One of the biggest hypothetical problems when it comes to transitioning is that it really fouls up your time-travel fantasies, or at least muddles them for a good long while. (Another problem is whether to refer to transition as a sex change, which I’ve seen a handful of people do for a variety of reasons. There’s something pleasingly retro about it, but I’m not quite sure I’m tall enough to pull that style off. Transition it is, at least for now.) I’ve always felt particularly prepared for time travel, to be in a position where I would be forced to keep my head down, abandon my values for expediency, and say only things I knew other people wanted to hear in order to survive.
There’s no transmasculine equivalent of forced-femme fantasy (“HELPLESS college freshman FORCED into a pullover and called LITTLE BUDDY by older brother’s COOL BEST FRIEND: BECOMING A BOY FOR MALE ATTENTION”), at least not that I ever came across, so my daydreams always took the shape of being forced to travel back in time to an era where I’d finally have to be a woman as hard and as long as I could. The plan was always (after stepping through a ley line or mysterious portal): keep my head down, wait for other people to start talking before opening my mouth and giving myself away with an out-of-place accent or vocabulary, agree with everything I’m told instead of trying to advocate for modern behavioral standards, look for context clues, start a lot of conversations with, “Oh, hello, you,” get a low-level job and act so normal for decades that everyone leaves me alone, respond in kind to anyone who refers to me as “darling,” immediately stop making references to air travel or television or anything that might sound like magic (if in the future, refuse to ask “What does this do?” about anything), immediately abandon every single value of my own for contemporary ones so that whatever this culture approves of, I approve of, and whatever this culture abhors, so do I, make no waves, ask no questions, come up with a decent explanation for my clothing before getting changed as quickly as possible, let other idiots try to avert the Battle of Hastings or invent feminism eight hundred years early or whatever, and either get home safely or find a way to live as comfortably as possible. The most cherished and longstanding of these counterproductive fantasies involves the court of Henry VIII.
The really nice thing about imagining yourself as a wife of Henry VIII is that you got to deal with every single male authority figure imaginable all at once, because he was everybody’s god and pope and dad and husband and boss, so if you wanted to fight or resent or betray or fuck or suck up to any one of them you could get it all done at once with the same very tall person. Moreover, I had the benefit of hindsight and knew that his daughter Elizabeth I would later invent feminism, so I didn’t need to feel guilty about abandoning mine for her father, or for never imagining myself accidentally time-traveled to her court.
I knew enough about the futility of changing a man (or worse, trying to change a man in order to try to change myself) that I thought it best to confine such fantasies to the distant past. Henry VIII married everyone in the home counties, invented Christmas music, and was winning enough to make Anne Boleyn swim across the Channel to introduce the blow job to England; both sufficiently charismatic and sufficiently dead to hang a lifetime of maladaptive fantasies on. It’s easy, with the benefit of hindsight and roughly two television specials per year, to feel superior to Catherine of Aragon. Twenty-four years spent in the company of God’s representative on earth, yet that still somehow wasn’t enough time for her to learn that he was as easily soothed as he was irritated. Henry was a simple man: he wanted literally everyone to love him without reserve or criticism, and he believed God invented England so he could have sons in it. That was it; that was the one thing to remember about him. When the king of England, who has been trying to divorce you for years, offers you the chance to say, “My lord! I see now what a mistake I have made, and that I have never truly been your lawful wife. I see it all now! I must have consummated my marriage with Arthur and forgotten, and consider you my dear brother, and will never bother you again with an attempt to assert my wifely rights,” you say it with a smile on your face and accept your consolation castle in Coventry. Stick to your guns, and where does it get you? A handful of servants who were willing to call you the queen, a hair shirt, and nothing, plus whenever they make movies about Queen Elizabeth they always make up the actress who plays your daughter Mary to look like a nightmare.
The problem with all these fantasies now—not that Catherine of Aragon would have ever welcomed advice from me at any age, in any form, and obviously Henry VIII would have been lousy at helping me get into a pullover—is how to explain a transitioning body to the friendly peasant woman I assume will lend me a cloak and a loaf of fresh brown bread after I stumble disheveled and disoriented out of the Portal; I have enough trouble passing in 2019 Berkeley, California, without wondering how I’m going to get read by early modern courtiers. But the fantasy persists, and there are at least two reasons why the Tudors are such an important component of it: One, because it helps to make obvious the ridiculousness of similar questions that try to pass themselves off as legitimate concerns, like “What if you start to transition and then society collapses, and you’re artificially dependent on something society provides for you, like hormones?” The answer to that, of course, is that if society collapses, I’ll die and so will you, even if you have a second freezer and some MREs in your basement and know how to do push-ups. I am artificially dependent on everything from electricity to antibiotics to refrigeration and indoor plumbing. Taking up the hobby of survivalism will not extend my life another five minutes past the end of human civilization, and there’s no good reason to put off present happiness, usefulness, and meaning to prop up the fantasy of being able to survive without depending on anybody else.
The second reason the Tudors are important is because the backdrop I choose for my maladaptive fantasies tells me something about what I’m not prepared to articulate or ask for myself. Put me back in time where gender roles were more strictly enforced, give me a body I’ve got to account for to some greater authority every second of the day, throw me into a high-stakes fertility-and-death cult centered around the tallest man in England and keep me sufficiently distracted with high stakes and high demands and let me get the job of fulfilling an unpleasant man’s expectations done. I suppose the real problem is—as it’s always been—that once you bring up the possibility of time travel in relation to transition, the natural first stop is going to be puberty, not the Tudor court, to increase the possibilities available to one’s own future rather than restrict all options outside of “giving an heir to Henry VIII.” But if you look at the past just right, you can almost picture it.