There’s something truly wonderful about referring to a procedure as specific as a bilateral mastectomy with a term as blandly ominous as “top surgery.”
Is it serious, Doc?
Yeah, son. I’m afraid there’s nothing to do but schedule you for top surgery.
What parts of me will be affected, Doc?
The top.
What are you gonna do to the top of me?
Surgery. We’re going in and we’re gonna have to surger your Top.
“Just get rid of the whole thing, Doctor,” I imagined myself saying generously, swinging my legs from the examination table. “Take the whole top off. I want my neighbors to have a clear view to the sea. Give it away to those deserving unfortunates who may have no top to speak of. I’ll get by just fine with a bottom and a middle. No top for me—I’ll get by.”
One thinks of it less as a removal than as an installation, or having one thing hauled away to make room for something else, the more time passes. In the months and years since I had/underwent/experienced/paid for/submitted to/achieved top surgery at a clinic in Plano, Texas, I’ve been able to experience something physically that I had previously only had scope to imagine. There is, as I had suspected but did not know until I had done it, a great deal of difference between imagining one’s chest without something and encountering a wholly new physical plane. I had been very anxious in the months leading up to the surgery itself, often stopping to ask myself if I wanted to postpone or even cancel the appointment altogether. Without making claims on what I may or may not feel about my body in the future, I can say that doubt and uncertainty seemed to leave me the day I exchanged imagination for experience. Now that I have a new kind of embodied knowledge about my own chest I might sometimes experience wistfulness, or a sense of poignancy, or curiosity about various alternatives, but it is not a chest I feel uncertain about any longer.
“Yes, of course not, you cut the uncertainty off,” might be the reply if this were part of a vaudeville routine, which it isn’t.
But at any rate, I’ve developed a different sort of relationship to uncertainty, one where I no longer consider avoiding change to be the highest good. I may have various changing thoughts and opinions and reactions to myself—my body, my future, my past, the things I want, the things I fear, the things I want to want—but having tested one uncertain theory, I flinch less at the prospect of others. It’s a new chest for me, rather than simply an altered or a pared-down version of my old one, and I’ve had a new chest before, so even in the newness there is a kind of familiarity. The first new chest was given to me by my endocrine system (I assume; I’m no expert, and it may be that the endocrine system is simply an old superstition designed to scare children) around the age of twelve, and I accepted it then with relatively good humor and a sense of resignation. I accepted the second at thirty-one with great joy and a number of bookmarked tabs about changing surgical dressings.
In the first few weeks of recovery after top surgery, I spent a lot of time watching old movies. It did not make sense, at least in my mind, to think of myself as recovering from anything, because from almost the first moment I came to it seemed as if there had never been anything about my chest that would have required surgical intervention in the first place. This reality was more believable than what had come before. This is a line of thinking that my mind is more easily convinced of than my body. About nine or ten days afterward I started feeling pretty well most of the time, and could once again gingerly hold my own coffee cup and open silverware drawers on my own behalf. But there’s a good long distance between feeling no longer freshly incised and being able to resume normal activities, and I was under doctor’s orders to restrict myself to “T. rex–style arm movements,” which meant I spent a lot of afternoons watching old movies on the couch in a spirit of mild-to-moderate agitation. Miles and miles of adorable new chest, and a tired body that wouldn’t deliver it anywhere without protest.
I had a friend visiting from out of town who was doing things like cleaning out the litterbox (for the cat) and opening jars (for me) and in the course of conversation it came up that they’d never seen Destry Rides Again, despite being a big fan of Madeline Kahn’s performance in Blazing Saddles, modeled after Marlene Dietrich in the same, so the two of us watched it together. Grace and I had been explaining our T4T energy theory to this friend, and I’d been trying to look for examples beyond the usual “short, anxious men” and “statuesque blond women” pairing.
When Jimmy Stewart as Tom Destry Jr. steps down from the coach in Bottleneck for the first time, it’s on the strength of his reputation as a lawman like his father. The man who’s been riding in the coach next to him has been angry at the driver the whole trip, and the first thing he does is punch the guy in the jaw before shooting a gun out of the postilion’s hand. Everyone applauds, assuming this is the new deputy, truly his father’s son in name and deed, but of course it isn’t—Jimmy steps onto the street carrying a canary in a birdcage and a woman’s parasol. The case for Jimmy Stewart’s transmasculinity as Tom Destry is, I think, a straightforward one: he’s easily distinguished by his unusual height, immediately mistaken for someone else, bears a conflicted relationship to his father’s legacy, constantly offers folksy, rambling, Christ-style parables about something that once happened to “a friend” in order to defuse tension (if you know a trans man, odds are good that you also know a trans man who’s currently in seminary even though he isn’t necessarily religious himself. Lord knows why, but it often seems to go with the territory. I’m not saying every guy who goes to seminary is trans, nor even that most trans guys sooner or later find themselves pursuing a doctrinal education, just that if you scratch enough trans men, eventually a seminarian will turn up).
There’s a moment in the movie where Charles Winninger—Sheriff Washington Dimsdale—tearfully breaks down in front of Jimmy Stewart once his great plan to prove everybody wrong and clean up the town once and for all has fallen apart. It was a one-point plan, destined for failure: Call Tom Destry. That was all he had, and once that didn’t work, he was left with nothing.
“Oh, Tom,” he cries. “The only reason they made me sheriff here is because I was the town drunk. They wanted someone they could kick around, someone who wouldn’t ask questions. But I was aimin’ to fool ’em, do things right, send in for you. And now, you fooled me.”
That day I watched Destry Rides Again with my friend I was exactly five years sober, and watching a man-who-is-not-a-man cradle a terrified drunk and say, “Well, you will fool them, Wash. We’ll fool them together,” was deeply moving to me, a man who has spent much of his life having exactly one plan upon which all my hopes rest, and falling to pieces when the plan (just four drinks tonight, just a haircut and hope nobody notices, disavow all desires and hope for the best) falls apart. I think there are better ways to talk about transition and sobriety than to only focus on one’s feelings; sola sentimente is no better a foundation for transition than sola scriptura was for Protestantism. But it is true to say that I could not be a drunk and a man at the same time. The drunk was there to kick around and make sure no one asked questions; the drunk had to give way to make room—though that’s not to say that I neatly and immediately swapped one out for the other, either. The point of my drunkenness was to forestall imagination; imagination was the first step on the road to action and action was dangerous. Better to ruminate, to nurse over old hurts, to rehearse again and again things that had already happened and could not be changed. Just as top surgery was about something more than merely removing part of my chest, sobriety required more than simply quitting drinking and carrying on otherwise as if nothing had changed. It required imagination, and imagination necessitates acknowledging that the future exists on its own terms and in its own right, and might even reach out and make demands of the present.
Anyhow, Tom Destry’s great plan for Bottleneck is something along the lines of few-to-no guns, but plenty of incarceration, which is not much of an improvement in many ways. But in the world of the movie at least, he’s unique in wanting to spend a great deal of time thinking before he does or says anything, unique in prioritizing imagination and possibility before moving ahead.
Grace and I talk often about what we thought about each other the day we met, when I asked her if she wanted to be best friends and she said that she did. The two of us looked very different then than we do now, but still recognized each other on sight. When Jimmy Stewart meets Marlene Dietrich—a German woman inexplicably nicknamed “Frenchy” in a Western boomtown, tricking drunk ranch hands into gambling away their life savings, stealing men’s pants and sucker-punching their wives—they both spend a lot of time sizing each other up, trying to figure out who’s got the upper hand, and if the upper hand is worth getting.
“How’s the weather up there?” she says to him on sight, looking up at his great height. “How’s the weather up there,” he says at the exact same time in a weary tone. “Ah, come on. You can do better than that.” Marlene never exactly tells him that he can do better, too, but she does hurl a number of glass bottles at his head, which communicates the same general principle. There are moments in the movie where Grace is very much Marlene, and moments where I am very much Jimmy, but there are two moments, I think, where we switch.
The first switch comes when Tom Destry visits Frenchy in her dressing room and says, “Now, I bet you got kind of a lovely face under all that paint there. Why don’t you wipe it off someday and have a good look? Figure out how you can live up to it.” Most of the sentiment behind the idea of makeup as a face-obliterating mask we can cheerfully leave in 1939, of course, but the work of figuring out how to live up to one’s face is no joke. The first time I ever used a men’s bathroom in public was at a grocery store. I’d been transitioning at this point for a little while but dithering on the subject of which door to duck behind. Grace—still, at this point, my best friend and not my girlfriend—pushed me through the door. She was on the other side, a little pale, when I came out a minute later, all certainty gone: “Oh God, did I read that moment right?” (She had; everything was just fine; I don’t recommend that you shove any of your loved ones into any bathrooms, but it worked for us in that moment. All public bathrooms are terrible, but men’s rooms are terrible in an entirely new way.)
Destry is a man who is not like other men in Bottleneck, and Frenchy is not like the other women there, either. There is more to transition than that not-being-like, but there’s some there there; they have a dissimilar and yet a shared sense of uniqueness. She notices his height, and he notices her face. He is stymied in certain ways; she is self-sabotaging in others. They both like each other very much.
The second time the two of us switch our sense of identification is the moment Frenchy dies. (Another sentiment we can happily leave in 1939.) She sags into Jimmy’s arms and wipes the lipstick off her mouth before asking him to kiss her. He tilts his hat before he does, so that no one else, not even the audience at home, can watch them do it. And without suggesting that removing makeup is the same thing as removing artifice or becoming honest, I knew myself to be Frenchy, not Destry, in that moment: ready to ask for privacy and intimacy at the same time. The year I asked for top surgery, five years into sobriety, was the first time I admitted publicly to having a body and wanting to do something about it, something I could not, or at least had not, done before. Part of the reason I did not think of top surgery as being primarily organized around any sort of removal, at least physically, was because I thought of there being more of me afterward, rather than less.
Fin.
Toward the end of Destry Rides Again, just before the credits roll, when Destry is being set up in an obvious marriage-plot moment with a different kind of girl, he defers with another story. I love this moment because it suggests that he considers heterosexual marriage to be a threat just as serious, and just as need of a solution, as gun violence: “Y’know, speaking of marriage … I had a friend once that happened to …” She looks disappointed. He keeps talking, trying to defuse the situation. It’s Marlene or nobody, and it looks like Jimmy is ready to stick with nobody—and by extension the whole town of Bottleneck.
Later, director (not their director, merely a director) Peter Bogdanovich would claim that Marlene and Jimmy had an on-set affair that resulted in Marlene’s getting pregnant. His source was, supposedly, Orson Welles, who also claimed to have taken her to get an abortion without Stewart’s knowledge. In some ways I have difficulty believing that out of all her friends, Marlene would choose Orson Welles to confide in about her romantic relationships; in other ways I have no difficulty believing it at all. I once saw Bogdanovich give one of his “Life with Orson Welles” talks in Hollywood, and he said one of his fondest memories was looking up from his desk in his home office to see Orson tearing through the halls, shouting, “Dick Van Dyke is on!” And I had no trouble believing that, so perhaps it’s not too difficult to believe the rest.