We Learn Nothing

by Tim Kreider

  My girlfriend, arriving for dinner that night, found me sitting on my porch steps where I’d read the letter, holding my head in my hands as though it required constant firm external pressure to keep it intact. Talk about Chutes and Candyland: I felt as though I had suddenly slid into another game altogether, with a completely different set of rules. I now had to thoroughly re-understand someone I’d thought I’d known for ten years. It was retroactively shocking to realize that at any one of those times when I’d casually dropped in unannounced on Jim in Baltimore I might’ve caught him playing the autoharp in a skirt. I could hardly stand to think of the years of secrecy and isolation he’d endured—sitting alone in his apartment with the blinds drawn, grading our papers on Borges in drag, all dressed up with no place to go. It was hard to imagine the gut-clenching dread and hope you’d feel and the bravery it would take to make your fingers let go of a letter like the one I’d just read and commend it to the mailbox.

  My first response was to phone Jim—Jenny?—and reassure him—her—that although the news had indeed come as something of a shock and I intended to write her a long letter in reply, I would always be her friend, and we’d figure it all out. Which was, of course, just what I was supposed to say. Not that I didn’t mean it; just that, having said all the right things, actually doing them was a different matter. There was, I think, an inverse relationship between how close people were to Jim and their readiness to accept his new identity. It’s easy to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded and loyal you are when it costs you nothing. Jim worked at a New England liberal arts college, where acceptance of her transition was not only the appropriate social reaction but mandatory under the university’s official diversity policy. His colleagues and acquaintances accepted her new identity as a matter of political correctness, professional protocol, and the traditional Yankee policy of minding one’s own business. They changed the Jims to Jennys and hes to shes in the same way that they’d learned to say Asian instead of Oriental sometime in the nineties. But for those of us who’d loved Jim for years, and thought we’d known him, it was more complicated.

  Historically, I had not adapted easily to change. When an ex-girlfriend of mine, who’d gone by the nickname Sandi the whole time we dated, later reverted to her actual name, Margot, it took me years of mental translation to adjust. I think of her as Margot now, but if you were to ask me whether I’d ever dated a Margot I’d say no. Pronouns are ground even deeper into our brains; he and she are so automatic that suddenly switching them is like having to learn to drive on the other side of the road. Jenny was forgiving of the inevitable slipups at first, but if they persisted you could tell it got on her nerves. (She went so far as to threaten a colleague of hers, who could not seem to bother to make much effort to change, with a formal complaint.) Even within the last year I once referred to Jenny as “him” in front of her in a bar. It made me wince in the same way you would if you accidentally called your spouse by someone else’s name. There’s no backpedaling or covering or explaining it away; you’ve involuntarily revealed some impolitic truth, the kind that means you’re going to have to have a Conversation. From her closest friends, Jenny was asking for a deeper, more genuine acceptance than the acquiescence to forms of address that political correctness calls “respect.” She didn’t want to be humored; she wanted to be taken seriously. She wanted us to think of her, truly, as a woman.

  Which was impossible. I had known Jim Boylan for ten years. There was no way I would ever think of Jenny as a woman as automatically and unconsciously as I think of my friends Annie or Lauren or Lucy as women. But just because it may have been an unrealistic wish didn’t mean it was an unreasonable one. To Jenny, who had thought of herself as female since before she could talk, it seemed that she was asking for a kind of respect so basic that most of us don’t think of it as respect at all, only simple recognition. It’s the same sort of privilege whereby white people seldom have to think of themselves as white—just as people. Her only real wish, throughout her transition, was that others should see her as the person she felt herself to be—which wish is shared by everyone, and is, of course, granted none of us.

  Some of my acquaintances were surprisingly intolerant about Jenny’s transition. One of them likened transsexuals to people with a paraphilia for auto-amputation. (“I never felt like a whole person as long as I had two legs,” is how one such case memorably put it.) This seemed not just unsympathetic but a bad analogy; renouncing your status as a tetrapod is pretty straightforward pathology, but gender has never been as unambiguously binary as people like to pretend. There’s also a high correlation between gender identity disorder in males and prenatal exposure to diethylstilbestrol (DES), a synthetic estrogen that was given to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage from the 1940s through the ’70s, including Jim’s mother. And, asking myself whether Jim seemed delusional in any other area, I concluded that he did not. Although there are plenty of people who are sane and reasonable in all matters except for the one pet subject on which you do not want to get them started, Jim didn’t sound irrational when he talked about his condition; he knew how bizarre it was, he’d been baffled and embarrassed by it his whole life, and he was all too aware of what he might be forfeiting by trying to integrate it into the rest of his life.

  But I still found myself groping for some analogy to that condition, something more familiar: was it as if Jim were gay, and coming out of the closet? Like he was confessing to an affair, the kind of hopeless, inappropriate love that tears your life in two? Or was it more like fibromyalgia or lupus, some medical problem I just didn’t know much about? Had Jim Boylan died? Who was Jenny Boylan? The only instructive model I could find anywhere in art or literature was an episode of Star Trek. Maybe my mistake was in trying to find an analogy at all; there simply was no precedent for this in my own experience. But then I’d never had situs inversus or seen a ghost or been to the Moon, either; that didn’t necessarily mean no one else ever had. I finally accepted that I was going to have to file this under Things I’m Never Going to Understand, a mental file already crammed to overflowing.

  What I could relate to was the common fear that you are secretly so uniquely screwed-up that there is no way anyone would like you if they really knew you. In an old short story of Jim’s, he had described a character who bore an obvious physical resemblance to himself from a woman’s point of view by saying: “There was something charming, yet also slightly unpleasant, something false, about him. Like he was nice enough in general but used his articulateness as a means of covering up the fact that he collected worms or something.”1 Now the Worm Museum was open to the public.

  One of the more inappropriate emotions I encountered in grappling with Jenny’s transition was a kind of envy. Of course I didn’t envy Jim the years of secrecy and shame he had endured, or what more he would have to undergo, and risk losing, to become who he wanted to be. I knew how lethal secrets can be, and I was proud of Jim for dragging his into the light instead of letting it devour him. But I had always sensed in Jim some of the same sadness that inhabited me—it was a bond between us deeper than our goofball hijinks or our love of literature, the thing that lay beneath them both. It was a kind of brotherhood. And I’d assumed that he was sad for the same reason I was: having to be a person in the world. Most of the people I loved were outsiders and misfits, skulking around on the margins, their fundamental relationship to the world one of being misplaced. Once, after watching me play a piano piece using my own idiosyncratic self-taught technique, which, like my typing, doesn’t use the pinkies at all, Jim said: “You’re weirder than me.” His tone was funny—like a legless beggar checking out the new guy on his block who’s just a torso. So it was jarring to learn that Jim’s sadness had always been something so much stranger and more specific than my own. And that his could be fixed. I couldn’t help but wonder, in a selfish, petulant way: so what operation do I get? I suppose I felt the way some lesbians must when one of their number suddenly ups and marries a man,
defects to conventionality. Not just abandoned but betrayed, as if one of a besieged cadre had deserted.

  Jenny would argue that she’d never been a man; she’d just been impersonating one. I would say, You and me both. That’s what we’re all doing—trying, with varying degrees of success, to impersonate our assigned genders. This life is like a costume party where we all get handed an arbitrary outfit at the door and told, Here, you’re a pirate. If you say But I wanted to be a princess they say, Tough—we got enough princesses already, you’re a pirate, so you put on your eye patch and hook and fake parrot and wander around halfheartedly waving your cutlass saying Arrrr—Aye’m a purr-ty princess!, feeling ridiculous and wretched. Even now, whenever I change a tire or throw a football with a respectable spiral, I’m still secretly impressed by my own display of male competence. There’s always a sense of successful fraudulence to it, the way you feel the first time you manage to order food or ask directions in a foreign language.

  Jenny’s condition was not comparable to my own discomfort with the dumb cultural codes of gender. What I experienced metaphorically was for her painfully literal, physical; it was like the difference between having a cancer of the soul and cancer of the pancreas. For Jenny’s own account of her transition you can read her eloquent and funny memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders; it’s the closest most of us will come to understanding what it’s like to be transgendered. But her transition also inadvertently illuminated some of my own comfortably unexamined assumptions about gender and sex and identity by testing them to their limits, just as it’s in black holes, those places where the laws of physics break down in extremis, that we glean new insights into the most fundamental structure of nature.

  We are all unavoidably ignorant about the experience of the opposite sex; it might be easier for me to imagine growing up in a Paleolithic tribe in Papua New Guinea than it is to imagine growing up as a girl in my own hometown. I do know that we both have to endure a crushing amount of indoctrination into our respective genders. I remember a childhood friend of mine telling me not to sit with my legs crossed, because men didn’t sit like that. (This was the same kid who instructed me that toilet was pronounced terlet.) I thought, My dad sits like that, but I also uncrossed my legs. This mostly unspoken code only got more rigid and intricate and harshly enforced in adolescence. My sister complained, in middle school, that her formerly intelligent friends were suddenly acting giggly and dumb because boys liked them better that way. Some of the rules verged on superstitions of the Babylonian dog-on-the-bed variety: boys could not carry their books clasped to their chests but had to lug them all under one arm, no matter how unwieldy a stack they had; if you wore an earring in your right ear it meant you were gay; if you wore green on a Thursday you were gay.

  It didn’t end in adulthood, although the code is less crudely enforced than in middle school. My female friends who don’t shave their legs describe it as by far the most transgressive thing they do; they report getting nasty looks from other women as though it were an act of gender betrayal, outing them all as hairy creatures hardly less repulsive than men. Last winter I wore a very silly knit polar-bear-head hat that endeared me to women and children, but men often gave it and me contemptuous looks, as if the hat brought discredit upon us all. It had little ears. I don’t know, maybe it’s just a stupid hat. My own mother told me it made me look like a lunatic.

  Jenny had to go through this socialization ordeal twice—once, in childhood and adolescence, learning how to act like a male, and again in middle age, learning how to act like a female. She had warned me that this second adolescence could be, not unlike the first one, a little insufferable for bystanders. She was going to be allowed to be female for the first time, and so was as excited about, and inexpert with, fashion and cosmetics as a fourteen-year-old girl. When I saw she’d captioned a photo of herself on her website “Skirt by Coldwater Creek,” I felt she had crossed over into some truly alien country. It wasn’t my friend wearing a skirt that disturbed me; it was my friend caring about skirts. For the first time I wondered: Who is this person?

  She took lessons with a voice coach to refine her feminine voice. At first it sounded too Valley Girlish in its inflections, with a bit of that ditzy interrogative lilt at the ends of sentences. I’m not sure whether I even would’ve noticed it coming from someone I’d always known as female, but coming from my old friend Jim, it initially creeped me out like the voice of a split-personality ventriloquist in a movie. I think this initial Valley Girl phase was an overcompensation—I can only imagine how self-conscious and scared she must’ve been using it in public at first, like venturing out into the night in women’s clothes back in grad school, hoping to pass. Over time, though, it’s evened out to the point where I can no longer remember how Jim used to sound any different.

  The first photos Jenny sent me of herself as a woman gave me the willies. I was experiencing the gender equivalent of what psychologists call the Uncanny Valley, whereby something looks a little too real, but not quite real enough, for comfort, like low-budget CGIs. To my eye, it was not quite Jim anymore, and yet still too much him to look like somebody else. It was like the vase-and-faces illusion, positive and negative space reversing to yield two entirely different images. I had this same disorienting experience when I first met Jenny in person, for drinks at the Algonquin Hotel. At times it felt perfectly natural, sitting in a hotel lobby chatting with a female friend, but then at moments I’d get what felt like the first panicky wave of onrushing LSD and realize I was sitting in public with Jim Boylan in drag. It was irreal! Jenny was drinking some flagrantly girly cocktail in a secondary color, garnished with fruit and a swizzle stick. I ordered a large glass of gin.

  I have no idea how Jenny looks to other people—whether, as the transgendered say, they ever “read” her as male. I think she looks like a tall, striking soccer mom with long ash-blond hair. (Once I was describing her to someone in these terms and a guy at the end of the bar roused himself from a stupor to holler, “I’ll take her on spec!”) My female friends who’ve known her only as a woman can’t imagine her ever having been a man. Looking back at old photos of Jim now, it’s hard for me to articulate exactly how Jenny looks different from him. The superficials are nearly identical; the difference is something essential.

  I also can’t tell whether Jim’s old personality has changed or whether other people’s perceptions of him/her have. Some of my friends thought she was extremely competitive with me, which would probably have gone unremarked-upon between male friends, and is hardly unheard-of among artists of either gender. Some people—most of them female—found Jenny self-absorbed, talking incessantly about herself. I don’t recall anyone making this criticism of Jim, even though he was also very much a center-of-attention kind of guy, the sort who clowns and holds forth as a way of drowning out his fundamental discomfort with himself. I’m not certain whether Jenny finds herself more interesting and worth talking about since the sex change—it is, after all, a pretty un-one-uppable conversational topic—or if she’s just more at ease with herself. It’s also possible that people read the same personality traits s/he’s always had very differently now that she’s female. We expect men to be loud and funny and talk about themselves; we think of these guys as big personalities, boisterous and fun. It’s not always charming, but it’s also not unacceptable. When Jenny acts this way I think it seems, to other women, as if she’s cheating, getting to have it both ways. Girls are taught to listen, ask questions, and laugh at men’s jokes; a woman who makes herself the focus risks being seen as vain, obnoxious, needy, or insecure—as unattractive.

  It was hard to know how much I was now seeing her through my own preconceptions about women. Our relationship was changing for other reasons—as we both got older the age difference between us no longer mattered as much, and I was finding my own odd, meandering path as an artist—so it was impossible to parse out how much of it had to do with her transition. A few months after she’d started on hormo
ne therapy, Jenny wrote me an earnest letter expressing concern about my life. For the first time in our decade of friendship, she told me she sometimes worried about my apparent aimlessness and shortterm, immediate-reward, regret-minimization philosophy. She wondered whether it might not lend my days some structure, and make my life more meaningful, if I were to do something for others, maybe volunteer work or teaching—something, yes, perhaps not unlike like a job. I wrote her: “Wow—that estrogen works fast.”

  I grew up in the 1970s, when it was not just intellectually fashionable but, in some circles, politically mandatory to believe that all gender differences were culturally conditioned. (This idea has been somewhat qualified over the last few decades by genetic and evolutionary explanations for human behavior, and by that generation’s own experience of raising kids.) At the same time that we grade schoolers were being taught that the color green was gay on Thursdays, this conscientious gender blindness was filtering down to us through the medium of Norman Lear sitcoms and girls-can-do-anything-boys-can cartoon agitprop. As an adult, I think of myself as a pretty gender-indifferent guy: I have as many close female friends as male, and none of them are what you’d call girly girls—they’re all unabashedly intelligent, funny, and assertive, in flagrant defiance of middle-school norms. None of them reads checkout-aisle fashion magazines, not even as a “guilty pleasure.” They do seem to think about shoes more than I do. My male friends, even the ex-marines, rocket scientists, and hunters who’ve shot six-hundred-pound boars, are all pretty gentle, sensitive guys who don’t need to get blacked-out drunk to talk about their relationship troubles or admit that they enjoy each other’s company. None of them gives a shit about cars. Some of them do get excited about professional football, but this I regard as a regrettable genetic defect, like the predisposition toward sickle-cell anemia among African-Americans. I tend to think that anyone who conforms too closely to his or her assigned gender role must not be all that independent-minded or brave.