And then came that moment. I was with some friends, just having fun, and at a certain point I was sitting by myself when the thought came that I could no longer put off the question. Did I want to become a woman? And almost the instant I allowed myself to ask that, the answer came like a kind of revelation. I did not want to be a woman. I already was.
Since then I’ve discovered other trans people’s accounts of what I’m calling “the Moment.” One woman said it was like a glass wall shattering. Her real life had always existed on the other side, and now she could enter it. Another said she had been going through great anxieties and told her girlfriend she was going to take a shower and try to clear her head. Standing in the water, she thought, “What’s the worst this all could be?” A moment later she came out of the shower, dripping and astonished, and told her friend, “I’m a woman!” Her friend replied, “It’s about time you figured that out.”
A transman friend of mine once told me that for years, while he was trying to live as a woman, he would have a terrifying dream in which he would look into his grandmother’s full-length mirror, the kind that turned on a hinge, with a second mirror on the other side. But when he looked, there was no one there, as if the person looking in the mirror did not really exist. When he finally accepted that he wasn’t a butch lesbian, he was a man, he had the dream again. But now, as he stared at the empty glass, a voice said, “Turn me around.” He flipped the mirror to the other side and saw a man staring back at him.
Consider a fantasy. A wizard casts a spell on a child, maybe before birth, so that she finds herself in a world that does not recognize the very possibility of her existence. The way out of this trap does not involve a counter-spell, or a discovery of the plot. Instead, it follows the path of desire, even when that desire seems incomprehensible.
Actually, Edith years ago came up with a lighthearted version of this fantasy. She suggested that my soul had decided to incarnate as a girl this time around, but a sorcerer had shunted me into a male body. My soul proved stronger than either the spell or the body’s seemingly self-evident logic. Here is a possible title for a story: “The Illogical Body.”
The physical world may be made out of elementary particles (and dark matter) but the world of our lives is made out of language. With the wrong language, one of strict categories and confinement, the world becomes a fake, a stage set whose actors don’t know they are in a play, a Potemkin village whose inhabitants think they live in the real world. Most people do not notice this because their own sense of self, of language, more or less fits the received version of existence. They still suffer, for in a world of strict and very limited categories they must constantly check themselves against the model of a “real man” or a “real woman.”
The ones who reveal the fake are the ones who simply cannot make themselves fit. To not fit can bring great pain, and often very real danger. Yet who else can discover the light behind the screen?
Let’s look a moment at those dangers. There are, of course, the examples, far too many, of harassment, beatings, and murder. If those insane “bathroom laws” were ever put into effect, any or all of three things would happen to transwomen forced to use men’s toilets: 1. rape, 2. beatings, 3. arrest on a charge of prostitution. And meanwhile, the very thing proponents of these laws claim to fear would happen—burly, bearded (trans) men using the women’s room.
As well as physical and legal dangers, trans people, particularly young transmen and women, face a different kind of danger. This is identity loss, and it occurs through language. To call a transwoman “he” or a transman “she” is either a deliberate insult or something worse, a casual obliteration of the person’s identity. Recently, young trans activists have come up with a powerful term for attacks on a person’s very existence—dead-naming. Its fullest manifestation occurs when a young transperson dies, from disease sometimes, but more often through murder or suicide. The family, who may have thrown the adolescent out, now claim the body, dress it in the “original” gender, then hold a funeral and set up a tombstone, using only the name (and pronouns) the parents chose for the child. This is dead-naming. The person dies twice, first in the body, and then in memory, deliberately erased from existence.
By extension, any use of a person’s old name to designate who they are is now called dead-naming, and people may refer to the name on their (original) birth certificate as their “dead name.” Deliberately brutal, the expression shows trans people’s passion in claiming their real, alive selves.
My first story was published under my old name (all other stories, articles, and books are under my “living,” or chosen, name). This is a matter of public record. You can find it on the internet. But out of respect for all those people who struggle against dead-naming—and to be honest, my own struggle, when I first came out, to get people to respect my chosen name and pronoun—I choose not to use it.
Since so much of this account revolves around words—the way pronouns and terms like Mr. and Miss, and names, can imprison people, while claiming your true words can set you free—and since I am a writer, a “woman of words,” to use the phrase of the great Mazatec shaman and poet María Sabinas, let us consider the prefix “trans.”
There is, of course, “transparent,” a term used in support groups well before the television show. But aside from its pun on parenting, think of what it means. To be clear, to allow the world to see you, all the way through.
And then, of course, there is “transgender” itself, and its antecedents, “transvestite” and “transsexual.” I once met a man whom I privately dubbed “the happy cross-dresser.” He loved dressing up privately, with his wife’s enthusiastic support, but felt no need to go further. He told me a great story. He said that as a teenager he was filled with confusion, if not shame. Then he went, by himself, to see the movie Psycho. At the end, a psychiatrist says that Norman Bates, who dressed up as his mother to kill his victims, is not a transvestite. Now, Mark (not his real name, alive or dead) had taken some Latin in high school. Almost idly, he pondered the strange term. “Trans … cross. Vest … clothing … There’s a word for it!” He ran out of the theater and headed for the nearest library.
Trans-port. To carry yourself from your assigned gender to a new one, or none at all. To be transported by ecstasy. And what port will you arrive at? Many people, including trans-people themselves at the start of their journey, may assume the port, the destination, is known—from woman to man, or man to woman, or either to none—only to discover, as they set off, that the wonder of the journey may open up the world to ports, destinations, never considered or even imagined. But perhaps I say this because I’m a science fiction writer. And maybe I’m a science fiction writer, at least in part, because I had no choice but to break open the world and discover what ports lay hidden behind its façade.
Trans-action. Not just the power of acting, of standing up for yourself, of simply doing something, but the transactions, the relationships between people that become possible when you take the action of letting them see who you really are.
And what of trans-mission? “Your mission, should you choose to accept it …” And yes, you must choose it, there is really no way around that, even if you know, as I do, that there really is no choice, except maybe death. Despite that, you must take the action. Come out. Tell people. Begin, finally, to live. Discover what world lies beyond the Potemkin façade of received categories.
Can you see why I was drawn to science fiction? And to comics? In the first, people were creating other worlds, worlds with different rules or structures. In the second, people changed their very selves, gaining “powers far beyond those of mortal men.” When I came out and began to explore the world of trans possibilities (a very narrow world in the early ’70s), I discovered something interesting. The small population of professional science fiction writers contained several people known to have “changed sex,” as we used to say back then. And, judging from various writers’ stories, there were others, from still earlier
generations, who might have done it if the world had given them an opening.
Extending into the ’80s, the number of trans people in the world was still just a handful. But back then, before the internet and online magazines, the entire population of professional science fiction writers was only a few thousand people. And according to the “official,” that is, psychiatric statistics, the percentage of people in the general population was miniscule. I do not have the numbers on hand, but I seem to remember “one in ten thousand” being thrown about.
Now—well, Riki Wilchins, mentioned above, once commented that if it were easier to change sex, a lot more people would do it. It’s astonishing how right she was. For my part, my second short story, “Tubs of Slaw” (the title came from a surreal comedy record by the Firesign Theatre) featured a group of children who receive their genitals from the government one afternoon and are disappointed to discover there are only two varieties. A little later, still in the ’70s, I published “The Second Generation,” in which people can take instant sex change pills that allow them to change back and forth between male and female all day long if they wished. This is their world, and the two young protagonists see nothing strange about it—until the day one of them, then the other, takes a pill—male or female, it doesn’t matter—and changes into something entirely different, something completely unknown. The nano-trannoparadiso of “The Beatrix Gates” is a kind of sequel to “The Second Generation.”
Science fiction lures trans people with that possibility to imagine a different world. And the community of SF people, by and large, opened itself to trans people, gave us a chance to be ourselves.
In much of this essay it might seem as if I transitioned, heroically, all by myself. Nothing could be further from what happened. I did come to that life-changing realization that I was a woman—the shattering of the glass wall—essentially on my own. But Edith had been encouraging me to try to understand who I was. And when I did come out, she strongly supported me. I’m happy to say that this was not just altruism, or loyalty, some bizarre version of “stand by your man.” If anything, it was the opposite. She had become deeply involved in the women’s liberation movement and preferred the idea of standing by her woman. (I could say vastly more about her, and her vital place in my life, but I prefer to respect her privacy.)
Women’s liberation and then gay liberation helped open the world for me. They gave me models of how to trust your own experience rather than society’s rules and stereotypes. When Edie and I moved to London in 1971 we joined GLF (the Gay Liberation Front) but also sought out trans groups. At first, I found this frustrating. I was looking for a political consciousness, a framework of ideas. The groups that existed seemed, well, light. And then I realized something. The liberation groups took everything very seriously, constantly arguing, theorizing. The trans groups liked to have fun. And that was when I understood that being trans was about joy almost more than anything else.
That did not mean I gave up on the idea of a group dedicated to raising consciousness. If one didn’t exist, I would start it myself. Edith and I began to host weekly meetings in our flat in the Notting Hill section of London. My desire to discuss theory never got very far, but something important happened. We provided a place where people could be, and explore, themselves, at whatever level seemed comfortable. The Japanese transwoman described in the title story of this book was one of those people.
Another was a young and brilliant Oxford grad student, still in the closet in everyday life but excited to have a place to go and explore her secret self. Years later, Roz Kaveney has become an award-winning memoirist, poet, critic, activist, and yes, science fiction writer. A while back she wrote a short article about those days, in which she very kindly dubbed my London flat “trannie central.”
Since then, and in fact since I used the word “trannie” in “The Beatrix Gates,” the term has taken on some nasty meanings. Thinking of how I might change “trannie central,” and being from New York and a lover of Grand Central Station, I came up with the title of this essay. “The Beatrix Gates” proved more problematic, since the utopian frame story plays on “trannie” and “nannie,” the latter short for nano-machines. I kept one or two but changed the others. Hopefully, no young militants will take offense.
My activism comes and goes. Edith and I left London for Amsterdam in 1973 and while I stayed connected to trans people I focused on my writing and enjoying life. Partly my step back from political action came from the trauma of discovering that the women’s movement, especially the more radical branches of it, where I’d felt a natural home, wanted nothing to do with me. They saw me, and people like me, as something akin to creations of mad scientists (I am not exaggerating, believe me). Over time I came to see their hostility as a kind of secret blessing. If they had welcomed me, I might have adopted their views for the sake of fitting in. But it was painful. Luckily, Amsterdam was a good place to recover from such wounds.
In the ’80s I got involved in the Goddess movement, which in many ways was really about uncovering hidden histories—or “herstories,” as we liked to say back then. In the process I discovered something very important and powerful. Trans people have always existed and more often than not been seen as sacred and powerful. This may seem almost self-evident now, but many people had considered “transsexualism” as a modern phenomenon and usually a negative one—a creation of the medical profession, an offshoot of repressed homosexuality, even a result somehow of what Marxists like to call late capitalism. The discovery of trans people’s ancient history became a kind of antidote to all these negative and very limited views.
In the words of Normandi Ellis in her brilliant book Awakening Osiris (a poetic translation of the so-called Egyptian Book of the Dead), “Give me not words of consolation. Give me magic, the fire of one beyond the borders of enchantment. Give me the spell of living well.”
Part of that ancient history included shamanism. I began reading about this long before the term became a cultural phenomenon. Some kind of gender change was so ingrained in tribal shamanism that when people started going to workshops to find their “power animal” and declare themselves shamans, I always wanted to say to them, “How can you be a shaman if you’ve never changed sex?”
One of the features of shamanism—and mediums, for that matter—is what the scholar Mircea Eliade called “the shamanic crisis.” A young person becomes very ill or suffers what seem to be horrendous hallucinations. The way through this is allow it to happen, to let the demons, or beasts, tear them apart, and then put them back together, but now transformed into a person of power. And as mentioned, the process often involves changing gender.
The experiences became ritualized, and literal, in the more structured world of historical antiquity (and even into contemporary life, with the hijras of India and Pakistan). Possibly the most famous ancient example is the gallae (unlike many mainstream historians, I use the feminine form of the plural name) who came from Anatolia (Western Turkey) to Rome with their Goddess, Kybele. Standard texts will refer to them as “self-castrated eunuch priests” (“eunuch” is the standard translation of hijra). But if they were simply eunuchs, meaning nothing, why did they wear female clothing? In fact, when they healed from their surgery (done in a state of ecstasy), and were initiated into the service of their Goddess, they wore wedding dresses to the ceremony. Kybele’s name in Greece was Artemis.
When I was eight or nine I went through a kind of “shamanic crisis” without knowing the concept. Happily, it did not involve flat-out hallucinations, but I experienced terrible nightmares every night. My parents took me to doctors, but no one really knew what to do. (I was lucky—today, the doctors would have fed me drugs.) The nightmares ended when my great-grandmother told my mother to place a small Jewish prayer book under my mattress. My mother did not tell me about it—I did not even know it was there until years later—but the nightmares stopped. This is one reason, but only one, why, whatever else I am—lover of Goddesses, witch,
heretic of all sorts—I will always be deeply Jewish.
Out of all those terrible dreams I remembered exactly one. Bears had escaped from the zoo and were rounding up all the humans to imprison us in sewers under the street. I remember being huddled with the other prisoners and looking up through the bars of the sewer grates at the bears gathered around to stare at us. I don’t really know why that dream, and only that one, stayed with me for the rest of my life. Or at least I didn’t know then.
In the late ’80s I went to Greece to research ancient sacred sites for a book called The Body of the Goddess. One of the places I went was a temple to Artemis at Brauron, on the southern tip of Attica peninsula. I was interested in Artemis because of the gallae, but also because she was a Goddess of lesbians, and because of a certain mountain formation known in ancient times as “Winged Artemis” (the relationship between landscape and religion was part of the thesis of my book). And also because, in various ways, Artemis had begun to seem a strong presence in my life.
When I got to Brauron, I discovered something fascinating. Preadolescent girls from Athens would be given in service to Artemis, to live a kind of wild life in the temple until they reached the age at which they had to return and get married. While at Brauron they dressed in bear skins rather than “civilized” dresses, and bore the collective title arctoi, or “bear cubs.” The age when they left the rigid roles of society to become wild bears was nine years old, the same age I was when I had my dream of being “captured” by the bears.
In the ’90s I moved back to America and once again became involved with activism. I lectured and wrote articles about trans experience being worldwide and as old as humanity. Ironically, some young activist recently described people who transitioned in the ’90s as “prehistoric.” I thought, what does that make me, who transitioned in the ’70s? Paleolithic? Luckily, Paleolithic cave art is one of my passions.
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