CHAPTER 15 And His Name Shall Be Called Something Hard to Remember
And He said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel; for you have struggled with God and with men, and have prevailed.”
—Genesis 32:28
And they said to him, It’s not that we don’t like the name Israel, it’s just that we’ve always called you Jacob. We’re so used to it.
And he said to them, Right, no, I get that, I do know that you’ve always called me by that name before, I hadn’t forgotten. I’ve been used to it, too, ha-ha! And I really appreciate your bearing with me—
And they said, Well, first things first, you should definitely know that we’re going to get it wrong sometimes.
And again he said, Of course! I figured that.
And they said, We just really want to stress, before moving on to any other topics, that we’re going to forget a lot, and use the old name. That’s the first thing we want you to know, now that you’ve made your request, just how badly we plan on carrying it out.
And Jacob said, Okay.
And they said that a lot. And everyone else said that, too, with astonishing regularity upon hearing the new name, so eventually when Jacob—sorry, Israel—told anyone about it he started saying it for them, to save time, My name shall no longer be called Jacob but Israel for I have struggled with God and with men and have prevailed but I don’t expect you to get it right all the time, I know it’s a big change, I totally understand that it’ll take some time to adjust.
And some of them said, What if we came up with a name that meant both? Sort of in between until it feels more natural? Like Isracob or Jasrael. Yeah, we’re going to call you Isracob.
To which Israel said, I—okay. If you think it’ll help.
And they said, Thanks for understanding. It’s just that this is really hard for us, too, you know? In some ways, it’s like you’ve died.
To which Israel said, In which ways?
And they said, Please don’t get defensive.
And some of them took “it’ll take some time to adjust” as “forever,” which had not been what Jacob—Israel! Sorry, sorry, sorry! It’s just that my brain is so used to saying Jacob, because you really are Jacob in my brain, just Jacob-doing-something-weird-these-days—had meant at all.
And some of the others said Israel some of the time, and Jacob some of the time, exclaiming Oh my God, oh my God!! ISRAEL, sorry, oh my God I’m SO sorry after each accidental Jacob such that each time was more noticeable than the time before, and Israel found himself saying, It’s fine, don’t worry about it; it’s totally fine, don’t feel bad; I didn’t even notice; Jacob is fine, I honestly always liked Jacob better anyways.
CHAPTER 16 Pirates at the Funeral: “It Feels Like Someone Died,” but Someone Actually Didn’t
A particularly thorny modern question of etiquette is how to properly receive, as an alive person who has recently advertised either an intention to transition or that transition has already begun, any variation on the following sentiment: “It feels like someone died.” Sometimes people are willing to be more specific and clarify, “It feels like you, the transitioning person, died,” or possibly “It feels like my spouse/parent/child/sibling/friend died.” But more often than not, I think, non-transitioning people prefer the safety of announcing the death of Someone rather than name the transitioner outright. It serves as a softer replacement for “You’re dead to me,” as the speaker lacks either the desire or the determination to simply announce an estrangement. It feels like Someone died—I won’t say who—you know who I’m talking about, the party of the first part—but let’s not speak ill of the dead.
One worries that responding with the good news that one is not dead at all but very much alive—that one is, in fact, moving in the direction of vitality, animation, the future, developing a new kind of continuity, carrying on the good work of naming and identification that all people have been charged with—would not be received with wonder and relief. Yet, like Tom Sawyer listening to his aunt Polly reproach herself after believing him to have drowned, the temptation remains to “rush out from under the bed and overwhelm [them] with joy.”
But how to talk someone who loves you out of their grief? One might argue (I’m not dead, nor anything like it; you’re mistaken), or persuade (I’ll be just around the corner from my own life; come by and visit anytime), or demand, or manipulate, or threaten, or cajole, try to strike some sort of bargain: What if I were to transition as little as possible—might my condition be upgraded merely to some sort of serious but nonfatal complaint? How does one behave as a guest at one’s own funeral? Anyone might be naturally curious to see such a thing, if only to luxuriate in how much one is missed. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn did it to profoundly satisfying effect:
As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking he recognized these pictures, felt a pang in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they had seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide. The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit.
There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed; a moment later the church door creaked; the minister raised his streaming eyes above his handkerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then another pair of eyes followed the minister’s, and then almost with one impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck, a ruin of drooping rags, sneaking sheepishly in the rear! They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon!
Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves upon their restored ones, smothered them with kisses and poured out thanksgivings.…
Suddenly the minister shouted at the top of his voice: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow—sing!—and put your hearts in it!”
What a death! I, for one, would cheerfully sit through a few weeks or months of “It feels like Mallory died” for a chance to watch my hometown gather together to mourn my rare promise, grieve over what were after all only the most minor of faults, rend their garments in grief for not having praised me more often, only to dazzle them by descending from the rafters and guide them into amazement and song. What theatrically inclined transsexual wouldn’t jump at the chance?
And who could be so unreasonable as to not permit their loved ones the opportunity to express sorrow or a sense of loss at the prospect of change—in short, the thinking goes, why must those theatrically inclined transsexuals insist on monitoring and superintending the feelings of others? You may have the right to transition (though what grounds in which that right may be established is unclear—you may very well be getting away with something, let’s revisit our generosity later), but certainly we have the concomitant right to name our own emotions and go into mourning. All change entails at least some loss, if only the loss of a certain type of potential or expectation. Everyone has the right to mourn a loss. You’re taking _____ away from us, at least let us hold a funeral. And yet other changes, other losses, even significant ones, are not counted as bereavements. The problem with the forced-bereavement that is sometimes thrust upon the transitioner is that there is no point at which the transitioner can rush up the aisle, call an end to the eulogy, and lead the congregation in song, praising God from whom all blessings flow, putting their whole hearts into it.
On the one hand, here is death: stagnant, permanent,
immobilized, silent, unvarying, inactive, formless, characterless, shrinking, constrictive, irreversible. On the other hand, here is transition: active, forceful, adaptable, energetic, animated, expansive, full of possibility, capacious, comprehensive, vital, ambitious. Loss may be a part of the project of transition, but hardly the primary or initializing force. The question for the transitioner, then, is how to act in such a way that one is not mistaken by friends and family for Death itself; how to cope with being merely noticed rather than seen, how to prepare oneself to announce the end of a funeral only to be met with, “No, you’re dead, or as good as. We’ll stick with our corpse, thanks.”
I was prepared for a degree of sadness and grief from my loved ones when I started to transition. I had often been sad about it myself, and considered that sadness part of a natural, intelligible response. In some ways it was correct to describe my transition as the beginning of an unprecedented kind of life; in some ways it was correct to describe my transition as an involuntary forgetting—I lost the ability to be a woman, sometimes by nearly imperceptible degree, sometimes in a great rush. Things I had known for years I suddenly forgot. I lost fluency, capability, drive, familiarity in the project of my womanhood, and I sometimes felt that it had been taken from me by some unknowable and external force. How could I possibly want, how could I possibly be responsible for, something I did not understand, something that bewildered and startled me? I had begun my transition unwittingly when I asked myself why, even in a life often characterized by happiness and purpose, I so often worked so hard not to ask myself what I felt or wanted in a given moment; once I began to think about things I had previously decided were impossible to think about, the very definition of the world impossible began to change.
Unremarkable, everyday things became wildly impossible; baffling, sometimes contradictory, profoundly daunting things became possible and shortly thereafter absolutely necessary. Nothing had been taken from me; I was not beset by external, capricious forces, not subject to the vicious whims of something outside myself; my sense of self was not under siege. I had never taken the compass of the things I did not want to want. I knew how to fantasize and how to deny my fantasies. I knew how to take my cues from other people who seemed satisfied with my part in the order of our relationship and I knew how to sustain myself with sufficient private, plausibly deniable escape valves that made it possible to go on without asking difficult questions. Those early days of transition, where I tested the waters while steadfastly refusing to admit I was doing anything differently, were of course characterized by a sense of loss; loss was the only way I could understand myself at first. But the loss was not only necessary, it was inevitable, and it cleared room for the possibility of something new, compelling, shared, productive, and profoundly good. Loss was present; death wasn’t.
There is something willfully perverse about bereavement in the face of new life. My hope is not to squash or censor the complicated feelings of non-transitioning people, but to reconsider the direction of their sorrow. One might grieve and be prepared for something else, some new experience or sentiment to join one’s grief, to mingle and ultimately sweeten it, add richness and support and texture. But to enter into mourning, to reenact the rituals of death, to borrow its vernacular, is to cut off understanding, curiosity, possibility, knowledge before they have a chance to flourish.
I sometimes think of the phrase “deadnaming” as a capitulation to the sometimes-fatal language other people use about our transitions—an attempt to reroute the language of death, if we can’t clear it away entirely. It is, I suppose, a useful-enough shorthand for “This name is not part of the project of life.” Death, and the threat of death, must be met somehow, and it may be that we cannot invent a new vocabulary overnight. But whenever I hear someone refer to death-as-transition or transition-as-death I think of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians on the subject of the resurrection:
For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life … old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
Here there are persons with multiple bodies that give way to one another—sometimes subject to corruption and destruction, sometimes ascending and taking on new power, new structure, new capabilities; sometimes clothed and sometimes naked, sometimes longing to be more naked than they already are; sometimes clothed and longing for further clothing; capable of change and regeneration that necessarily involve death but do not end with it—here death is a creative power in service to the greater force, the greater reality of life. Here life swallows up death, and everyone is invited to look at it, to see the evidence of the persistence of life with their own new eyes. Praise God from whom all blessings flow—sing—and put your hearts into it.
INTERLUDE XV Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck, Transmasculine Edition
I feel bad about my neck. All the time. If you saw my neck, you might feel bad about it, too, but you’d probably be too polite to let on, unless you are the kind of person who says things like “Welcome to womanhood” in a tone that actually means “Shut up” when a trans woman references her own experience with sexism, in which case you might let on after all. In that case, you might say something to me like, “Well, what do you expect?” or “You get what you paid for.” And you’d be right, sort of, but it’d still be rude.
If I said something to you on the subject—something like “I absolutely cannot stand my testosterone-induced neck acne”—you’d likely respond by saying something nice, like, “You can barely notice it,” or “Well, at least it’s not on your face.” You’d be lying, of course, but I forgive you just the same. I tell lies like that all the time, mostly to friends who tell me that they’re not sure yet if top surgery is right for them, but would I recommend it if they were thinking about it, and if so should they consider free grafts or medically tattooed nipples, and how important was prioritizing sensation to me, and do I think they might qualify for peri or keyhole and what have I heard about Mosser and is it true that most surgeons want you to go on T first, and if so is the neck acne on T really that bad? My experience is that “I can barely notice it” is code for “If you think you’re going to trap me into acknowledging how bad your neck acne is by asking me for suggestions on how to treat it, you’re dead wrong.” It’s dangerous to engage with such subjects, and we all know it. Because if you said, “Yes, your formerly smooth neck has since bloomed into a map of angry red blotches,” I might end up being one of those people you read about in the tabloids in court suing their endocrinologist. Furthermore, and this is the point, it would be All My Fault. I am particularly sensitive to the All My Fault aspect of things, since I have never forgiven one of my friends for seeing almost immediate results with Hibiclens.
Sometimes I go out to lunch with my boyfr— I got that far into the sentence and caught myself. I suppose I mean my transmasc friends. We are no longer boys and have not been boys for fifteen years, although you wouldn’t know it to hear us refer to ourselves in the third person. Anyway, sometimes we go out to lunch and I look around the table and realize we’re all wearing turtleneck sweaters, like the cluelessly handsome barista in a Coffee Shop AU. Sometimes instead we’re all wearing scarves, like Johnny Weir in 2009. Sometimes we’re all wearing hand-knitted mittens from our equally transmasculine boyfriends and look like an advertisement for “carefully calculated queer coziness.” It’s sort of funny, because we’re not neurotic about identity, and whenever any of us exhibits a tendency to rename himself after a character from A Separate Peace, someone else gently sits on his chest until the urge passes. We all look good for our age and various hormone levels. Except for our necks.
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Oh, the neck acne. According to my dermatologist, the neck starts to go at 220ng/dL of testosterone, and that’s that. You can slather yourself in Dr. Jart correcting cream, order those little overnight acne patches from Sephora, you can hire a facialist to perform the most hygienic and regular of extractions, but short of a surgically implanted turtleneck, there’s not a damn thing you can do about the neck. We try to tell ourselves that chaos is not the only governing force in our lives, but our necks are the truth.
My own experience with my neck began shortly after I turned thirty. I started taking hormones that shot me into a sort of second puberty, and while I’d had plenty of experience with the occasional spot on my nose during the original go-round, this was my first time dealing with zits below the jawline. If you learn nothing else from reading this essay, dear reader, learn this: Never start testosterone therapy without first taking as many pictures as possible of your neck. Because even if you honestly believe that your well-being is more important than vanity, even if you record your first “Six Days on T” video thrilled beyond your own imagining, grateful to be alive, full of blinding insight about what’s important and what’s not, even if you vow to be eternally joyful about being on the planet Earth and never to complain about anything ever again, I promise you that one day soon, sooner than you can imagine, you will look in the mirror and think, Do they manufacture testosterone that leaves the neck out of it?
Assuming, of course, that you do look in the mirror. That’s another thing about being at a certain point in my own transition that I’ve noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror, preferring instead to toggle the “Male” filter on FaceApp and consider the results a binding promise of what I will look like two years from now. If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if something really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight. And if the light is good (which I hope it’s not) I often do what so many folks two years into testosterone replacement therapy do when stuck in front of a mirror: I place my fingers carefully over the acne and stare wistfully at the smooth skin in between. (Here’s something else I’ve noticed, by the way: If you want to get really, really depressed about your neck, sit in the car, assuming you have access to one, and look at yourself in the rearview mirror. What is it about rearview mirrors? I have no idea why, but there are no worse mirrors where necks are concerned. It’s one of the genuinely compelling mysteries of modern life, right up there with the unstudied connection between people with PCOS and trans men. Maybe it has something to do with control. In a selfie, you’re holding the phone, and it knows it can’t get away with so much as a mirror, which is farther away and harder to throw.)
Something That May Shock and Discredit You Page 15