I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

My secret poisoned my entire experience of life. There was never a moment when I didn't feel the acute shame of being me, even as I denied to myself that my secret had anything to do with it.

The dam burst on February 16, when I uploaded FaceApp, for a laugh. I had tried the application a few years earlier, but something had gone wrong and it had returned a badly botched image. But I had a new phone, and I was curious. The gender-swapping feature was the whole point for me, and the first picture I passed through it was the one I had tried before, taken for that occasion. This time it gave me a full-face portrait of a Hudson Valley woman in midlife: strong, healthy, clean-living. She also had lovely flowing chestnut hair and a very subtle makeup job. And her face was mine. No question about it—nose, mouth, eyes, brow, chin, barring a hint of enhancement here or there. She was me. When I saw her I felt something liquefy in the core of my body. I trembled from my shoulders to my crotch. I guessed that I had at last met my reckoning. Very soon I was feeding every portrait and snapshot and ID-card picture I possessed of myself into the magic gender portal.

I don't mind representing myself as an example of someone who has found happiness by confronting the truth.

My story is not a typical trans story - but what is a typical trans story?

Transitioning is not an event but a process, and it will occupy the rest of my life as I go on changing.

although very few expressed their transness because of the exceptionally strong taboo. That taboo was a detail in the male campaign to hold and exercise power; there was to be no blurring of the line, or heaven forbid, deserters.

Whenever I contemplate a gender-related course of action, I ask myself whether I’m basing it on my own happiness or on the judgment of others.

When I say that I have transitioned from male to female, one of the things I mean is that I have built myself a new persona, appropriate to my age and walk of life, with a certain distinctive appearance. I didn’t exactly plan this look—it just happened, but it is strong, and it instructs me on the character I am to play. I have an expectation of myself based on how I appear. My appearance is there for me to grow into.

There is gender playacting, deliberate or unconscious, and the rest is a broad field of ambiguity.

In other words, I’m totally normal, the same person as ever, while also quite different. (Transitioning really makes you appreciate the beauty of the dialectic.)

A prerequisite for maleness was that one must dominate at something (belching, sports statistics, blue humor), or at least make an honest stab, and writing was the only field in which I had a shot.

wasn’t gender a spectrum? Why did I feel as though I had crossed into another dimension? But eventually I realized that the portal was not between genders. It was the eye of the cognitive needle I had to pass through in order to break out of the prison of denial.

But how different were girls from boys? We ate different things, mostly. Boys ate any kind of slop; girls ate mostly leaves, and if you spent the night at a girl’s house there would never be any sugar for your coffee in the morning, maybe honey if you were lucky.

I’m profoundly nostalgic for the analog era, but even more my nostalgia is for the time before Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher ushered in the present sociopathic moral culture, devoted to the destruction of community and the devaluation of human beings, which grew all-pervasive with the coming of the digital era.

I do believe that my newfound sociability came not from transitioning per se, but from the release of the ten-ton secret that had been stapled to my chest for so many decades. Suddenly having nothing to hide will definitely incline one to weightlessness and that is a permanent change. When there is nothing left to protect, the result is freedom.

(Although it is extremely exciting to have tits.)

I experience a kind of serenity, a general rightness with the world, and acceptance of my being and my eventual fate now that I finally have achieved true selfhood. I don’t hate myself anymore, I’m no longer apologetic for my very existence. I walk with pride, I feel exceptionally fortunate, grateful to whatever force cracked my egg before it was too late, I was saved from drowning.

I can honestly say that I'm happy, in a way I’ve never been before. I am finally inhabiting myself, the shadow me once hidden under the floorboards. I feel entirely comfortable, as if I had always been this way in waking life. I’m old, and that’s unfortunate, although I’m exceedingly lucky: on some days in certain kinds of light I don’t look my age. I naturally wish I could have transitioned in my teens, or my twenties, or any age earlier than mine, but there are compensations, being left in peace, remaining immune to all affinity-group competition, being able to nestle my changes into a life that was already structured, having outlived all the censorious elders.

I knew how to be alone, had studied the manner deeply, knew all the shadings of aloneness, and even spent considerable time alone within each of my relationships, but I was afraid to be alone.

and nearly every day at some point, I'd find myself overcome by sheer indredulity, that I’d actually gone and done this thing that had haunted me all my life and that I had been so invested in suppressing. It was if I’ve been struck by lightning, or rescued from a cave-in, or returned from a near death experience. I had been liberated – by mysterious forces it often seemed – and my immediate task was to relearn normal life under vastly changed conditions.

As a trans woman, I might now and then feel freakish, or horribly clockable, or out of place, or resented, but those were all projections from without. In and for myself, I did not have a speck of doubt. I had once described myself in print as a creature made entirely of doubt, most of it self-doubt, but I had now been given something like a euclidean proof of an essential truth about me.

It appeared that transitioning did not involve piling on additional stuff; rather it was a process of removal, dismantling the carapace of maleness that had kept me in its grip for so long.

I wanted to so badly to be a woman that I could not really understand anyone wanting anything else

For those who haven experienced it gender dysphoria is a hard thing to conceptualize. It may be dificult for them to understand that sex and gender are not identical propositions, and it is certainly hard for them to understand the urgency and totality of the need. Not understanding the why and the how will make people a bit frightened. Delicacy and the wish not to hurt may prevent them from articulating the sort of questions they actually want to ask: How did we not know that about you? Will you be dating men now? How do you feel about your dick? If not: Wasn't it taboo only yesterday? Doesn't it run contrary to nature? Isn't it something you'd see in sideshows? Isn't identity just a construct after all? In any case, most of the people in my life preferred to act as if nothing had happened. If we normally talked about movies or music or local gossip or animals, we'd carry on talking about movies or music or local gossip or animals. That was fine as far as it went, but after a while it made me feel a bit sexless and unappreciated. I was, after all, on a metaphysical journey that beggared anything they were likely to have experienced.