A Passing Problem

For the past several nights, my dreams have been…turbulent.

Three nights ago, deep in my slumber, I forgot the protection spells needed to stave off a strange and ancient force from beyond the realms of space and time. A bank of fog began to encircle my childhood home as a series of pulsing yellow lights descended from above. I had learned the series of ethereal sigils that would have neutralized the threat long ago, but I could no longer recall them. The lights swept toward me. I could do nothing to stop them.

Two nights ago, I was on the balcony of a motel overlooking a rainy shoreline and a slate gray sea. There was a cliff at the edge of the beach, and a grove of scrub pine trees at its rim. Moments later, the sharp whine of a massive 747 struggling to stay aloft began to pierce the air. It was tacking against the wind, moving slow, flying low. It missed the trees on the top of the cliff by inches before being blown back around toward the sea. The plane hit the top of the cliff on its second pass, and I ran back inside and dove into the motel’s flimsy porcelain bathtub. I woke up as the fireball passed directly over my head.

Last night, I was back in my middle school, only it was on top of a mountain during a tornado outbreak. The first black funnel cloud came right for me, but it was small enough that I was able to survive being picked up and carried off by hanging onto the side of a large steel desk. The second tornado picked up an entire building and began pushing it in my direction, forcing me to outrun a moving wall of wood and plaster as it tore up the concrete right at my heels.

I’m certain that there is plenty to glean from the small, specific details of these dreams — the fact that I was literally chased by my middle school can’t mean nothing — but I don’t think my subconscious was being especially coy. I’ve been having these dreams because I am at war with myself about transitioning, and my mind wants to give a psychic preview of the challenges to come.

***

“Do you want to be a girl?” I ask myself.

“Yes,” I reply. This question is easy.

“And if you had a magical way of transitioning, you’d take it?”

“Without hesitation,” I say. This question is easy, too.

“Okay, so what about a full medical transition ? What if a doctor gave you a bottle of pills and told you that you’d have the body of a cis girl if you took them daily for a couple of years?”

“Yes,” I repeat. I wouldn’t hesitate in this scenario, either.

“So,” I ask myself. “If you’re certain about all of that, why does transition still scare you so much? Why do you still act like you might not go through with it?”

If I’m being honest with myself, I know the answer to this question, too. I still cannot look in the mirror and imagine that the face and body looking back at me will ever be read as female by anyone — least of all myself.

Here is an excerpt from an essay that I wrote about my struggles with overeating. I wrote this paragraph a year and a half before I fully came to terms with my gender. After I wrote it, I remember thinking, “huh, this will look very different in retrospect if…”

Then I pushed the thought deep into the farthest recesses of my mind.

It wasn’t just the hunger I was hoping to eradicate by losing weight, it was the growing feeling of disconnect between my mind and body. I didn’t feel very comfortable as a skinny kid, but my paunchy adult form is somehow even further from how I picture myself in my mind’s eye. Mirrors are bad, especially when I catch a glimpse of myself from the side, but photos are worse. There’s a permanence to photography that mirrors lack; a confirmation that, yes, this was exactly how I appeared to the world in that discreet and frozen moment. I can no longer duck out of the way and pretend that my reflection belonged to somebody else.

I now have a name for this feeling: gender dysphoria. I had assumed it was simple body dysmorphia regarding my weight, but that ignores the truth: I’d rather be overweight as a woman (including all the discrimination and shitty treatment that comes with it) than skinny as a man.

The problem with this particular flavor of dysphoria is that it makes me my own worst critic regarding my body. For years, I’ve tried to avoid thinking about my physical self at all. My body had nothing to do with my mind, after all — it was just a sack of meat that carried my brain around from place to place, often quite poorly. I was bad a sports, bad at dancing, bad at everything involving coordination. And attempting to get better at any of these things often involved attempting to reach a level of comfort and symbiosis with my body that never felt good or natural.

The “ignore my body forever” plan hasn’t worked all that well, admittedly — I’ve had more than one legitimate panic attack triggered by some aspect of my physicality freaking me the fuck out, and there was about a three-year period in my early twenties where I did nothing but eat greasy food and attempt to ignore my ballooning waistline. (I’m still paying for that one.) Since nothing I did about my body ever actually felt good, my only motivation for taking care of myself was trying to ensure that I wouldn’t die from obesity. And fear isn’t exactly the healthiest motivator.

Knowing that I’m trans has made things both easier and harder. Dysphoric feelings are a lot easier to handle now that I know the demon’s name, and I’ve been able to take small actions (a new haircut, shaving my body hair, painting my nails, using perfumed body wash) that have allowed me to feel good about myself in ways that have eluded me in the past.

On the other hand, knowing what I want to look like for the first time in my life has also done a great job of highlighting all the aspects of my physical form that don’t align with who I want to be. I was never self-conscious about my height before, I just knew that I always felt like I took up too much space. Now, being almost six foot two feels like an insurmountable obstacle. I’m much more aware of my large head, my large nose, my beard shadow, and the decidedly masculine way that the weight in my lower body is distributed.

Some of these things can be fixed with lasers or hormones, but others cannot. Some are just me, forever and ever, regardless of which path I choose to walk.

***

Yesterday, I had to deal with the sort of mundane logistical rigmarole that comes up every so often in adult life.

Some idiot backed into my wife’s car in the hair salon parking lot back in March, and I had to bring it into the body shop to get it repaired. Then the insurance company cancelled our rental car reservation when the body shop pushed our repair date back a few weeks due to being overbooked. Then the paperwork was all in my wife’s name (my last name is different) and she was busy at work. Then the car rental folks had assumed that my personal insurance was better than it was so I had to provide proof to the other insurance company that…etc, etc, etc, you get the point.

The reason I bring this up is that I spent the entire morning feeling hyper-conscious of how much more difficult all of these exchanges would have been if I were presenting as female and obviously trans. I was asked for my name a dozen times, had to show off my ID half-a-dozen more, dealt with a gaggle of older members of the public, and took a ride in a rental car alone with one of the rental car dudes. Maybe they all would have been cool with it. Maybe not. Either way, I would have had to open myself up to pitying glances, outright revulsion and bigotry, intrusive questions, and all of my other greatest fears.

This is why I’ve been dreaming about wizards, tornadoes, and exploding airplanes. I’m not scared of being a woman — I’m scared of being visibly and openly trans.

The problem with this fear is that there is no good way to know whether or not I’m overreacting (or if the benefits of transition outweigh the costs) until after I’ve made a lot of very bold and perhaps irreversible decisions.

Will I pass well enough to feel like a woman in most social situations? I won’t know the answer to that until I’ve been on HRT for a while. Heck, even the laser that’ll zap my beard shadow (the physical thing that causes me the most dysphoria currently) won’t be all that effective unless I use it in tandem with HRT. So either it’s into the abyss, or not.

Will transition be worth it even I’m still read as trans in almost all social encounters? Again, I won’t know the answer to that until I start socially transitioning. The fact that very few trans people detransition is heartening, but I also follow enough open trans people on social media to have a pretty real sense of the kind of bigotry they face on a daily basis.

Of course, this fear isn’t uniquely mine. If you’ve spent any time in trans forums, you’ve undoubtedly seen people saying “I wish I was more trans so I knew for sure,” or “I worry that I’m not trans enough to transition.”

These sentiments are so common, and I feel like the truth at the heart of them is this: “I wish transitioning didn’t feel like a choice. As long as it’s a choice, it means that I might choose wrong — and in doing so, cause myself a lifetime of harm and grief.”

***

Do I actually have a choice?

More accurately, is the choice NOT to transition still a viable option for me?

The answer, I suspect, is no. This is a part of The Matrix-as-trans-allegory that I haven’t heard discussed much: in The Matrix, Morpheus doesn’t present the red pill to Neo as a thing that will physically change him. He presents it as knowledge that will prevent him from ever being okay living his old life in ignorant bliss. Once he knows the truth, he can’t go back.

The same is likely true for me. Now that I know who I am, the idea of spending the rest of my life pretending to be somebody else sounds awful. Not that I was having a great time being a guy before all this: I’ve had my share of successes, but I was also deep in an anxious and depressive existential crisis when I finally realized I had to face my gender identity questions head-on. It’s easy to say that I made it nearly 33 years presenting male, so what’s a few more decades? It’s harder to admit that I spent a lot of that time suffering from a quiet and unrelenting undercurrent of emotional distress.

But as long as I feel like I still have a choice, I will continue to obsess over questions like “will I pass?” (knowing that the answer, as much as it pains me, is probably no) and “am I trans enough to do this?” (knowing that the answer, as much as I want to deny it sometimes, is probably yes.) As long as I feel like I still have a choice, my subconscious mind will keep throwing things at me: airplanes, wizards, tornadoes, the administration building from my old middle school.

But my brain will run out of disasters eventually, and I’ll still be here.