Midway this way of life we’re bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.
Ay me! How hard to speak of it that rude
And rough and stubborn forest! The mere breath
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood.
—Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers
I first came to experience transition as a series of structural collapses. Before I had any sense of what I wanted, of what I believed myself to be or need, I experienced a falling-away, a loss of social and physical fluency, a sense of foundationlessness. It is tempting, now, from the relative safety and security of my current position, to absorb that interval into the new narrative of a life that makes sense to me: my old understanding and self-conceptions had to first give way in order for something realer, truer, braver, more radical, more modern, more exciting, more zeitgeisty to take charge, to wrap up various dramatic arcs of my life like a season of television. But I find myself resistant to declaring, That was false and this is real; here I did not know myself and there I did; this was something not-me and that was my true self. This fondness for disavowing old mission statements and replacing them with new ones was, in fact, the most characteristic habit of my drinking days, where every morning brought with it a fresh announcement, a new resolve, a declaration of profound and immediate change, even if the declaration was only broadcast inside my own head and crowded out by more pressing matters by the time I reached the front door. Now I know what I need to do to get out of this fix. Now I truly know myself, and in knowing myself I can master myself, and by mastering myself I can start building a brand-new future this instant. Getting sober had less to do with finding a better way to more effectively stick to a new resolve and more to do with permitting collapse and abandoning resistance. I found it both discouraging and distressingly on the nose that transitioning seemed to mirror sobriety in that respect. It sounds like an evasion, or at best a euphemistic bromide: “Just stop trying and everything will work itself out somehow!” There are times when I look back over my life and see roots of a potential transition long before I began to consider the possibility. Not ironclad evidence, not portents and prophecies, but something that might have been tended and watered into growth, had I recognized them as being anything capable of growing.
By the time I reached my thirties, I believed the main narrative cycle of my adult life had been resolved. Not finished, of course, but having achieved the kind of balance I assumed was a natural result of addressing the main hindrances to my personal growth, I envisioned a future that simply played out gratifying, interchangeable variations on the major themes of the present: A financially self-sufficient woman, who ran her own business and managed her own career, living independently and liking it, contentedly childless with perhaps the occasional wistful fantasy of what might have been, extolling the pleasures of eating alone and wearing caftans, entirely and cheerfully divorced from the world of men. A one-woman Golden Girls act (never mind that the Golden Girls ends with Dorothy getting married and leaving the rest of the girls behind to run a hotel in Miami). The story of my life, then, was for years that I was a woman because it did not occur to me that I might have other options, if I cared to investigate them. And there were so many wonderful things about being a woman! If I experienced moments of dismay, or disappointment, or discontentedness, that was easy enough to account for; life is often made difficult for women, so those moments were in themselves further evidence for my cis womanhood. Then came the question, the sudden uncertainty, the loss of faith in my future, the giving-way of self-satisfaction to panic. I imagined the solution to my problem to look something like this:
Followed, of course, by a graceful exit and a renewed zest for living.
The story of my drinking had been much the same. If I experienced moments of panic, or terror, or loss, or mental degradation, or bewilderment, or lost time, or found myself in places I did not wish to be, that was easy enough to account for, too; there was something broken with my drinking and I needed a better drinking strategy, of which there were thousands, if not tens of thousands. So many ways to be a drunk, so many ways to be a woman; it was simply a matter of trying another set of combinations and waiting for them to take effect. I continued to drink long after drinking had stopped working, by which I mean it no longer reliably produced the same familiar cycle of crisis-panic-abandonment-release-crisis that enabled me to feel like my life contained useful forward momentum. Entering into sobriety necessarily involved resigning from the unpaid, unpleasant job of crisis management and developing a new relationship to momentum entirely—not attempting to manufacture it, but attempting to move along with it, and even sometimes attempting to rest in its absence. It required a great deal less work than drinking had. The mental and physical energy required to formulate a brand-new drinking strategy; create a plan for off-loading shame and avoiding disaster; pilot a worn-out body into work reliably enough to keep a job; and steel my nerves for the hours between the old hangover and the next day’s drunkenness was immense. Every day began in fevered preparation for the turnaround that was always just about to begin, in the certainty that today I had solved the riddle of how to drink as I needed to without giving anyone else cause for concern or finding myself in the hospital—as if I had just discovered I was about to come into a great inheritance, and needed to prepare my house and my body and my social life and my bank account for the new and glorious work of stewarding that inheritance.
The delusion that this work was real or meaningful or profitable to me in any way was persistent, impenetrable, and deadly. Progress, at least in terms of sobriety, looked at first like regression, like loss: loss of certainty, of direction, of habit, of routine, of activity, of the ability to envision a recognizable future, of the sense of momentum. But what I experienced first as loss I would go on to experience as necessary, invigorating, useful, even pleasant. Even, on occasion, as a relief.
Transition was much the same way. After a year of trying very hard every day not to transition, trying to isolate, control, and obliterate the desire to pursue it, giving up the idea that I could manage myself out of my own body came as such a relief. “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30). But I had to desire rest for my soul more than I desired to cling to cis-ness, and I fought that exchange every step of the way. It was too late, I was both too young and too old, I should have said something sooner, it would not work for me the way it worked for other people, I would lose my family, I would be reneging on the promise my body had made to others, I would humiliate myself, I needed the heavy yoke, deserved it, owed it to the people in my life to go on carrying it; I did not believe an easy yoke existed for me.
One of the most common admonitions in the Bible is “fear not.” Sometimes it is offered as advice, sometimes as reassurance, sometimes as command. Sometimes death and disaster follow regardless, as in Genesis 35, where a midwife counsels Rachel not to despair as she delivers her son before dying. So “fear not” is not the same as a promise that all will be well, that life will go on. Rachel, dying, names her son Ben-Oni; Genesis tells us that her husband Jacob goes on to rename him Benjamin, though it does not say why; nor does it say whether Rachel died in a condition of fearlessness or despair. But we who read the story are told the name she chose, even if no one ever called her son by that name except herself.
One might understandably grow a little frustrated, encountering the same reminder to be not afraid again and again, especially if one interprets it as an instruction missing a few key details about how, exactly, not to fear. It is the same frustration shared by the alcoholic who wants to just stop drinking, the transition-shy who want to just stop thinking about it. It reads better, I think, if one considers fear not to be a descriptive rather than a prescriptive remark, as informative rather than exhortative. The feeling of safety and the condition of safety are not the same; it is both the nature and the purview of God to exchange the former for the latter. So it is that the forty-sixth Psalm reads,
God is our refuge and strength,
a very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
Even though the earth be removed,
And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though its waters roar and be troubled,
Though the mountains shake with its swelling. Selah
This is no mere anxious fancy—there is reason enough here to be afraid. Destruction and death are at hand, mountains develop rootlessness and the foundational security of the earth itself is at risk. More distressing than even the prospect of the earth’s wholesale removal is the description of God’s career:
Come, behold the works of the Lord,
Who has made desolations in the earth.
He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
He breaks the bow and cuts the spear in two;
He burns the chariot in the fire.
Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth!
The invitation to come and look on desolation, to prepare for God’s inevitable and terrifying exaltation, the reminder that wars can be finished—not ended, merely finished—at the unknowable whim of the divine is hardly reassuring in the face of mortal fear. The source of safety, then, cannot come from a certainty that dangers will pass and one will be permitted to resume the previous course of one’s life. It is a portrait of God that is bewildering, conclusive, irresistible not in the manner of being delightedly drawn in but in the manner of being devastated, unaccountable. The Psalmist suggests that true safety, then, cannot be found in what seems secure, cannot be found in reliability or predictability or contentedness, that desolation will come and must be met rather than forestalled or foreclosed upon, that safety itself lies upon the other side of the fire and the broken chariot and the collapse of the mountains into the sea. One might be forgiven for seeing such an account and deciding against the idea of safety altogether.
The first time I actively sought out the company of trans people came after I gave up on the idea that I was going to solve the problem of wanting things by sitting alone in my room trying as hard as I could not to want anything. It was a terrible, dizzying day; I wanted more than anything for solitary despair and self-recrimination to provide me with the tools to build a bright and livable future, never mind that solitary despair had never produced anything for me but additional solitary despair. I snuck into a local trans support group well after the meeting had started in an act of complete surrender, having given up yet again on the fantasy of the successful operation of crisis management. Progress looked, once again, like regression: I had failed to cope, failed to maintain a secure and sufficient cisgender sense of self, failed to force peace upon myself. I was emotional, embarrassing; bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Worse still, my greatest fears were realized when I entered the room: I felt comforted in the presence of other trans people. It was not that I felt immediate kinship and recognition with everyone in the room—many of us had relatively little in common, some of them I liked and some I did not—but the effect was nonetheless immediate and came in the manner of a reprieve after a long day’s thankless work. I experienced relief when I had not come seeking relief but resolution and a promise that the mountains would return to their original position at my command. The forty-sixth Psalm and the Friday night meeting of trans Californians served as a necessary reminder that the mountains do not move under my imperative, and that safety cannot ever be reached in trying harder to make sure my orders are obeyed by things that fall outside of my personal power.
Jesus in the Gospels tells a number of stories about the kingdom of heaven, sometimes also the kingdom of God; whether the two are interchangeable or merely closely linked is a matter of some debate. He does not spend a great deal of time explaining what the kingdom of heaven is, but in alerting others to its presence. It is like a seed, it is like a net, it is like a pearl of great price hidden in a field, it is like yeast, it is like a merchant who comes across a pearl of great price hidden in a field, it is like a king preparing a wedding banquet and his uncooperative guests; it is near at hand, it is more than just near at hand but currently present, it is an internal condition, it is an external system of justice, it is expansive, it is restrictive, it is the enemy of wealth and tightfistedness, it is a gift that God takes great pleasure in giving, it is the engine that metes out not just justice but retribution and more than retribution, terror, it is mysterious and far-off, it is like children and for children, it is for the childlike, it is seen and unseen, capable of sudden and rapid growth, bursting through and out and up, continually emerging and becoming more of itself, more real by the second and already real, all-welcoming and difficult to enter. The Parable of the Sower reads:
“Listen! Behold, a sower went out to sow. And it happened, as he sowed, that some seed fell by the wayside; and the birds of the air came and devoured it. Some fell on stony ground, where it did not have much earth; and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up it was scorched, and because it had no root it withered away. And some seed fell among thorns; and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no crop. But other seed fell on good ground and yielded a crop that sprang up, increased and produced: some thirtyfold, some sixty, and some a hundred.”
And He said to them, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”
—Mark 4:3–9
This served as a guidepost to me throughout various moments of heartsickness and fear and doubt and hope and joy along my transition, which grew more real by the second and as a result more real retroactively, which was all-welcoming and difficult to enter, which was seen and unseen, capable of sudden and rapid growth, bursting through and out and up, continually emerging and becoming more itself. I often thought, too, of Dorothy Zbornak and her exit from The Golden Girls, a show I often watched on repeat in the evenings when sleep became impossible and sometimes in the afternoon when everything else seemed impossible, too. I’d grown up watching Rose and Blanche and Dorothy and Sophia in reruns, but somehow I’d never seen the series finale or had any sense of how the show had ended.
I’d been dimly aware of the existence of The Golden Palace, the single-season spinoff that didn’t feature Bea Arthur, who played Dorothy, but I hadn’t expected that the last episode of The Golden Girls would actually show her leaving. One afternoon a friend of mine came over to keep my company and we spent a few hours watching episodes from the first two seasons of the show. I had to leave the house to run an errand, and when I came back my friend was watching “One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest, Part I,” which I assumed was still part of the early series run. All I knew was that it was a two-parter that featured Leslie Nielsen. I figured, based on the title, that there’d be a strange, farcical spell of some form of institutionalization, like David Duchovny’s arc on Sex and the City, and I thought that was sort of a strange direction for the show to take in a brief run, but I generally like Leslie Nielsen’s work and had a lot of faith in The Golden Girls’ writing staff, so I went with it.
It was a fantastic arc, maybe the best Golden Girls episode I’d seen, even though the plot was absolutely bananas. Dorothy and Nielsen’s Lucas pretend to get engaged to cheese off Blanche, only to actually fall in love with each other. Oddly, no one else in the cast ever discovers that their engagement started out as a put-on, so when they get engaged-for-real a second time, all the other girls just sort of shrug and accept it as a quirk. Dorothy’s ex-husband, Stanley, drives her to the church and offers her his blessing in the form of a rambling monologue about his hairlessness:
“Do you see this hair? It is the only one on my forehead. The other traitors receded years ago, but this proud and loyal sprout clings desperately. It is unrelenting. It is true. Dorothy, it is this hair I hate more than all the others. It mocks me. Don’t you see? I am that hair. And you’re my big, crazy, bald skull. I may give you some reason to resent me, but you cannot shake me. I am loyal.”
One of the things I’d feared most about starting testosterone therapy was the idea of losing my hair, that I might arrive to manhood late enough that its first fruits would be male-pattern baldness, that I would have made a foolish bargain trading away being a reasonably pretty woman for a single proud and loyal sprout of hair mocking my head. Dorothy’s response to this man is, as always, dry, fond, and exasperated, utterly uninterested in humoring male vanity by avoiding the truth: “Stanley, you wore a toupee for twenty-seven years.”
And then she marries Leslie Nielsen, and then she moves away. That’s the end of the show.
I kept watching in increasing confusion, thinking, They’re going to have to come up with some reason to get rid of him really fast, because I know the next five seasons of The Golden Girls don’t prominently feature Leslie Nielsen as Dorothy’s husband Lucas, who lives next door and is always stopping by for iced tea and cheesecake. But they don’t get rid of him; he marries Dorothy and they move away. I didn’t know the end was coming—I didn’t even know what I was watching was the end of something. I proceeded to entirely lose it, and started sobbing in front of my friend. We had watched the pilot episode only a few hours before. I had thought we had more time. In the very first episode, Blanche almost moves out of their shared home to get married, but her fiancé turns out to be a bigamist and a con artist who gets arrested right before the ceremony. Blanche takes to her bed for three weeks. She finally comes out of her room to talk to the rest of the girls:
And I kept trying to explain that to a friend, through tears, that I felt betrayed by a long-since-canceled sitcom about a house of retirees. That show, that particular vision of retirement, had promised me something, implicitly, or rather through that show and other visions like it I had promised myself something I could now no longer keep. My security had rested in a sort of negotiation with compulsory heterosexuality, such that when all my friends had outlived their husbands, we’d all get to move in together and eat cheesecake and wear comfortable loungewear for our seven extra statistically predetermined years of life. Whatever else might change in life, we could at least count on that. And that even if we got married, even if we married men, we weren’t going anywhere in terms of our relationship to one another; the show wasn’t called The Golden Placeholders Until I Meet Leslie Nielsen. It was a negotiation that existed primarily in my own fantasies, of course, but it was a load-bearing fantasy, and the architecture of my mind suffered from the loss of it.
I’d never hated Leslie Nielsen before—I thought the Naked Gun movies were overrated, but I didn’t blame him for that—but Lord, did I hate him then. He tugged Dorothy through every door in every scene. You could barely keep him in a shot. He was always disappearing just out of frame. Let’s get a move on, let’s get out of here, time’s a-wasting. What are you in such a hurry for, Leslie? There’s no rush. Sit down in the kitchen with the girls and have some iced tea. I didn’t mind that Dorothy got married, but I minded that he took her away from that kitchen table. There was room at the table for him, if he’d just pulled up a chair and sat down.
Later that day I tried looking up The Golden Palace to see if it would cheer me up, but then I read the plot summary of its own series finale: “Following the cancellation of the series, Sophia returns to the Shady Pines retirement home, appearing as a cast member in the later seasons of Empty Nest. What becomes of Rose, Blanche, and the hotel is left unresolved.”
My friend attempted to remind me that it was perhaps not especially useful to assign an old sitcom the job of reassuring me that everything was going to be okay, that transition would not take me out of my place in the world or in the lives of the people who loved me, that intimacy does not require total personal immutability, but I still felt for all the world like Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre upon learning that Mr. Mason has arrived, that all of his plans and hopes for the future have come to nothing, that the full force of his past is coming back to claim him, that his attempts to force Jane into the shape of a wife through the sheer force of his desperation and will must prove ultimately fruitless—
“Jane, I’ve got a blow; I’ve got a blow, Jane!”
Later I ended up calming down enough to go back to an earlier episode, one where Rose and Dorothy enter a songwriting competition and write a jingle about Miami. I still knew the blow was coming, but once you’re prepared for the hit, you can get into position and wait for the force to pass through you. On the other side of sobriety my life was not given over to a daily battle against the desire to drink; after starting to transition my life was not given over to a daily battle against the desire to be a man. One no longer has to fight battles after giving up; something new can happen then. Once you accept that you’re going bald you can start to look for toupees; once the mountains are in the sea you can stop imagining they’re going to move at your command; once the blow hits, you are free of the dread of the blow, and you can start to mend from it.