In the first few weeks of recovery after top surgery, I spent a lot of time watching old movies. It did not make sense, at least in my mind, to think of myself as recovering from anything, because from almost the first moment I came to it seemed as if there had never been anything about my chest that would have required surgical intervention in the first place. This reality was more believable than what had come before. This is a line of thinking that my mind is more easily convinced of than my body. About nine or ten days afterward I started feeling pretty well most of the time, and could once again gingerly hold my own coffee cup and open silverware drawers on my own behalf. But there’s a good long distance between feeling no longer freshly incised and being able to resume normal activities, and I was under doctor’s orders to restrict myself to “T. rex–style arm movements,” which meant I spent a lot of afternoons watching old movies on the couch in a spirit of mild-to-moderate agitation. Miles and miles of adorable new chest, and a tired body that wouldn’t deliver it anywhere without protest.
I had a friend visiting from out of town who was doing things like cleaning out the litterbox (for the cat) and opening jars (for me) and in the course of conversation it came up that they’d never seen Destry Rides Again, despite being a big fan of Madeline Kahn’s performance in Blazing Saddles, modeled after Marlene Dietrich in the same, so the two of us watched it together. Grace and I had been explaining our T4T energy theory to this friend, and I’d been trying to look for examples beyond the usual “short, anxious men” and “statuesque blond women” pairing.
When Jimmy Stewart as Tom Destry Jr. steps down from the coach in Bottleneck for the first time, it’s on the strength of his reputation as a lawman like his father. The man who’s been riding in the coach next to him has been angry at the driver the whole trip, and the first thing he does is punch the guy in the jaw before shooting a gun out of the postilion’s hand. Everyone applauds, assuming this is the new deputy, truly his father’s son in name and deed, but of course it isn’t—Jimmy steps onto the street carrying a canary in a birdcage and a woman’s parasol. The case for Jimmy Stewart’s transmasculinity as Tom Destry is, I think, a straightforward one: he’s easily distinguished by his unusual height, immediately mistaken for someone else, bears a conflicted relationship to his father’s legacy, constantly offers folksy, rambling, Christ-style parables about something that once happened to “a friend” in order to defuse tension (if you know a trans man, odds are good that you also know a trans man who’s currently in seminary even though he isn’t necessarily religious himself. Lord knows why, but it often seems to go with the territory. I’m not saying every guy who goes to seminary is trans, nor even that most trans guys sooner or later find themselves pursuing a doctrinal education, just that if you scratch enough trans men, eventually a seminarian will turn up).
There’s a moment in the movie where Charles Winninger—Sheriff Washington Dimsdale—tearfully breaks down in front of Jimmy Stewart once his great plan to prove everybody wrong and clean up the town once and for all has fallen apart. It was a one-point plan, destined for failure: Call Tom Destry. That was all he had, and once that didn’t work, he was left with nothing.
“Oh, Tom,” he cries. “The only reason they made me sheriff here is because I was the town drunk. They wanted someone they could kick around, someone who wouldn’t ask questions. But I was aimin’ to fool ’em, do things right, send in for you. And now, you fooled me.”
That day I watched Destry Rides Again with my friend I was exactly five years sober, and watching a man-who-is-not-a-man cradle a terrified drunk and say, “Well, you will fool them, Wash. We’ll fool them together,” was deeply moving to me, a man who has spent much of his life having exactly one plan upon which all my hopes rest, and falling to pieces when the plan (just four drinks tonight, just a haircut and hope nobody notices, disavow all desires and hope for the best) falls apart. I think there are better ways to talk about transition and sobriety than to only focus on one’s feelings; sola sentimente is no better a foundation for transition than sola scriptura was for Protestantism. But it is true to say that I could not be a drunk and a man at the same time. The drunk was there to kick around and make sure no one asked questions; the drunk had to give way to make room—though that’s not to say that I neatly and immediately swapped one out for the other, either. The point of my drunkenness was to forestall imagination; imagination was the first step on the road to action and action was dangerous. Better to ruminate, to nurse over old hurts, to rehearse again and again things that had already happened and could not be changed. Just as top surgery was about something more than merely removing part of my chest, sobriety required more than simply quitting drinking and carrying on otherwise as if nothing had changed. It required imagination, and imagination necessitates acknowledging that the future exists on its own terms and in its own right, and might even reach out and make demands of the present.
Anyhow, Tom Destry’s great plan for Bottleneck is something along the lines of few-to-no guns, but plenty of incarceration, which is not much of an improvement in many ways. But in the world of the movie at least, he’s unique in wanting to spend a great deal of time thinking before he does or says anything, unique in prioritizing imagination and possibility before moving ahead.
Grace and I talk often about what we thought about each other the day we met, when I asked her if she wanted to be best friends and she said that she did. The two of us looked very different then than we do now, but still recognized each other on sight. When Jimmy Stewart meets Marlene Dietrich—a German woman inexplicably nicknamed “Frenchy” in a Western boomtown, tricking drunk ranch hands into gambling away their life savings, stealing men’s pants and sucker-punching their wives—they both spend a lot of time sizing each other up, trying to figure out who’s got the upper hand, and if the upper hand is worth getting.
“How’s the weather up there?” she says to him on sight, looking up at his great height. “How’s the weather up there,” he says at the exact same time in a weary tone. “Ah, come on. You can do better than that.” Marlene never exactly tells him that he can do better, too, but she does hurl a number of glass bottles at his head, which communicates the same general principle. There are moments in the movie where Grace is very much Marlene, and moments where I am very much Jimmy, but there are two moments, I think, where we switch.
The first switch comes when Tom Destry visits Frenchy in her dressing room and says, “Now, I bet you got kind of a lovely face under all that paint there. Why don’t you wipe it off someday and have a good look? Figure out how you can live up to it.” Most of the sentiment behind the idea of makeup as a face-obliterating mask we can cheerfully leave in 1939, of course, but the work of figuring out how to live up to one’s face is no joke. The first time I ever used a men’s bathroom in public was at a grocery store. I’d been transitioning at this point for a little while but dithering on the subject of which door to duck behind. Grace—still, at this point, my best friend and not my girlfriend—pushed me through the door. She was on the other side, a little pale, when I came out a minute later, all certainty gone: “Oh God, did I read that moment right?” (She had; everything was just fine; I don’t recommend that you shove any of your loved ones into any bathrooms, but it worked for us in that moment. All public bathrooms are terrible, but men’s rooms are terrible in an entirely new way.)
Destry is a man who is not like other men in Bottleneck, and Frenchy is not like the other women there, either. There is more to transition than that not-being-like, but there’s some there there; they have a dissimilar and yet a shared sense of uniqueness. She notices his height, and he notices her face. He is stymied in certain ways; she is self-sabotaging in others. They both like each other very much.
The second time the two of us switch our sense of identification is the moment Frenchy dies. (Another sentiment we can happily leave in 1939.) She sags into Jimmy’s arms and wipes the lipstick off her mouth before asking him to kiss her. He tilts his
hat before he does, so that no one else, not even the audience at home, can watch them do it. And without suggesting that removing makeup is the same thing as removing artifice or becoming honest, I knew myself to be Frenchy, not Destry, in that moment: ready to ask for privacy and intimacy at the same time. The year I asked for top surgery, five years into sobriety, was the first time I admitted publicly to having a body and wanting to do something about it, something I could not, or at least had not, done before. Part of the reason I did not think of top surgery as being primarily organized around any sort of removal, at least physically, was because I thought of there being more of me afterward, rather than less.
A STRONG CASE FOR T4T ENERGY IN A CONVERSATION BETWEEN GRACE AND MYSELF
SELF: [Unspecified acknowledgment of surprising, yet obvious, new hormonally charged reality that is both true physically and beyond the physical].
GRACE: If someone else had made a claim about [unspecified acknowledgment of surprising, yet obvious, new hormonally charged reality that is both true physically and beyond the physical] before I started hormones, I would not have believed them. But if you had said it to me, I would have believed you.
SELF: [Wipes makeup off and dies triumphantly in her arms.]
GRACE: You are being dramatic. Wake up and finish this conversation.
SELF: [Cracking a single eye open] I am willing to sing two bars of “Something There,” but I don’t think I can get any less oblique than that.
GRACE: Ah, come on. You can do better than that.
SELF: I am willing and able to acknowledge that you have a body, and that I have a body, and that yours is good, and mine. This is more than I have ever done. The weather up here is fine.
GRACE: Now, I bet you got kind of a lovely face under all that paint there. Why don’t you wipe it off someday and have a good look? Figure out how you can live up to it.
Fin.
* * *
Toward the end of Destry Rides Again, just before the credits roll, when Destry is being set up in an obvious marriage-plot moment with a different kind of girl, he defers with another story. I love this moment because it suggests that he considers heterosexual marriage to be a threat just as serious, and just as need of a solution, as gun violence: “Y’know, speaking of marriage … I had a friend once that happened to …” She looks disappointed. He keeps talking, trying to defuse the situation. It’s Marlene or nobody, and it looks like Jimmy is ready to stick with nobody—and by extension the whole town of Bottleneck.
Later, director (not their director, merely a director) Peter Bogdanovich would claim that Marlene and Jimmy had an on-set affair that resulted in Marlene’s getting pregnant. His source was, supposedly, Orson Welles, who also claimed to have taken her to get an abortion without Stewart’s knowledge. In some ways I have difficulty believing that out of all her friends, Marlene would choose Orson Welles to confide in about her romantic relationships; in other ways I have no difficulty believing it at all. I once saw Bogdanovich give one of his “Life with Orson Welles” talks in Hollywood, and he said one of his fondest memories was looking up from his desk in his home office to see Orson tearing through the halls, shouting, “Dick Van Dyke is on!” And I had no trouble believing that, so perhaps it’s not too difficult to believe the rest.
INTERLUDE XX The Matriarchs of Avonlea Begrudgingly Accept Your Transition / Men of Anne of Green Gables Experience
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
RACHEL LYNDE, as efficient and sure-minded as God
MARILLA CUTHBERT, formidable, earthy, winsome
THE AUTHOR, uncertain
RACHEL LYNDE: Mind that I was against taking the boy in from the start; orphans, especially redheaded ones, are always exactly the kind who do end up transitioning, and the only thing I can think of that’s worse than a redheaded girl child is a redheaded boy one.
THE AUTHOR, POINTEDLY: If it helps, I think I’m going bald early.
RACHEL LYNDE: It doesn’t, of course. Well, instead of being hopeless in the kitchen, maybe he can go be hopeless in the fields for a bit, until we can figure out just exactly what part of Green Gables he’s capable of being something other than hopeless in.
MARILLA CUTHBERT: I don’t mind saying that I think he’s turned into a real fine boy. And I don’t mind saying that I’m proud of him, either.
RACHEL LYNDE: Does raise some tricky questions about the Blythe boy and the Barry girl, don’t it, though?
MARILLA CUTHBERT: Does it?
THE AUTHOR, POINTEDLY: Yes, does it?
RACHEL LYNDE: I can see I’ve stepped into a real nest of it today. Didn’t know male wasps carried stingers, too.
MARILLA CUTHBERT: [As if nothing had happened] I can’t say I saw it coming, but then many a good turn has come from a surprise.
RACHEL LYNDE: Lord knows I enjoy a surprise myself. But if anyone was going to end up that way, I would have put good money on it being—
MARILLA CUTHBERT: [Loudly] He’d been worried, some, about how Matthew would take it, for fear that there’d be a distance put between them.
RACHEL LYNDE: As if Matthew wouldn’t find a way to spoil him regardless.
MARILLA CUTHBERT: I thought it was nonsense, too.
RACHEL LYNDE: And I hear a number of Redmond students are doing it now. So he’ll have—I expect—company in the spring. Not to say it’s faddish, exactly, but then who wants to be an iconoclast?
MARILLA CUTHBERT: Fad or no fad, once he puts his mind to something, it usually carries the day.
RACHEL LYNDE: Lord, yes. Whatever else might change, that red hair is mighty determined. Can see it coming from a mile away.
CHAPTER 22 The Opposite of Baptism
Thus having pass’d the night in fruitless pain,
I to my longing friends return again,
Amaz’d th’ augmented number to behold,
Of men and matrons mix’d, of young and old;
A wretched exil’d crew together brought,
With arms appointed, and with treasure fraught,
Resolv’d, and willing, under my command,
To run all hazards both of sea and land.
The Morn began, from Ida, to display
Her rosy cheeks; and Phosphor led the day:
Before the gates the Grecians took their post,
And all pretense of late relief was lost.
I yield to Fate, unwillingly retire,
And, loaded, up the hill convey my sire.
—The Aeneid, Book II, translated by John Dryden
There are two accounts of how persons came to be in the book of Genesis, as it retells the making of them: first as a pair (Gen 1:26–28), later in sequence (Gen 2:7–24). The first is, perhaps unsurprisingly, my favorite. The story of creation is full of the pleasures of accuracy-in-naming—not quite “I calls ’em like I see ’em,” neither so idiosyncratic nor so defensive an attitude, but in taking correct measure of and full responsibility for things. The pleasures of the person Eve-and-Adam, who was both a community and a worker, came in cataloging, in identifying, in recognizing, in naming, in affirming—God’s work among God’s creatures. Labels that suggest vocation, rather than labels that restrict ability, if one is skeptical of labels.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
—Gen. 1:26–28
Let us call this act empersoning rather than impersonation. God begins the task of empersoning by speaking to himself, by making a delightful announcement and establishing the number of gifts he plans on giving someone else, then lists
all the things he has already made in a pleasurable recitation. Persons are unlike creatures, in this account of creation, and yet they are recognizable and known to one another, and bear different kinds of responsibility to one another. Persons have been given the task of creating more joys and pleasures in an already pleasurable world, of exploring, of establishing meaningful authority, of establishing care, of identifying life and offering it the rights and privileges that are all life’s due; one might spend a great deal of time examining the word “subdue” but I don’t especially care to. One might summarize this portion of Genesis as: there are many good ways to relate to everything that experiences life differently than oneself; persons have been tasked by a creative principle to explore them all.
I don’t remember who first claimed that the voice one uses to talk to animals is the voice one would like to use to speak to oneself; it sounds vaguely plausible in the way that most of my horoscopes do, but also a bit too neat to provide the whole story. But every dog I have ever lived with has made it clear to me that my desire for cheerful narration as I perform the tasks necessary to self-replication (cleaning, eating, stretching, drinking, walking, doing the washing-up, ignoring my mail, hormone injection, making tea) is immense, and it requires a dog in order to work; if I say those things to myself I feel ridiculous and infantilized, and if I say it to another human being, I’d likely (and rightly) be begged to knock it off. But a dog’s capacity to absorb repetition is equally immense, and in this way persons and dogs are uniquely suited to one another. There is no end to a dog’s ability to receive acts of affection and reassurance throughout the day. A dog delights in establishing comfort and meeting its physical needs in ways I often forget, avoid, attempt to draw out, or manipulate in myself.
Something That May Shock and Discredit You Page 20