Now it happened as they went that Jesus entered a certain village; and a certain woman named Martha welcomed Him. And she had a sister called Mary, who also sat at Jesus’ feet and heard His word. But Martha was distracted with much serving, and she approached Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Therefore tell her to help me.”
And Jesus answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things. But one thing is needed, and Mary has chosen that good part, which will not be taken away from her.”
—Luke 10:38–42
Now it happened that the dishwasher was broken, and that I tried starting it but it kept making that thwumpa-thwumpa sound instead of turning over, so I just left the dishes in the sink. I don’t know if you needed them for dinner. I would have washed them myself, but they never seem to get as clean as when you do them—probably because I do a purposefully half-hearted job of scrubbing in order to get you to do it without asking me for help.
Also, I’ve noticed that the house is out of toilet paper, but instead of buying more I plan on tearing little strips of paper towels and layering them carefully over the old toilet paper roll (which I will not throw away). I will do this indefinitely until you buy more toilet paper.
And I hit START on the load of clothes that were sitting in the dryer, which were already finished drying, but which I did not wish to fold; this way when you get home it will sound like they have just finished drying when it buzzes, and you will be the one to fold them.
I have intentionally lowered my standard of living so that when you say things like “This place is a mess,” rather than acknowledge the implicit request for acknowledgment or respect or help I can simply grunt, neither agreeing nor disagreeing, and not having to do anything, knowing that eventually you will do all the work necessary to make yourself happy.
Now, either one imagines Martha in the middle of serving when she asks this question, possibly elbow-deep in a sinkful of dishes, trying to wipe a flyaway strand of hair off her forehead with a sweaty elbow, in which case being informed that she’s troubled “about many things” is both rude and self-evident. One might rather imagine the question coming up throughout the course of an ordinary day, a request to compare and rank their respective vocations without the immediate emergency of having nothing to eat lunch with. But one thing is certain: it is illegal, according to God, for women to wash dishes. Someone else is going to have to do it.
When I was twenty-five I flew to London to spend a week with a man who used to be in love with me but wasn’t anymore. Every day he left for work and I would wash all the dishes that were left in the sink from the night before; then I would walk around the neighborhood and weep until it was time for him to come home, where I would pretend to have spent an exciting day not crying and wait for him to notice I had washed and put away all the dishes. He did not bother about the dishes, and then I would wait for him to fall asleep and crawl out into his tiny bathroom and cry in the shower. I did this for six days in a row, and grew so frantic by the end that I came up with excuses to furnish him with extra dishes to use, making cup after cup of coffee or suggesting we make pasta so eventually he’d be forced to consider how there could possibly be another mug or colander available, since for all he knew he hadn’t done the dishes in a week. It’s an embarrassing story for a number of reasons, not least because I fear the moral of the story could be misrepresented as If you can’t get your lousy boyfriend to pick up after himself, become your own lousy boyfriend instead, or worse, that my failure to demand my rights as a woman directly resulted in my opting for Door Number Two and transitioning as a means of avoiding difficult conversations about housework. What remains true about the story is that I wanted this man, like all men, to immediately and intuitively recognize something in me they consistently failed to notice, and, when that failed, I attempted to make myself so helpful and unobtrusive I would become necessary to their comfort if not to their happiness, and when that failed I ran away to face my own dishes at home.
A few years later, when I went from passively ignoring to actively resisting the question of transition, I stopped cleaning up after myself entirely. I lived alone at the time, so there was no question of inconveniencing or blaming someone else. The idea of tending to anything that belonged to me—my home, my clothes, my appearance—was unbearable, because everything at that time depended on my not having a body. Washing the dishes meant acknowledging that I had hands to wash them with, a stomach to fill, a hunger to address, a body to nourish. I was worried and troubled about many things, although only one thing was needed. I preferred to worry about many things. The work of not doing the dishes is much more complicated and exhausting than doing the dishes, and involves sticking to a strict schedule:
Step One: Begin to avoid the kitchen. If the kitchen cannot be avoided, if it must be passed through in order to reach more desirable environs, like the out-of-doors, avert your eyes from the sink and neighboring counters. The kitchen is now formally Unlovely; do not treat it with affection.
Step Two: Designate a particular coffee mug as the Mug. The Mug is part of your body now and may be reused for any and all beverages, whether coffee or not-yet-flat, this-is-still-good Red Bull, nicotine gum wrappers still sparking with aluminum and chemicals, soups (including ice cream). You might rinse the cup out every now and again, but do not feel the need to formally wash it any more than you would scrub your mouth out with soap and water in between meals; the Mug is as much an extension of your body as your hand or your face.
Step Three: The sink is a place for stacking things and leaving, nothing more.
Step Four: If the sink must be addressed, employ a Tetris-style restacking strategy, drizzle everything with watered-down dish soap, turn the faucet on for a few seconds, and announce that you’re “leaving these to soak.” This qualifies as a chore, and no one can accuse you of task-shying.
Step Five: “It’s growing and growing, there’s more of it every day, if it’s possible to speak of more nothing. All the others fled in time … but we didn’t want to leave our home. The Nothing [of Neverending Story fame] caught us in our sleep and this is what it did to us.”
“Is it very painful?” Atreyu asked.
“No,” said the second bark troll, the one with the hole in his chest. “You don’t feel a thing. There’s just something missing. And once it gets hold of you, something more is missing every day. Soon there won’t be anything left of us.”
Step Six: When the stacking balance fails you and topples over, leave the house and take your dinner in a dark corner of a dark restaurant. Place a paper towel on top of the soapy, crumb-filled mess that has oversloshed the kitchen counter, as a sign of penance.
Step Seven: If you have a dishwasher, open it for a few hours—“to let the air in”—and close it sometime after sunset. That’s enough for one day.
Step Eight: “And he went a little farther, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matt. 26:39).
Step Nine: Throw something you need very much in the garbage.
Step Ten: “Is it very painful?” Atreyu asked. “Is it very painful?” Is it? Is it very painful? Is it painful? Is it very? Is it very painful? Is it very painful?
And so on, until your life cracks open and God addresses you by your name twice to make sure that he’s gotten your attention. The question then becomes what it is, exactly, that Mary has chosen. Martha seems to think the work, whatever the work is, has fallen exclusively to her. Jesus declines to call what Mary does either work or not work, describing it instead as “what is needed,” sometimes “what is better,” sometimes “what is good.” Every so often it is written “what is best.” The question that kept me from my own dishes was the question of whether transition was necessary or merely good, namely whether I could get away with avoiding it. I wanted to know my other options. I wanted to see a different menu. I wanted a guarantee that my only alternative to transition was ruin, because to take that risk on any other terms was totally unacceptable to me; I wanted to be informed that I either had to or could not do it, assigned a formal vocation rather than encouraged to discern one. What can Martha do, at the end of that conversation? If she has been chastened, it was lovingly done; but she has received very little guidance about the nature of her own work. Is Mary’s part the best for her, too? Should she join her sister in formal discipleship? Should she compare the two of them together more often, or less? She knows more about Mary, certainly, but not if her own work is good or good enough or good-for-Martha or something else. What I wanted at the outset of transition was the opportunity to fold back the page at this particular turning point and live forward in two directions at once, in one version of my life where I transitioned and in one where I didn’t, then revisit after about fifteen solid years in each reality and make an informed assessment of which life proved the better. I had no interest in keeping my eyes only on my own work. I wanted my work, and everyone else’s, and for someone else to come and help me with mine in the bargain. I wanted a guaranteed outcome before moving forward. I wanted what was best, and I wanted to know what was best in advance, with frequent updates to follow just in case the good or the better suddenly moved into the lead.
Brother Lawrence offers a third possible perspective on the problem of dishes and vocation (which may or may not have been Martha’s problem after all):
He does not ask much of us, merely a thought of Him from time to time, a little act of adoration, sometimes to ask for His grace, sometimes to offer Him your sufferings, at other times to thank Him for the graces, past and present, He has bestowed on you, in the midst of your troubles to take solace in Him as often as you can. Lift up your heart to Him during your meals and in company; the least little remembrance will always be the most pleasing to Him. One need not cry out very loudly; He is nearer to us than we think … We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of Him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before Him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God.
Brother Lawrence, of course, never had my or Martha’s problem with the dishes, having neatly sidestepped a number of psychosexual dish-adjacent issues by only doing the washing-up in a monastery. But there is a neatness to it, particularly for a spiritually anxious transsexual: picture a sacred presence, dress it up as a boy if you like, who not only notices every time you bake a cake or unload the dishwasher but delights in it, revels in it, considers it a pure and lovely offering every time you do it. This is my son, in whom I am well pleased; I see you have done the dishes again. Trans people sometimes talk about gender euphoria, that expansive sense of purpose and delight that can accompany certain moments in transition; I found myself anxiously scanning my own brain in the first few hours after starting testosterone (“I’m just trying it,” I told my friends. “I’m not on it, exactly, just trying, there’s a difference”): Am I euphoric yet? How about now? Is this euphoria? How will I know, if transition has been founded in large part by the realization that I often can’t trust my own sense of self, because I used to think I was a cis woman and only belatedly realized I might have been in error? There was nothing to do for it but continue to go about my life, running the experiment and walking the dog and answering emails and boiling water for tea and putting away dishes as needed, all while paying careful attention. And when the euphoria came—and went, and came back, and settled into something a little more than predictable and a little less than jarring—it was enough to pick up a straw, or put away a dish, all for the love of it.