What did the dream want? Is there any surer way to your heart than that?

He’d told us all to stay down, heads on the floor of the diner, his mask the type that freaked me out at my grandparents’ house as a kid: see-through, a painted face with rouged cheeks, so that his features were obscured but present.

My cheek’s pressed to dirty, black and white linoleum. I can see Michael, my wife, and a woman behind her, hair dyed and frizzy. In the dream I’m reminded of the real-life mugging on 41^st Street back in Oakland, my view of the gun from my knees, my far-away sense that I would die. But I didn’t die. In the dream I comfort myself with the reality of my waking life, but then the masked man changes his mind.

He shoots the dyed-hair lady, the beer-gut man, the sorority girl. Who are these people? The going theory is that each person in your dreams represents a part of yourself.

The man turns to Michael; I watch it happen. She slumps and I rise like a lion. I rush the man and, even though she is dead and I will die, I’m surprised at my valor. I see the gun and the man’s terrible, blurry face. I leap even though I don’t believe I am the kind of person who leaps. I guess that’s what the dream wants: for me to know that the worst kind of man, the man I was scared of becoming, doesn’t frighten me any more.

***

Today I stuck myself with a needle. I’m jangly with testosterone. Later I’ll go swim it off. I’ll make my body straight as the line on the floor of the pool. In the locker room, men will wander bare-assed past me, unselfconscious and beautiful, all of them. I will wait until they aren’t looking to pull off my shorts, or will change behind the curtained shower stall, even though I’m beautiful, too.

A secret I kept, even from myself: I quit soccer, basketball, and the swim team because I couldn’t regulate my breath. I’d quietly panic, raise my head to a cheering crowd, but could only see my father, a specter, watching like the man with the mask. My fear was shallow in my chest; it gathered there and I couldn’t keep my core strong enough to draw myself down.

“Focus,” one coach after another would yell. I ran a mile around the rubber track, ignoring my own tunnel vision, until I hyperventilated. Without breath, we are fight or flight.

It’s funny to put on goggles now and dive right in. Stroke, stroke, breath. I can’t escape all that’s stored in these ballooning muscles. The dream, maybe, was about how I’d had the wrong idea all along.

***

Michael says I picked the perfect name for myself: Thomas, Aramaic for twin. I think of the apostle Thomas, doubting Thomas. They say he didn’t believe that Christ was resurrected until he could see the wounds himself.

Faith, as we all know, is nothing without the shadow of doubt that highlights it. I was nearly certain that I couldn’t be the man I’ve become. I am a better person than I thought, even if I am still, sometimes in a foggy mirror, a stranger to myself.

 ***

The students in my short fiction class this spring were fascinated with second person. The biology majors, especially, liked the idea of a narrator that was instructive and universal, the reader and the author at once.

“You” could do what “I” couldn’t, they told me. Their yous told semi-fictions about souring romances and abusive parents. “You” learned you couldn’t go home again, and you are right.

You stick yourself in the thigh, strangely comforted by the sight of your blood. You like the fact of yourself, the hair inching over the tops of your hands.

You taste like chlorine; you lose a swim meet in a girl’s suit and raise your head to a quiet gym in perfect, red trunks. You dream yourself into being; you, your own twin—you come as you are: the second person and the first one, too.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• Sometimes Bodies Are Just Bodies
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space

Two years into the weekly shots, the needles no longer intimidate me, their hollowness a wormhole I shoot the magic through. Genes get turned on, I’m told: we’re born with both sets of blueprints, we all have a male and a female body inside us. One cannibalizes the other, you could say. That’s not a medical fact, that’s how I feel when I see my sideburns, when I smell my own spicy skin, when I get called bro by a tollbooth worker in western Mass, and then another closer to home.

I’m being honest: beginning again is a monstrous process, a real horror show.

I’m a bro, sure. Just like my friend, a new mom, says I’m like her—a body forever changed, passing between worlds. I’m an ex who no longer exists. I’m a brother that never was, a sudden-husband, a twin—the meaning of my name, Thomas. My birth name rests right alongside it, a reminder, a refusal to forget.

And yet.

Sometimes I get this ragged wind in my chest. It’s a graveyard in there, too: instead of clothes holding my ghost shape, it’s my old self that calls out from beneath bone. Change isn’t all beauty and biceps, sometimes it’s zombie parts hurtling on alongside my heart. The zombies, baffled, can’t squeeze into my old clothes. They haven’t caught up with the truth of this body: they walk me into a gay bar and then react with dumb indifference to the men who cruise me. They don’t understand that the queer women no longer recognize me, they smile chummily and everyone looks away.

At the coffee shop, I stress about how long to interact with the woman I see every week. She has taken to calling me “dude” suddenly and with strange regularity, the word like a bit of garlic, a “bro”-like periphery between us.

Maybe not, that’s the thing. Being a man in the world is often, still, alien to me. There’s the young guy at the bar beside me this weekend, in dress sneakers and too much cologne, trying to impress a date who’s clearly indifferent to him. His desperation has him speaking up an octave, exposed in his brand-new blazer and theatrical kindness, and I wish I could tell him to be gentler with himself, I wish I could say, “Bro, let it go.”

Adaptation begins with acceptance. You probably don’t know what it’s like to hold your breath in an X-Ray scanner in a suburban strip mall, the beeping machine inching closer to your pelvis, the pad covering your groin but not hiding the fact of your difference from the lady behind the glass.

But you know about exposure. You know where you are vulnerable, where you are not who they expected. You have zombies shaped like memories or loves long-gone, you have clothes in your closet that hold selves you’ll never be. Maybe you’re still waiting or maybe, like me, you’re just beginning to let it go.

“You’re the same, but different,” everyone tells me. I am a bro, an ex, a husband, a twin. I am a new mom, a toll booth worker, a hormone, a ghost. I get right with that, I give my shirts away so they can be brought back to life by new bodies.

My zombies aren’t alive but I am, and I care for them so they know the difference. It’s a real horror show, but you know—they’re just asking to be considered, like that man at the bar; like you reading this; like me in my shirt that fits, thankful for the technician that saw all of me and handed me the X-ray film, saying everything by not saying a word.  

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #16: Trapped in the Right Body

needles as conduit

forgiveness as belief                                     complicating masculinity

love as prize                                                     identity as metaphor

restrooms as geospiritual location

But I’m a body, not a metaphor and certainly not a static shape, so what I’ve left out—my raw materials—are more relevant than I allow here. My leg manifests a strange allergy at the site of my injections; my anger prickles more hot and more often; my empathy is erased easily by minor transgressions; I torpedo my internal, benign authorial narration with counternarratives from less empowered times.

This year, as I wrote this song of myself, I grew a self-consciousness that lacquered over every night out until I’d cocooned myself at home, until the days darkened fast.

On the phone I had the same conversation: I’m great, never been better. I walked into rooms burning with self-consciousness—I’m thinking now that I shouldn’t be telling you this but if you were me, 10 years ago or in a different body, I’d want you to know that you’re doing it right.

***

It’s just easier to be transcendent than it is to be honest.

***

Here’s the negative space: I wrote a pretty snow angel of my best self and then I lay down inside it. I’m a self-made man because I willed myself into existence. I made myself real.

In college, I had a professor who taught fiction this way: imagine a character. Fill in the blank. Thomas is the kind of person who ______. Here’s the good stuff: is sympathetic to suffering, resistant to cultural norms, thoughtful in small exchanges, measured in conflict.

Behind the scenes, of course, there’s the harsh rub of this bristling face, the hangnails and wayward cowlicks. Behind the scenes, I’m hurtful, I cry wolf, I fear, I fail, I fail again. I won’t write this in past tense: I fight myself, I give up, I grow impatient.

Right now, as you read this, I’m cutting, judgmental, tired. I fantasize about hitting the man ahead of me in line at the grocery store; the man who cuts me off on 95; the man who stares, googly-eyed, at me, my wife, my friend, me.

I think a lot about the problem of hope.

Hope paints a pretty picture of statues that will never be you; but faith pilots you through the messy moment. I’m home alone, I’m doing leg lifts on my chin-up bar in the doorway of my office because the fact is, to have faith you don’t need a story, you need a core.

***

“If you bring forth that which is within you,

Then that which is within you

Will be your salvation.

If you do not bring forth that

Which is within you,

Then that which is within you

Will destroy you.”

— The Gnostic Gospels

***

I’ve known what many would call evil: child abuse, a close call with a murderer. I know about other people’s dark impulses, and so I’ve been all the more terrified of my own.

I think Carl Jung was equally troubled witnessing of Hitler’s rise to power. Unlike many of us, he wasn’t content to dismiss the despicable as foreign to the human experience. When you bear witness, when you bear the weight of another’s actions, even as a victim—you are no longer able to distance yourself, and the arrogance of that position becomes clear. Because where does that leave us, those left to make meaning out of the handprints on our bodies, the guns, the horrors of history?

So he designed the shadow theory: that what we repress returns, that we act out our hidden selves. In this case, it’s a moral imperative to make oneself vulnerable and to find the familiar in even the unthinkable. He’d say to deny any aspect of humanity is to deny all of it.

Jung charged that our work, individually and culturally, is to bring our shadows to light, to integrate what we most fear within ourselves with the snow angels we create in their place.

***

On a puddle jumper back from Nashville after Christmas, we hit turbulence. A better, cheaper story would claim an epiphany as we bumped over New York, Central Park visible from our windows, this little life above bearing witness to the little lives below; but that’s a conflation.

What’s close to the truth is that an hour before we could see the city, tiny and twinkling, beneath us; before the plane lurched and hiccupped through the sky, I listened to the song that soundtracked my cross-country move from Pittsburgh to San Francisco, almost a decade ago. Because I’ve been shining flashlights in my corners, I remembered everything: the sweaty anticipation, the bittersweet twinge that grew as the landscape changed, the cocky phone calls with the girl I thought I’d marry; how certain I was, how it was the first time I believed in myself and how I was right.

I imagined the body I once had, nesting within this one like a Russian doll. I remembered, too, the hope it held: that if I were to just change hard enough, I could be free of cold sweats and flashbacks, shame and grief, disconnection and fear.

Hopeless now and suspended, shuttling in time but beyond it, I felt a small grace among the sick bags and the hot smell of other people’s skin. I thought, I will no longer abandon myself.

And then I pictured you, all of you, with your bad breath and fear of failure and bum knees and dashed dreams and credit card debt. I saw you as the plane dropped and lifted, dropped and lifted, and I thought as long as we don’t crash, I will tell you this.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• SELF-MADE MAN #16: Trapped in the Right Body

I’ve changed my mind.

I’ve come to think that the interplay between our constructions and realities are, in fact, the metaphor for what makes identity meaningful. You got me at this angle, and that doesn’t make my image a lie any more than passing does.

Online, people say IRL—In Real Life—the distancing code of it hiding the underbelly of need. In Real Life is where awkward pauses live. I’m in real life with onion breath and too many drinks. I’m a million failures per revelation; I’m not just constructing myself but absorbing each reflection of who I am -  divided by all of your eyes, spinning like a disco ball.

In real life I’m a man, a trans man, an invisible man, walking among you. Is it any surprise that it was a passing queer poet Walt Whitman, who wrote, “Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself,/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

***

In real life, today I smell of talcum. I’m with my barber in Jamaica Plain shooting the usual shit. He’s a big-bellied Italian guy, a little leather, a little bear, a little old-school New England. Picture the accent, the gruffness.

“What do you do?” he asks, and I say I write.

“About what?”

“Gender,” I tell him, struck by the simplicity of the word, how it can hold me, the man getting his hair clipped and the me here with you.

“You know what would be a good story? Trans guys have been coming in by the dozens, wanting men’s cuts.”

My mind pinwheels. Which me is he speaking to? The writer, the trans man, the guy in glasses with a fine spray of glimmering grey hairs and a day job at a magazine? You can Google a pristine version of my depths, or you can take me at my face value and in both cases you’d be wrong to think you know me.

Here’s what I think passing is: that moment when one reflection eclipses the rest. The party pic that doesn’t reveal the panic attack, the scruff that doesn’t tell the story of the needles and the hormones I’ve metabolized to produce it.

He’s still talking. “I work hard to make them feel good about themselves,” he says.

Them: I hear who I am to him in the pronoun. I look at my face and see the many truths of it.

“It breaks my heart,” he says, shaking his head. “These guys, being trapped in the wrong body?”

It’s a question and it hangs there. I’m a man, a trans man, a considered man, a man who doesn’t know, in real life, what to say.

***

Something important: at the University of Chicago last month I gave a talk about taking control of trans narratives and the importance of diverse masculinities in general.

It was called, “Born in the Right Body.”

Here’s what I told the students and not my barber: My body’s never been wrong. I’m suspect of such a simplistic translation.

After, here were my two favorite questions:

Do you ever worry that being trans will define you?  

How can I, as someone who’s not trans, tell a counter-narrative about gender?

***

The barber asked if he could find my writing online and I said yes.

Hello, if you’re reading this.

***

This is not a joke: a trans friend goes to the same bar after work most nights. He’s a blue-collar guy among other solo blue-collar guys and they talk about work and relationships, and if they’re sloppy enough, maybe about their disappointments or (similarly) their fathers.

He says later he wishes he felt right telling those guys he’s trans. He says he feels like he’s betraying them. This bugs me – sits heavy in my gut. The word betrayal, of course, but the scene in my mind: this guy eating peanuts with some man who wants to know him, and my friend doesn’t see his reflection in the other guy’s affirmations. I know because this is how it happens: a guy calls you “bro,” he says, “Being a man, I…” Guys really do say these things. My friend, though, he doesn’t see a refracted version of reality, a facet of himself looking back at him.

He sees a betrayal. I want to tell my barber that that’s what breaks my heart. Not a guy just starting hormones whose sideburns aren’t square, but the sense that that we need to warn the world of who we are; that because we have always been defined by the force of our difference we must now announce it ourselves.

***

There’s another way to tell this story.

I had the best conversation with a guy I interviewed for an article about masculinity a few weeks back. He was friendly and smart, and he called me “brother,” not knowing I was trans. He said something about grappling with negative role models growing up and how tough it was to break out of masculine expectations.

“You’re a man,” he concluded, “you know.”

And the thing was, I do. No fucking question.

The shame of passing is a shame of deferring: you either are or are not the monolithic identity projected on you.

I think that we need to quit feeling obligated to trumpet our multitudes at the start of every interaction. We’re all angles anyway, and there’s one I might be missing in someone else’s interpretation.

***

In real life, I cannot possibly keep up with the construction I’ve made here for you. I may pass as compassionate or contained. I may be this story but it’s important to note that I’m another one, too.

So, the answers are related:

Do you ever worry that being trans will define you?  

No. I define myself. All I can hope is that you’ll stick around.

How can I, as someone who’s not trans, tell a counter-narrative about gender? By understanding that you too, have a gender and a story to tell. Tell it, because if you’re not a singular self, then none of us are.

***

There are as many ways to tell this story as there are many ways to know me. In real life, my sideburns have grown square. In real life, I’m the only man I’ll ever be.

And if you are my barber: I’m no more trapped in my body than you, brother.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men
• Trans Lit Blooms
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space

What makes a man? When I started testosterone, I posed this winking refrain, but the notion of “real men” still stung, each joke T-shirt and black-and-white bus-stop admonishment a nick on my heart. No one’s a “real man,” I figured, but most definitely not me, with my weekly shot and unique plumbing.

What makes a man? As I grew stronger and more confident, the question remained the crux of my core anxiety. I didn’t want to be a “real man” if what was meant by it was the hypermasculine ideal or the reactionary response. I’d spent 29 years struggling against a bad translation. I wanted to be my own man, to comb my hair with Brylcreem, to tailor my jeans, grow a beard, wear a shirt: This is what a feminist looks like.

 ***

We all get the message of what a man is meant to be but, unlike feminism’s unbraiding of the ideal feminine, hypermasculinity sits like an elephant on steroids, stinking up the living room. It’s complex to examine what being a man means because most of us, whether we realize it or not, are committed to a monolithic answer.

We might pretend we’re not all engaging with the mixed-message at the heart of our every interaction: we value masculinity in all bodies because we value men more than women. Conversely, those of us who’d like to disengage with patriarchal, problematic stereotypes of maleness, even a little bit, are undermined and satirized, bullied and belittled. Every man I care about is troubled by other men, but there’s still a Stockholm-syndrome-feel to the framing:  a shrugging, “That’s just how guys are.”

That’s just how guys are.

I’ve been on testosterone for 16 months. After the muscles bloomed, after my beard began to appear, after my calves widened and my jaw squared, after I mastered the politics of the men’s room, after I learned not to take personally the newly cool greetings of women strangers; a pattern began to emerge. The elephant was real, trumpeting its answer to what makes a man? Here I was, becoming one, forming at bars and backyard barbecues and work meetings; confronted at every turn with an expectation and whether or not I would meet it.

What makes a man? Here I was, not the question but the answer.

 ***

My brother and I grew up in a house where one man’s failure defined masculinity for both of us. Our father, who abused me, was domineering and manipulative, double-crossing and compulsive. Later I would come to see that he was also lonely, lost, and scared, a link in a chain of male violence that ended, turns out, with me.

“Men!” my mom would say, a single word that held the universe of her rage, everything we needed to know in the way it was bathed in acid. In elementary school, my little brother would sometimes tear up his room, blank-eyed and sleepwalking. After years of bullies, B went to the gym and grew chiseled, played varsity hockey, then American Dreamed his way into a dot-com. In college, he made a bronze sculpture of grown men crouched with his arms around his knees. “You remember?” He asked me once, and it was the kind of man he became that allowed me to believe in something better than our father.

Now he’s sensitive and muscle-bound, successful and stylish and, like me, a little brooding. I told him last April, in a bar in the Mission, of my plans to take testosterone, back when I also lived in San Francisco. I couldn’t figure out why, but I was more nervous to tell him than anyone else. That’s a lie. I was nervous to tell him for the ways I’d grown up projecting my father onto his little-kid frame, seeing their similar grins as proof something dark. We’d thrown around a baseball, beat each other up, gone to the movies, but we’d also fought bitterly. I sat in that bar waiting for his “I told you so.” He knew intimately the ways I’d misunderstood myself.

He smiled wide, shrugged. “I’ve been saying my whole life that you’re a guy,” he said.

That was that. We ordered another round, he reported some work trouble, and we were like the brothers we were meant to become, if I’d only been paying attention.

***

Last I saw him, this summer at our grandmother’s funeral, B looked at me meaningfully and said, “Don’t let anyone tell you you don’t look totally different.” I swear he was teary eyed.

Still, a sticking point for us is his interest in the destiny of biology, the reassuring, essentialist refrain of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Sometimes his understanding of me feels limited by hormones and science, the framework that helps him understand his maleness. But as he tells me how terrified he was of becoming a “monster” growing up, I begin to understand the comfort of biology. Being a boy, the strange rush of testosterone, the two-faced dad: he worried he was broken, much in the way I did. In his worldview, there’s room for me, and he’s eager always to compare lifting strategies. “You’re cut like a Band-Aid!” he joked on a recent picture I posted on Facebook.

I feel it, too, the need to make muscle to guard the pinkest, most scared parts of myself. I watched him spend hours at the Y and come home calmer. There’s something to pushing all that anger and confusion into a weight that can bear it.

“I felt this shame growing up,” B told me a couple weeks ago, when I told him I wanted to write about us. “I remember sitting in the van with you guys when you told me what Dad did to you, and I felt dirty. I felt, ‘That’s my father,’ one; and two, ‘I’m his son.’ It was the beginning of this whole thing for me when I felt ashamed.”

“I struggled with the fact that I was a guy. I think it’s been a lifetime struggle,” he said. It makes me curious how many men are fighting similar fights, shadowboxing the worst aspects of maleness, trying to grow something sweet from the toxic waste of inheritance.

I asked him how he feels about other men, if he’s suspicious of them in the way the world has taught us to be suspicious of ourselves.

“A guy that doesn’t show any emotion? That’s scary.” I think of our father, his silence, his far-off stare. I think of how, almost always, naming what scares you is the primary way to avoid becoming it.

“I’m very up front with people,” B said, as if an answer. “They know how I feel.”

***

Before I transitioned, the struggles of the men in my life felt gritty and strange to me, a little unwashed. They’d get uncomfortably vulnerable over beers, easily crushed about fathers and exes especially, like animals without shells. It was a little foreign and often so raw I’d leave wondering how it was possible that the young women I knew seemed so much more resilient in reclaiming their identities in a world of intense violence and inequity, while the men seemed genuinely baffled as to how to make it all add up to something meaningful.

How naïve, I see now, to think the crush of gender expectations only affects the most obviously oppressed.

My best friend in high school, a wiry eccentric whose religious parents didn’t know he was gay, was my first exposure to a man wrestling with masculine expectation. Late at night, stoned in his beat-up Camry, he said he felt alien next to his jock brother, afraid to disappoint his father. He was hilarious and well-liked, John Waters meets Robert Smith, but it was clear that a girl of a similar stripe would have an easier time finding a template through which to translate herself. Hell, even before I was on testosterone, I was treated by pretty much everyone as a dude without much issue, while the many interesting and sweet men who marched through my life, arriving on cue in Pittsburgh, Boston, San Francisco, seemed to always be head-butting masculinity’s brick-wall boundaries.

So the crushed-shell seemed to me, eventually, to be about claustrophobia, the way that the sexism underpinning hypermasculinity is a vice grip on even the most rebellious among us. To be your own man is to acknowledge that you’re not “real” unless everyone’s “real,” that all the power located in a monolithic masculinity is a house of cards built on your back and you, pulling yourself out of the stack, are helping to upend the whole foundation.

What makes a man? It’s not just my question then, but one for all of us, and the answer depends on how much one can extricate oneself from the war cry of a society intent on destroying femininity, enforcing a reductionist binary, and flattening complexity. Every man I’ve known well enough to get a little drunk with has eventually addressed the dilemma: how to be yourself in a world that expects a monster or a hero, but never a new dad struggling with how to raise his own child under the weight of a bad relationship to his own father, or an effeminate straight man struggling to accept himself for who he is when his own family can’t believe he’s not gay.

We eat peanuts, drink beer in San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston. A guy tells me, upon his marriage, that his mother reminded him to be good to his wife. A real man respects women, says the ad campaign, which only exists to tell us exactly what real men have failed to do, a reminder of what isn’t expected.

***

A memory: in Napa for his birthday a few years ago, before I was on testosterone, I looked up my brother’s astrological chart. This is a thing I do, inevitably, at parties and birthdays and long car rides. Anyway, I told him he was a Cancer rising, started to read the description off my phone as we drank coffee near the French Laundry, surrounded by tourists despite the drizzle.

“What does that mean?” he asked, his aviators mirroring myself back to me.

“It says you’re imaginative,” I told him, “and sensitive, and nurturing.” He looked chiseled and young, a little out of place still, living in a city after so many years in wintery, industrial towns. I could see, in the months since he’d arrived, that he was becoming himself.

“I’m nurturing!” he echoed, his thick arms crossed across his chest. He turned to his girlfriend. “I’m nurturing,” he told her.

Since I’ve transitioned, I’ve revisited that moment: my surprise at his enthusiasm, the emphatic way he announced it, the pride in his voice. What a reward it must have seemed to him to be seen as the man he was, not the father he was afraid of becoming, but the person he’d grown out of thousands of reps and all those cracked-shell moments when the vice squeezed too hard. Here he was, the person he’d been all along.

“I’m nurturing,” he said, shaking his head. “Did you know that about me?” We were leaning against a car, the two realest men you know, and of course I said yes.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• Sometimes Bodies Are Just Bodies
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space

The isolated feel was unnerving, the whole place half-empty on a Saturday. So, creeped-out as I was by the long, fluorescent hallway, the surprising, murder-y backwoods vibe, I went with what felt safer.

When I opened the door a lady at the sink saw me, startled, then sneered. She packed up her make-up kit, made a production of checking the sign on the door, then let it close behind her, a trail of toilet paper flapping from her heels. I still had to pee, so I did, washing up and softening my expression for a beat, anticipating the mall cop, who arrived just as I toweled my hands.

A big guy, he thrust out a gut and assessed me in my jeans and T-shirt, my high-tops and tattoos. There was a long moment, just me and him in almost companionable silence.

“Sir?” he said, finally. “I think you’re in the wrong place.”

I knew I’d have to show ID, I knew I was in the middle of nowhere, that I was alone. But, fuck it.

“Maybe,” I said, a Big Bang located where our words collided. “But so are you.”

The expression on his face was worth it.

***

Eight years later, I made the mistake of conflating the howl of my body in the mirror with the perspective of the mall cop and the pinched-lip lady. So I watched that first needle heading for my thigh and thought, not a little sadly, that it symbolized a certain compromise. I figured being a man meant a blind faith in the gender taxonomy, a byproduct of hormones and ease of bathroom use, sure as facial hair and increased muscle tone. Because we’re primed to believe in binaries: before and after, say, or the real me versus the me I thought I was. Most of us would rather pass than be seen.

And so I did. Like a trade made in a fairy tale, I moved through the first few months a projection of my former self, trying to keep up my end of the bargain. I was more a ghostly highlight reel of social conditioning than anything else. I reluctantly nodded along to a run-down of last night’s game, I kept my voice low, gendered cocktails, and quit crossing my legs.

But testosterone can only bring your body into alignment, as the story goes. Everything else is up to you. I saw that I was trapped in the right body, and I couldn’t stick a needle in my thigh every week, couldn’t risk cancer and prejudice, just to wrap myself in stereotype and keep my head down.

It’s an elegant physics, not drawn in bathroom signs but in the radical shift of a world waiting beyond four-wall boxes, one where comfort is snake oil, where life happens whether or not we can define it.

***

Before I got my math straight, my body seemed to float restlessly on my bones. I strapped myself together with endless, spooky narration: you comb your hair with the black plastic comb, you run the rubber track, you kiss this girl,  knocking teeth.

If I tightened my abdomen back then, a weird trauma whirlpool would swirl into a wily predator no one else could see. You lie on a stinky mat. Your sweat slicks your upper lip. You see that cloudless sky. The air’s cool like it was made for you.

On testosterone, I looked for the narrator, but it was gone. There’s no tidy world for the man who embraces paradox. Binaries are luxuries I can only study clinically; they lost their soothing qualities when I prioritized my reality over yours. Now I can’t read the news and see right and wrong, I can’t gloat in my goodness, I can’t see politicians or parents or partners as more than their own mysteries, shifting in the light, just like me.

Are you a different person? That’s the question, the big fear, what pins us tight to what’s familiar. Of course, I say. The landscape inside me changed: there’s the new anger, hot and resistant, flapping to the surface like a bird let loose. There’s the soreness of sadness, a wet choke in my throat, a ragged refusal to manifest. There’s the sun-blare of my focus, the muscle of my energy pulling me wildly forward. Then there’s joy conjured, incredibly, by simple splash of a diving seabird, or the sweet pain of teeth knocking teeth without a mediating story.

What you mean to ask is if I’m more me.

I can’t tell you, but last week a firework sparked my chest, twinkled through my limbs, a neon realization: I love my body. It seemed impossible, but I actually thought those words, and there was my electric self, aligning, all the answer I need.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak and Gertrude Novak, age 1½.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men

Back then I was a kid with short hair, steeple hands, and only a vague idea of who I was asking. Bargaining is the better word, I suppose, in my first of many rides on the grief —-> acceptance merry-go-round. I’d give up anything. I’d be anyone. I just wanted to get old enough to forget my dad’s greedy hands, just wanted to have a chance to grow up unbroken.

My father? I figured him a childhood-stealer, burgling my potential for sitcom-simplicity, and I wanted it back. I was on a backwards hero’s journey, looking to be returned to an earlier state, a better version of myself. I bumbled along, seeking a quantifiable substance, the antidote to my ivy-ing weirdness: the dissonant dude in the mirror being the most troubling example, but you could also eventually cite the whirlpooling anxiety pushing me to lock myself in my college dorm room most nights with a six-pack and a dozen cigarettes, or the classic fear of intimacy that hovered like Dad’s shadow, swiftly swallowing the face of every woman I loved.

“Somehow you learned that being different is wrong” –everyone.

“Being different is wrong” –everyone else.

It wasn’t until I was mugged at 29 that I stopped trying to pass as normal. In the moments right before I thought I was to die, I saw the ways I’d learned what to do in the face of unfathomable fear. This was me, gun-to-head, holding perfectly still. This was the adrenaline that blew through me as my feet hammered out an escape, the way my chest opened to breathe in everything I’d almost lost. I could never pass as someone who’d not seen the ugliest side of life, but hallelujah, I knew now that my fluency was my life fuel: I had triumphed over annihilation not once, but twice.

A year later, a month before I began injecting testosterone, I went to see my estranged father in Oregon. I flinched when he used my birth name, but I was on my way to changing everything, and the last thing I wanted to do in the soft, narrow version of my body was talk to this huddled old man. I expected defiance, so he surprised me when he launched, unprovoked, into a painfully stilted apology and accompanying white-knuckle rendering of his own childhood ghosts.

“Do you think you could forgive me?” he asked in his lilting, South Carolina accent. I don’t know if I’d seen anyone more vulnerable.

I knew then how he must have felt, hovering above me as a child.

He was 71 years old, and we both knew I’d never see him again. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” I told him, “no one deserves that.” He nodded, smiled with a frozen, faraway look. I couldn’t give him anything but animal honesty, but I like to imagine that when we parted ways in his cold mountain town, he knew that my shaking his hand was its own kind of forgiveness.

In that moment, on a street corner in a summer coat, I was both Thomas and not. I was the child I’d been and the skin I was in and the man waiting me out on the other side, breathing fog and watching my dad shuffle away, not passing for anything but myself.

***

Now here I am, unicorned in the body testosterone unlocked, the person in the mirror only now beginning to show up in my dreams. When I’m plagued with just the sort of terror I imagined would disappear when I Became Myself, I’m most comforted by envisioning a naked, muscular man moving freely thorough scenic landscapes, Adam-like in his joy, but with anatomy that mirrors my own. That’s me, I realize, shocked somehow, that my most yearning subconscious ideation could really be a happier version of the body I’m in, belonging.

The truth about passing: sometimes it’s necessary, efficient. It’s an ugly word, and yet something about its crudeness is accurate, like fucking is not the same as sex. In an exact inverse of my former queerness, difference is the destination, passing the invisible cloak that allows me to move through the world, locating myself.

I knew I was a man when I stopped fearing men. I knew I was a man when a guy with a gun made me see that my defining trait was my not my failure to be normal but the space between the poetry of my mechanics and the narrative I’d constructed to bridge that gap. That opening is where I changed the story, and as I ran I could feel that I was no longer who I thought I was, but who I’d been quietly as I passed for someone less affected.

I was nothing if not affected, running gratefully away from a man who looked like death with an engine-heart and a rush of hormones that knew exactly how to guide me.

***

“What do you mean?” The therapist said, his teeth small, his smile irksome. He meant about the running, how I said that I found myself because the two traumas collided, and it was like a wrecking ball. The only thing left once the cops showed up was me, exposed and facing a choice: pass or don’t. It was a repeat of a moment I had when I was 10, except then I’d prayed to disappear. So the backwards hero’s journey started again. This time I knew the elixir wasn’t located in the hallowed halls of therapists’ office, or the meaning made by sitcoms.

“It’s like your life flashing before your eyes,” I offered, ever the translator. “I just knew, in the escape, everything I’d been hiding from myself.”

He didn’t believe me, I could tell. Never matter. I left his office and folded myself into the busy foot traffic below; one of many black-haired, tattooed men with a story in his heart and not a stranger to tell it to.

***

Passing. There’s an uncomfortable implication, a suggestion that I’m not “real,” that the politics of my body are public, that I should announce myself like a debutante at a ball.

And sometimes I want to, because being male is a forcefield. Look, here I am de-boarding the rush hour train at Ruggles, six inches of space on all sides. Women jostle beside me but no one breaches my perimeter. No one wants to touch me.

These are my muscles, my hairy thighs, my broadened face. This is my relationship with myself. If you crack me open, I’m pink muscle and heartache and hormones still seeking homeostasis. I’m not my father, or my mugger, but I carry the weight of their crimes because I’m a son in their world; our world—it’s my world, too.

Passing is what happens when expectation meets body. I smile at another dude and quickly pull my mouth back to neutral. When the friendly man at American Apparel holds my gaze a beat, I look away, clip my tone.

So much of being male is about space: protecting it, making it, asserting it, projecting it. So much about being me is wanting to close the gap between us.

I don’t want all this room, I tell Michael.

She wants it, she says. A guy followed her down Broadway, yelling from his car; he said stuff so abusive she doesn’t want to repeat it. That’s what she talks about when she talks about being a woman—not being given any room to move.

“I mean by cis guys,” she’s quick to clarify. But. We both know what propels the high-heel clicks to quicken ahead of me on an empty street: my body is the push-end of the magnet. I may have passed as a woman for 30 years, but I’ve never known what it is to be one.

Naked, my power shifts. I’m my brothers who’ve been denied care for breast and ovarian cancers, or who’ve been held in the medical and legal limbo of our unrecognized bodies by systems bent on destroying anything that defies it.

I want you to understand that it’s not about passing.

When I put on a pair of pants and walk outside, passing is the side effect of being my body in space. The world parts for me but it eyes me—it eyes us all—carefully.

***

Everybody passes. You’re a tomboy in woman’s clothes, a functional alcoholic, a mother afraid she’s losing herself. You’re passing as something more than human because we are all walking through life as if what mattered most were the symbols of our acquisitions and not the fluttering flags of our hearts.

I don’t pass when I’m alone. Different as I am, the elixir wasn’t hidden behind a many-headed monster; I didn’t need to destroy something else to become myself. The privilege of masculine space and its attendant expectations are troubling and erasing, as gender expectations are for most of us. I don’t want this much space.

Nothing can disappear whatever toxicity we carry, whatever bad dad or hollering psycho or bruising fingers or state-sanctioned threat you defend with whatever armor lines your heart. We pass because the world asks it of us, a baseline of small talk, a frustrating reduction of what makes a person vibrant is now what I see in the space I once mistook for normalcy. Give me your tattered, scarred, lonely selves; your small forgivenesses, your holy contradictions.

Because now I pray for something else: may I be the light enveloping my father’s shadow, interrupting its long reach. May I know the truth of who you are and not the person you want to be. May we get the chance to move through the world defined by the boundary of where our darkness meets our light, invisible then, yes, but only in passing.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men

What I find, though, is that I’m invisible—a passable male, a hormonal reconstruction, a head nod-and-move-on. I am a square jaw, sideburns, a mass of leg hair. Testosterone in its amber vial, the science that produces it, the manufacturers that bottle it, and the pharmacy that dispenses it assure my safe passage.

Like Victor Frankenstein’s stitched vision, I am a man born of medicine. I’m not saying that I’m a monster, just that he’s not, either. I see that the parallel is uneasy, that the implication is uncomfortable. But I’ve read that book over and over because I think it tells us something brilliant about the slippery nature of monstrosity: that the body is not ever evil; it’s the mind that bends.

I relate to the “creature,” the gentle man who was brought into the world a collection of parts. The scorn that turned him lonely and, finally, violent was at the hands of those with untroubled bodies: smooth-skinned villagers who feared his difference. But my sympathy rests with the haters, too: only because everyone knows that letting fear vine through your heart makes hate inevitable: that you will direct all your noxious energy somewhere eventually, and that — if you pay attention — everything that makes you sick will look like a twisted version of yourself. There is a mirrored quality to our most evil acts.

I am queerly bodied, and I’d rather be an open-heart than a pitchfork-toting villager any day. Because, unlike some trans folks, I don’t think my body is tantamount to a birth defect. I believe I was born in the “right” body, and still had to change it.  I may be safely drifting among the urinal cakes, paradoxically visible and invisible at once, but I know I’m not a ghost.

I don’t want to pass the smooth-skinned like a perfect reflection. I don’t want to keep my arms at my sides to hide my surgery scars, to worry about the press of my swim trunks, to sit in an ER bed and wonder if the doctor notices the shape beneath the paper gown and what she will say when she does.

I’m already here. I don’t want to pass at all.

***

I ask non-trans people about how they imagine transitioning, and on a good day the answers mostly make me laugh. On a bad day, the gulf between us echoes; a game of telephone.

No, it’s not like wearing a mask of your face on your face. Also, it’s not addition and subtraction, not a math of beating heart – breasts + beard.

I want you to understand the sort of dissonance that pressures the body into a kiln of synthetics, the needles and scalpels, the drains filled with blood. I know our bodies are driven by the same yearning engine, that you, too, just want to be naked with yourself. I know that you are fractured, and that the mystery of how you got here and the ways in which you get stitched solves the puzzle of who you are. We’re all chasing monsters, that’s the moral. Whether we’re holding torches or hunting our father across a tundra, it seems humanity’s lost when we see our bodies as splintered, discrete.

That’s why I need you to know me. It’s selfish, but I don’t want to forget the way I fit together.

So, I try to translate. Here: my uncle, a spry 80-year-old with sparkling eyes, described it perfectly by accident. He’s a hiker, a dam-builder, a pocket-knife-carrying former Boy Scout. He’s the first on the rollercoaster, the leader of camping expeditions, wiry and calloused. He’s had heart trouble lately, and that sidelines him. “I wake up every morning, go to the mirror, and expect to see myself,” he told me recently, his voice softer than usual. “But I just get this old man, instead.”

I know you know this feeling: the crow’s feet, or the stretch marks on your belly, or the plate in your knee. Age is the equalizer, the hardest adjustment. I know the pinch of it, too, the double-take.

So start there, but back up. Let’s get broad, think about that niggling feeling you get when you see yourself as more than a sum of parts. Maybe it’s after a regrettable night with your ex, or the second you realize you’re pregnant, or upon the survival of a car accident. Maybe you’re bloody or gleaming, triumphant or lost, and you look in the mirror and think, This isn’t what I expected. You can see it: the distance between who you thought you were and where you stand, and even if it’s all glorious growth and poignancy, it’s disorienting.

Is this working? Can you magnify it out? Can you squint and imagine a moment of truth, squirming or cool, expansive or buckling? Can you multiply that magnification, imagine a mirror of parts coming together, a growing distance, a wail of worry: I’m doing it wrong I’m doing it wrong I’m doing it wrong.

For me the siren howled four years before the hormones and a year before the surgery. I’m in a bar in Los Angeles. I’m under a baseball hat and hoodie, I’m social anxiety. I’m so drunk I’ve eclipsed even philosophy; I’m just fucked up. I’m watching a cokehead sing ironic Journey. I’m thinking about when I stopped believing, and then I’m staring at my face over a dirty sink while a woman pees endlessly behind a shower curtain divide.

I see all the parts of me that look right: nose, eyebrows, eyes. But I look long enough to notice what I skip: my small mouth, the feminine delicateness of my jaw, the high swell of my cheeks, the billboard bulge of my chest. They all come together and I really see myself, you know?

Just as some tomcat howls “Pour Some Sugar on Me,” I telegraph myself a SOS: This isn’t what I expected.

Then I went home, slept it off, and went back to living in parts.

***

Even a year later, after top surgery, which brought my chest out of a fuzzy blur into something cleaner — I still relied on a Picasso flattening of my image: haireyesnosechestarms. I wanted skin that stretched over all of me, I wanted a recognizable face. Instead, I’d settled for keeping the floating pieces sort of in the vicinity of each other.

Everyone wants the trans narrative to be triumphant. But one thing you don’t know about me is how hard I tried to not be trans. I thought that to inhabit my birth body was authentic. I thought I shouldn’t have to inject anything in order to be myself.

But here we are. The story always arcs the same way: I had no choice. The parts drifted more and more until I looked in the mirror and it was all eyes and teeth, until I was a body on the brink of disappearance. That’s a poetic way of suggesting suicide, but that’s not what I mean. I mean I was fading, an amplified version of my uncle, shaving a wrinkled cheek.

I looked at my wedding pictures and thought: This isn’t what I expected.

I thought: I’m doing it wrong.

I thought: That’s not what I look like.

***

And so I am a man of medicine.

When I carefully label my needles and the accompanying vials and display them prominently in my luggage, when I walk through the body scan at the airport, I wait for the alarm to sound, for time to stop, for the parts to detach and crumble.

I’m constructed, how can I forget it? On days my hand shakes and I worry I won’t be able to stick myself, I take a deep breath and push because without that oil, I will divide, an astronaut orbiting my befuddled body, looking for a home.

The arc is supposed to end here, I’m supposed to distill it down to  “1 year, 2 months on T and I’ve never been happier!”

I’ve been happier.

But my body, my body, my body. I am the person I expect myself to be. You know what I mean, right? It’s something about growing up, you find yourself sober under harsh lights, down the hall from the person who sees through all your bullshit, thinking about what it is exactly that shines through the stubble and tattoos and scars, and aren’t you just trying to align that tremendous light that blasts through your stitches with the person in the mirror? Aren’t you trying to be a better Victor to your stumbling creature, a better parent to your flesh?

Yes? Then you’ll believe me that sometimes I do really say, I’ve never been happier.  Me, the self-made man. I am the technology and the beating heart. I am the result of latex gloves and operating rooms, but I see the parts welded together, and I know that the difference between me and Frankenstein’s monster is that I’m not a misguided ego or a cautionary tale, not a parable or an invention.

Those are the sorts of stories the villagers tell.

My body is not troubled. I construct myself.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men

Because, try as I might, I wasn’t gay. The two self-identified lesbians I’d dated in my nearly 30 years of Meow Mixes and Lexingtons and Eagles and Phoenixes and El Rios were exhausting in their efforts to convince me of my femaleness. I get it: they loved women, they wanted me to be one.

“You’re butch,” one ex told me, and I’d take a gulp of my G&T and look at the butch women across the way, in their Levis and boots, their beers and buzzed-head, breasty bravado or their quiet, motorcycle-jacket strength.

“I’m not,” I’d say, but she’d just pull me by the belt loops, and I’d close my eyes and pretend I was somebody else until she was gone.

*

The first girl I ever loved was straight. “You’re like a guy, but better,” she’d say, looking at me with these, big washed-blue eyes. Here’s what I wore then: a brown baseball cap, dark denim, too-big T-shirts, Chucks.

This was a narrative I could get behind. We were 14 and moony, Springsteen-esque. When she first said it, maybe she meant I wasn’t too gangly or smelly. Or maybe she meant that I was a romantic, that I’d wooed her with a bravery that emerged, blessedly and out of nowhere, with puberty. Who was this person that, holding up a makeshift canopy of plastic bags, kissed the popular pretty girl near the bus stop with cocksure abandon?

Only later, as we got to high school and the boys grew broader, did it occur to me that not being a dude might be a liability. “Is it weird, being with me?” I asked her. Every memory I have of those years is tainted a hormonal, sun-bleached gauziness. Picture a dewy summer day, and we’re lying  on our backs in the park near school. She’s the rare adolescent whose good-looks never soured into awkwardness, just straight-swan from day one.

She got up on her elbows to look at me, and I couldn’t believe how dumb I was for asking the question. She paused long enough for my heart to palpitate. She’d had a couple boyfriends at her old school, and I pictured them as popular, handsome, and decidedly boob-less. No matter how you cut it, I was an outlier, and all the swagger in the world wouldn’t change that.

“No,” she said, tying up her ponytail, like she’d never considered it. “You’re like any other guy.”

A rush of something heady and primal overtook me, and I looked in the mirror later and winked at myself.

I see sixteen-year-olds now, with their subway chatter and baby fat, and try to imagine the ways they are saving each other’s lives.

Like a guy, but better.

I rode that wave for 15 years.

*

It was in a bar in the Haight in 2003 that my old friend and now-wife, Michael (you know, she says sassily to male Michaels who insist it’s a guy’s name that they, point of fact, have “a woman’s name”) said she would “totally date me.” Here’s what I wore: dark denim, a black T-shirt, tattoos, a size XS hoodie zipped to the throat.

“You would?” I was shocked. She was rock-and-roll and art school, warm hugs underneath a smart mouth. Her hair was angular, her surfer-girl freckles a swoony counterbalance to her good-natured saltiness.  And she, like every woman who’d ever mattered to me, had a similar clarity about my gender. She said I was like every guy she’d dated: skinny-jeaned, thoughtful, big-hearted.

When I told her that I planned to take testosterone, she wasn’t surprised. It had been seven years since our first date. She’d sat in the waiting room when I’d had chest reconstruction surgery in 2008, in a last-ditch attempt to lessen my growing mirror-to-mind dissonance. She’d seen me twitch at every “ma’am,” watched me withdraw into myself. She’d seen the jangly growth of shame speed cancerously, present an every social interaction, a many-headed monster.

It was Michael that painted a mascara beard on my face one winter night in 2010; Michael who told me to go look in the mirror. I’d stared, struck with a slick sort of fear, a dizzy, humming recognition.

I’d washed off the mascara and told myself to not blow this. I’d built a shit-start into something beautiful, an epic childhood trauma into a fucking fireworks display of love and I wasn’t going to risk Michael and all her faith in the new and improved me for a bet on my twin, the guy whose fuzzy features I’d squinted into being in a million mirrors.

But by spring, the buzzing was making me sick, and I told her in an airport in Mexico on the last day of our honeymoon that, when I pictured myself, I saw that guy that I’d been blooming into at 14, that anybody else was a stranger. I knelt down beside her like I was proposing, and said softly that I’d decided to take T.

She nodded, the winter light bright through the window. People don’t believe me, but she didn’t miss a beat. Maybe it was because the conversation had been going on for years,  or because she was travel-stressed and distracted, or maybe it was that I was backlit, and she saw, in her squint, what I meant. Or, most likely, it’s because Michael’s most basic, hard-earned value is that no one should stand in the way of you becoming yourself.

All I know is that, after saying her principle concern was not being the recipient of my inevitable stress, she said something like, “Alright, that’s that. Might as well grab a drink at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville,” and pointed goofily across the way to the cheesy airport bar.

*

 A few months later, I was Thomas. Michael practiced saying my name until she no longer slipped, seven years of the old, single-syllable moniker out the window.

I fluctuated between excitement and sour fear. I’d imagine swimming, muscle, a light beard. But my dreams were a sweat-soaked parade of needles, lonely houses, rapists who turned around and looked like me.

Here’s what I wore on our move cross-country last May: dark denim, a grey T-shirt, tattoos, Ray-Bans, a wedding ring. I was to begin T in two weeks.

I didn’t tell anyone but Michael this, but I had to practice my name, too.

The light was waning in the Hudson Valley as we approached our new home in New England, and my shirt stuck to me in the heat. The headlights ahead grew more visible with each passing minute.

“I’m worried about this one thing,” she said, suddenly. This was her first and biggest waiver, and I could tell in her tone that I was about to face a hiccup of true doubt. I was ready for it, I told myself. “It’s stupid” — and here a long, awkward pause — “but what if you seem gay?”

Then there was a rush of words as I drove us on in stunned silence. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with being gay or seeming gay, but I thought it might scramble my attraction, you know?  I hadn’t even considered it, this wrinkle, my signifiers mistranslated, a new kind of aloneness.

She looked at me pleadingly, and I could tell she wished she hadn’t said it. Did I understand, though? What if a switch flipped in her brain, an indicator that said “gay, hands off”? It was awful, she said, this knot in her stomach.

She drained my tentacle drains after surgery, she held my hand when we told her mother, and she called me “he” with confidence, long before I passed, and with more bravery than I could summon in myself. I knew this was a fluke moment, a metaphor of larger losses. Didn’t she deserve it? For everything I wanted from her, wasn’t she allowed her fear?

I wish I could say that I’d handled the situation with that wisdom; that I’d cut beneath the words to the pulse underneath.

“I can only be myself,” I said, sharply.

I stayed up that night in a hotel in a grimy town in upstate New York, feeling a boxing match play out in the hollow of my heart.  It was very late when I felt her hand grab mine.

“I’m sorry,” she said sleepily, sensing the rigidity of my body. She put her free hand on my chest. “I’ll work it out.” It’s possible I was crying and maybe we both were, exhausted and anxious and fully aware of the weight of what was ahead.

“Remember what’s important,” she said, “is that you’re you. I can’t promise for sure, because no one can, but I think that I’ll love you, whoever you are.”

And I believed her. It was only because of the former that the latter was possible. This was our shared promise on a cliff in Mendocino, the core of our wedding vows.

*

“I should never have made my fears about you,” Michael said months later.

This was back when I was scared I’d never know myself, when I thought I’d only be a hurricane of adrenaline and agitation and acne and need. She was there, though, even when I did, in fact, become an irritable mass of stress and social anxiety.

And yes I felt ugly, and yes I doubted myself. Yes, we fought, stretching into new people in a new place. It wasn’t easy or pretty.

But the reality is, a few months in there was homeostasis doing its magic, recalibrating my body and our bodies together, and if I could sum her up I’d show you Michael, running her fingers through my hair and saying, “You are a beautiful Thomas.”

*

Picture this: it’s June, September, March; it’s the tenth of every month, the anniversary of the first testosterone shot. Here is what I wear: a soft grey T-shirt or thermal or tank top, my body resisting the old clothes a little, pressing up against what holds it. The dwindling stock of once-loose shirts that still rest like scarecrows on my hangers are now fitted, the tightness across my pecs a testament to all that’s shifted.

The thing is: outside of cities where masculinity is a spectrum, your San Franscicos, Los Angeleses, New Yorks: I often do get read as gay. Me, of the studied aesthetic and seersucker shorts; me of the neat hair and fast speech. As promised, I can only be myself: my evolving body holds the same gender. I pull on an old T-shirt and fulfill a promise I made to the me who bought it. I get cruised, I get flattered. I shed internalized transphobia. I try.

And when the hick in the pick-up truck this weekend stared me down with dead-eye aggression, I remembered that I’m still queer, even if I’ve never been gay.

Just wait, I told him, and the world that wants me different. I know I look like the men I used to admire in magazines.

Here’s what I wore: a strongman tank top, a dream of myself from another lifetime. It finally fits.

And so: I am baptized in the genderless sunlight on a summer day, holding Michael’s hand. She looks at me just as he does, and I know that I’m a beautiful Thomas —queerly beloved, whoever I am.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men

I like to anticipate the narrative to offset disappointment or avoid getting ambushed by someone else’s story. I had no idea how my family would react to me, and maybe that’s what really clenched my chest. Every exchange I’ve had since I’ve taken a new name and a weekly shot of testosterone has been an exercise an echolocation, and it’s depressing how invisible we are to each other, most of the time. Maybe to them I was still a ragamuffin with an antenna for unspoken secrets, a disappeared dad, and a penchant for counting the adults’ drinks.

So that’s how I pictured it: I saw myself, sitting away from the deck and the bottomless beers, listening to crickets and considering the loss of a body in metaphorical terms, drinking out of my own, grown-up Solo cup, me and my many-gendered grief.

Later, I figured, I’d write it all out: the way the men shook hands and didn’t cry, the way we all lose our bodies in one way or another and some of us gain them back again. I’d leave you on a high note, though, because I’m afraid not to; because some nights the dark curtain of everything I don’t know gathers into a gloaming, and the foggy shadow of all that scares me looks like my father’s prying fingers crossed with the mugger aiming the gun at my head.

And the truth is, that first night I imagined my mugger and my father both, Frankensteined together with everything else that kept me from sleeping in a cold hotel room in Dickson City, remembering stories of my grandmother’s descent into dementia, the screaming, the way it might feel to be buried alive.

Like what’s lost could be located in a body.

How arrogant of me, I thought at the church the next morning, to think that grief is predictable. The sons spoke in cracked tones or cried, their faces twisted into wet facsimiles that spoke of skinned knees but also salamanders and earth worms, fishing and fighting long into summer nights. The three older daughters, meanwhile, sat scattershot, their tears hidden behind the curtain of Kleenex, their uncharacteristic quiet a vulnerable inverse, like bodies twisted inside out.

Grandma was a complicated woman; charismatic and judgmental. She could be distant and hilarious, but mostly I remember her as baffled, a sweet kind of wide-eyed surprise that characterized her later years, a prologue to her deterioration. She died not understanding that I’d named myself after her son, whose ashes were scattered at the lake house and who I’ve come to resemble with such eerie accuracy that my grandfather, seeing me from under his sun umbrella at the burial, did a double-take.

This is Thom, my mom told him. My son, she clarified. He nodded, and his baffled eyes returning to the tiny box that held my grandmother, as if seeking her ghost.

Later I agreed when my mom asked me to read people’s condolences as part of the ceremony. And as I stood at the pulpit, sweating and exposed before relatives who hadn’t seen me since testosterone had done its magic, I thought it might have been a mistake. But as I spoke I realized that people were rapt, focused wholly on their words in my mouth: Grandma and her glamour, Grandma and her parties, Grandma singing “You are My Sunshine,” Grandma and the smell of blackberries.

I was an instrument, and felt, in the twinkling light, that we are more than just our bodies or even our loss. Knowing that felt holy, and I offered each word carefully, my voice foreign and strong in my ears.

Only later did I think that my mom had set it up this way, that she’d reached across some divide between herself and her own mother, and asked her family to be gentle with me.

In the hotel lobby the next day, my mom absentmindedly touched my throat, feeling the bristle of it. She pulled her hand back, embarrassed at her trespass, but in her blush I saw a kind of childlike wonder.

That’s what I really thought about after the service at the lake house, when I was not watching the action studiously from a deck chair but, in fact, swimming with a rowdy group of second cousins. Sometimes the not-knowing isn’t a gloaming, it’s an opportunity to know the story beneath the one you tell yourself; it’s a family that reconciles its ghosts, a family that believes in forgiveness.

Because, it turns out, there is no ending but a good one. Sometimes bad men are just origin stories and lost moms can be found again; sometimes we grow up to be more than the sum of our losses, and the water we pruned in as children will still hold our shifting shapes; and sometimes twilight comes on cue and Grandpa can sit on the porch in his ballcap, drinking a beer with the lightening bugs, his love all of us, his love his own.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

Related Posts:

• Self-Made Man #22: Second Person
• SELF-MADE MAN #21: Love Your Zombie
• SELF-MADE MAN #19: Notes on Negative Space
• SELF-MADE MAN #18: In Real Life
• Self-Made Man #17: Real Men