given Lewis' beliefs and methods of reasoning would have to have been "For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that [the transgender person] is telling the truth". Regardless of how difficult it might be to believe the gender identity claims of trans people (we cannot really control what we believe after all) Lewis' methods and metaphysics require that we trust transgender people who, after all, are the only ones with any access to our individual gender status.  

This gets us most of the way towards an understanding of how C.S. Lewis would have engaged with the reality claims of transgender people but I think there is value in pushing it one step further. Thus far I have been treating the whole business as a purely intellectual question. To leave it at that—as a mere proof in an intellectual "ivory tower"—would be a tremendous disservice to the transgender population who (as Bettcher pointed out) face serious and even life-threatening consequences as a result of popular perceived reality enforcement.  I think that Lewis's writing has a little more to tell us about the ethical and moral nature of reality enforcement when it is used to oppress people whom we have an obligation to trust rather than mistrust. 

The Implications (for Lewis) of Mistrusting Transgender People

Lewis cared about the core of who a person is—the real person—,and believed that that core is almost always hidden. In fact "becoming who you really are" is very much a theme in much of Lewis writings —think back to his language about the true Narnia in The Last Battle. It is seen best in the transformations he has various characters undergo when they enter (usually through bodily death) into the place where "all the sad things come untrue" and "for which they found they had been longing their whole lives without knowing it"; the place "for which they were really made". In fact Lewis suggests that one important outcome of the Christian life was to become fully what a person, in one sense, already was. He puts this most succinctly in The Screwtape Letters when he has the senior demon Screwtape admit:

When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever

Another example would be the man tempted/tormented by lust in The Great Divorce. Lewis describes the man (and his lust) both passing through a process of spiritual death only to be resurrected as beings which are described in near demi-god like terms:

Next moment the Ghost gave a scream of agony such as I never heard on Earth. The Burning One closed his crimson grip on the reptile: twisted it, while it bit and writhed, and then flung it, broken-backed on the turf. 

'Ow! That's done for me,' gasped the Ghost reeling backwards. 

For a moment I could make out nothing distinctly. Then I saw, between me and the nearest bush, unmistakably solid but growing every moment solider, the upper arm and the shoulder of a man. Then, brighter still, and stronger, the legs and hands. The neck and golden head materialized while I watched, and if my attention had not wavered I should have seen the actual completing of a man—an immense man, naked, not much smaller than the Angel. What distracted me was the fact that at the same moment something seemed to be happening to the Lizard. At first I thought the operation had failed. So far from dying, the creature was still struggling and even growing bigger as it struggled. And as it grew it changed. It's hinder parts grew rounder, the tail, still flickering, became a tail of hair that flickered between huge and glossy buttocks. Suddenly I started back, rubbing my eyes. What stood before me was the greatest stallion I have ever seen, silvery white but with mane and tail of gold. It was smooth and shining, rippling with swells of flesh and muscle, whinnying and stamping with its hoofs. At each stamp the land shook and the trees dindled. 

The new-made man turned and clapped the new horse's neck. In nosed his bright body. Horse and master breathed each into the other's nostrils. The man turned form it, flung himself at the feet of the Burning One, and embraced them. When he rose I thought his face shone with tears, but it may have been only the liquid love and brightness...which flowed from him. I had not long to think about it. In joyous haste the young man leaped upon the horse's back. Turning in his seat he waved a farewell, then nudged the stallion with his heels. They were off before I knew well what was happening.

Thus the transgender person who abandoned identification with the sex they were assigned at birth in favor of their real gender identity would have been moving in the direction of sanctification. The transgender woman who insists "I am a woman" evidences a spiritual breakthrough and spiritual health. It is vital that we not forget that the temptations of security and acceptance all push the transgender person to accept (or at least acquiesce to) the denier's declaimed reality; nobody familiar with their situation ever accused a transgender individual of cowardice for identifying as transgender. Just as important, Lewis would have understood the person who works to prevent someone recognizing and affirming their own real selves (in this case a transgender person living into their gender identity) to be doing the work of the devils—preventing another's spiritual and holistic growth. Bettcher's reality enforcement enacted against transgender people is something Lewis's thinking would decry not only as sinful but as a particularly virulent form of sin; one which he found important enough to devote an entire novel to exploring.

Reality Enforcement as the Sin of False-Love

Bareface (a reference to being one's true self, denying any mask or veil) was the working title of Till We Have Faces the novel C.S. Lewis considered his best(12). The book is a re-telling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche told from the perspective of one of Psyche's two older sisters. In the original myth, the beautiful Psyche is sacrificed to the gods but ends up being rescued by the West Wind and carried away to a mansion where she is then married to the god Cupid. The one condition that is placed on her is that she is not permitted to look at her husband (whose identity she does not know). He leaves before she wakes each morning and only returns in the dark of night. Psyche is immensely happy with this arrangement until she is visited by her two sisters who convince her to violate the one rule by waiting until her husband falls asleep and bringing out a candle to look at him. Psyche follows her sisters instructions and is initially delighted to discover that her husband is the beautiful god of love. But in her excitement she spills some hot wax on him waking him up. Immediately he flees and leaves Pscyhe alone in a field. Psyche then undergoes a series of trials and suffering in order to eventually be reunited with her love.

Cupid and Psyche

Lewis' retelling of the myth centers on Orual, the older of Psyche's two sisters. In Till We Have Faces Orual is ugly and lonely as a child. She finds comfort in her tutor (a man she calls "the Fox") and in her little sister Psyche (who calls Orual "Maia") as well as a few other characters whom she loves and who love her in return. At the point in the story where Orual finds Psyche (whom she had thought dead—sacrificed to the God of the Mountain). Lewis introduces a poignant example of reality enforcement. Psyche experiences herself to be living in a palace, but Orual sees only an empty field. In the following, you will want to note Lewis' return to the formula of the trilemma we have already encountered in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Mere Christianity:

For some strange reason, fury—my father's own fury—fell upon me when she said that. I found myself screaming (I am sure I had not meant to scream), "Stop it! Stop it at once! There's nothing there!"

Her face flushed. For once, and for the moment only, she [Psyche] too was angry. "Well, feel it, feel it, if you can't see," she cried. "Touch it. slap it. Beat your head against it. Here—" she made to grab my hands. I wrenched them free.

Stop it, Stop it I tell you! There's no such thing. You're pretending. You're trying to make yourself believe it." But I was lying. How did I know whether she really saw invisible things or spoke in madness? Either way, something hateful and strange had begun. As if I could thrust it back by brute force, I fell upon Psyche. Before I knew what I was doing I had her by the shoulders and was shaking her.

the scene continues with Orual trying to dissuade Psyche and eventually comes to a head when they begin to discuss Psyche's husband

"Oh I can't bear it," said I, leaping up. Those last words of hers, spoken softly and with trembling, set me on fire. I could feel my rage coming back. Then (like a great light, a hope of deliverance, it came to me) I asked myself why I'd forgotten that first notion of being mad. Madness; of course. The whole thing must be madness. I had been nearly as mad as she to think otherwise. At the very name madness the air of that valley seemed more breathable, seemed emptied of a little of its holiness and horror.

"Have done with it, Psyche," I said sharply. "Where is this god? Where the palace is? Nowhere—in your fancy. Where is he? Show him to me? What is he like?

She looked a little aside and spoke, lower than ever but very clear and as if all that had yet passed between us were of no account beside the gravity of what she was now saying. "Oh, Orual," she said, "not even I have seen him—yet. He comes to me only in the holy darkness. He says I mustn't—not yet—see his face or know his name. I'm forbidden to bring any light into his—our—chamber."

Then she looked up, and as our eyes met for a moment I saw in hers unspeakable joy.

"There's no such thing," I said, loud and stern. "Never say such things again. Get up. It's time—"

"Orual," said she, now at her queenliest, "I have never told you a lie in my life"

In the end Orual resorts to threatening Psyche's life and her own suicide in order to compel Psyche to accede to her (Orual's) understanding of reality(13). The result in Lewis' version as in the original, is that Psyche loses everything she had been given and is set a series of impossible seeming tasks in order to get back what she lost. Orual, ultimately separated from Psyche and, eventually, everyone whom she loves and who loves her in return, lives out most of her life as the ruling queen of her country. She writes out the account we read in the novel as her complaint against the gods and her primary charge against them is that, by not allowing her to experience reality as Psyche had—that is by keeping the palace invisible to her eyes—the gods are responsible for Psyche's tragedy as well as her own. The novel ends at the end of Orual's life when she is granted a sort of mystical vision or spirit journey to the mountain of the gods where she is given the opportunity to "bring her complaint against" them. But when she begins to speak she finds that the words she speaks against the gods are not what she had originally intended—the story we have read thus far—but a different speech which she acknowledges to be truer than what she had intended. As part of that accusation-which-is-really-confession, Lewis has Orual declaim the following:

But to steal her love from me, to make her see things I couldn't see... oh, you'll say (you've been whispering it to me these forty years) that I'd signs enough her palace was real, could have known the truth if I'd wanted. But how could I want to know it? Tell me that. The girl was mine. What right had you to steal her away into your dreadful heights? You'll say I was jealous. Jealous of Psyche? Not while she was mine. If you'd gone the other way to work—if it was my eyes you had opened—you'd soon have seen how I would have shown her and told her and taught her and led her up to my level. But to hear a chit of a girl who had (or ought to have had) no thought in her head that I'd not put there, setting up for a seer and a prophetess and next thing to a goddess... how could anyone endure it? ... Oh, you'll say you took her away into bliss and joy such as I could never have given her, and I ought to have been glad for her sake. Why? What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn't given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way?

Notice that the bitterness of Orual is directed, among other things, at the fact that her vision of reality was not the one which would ultimately allow Psyche's happiness (and before this point can be brushed away remember that Lewis understood happiness in Aristotelian terms as ultimate fulfillment of a self—eudaimonia). How closely that parallels and makes sense of the anger and fear we find in the transphobia which is daily hurled against transgender people. The sin here is great and terrible specifically because it is the sin of a twisted love. It is the love which refuses to love another on any but its own terms. Because the denier cannot (or will not) make the move to empathy for the transgender person, cannot (or will not) recognize the validity of the trans person's account of reality; they must make every effort to destroy that which they cannot give and will not share. In fact those last haunting lines "What should I care for some horrible, new happiness which I hadn't given her and which separated her from me? Do you think I wanted her to be happy, that way?" would fit perfectly into the mouths of every parent, partner, or family member who rejects a trans person for coming out as who we are.

The final title comes from a passage near the end of the book where Orual asks "How can [the Gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?". Orual is redeemed in the end only after she sees herself for what she has really been, both truly loving and beautiful and truly ugly and hateful. Lewis ends his last novel reminding us that health, happiness, flourishing are only possible when we know our true selves.

“Yes,” my friend said. “I don’t see why there shouldn’t be books in Heaven. But you will find that your library in Heaven contains only some of the books you had on earth.” 

“Which?” I asked. 

“The ones you gave away or lent.” 

“I hope the lent ones won’t still have all the borrowers’ dirty thumb marks,” said I. 

“Oh yes they will,” said he. “But just as the wounds of the martyrs will have turned into beauties, so you will find that the thumb-marks have turned into beautiful illuminated capitals or exquisite marginal woodcuts.”

- From the essay Scraps in the collection God in the Dock

Footnotes

(1) I suspect, but am not sure, that Dr. Bettcher holds reality to be finally unknowable. Thus she occupies herself in Trapped in the Wrong Theory with an exploration of the power dynamics which are created and exploited against transgender people who operate out of two specific models of trans identity.
(2) Cisgender means only "a person whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth" or more simply "a person who is not transgender".
(3) It really is vital to keep in mind that this was written in 1944. One hopes to avoid anachronistic criticism of an enunciation of gender theory years ahead of its time.
(4) It is possible that Lewis is one of the first modern authors to have publicly made this distinction. Whereas Perelandra was published in 1944, the research I have encountered to date locates the earliest examples of this distinction in either the 1950's or the 1970's. Here are a few links to that effect but more research needs to be done on this topic. Muehlenhard and Peterson in Sex Roles 2011, Debbie Cameron on the Philology of Gender 2016, Joanne Meyerowitz How Sex Changed Chapter 3
(5) an exception to this rule (that spirits do not change) might have involved the process of sanctification or glorification (though to my knowledge Lewis used neither of these terms). However, Lewis closely followed Boethius in his understanding of time and the mutability of soul so it is entirely possible that he would have denied even this exception.
(6) and, I suspect, Lewis would have included intersex bodies as well.
(7) Julia Serano coined the term subconscious sex for her first book Whipping Girl. The concept is at the core of her proposed Intrinsic Inclinations model.
(8) with the exception that Lewis would have claimed that the gender of individuals is objectively known by God and possibly by any other being which is able to perceive simple spirit.
(9) The current brain-sex hypothesis, if it turns out to be valid, would suggest that sufficiently high powered and accurate brain-state and brain-structure analysis and observation might eventually give us a method to empirically verify gender identity claims.
(10) the fact that, in the story, Edmund knows that he is lying is ultimately irrelevant to this analysis. Peter or Susan could just as well be stand-ins for the denier.
(11) Check out this piece at Debunking Denialism for a thorough run-down on the difference between gender dysphoria and delusion.
(12) Lewis is said to have worked with his wife Joy Davidman Lewis on this book to the extent that some of his friends at the time have suggested that she was almost a co-author of the novel.
(13) Threats transgender people are all too familiar with.

Transgender Resource Recommendations:

1. Julia Serano: Books and Blog
2. Austen Hartke Book and Youtube channel
3. Talia Mae Bettcher: Learningtrans resources and class  
4. Susan Stryker Transgender History

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