LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back
Not because we shouldn't, but because we can't
During the decades before I transitioned I used to have a recurring dream: I’m in a hotel room, about to get ready for a straight friend’s wedding, when I realize I haven’t packed my wedding clothes. I have no dress, no heels, no hat, no makeup, only the jeans and t-shirt I’m wearing. In the dream I’m panicking: can I get to a store in time to buy the things I need? Where can I find a store in this unknown town anyway? How can I go to a wedding looking like this? My hair is unwashed! My jeans are dirty! My face is bare! The fear of ridicule, exposure, and social catastrophe becomes so suffocating it eventually wakes me up.
In hindsight, it doesn’t take a particularly astute armchair psychologist to figure out I was afraid of revealing my trans identity. Without dresses and makeup to conceal my masculinity, how could I continue to convince everyone I was female? But because I didn’t know I was trans—because, like everyone else, I believed I was a heterosexual woman—for decades I couldn’t interpret the dream.
When I transitioned I believed, logically, that the dreams would end. I didn’t have to panic anymore about turning up at a wedding without a dress because I was no longer required to wear a dress. Problem solved. Authentic Self: 1, Anxiety Dream: 0.
But anxiety is anxiety, and if you take away one fear for it to fixate on, you can bet it’ll give you another. So I still have the same dream—I’m in the same hotel room going to the same wedding—but this time I’ve somehow accidentally detransitioned. I’m about to start getting ready when I suddenly realize that I have long hair again, and that I’ve only packed a dress and high heels to wear. I start to panic, tugging at my hair in horror. Where can I find a hairdresser at this late hour to cut it all off? How could I have let it grow this long in the first place? What was I thinking? Where is my suit? Why on earth did I pack a dress? Why am I wearing makeup? I can’t possibly go to a wedding looking like this!
My fear of being forced to be a woman again had finally superseded my fear of coming out as a man.
Until recently, I’d wake from these dreams and immediately reassure myself that they weren’t real. “No-one can take this away from me,” I used to tell myself every morning while I was shaving. Knowing that I’d never have to go back to those awful days of seeing someone else’s face staring back at me from the bathroom mirror—a face I neither liked nor recognized—made me feel stronger and more confident every day.
All that has changed since Trump won the election. Now I have no idea which part of my transition is safe. Will I be forced to use women’s bathrooms? Will I have change my gender back to female on my driving license, thereby outing myself every time I have to show my ID? Will my access to gender-affirming care be revoked? What will happen if I’m denied my weekly testosterone shots? Testosterone hasn’t just deepened my voice and put stubble on my chin, it’s altered me from the inside. I don’t know why having testosterone in my body makes me feel so whole and real because I’m not an endocrinologist, I only know that it does, and now I know what this feels like, I can’t lose it.
Since the election, much has been written about whether the Democratic Party’s defense of “extremist trans positions” cost them the election. Many articles have focussed on the benefits of compromise—such as this one by Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic—but while on the surface their suggestions sound perfectly reasonable, these journalists miss an important point. They’ve got so used to seeing trans issues as political that they’ve forgotten that first and foremost, trans is an identity. You can’t compromise on your identity, not because you shouldn’t from a political standpoint, but because it’s impossible. I know this because for a long time I was married to someone who wanted me to be queer in some spaces and straight in others, and it nearly killed me.
I am a man, I have always been a man and I will always be a man. I can’t be a man as I walk into a hotel lobby, and then a woman as I show the receptionist my ID, and then a man again as I go to the hotel restaurant, and then a woman again as I use the bathroom. This isn’t a reasonable request to make of someone just because you don’t want to lose votes. Asking me to use the woman’s bathroom isn’t only dangerous—I look incontrovertibly male so there’s a good chance I’ll get maced—but it sends the message that I can play at being a man, I can pretend to be a man, but I’m not a real man. I’m not man enough. I reject this with every fibre of my being. Yes, I need medical assistance to maintain my physical appearance, but if you take away my hormones it won’t make me a woman, it’ll make me what I was before I transitioned: a confused mess of a creature who found it almost impossible to exist in the world. Every time someone tells me they respect my right to identify as a man, but—(add caveat of choice here)—it breaks my spirit a little bit more.
Trans people are who we say we are, and we can’t compromise on our identities. We won’t, and we shouldn’t be asked to. This isn’t extremism, it’s basic self-respect, but the Right has done such a good job of painting it as extremism that even seasoned journalists like Jonathan Chait have been fooled. Added to which, this was never an argument about trans people anyway. Trump created a multimillion dollar ad campaign that implied trans healthcare was eating into government funds at a time when everyone’s focus was on money: it wasn’t identity politics, it was the economy stupid, and throwing trans people under the bus isn’t going to solve that problem. Meanwhile, the journalists driving the bus claim they aren’t being transphobic when they suggest we should compromise, but this only means that they haven’t yet grasped what transphobia is. It isn’t just the act of denying us our rights, it’s the act of denying who we are, and if you think we can put on and take off our identities at whim, that’s what you’re doing.
So when you read articles that suggest we should ask trans women to play on men’s sports teams or trans men to use women’s restrooms, please remember that being trans is not a radical or politically partisan act. It’s just how some of us were born. We are not pawns to be embraced or discarded for political gain, we are humans, like every other human, and we deserve to be treated as such.
Love, Oliver
I’ve written today’s newsletter as part of Julia Serano’s Planned Action for LGBTQ+ & Allies in Response to Democrats Capitulating on Trans Rights. If what I’ve written has moved you, please reach out to your Congressperson and Senator and tell them that 1) you will not tolerate any backpedaling on LGBTQ+ rights, and 2) if they fail to stand up against these attacks on LGBTQ+ rights, then they should not take your vote for granted. We want our representatives to understand that if they abandon LGBTQ+ people or backslide on LGBTQ+ rights, they may pay a political price for that decision. Thank you for your support.
If you would like to read about a trans person being as humanly human as possible, my memoir FRIGHTEN THE HORSES—an Oprah Daily Best Book of Fall—is out now with Roxane Gay Books. A valuable alternative narrative to the loss and pain that queer history has too often insisted on — New York Times; It’s the voice that makes this memoir stand out. This is a writer who can capture any moment with a dazzling, insightful, at times musical phrase — Oprah Daily; This book is sharp as razors, but it also pulses with a passionate, desperate, human urgency for truth and liberation — Elizabeth Gilbert; The finest literary telling of the experience of gender transition that I’ve ever read — Kate Bornstein. I would greatly appreciate it if you’d support my writing by buying a copy!