Inspired by Elena Wunderbar’s, ‘My Wife Almost Threw Me Out Yesterday and it Was Okay.’
A Puff-Sleeved Saffron Dress & The Stuckness
Being trans is just not that big a deal, if only we could all stop making it one — that includes me.
As a wee boy, I’d sit before my parents’ Magnavox TV watching reruns of old movies. I loved the women, nearly everything about the aesthetic of femininity made me want to be a part of it. It was more than attraction though; I wanted to occupy it, to be it and for it to be me.
People like to ask why about what many consider an aberration and I’d berate myself asking the same thing: Why am I like this? Why won’t it go away?
Today, beyond general curiosity, why I have that drive doesn’t matter to me, it just was and still is. It’s like asking why rain is wet; of course it’s wet. Knowing water’s molecular properties is interesting and informative but the embodied experience of water is what we know. I’ve pondered the whys of my gender incongruence, tried to rid myself of it but I can’t and I’ve come to quite love its properties.
Every time I sat crisscross before that TV, watching Samantha Eggar in 1967's Doctor Dolittle stomp about the Cotswolds in her petticoats and saffron puffy sleeved Technicolor dress whingeing about being a woman and the ass she’d kick if she were a man, I felt indignant: First off, I found her perfect. Secondly, why could she assertively sing about wanting to be a man but I couldn’t tell a soul about wanting to be a girl? I knew to keep my mouth shut about it but I’d spend hours daydreaming about being her…or Fiona Fullerton’s Alice in Wonderland… or Elizabeth Montgomery’s Samantha Stevens…
I’ve no shame saying any of this; there is nothing shameful about femininity or womanhood, looking up to them, or being trans. It is the truth of what I thought, why deny it? It just is, I am who I am, I do as I must and will according to my nature. Eventually, you either let the incongruence with societal norms destroy you or turn it into defiance. If it disturbs someone, that disturbance resides within them, I will not make it mine. It is simply an awareness born of some essential part of myself that informs the way I live and look, that’s all. It has abided from my earliest memories and it can be my joy, unless I make it my nightmare.
Oh sure, I’ve sat in the longing and hopeless depression. Sometimes I still do a bit because I remain on the fence about whether I keep my transness predominantly internal; I’m an egg, albeit a pink one. So, having not medically transitioned, I inhabit a male body but use cultural markers to communicate a feminine identity. I do wonder about pills and jags to change physically. Balancing that rail is about my hierarchy of values, i.e., maintaining my wife’s attraction and meeting her needs, as well as already iffy financial stability and health insurance tied to a job that I like but need to keep. Then there is a sense of principal I‘ve paired with my defiance: I hesitate ‘electively’ becoming beholden to pharmaceuticals and American for-profit healthcare to maintain my biochemistry.
Those considerations are important, and valid. Some people pooh-pooh them, say that like insulin or antidepressants, medical transition is necessary to save lives and I’m a coward for not making a commitment to it, for just playing at being trans, a ‘part-time woman.’ I understand medical treatment is lifesaving for many, I respect that, and this is my path I’m walking, not theirs. Being trans isn’t a choice but where I do have choices after that fact, they are mine to make. Helen Boyd’s books, My Husband Betty and She’s Not the Man I Married extensively cover the topic of marriage to a transfeminine spouse, how they walk the uncertainties I describe, together; they’re doing an impressive job.
I value my wife, her desires and needs, and if I want to maintain our partnership, I cannot focus on mine to the exclusion of hers; I think of the difficulty I’d have if my wife wanted to take steps to become a man. I can get all high-minded about loving the soul of the person above all and labelling my aversion to masculinity some kind of phobia, but people also have bodies; attractions and aversions run deep. Although my wife beautifully combines girliness and a confident tomboy sensibility, I wouldn’t like it in the least if she took testosterone and had phalloplasty. Yet, I look at her, at women in general, and am filled with longing and envy to live as one; that’s been there since the dawn of my memory. My wife knows all that and although she fondly calls me her “man/woman,” loves what she call’s my “feminine side,” my androgyny, her core sexual attraction is to masculinity; it can be ‘bent’ but she likes men — probably similar to the way I like tomboys. So, I walk my journey the way I need today taking our marriage into profound consideration. I’ll tell my wife when the next dysphoric sleeper wave hits and whether I am able to ride it or if it sweeps my feet out from under me.
For decades, I assumed I would go to my grave never telling anyone I wish I’d been born a girl or about my cross-gender fantasies. I never imagined I’d say to myself, let alone another person, “I am transgender,” but the isolation and dishonesty, the pretending and hiding got to be more painful than my fear of some ‘what ifs.’ In an instant, having tumbled past my lips, the secret ceased and with it began the dissolution of shame.
The shame, repressing a core need, drove my internally focused, often obsessive, self-destructive, thinking.
Before that resolve to come out, I often gave in to defeatism, withdrew, yet wondered why I was so despondent and stuck. I mistook ‘stuckness’ for an insurmountable and intrinsic part of my identity — inescapable. Lacking information, people close to me wondered what was wrong and if it was something they’d done. It was easier for me to fester, blame, resent, and punish, to let others stew in that vacuum than countenance the byzantine obfuscation of my truth — until it wasn’t. To change took a moment of clarity where I saw my responsibility for the predicament I was in and the way it harmed me and others. That moment kickstarted me to ask for help and then take it, to come out — it requires vigilance and effort not to sink into it again.
So for me, wanting to be a woman, perhaps actually being a woman wearing a skinsuit tailored to a man, might occupy my consciousness but I cannot allow it to interfere with the functioning of my family or work. It’s there, it is, and it is okay. I don’t claim perfection here but progress is important and owning and talking about it was huge. The gnawing born of the dysphoric incongruence waxes and wanes, and when the tide is high or that wave crashes, I’ll tell my wife.
Being born into a male body, I don’t believe the gnawing will ever go away entirely and there are many women who have ‘completed’ transition who still describe dysphoria. My way through it right now is to share that part of myself sans apology. I’m not pronouncing it from the rooftops but people see it, know it is who I am and can take or leave it. If they ask, I tell them matter-of-factly and I don’t linger on it as if it is a big shocker or something I about which to make them at ease. It’s just not that big a deal. So what if they stereotype and make assumptions about what it all means? So long as I don’t do those things to myself but rather celebrate it, the pain of withdrawal and constant thinking about it is significantly curbed because I am integrating it into my whole rather than relegating it to a closet. There just remains that nagging thought that I would probably find even more freedom if I took the pills but I’m not there today. I should probably talk to my doctor and just try it knowing I can manage it as needed, stop looking at it as some big step into a chasm. Transmedicalists can have whatever opinions they want of me for waiting, and indeed they do. It must be exhausting to have all the answers and sit in judgement of those who miss the requirements of one’s own infallible rubric. Frankly, it’s none of their business and their opinions are none of mine. This isn’t a zero-sum proof of validity contest, I meet my requirements before theirs. I know my truth but wonder if someone can truly know their own when they want to dominate or invalidate others.
My secrecy worked for a long time, and then it didn’t, so I came out. That one act created connexion and conversation, it engendered authenticity. It is in itself a transition from a state of closure and darkness into one of openness and light where I can dwell more deeply within truth, honesty and integrity. This led me to show up as a participant in my life and by default, the lives of others. My only way forward from ‘the stuckness,’ is to keep writing and telling my experience and that begins through honesty with myself. I have to be forthright about what I value today, what I will accept, and begin making a realistic plan to affect the changes I decide, when I decide them. I consider those close to me, because my choices affect them. Maybe I am resting on a plateau but I won’t be here forever and anyone who’s run a marathon knows the importance of rest to progress.
What is important is recognizing my agency to focus far less on the perceived insurmountability of my ‘situation.’ Of course many of the difficulties are real and concerns valid but I’ve the skill to query and discover where my mindset holds me back. I don’t claim any kind of perfection or guru status, I am faaaaar from that. What I do have though, is experience with the struggle and the frequently needless, self defeating nature of ‘the stuckness.’
The memoirist, humorist, actor, raconteur and frequent (sometimes cancelled) provocateur Quentin Crisp said,
“What would you be like if you were the only person in the world? If you want to be truly happy you must be that person.”
Continue to tell your story but remember: Revision, reorganizing and editing are part of the process. Until one is honest and fulfilled through purposeful involvement in it, she will treat her family as distractions, he will blame and resent others when in reality, she is the one in her own way. To anyone in that place of thinking your transness a burden, that you are ‘the stuckness’, set a goal to come out to one person you know is safe, do before withdrawing deeper into the closet of defeatism and despondency. Start with a therapist if you’re not ready to tell your family. Tell your spouse you’re going there to deal with your depression, that is true and she will respect and support that. And again, keep in the forefront of your mind,
THAT.
IS.
A.
TRANSITION.
It is the beginning of a series of steps forward. Your spouse deserves happiness and connexion with you as do your children and you deserve that too. Sit in inaction and you will lose your family, and even if you don’t off yourself or descend into substance abuse in a slow suicide but instead settle for living as a shell of yourself, you will loose yourself.
Tell your story!
