The Upside

It occurs to me that I complain a lot about gender- and transition-related stuff. This is because it, frankly, sucks. Getting misgendered sucks. Having to correct people on pronouns sucks. Trying so damn hard to look masculine and then being called "ma'am" at the grocery store sucks. Dysphoria sucks. Processing the changes in your relationship with your parents sucks. Being legally identified as the wrong name and gender sucks (and the process to change that double-sucks).

It sucks, it sucks, it sucks.

But hearing someone call me "he," "sir," "young man"? Makes me feel like a lottery winner, like a fairytale prince whose dreams have all come true, like the king of the fuckin' world.

Pictured: me.

On Being An Ex-Lesbian

The frequency of the identity trajectory

lesbian --> trans guy

 is well remarked upon, but that doesn't make it any less weird to experience.

I was never that big into lesbian culture. I mean, I like Tegan and Sara and alternative lifestyle haircuts, but that whole Dinah Shore, L Word, second-date u-haul, group-of-lesbian-friends-who-have-all-slept-with-each-other scene always kind of mystified me.

(Not, of course, to suggest that that scene is either prescriptive for all lesbians or somehow worthy of condemnation. I just mean that it's a big part of lesbian subculture, and that it was not for me.)

So I don't feel as though I'm leaving behind a whole community, which it seems like some people do. You know, the kind of guys who keep going to womyn's music festivals and stuff. I was never comfortable in women's spaces – being around an all-female group is easier for me now that I'm not expected to be one of them, but the majority of my friends are and always have been people who are not women – and the only thing I really miss about femaleness is clean public restrooms.

The fact is, though, there are things you do and say as a lesbian that have a very different resonance if you do and say them as a guy.

For example, my ships. Yelling, "Make out already!" at a movie screen when two female characters are talking seems like a pretty okay (if potentially obnoxious) thing for a lesbian to do. Insisting on some offscreen headcanon Hermione/Ginny experimentation might not make any damn sense (on Hermione's part anyway), but it's understandable in a lady-loving lady. Obsessively scrutinizing every minute aspect of your favorite lesbian relationship on TV is, contra Ryan Murphy, fair play in a community that gets so little pop-culture representation.

In a guy, though? Those behaviors are kind of creepy.

If you're a guy who spent a few years being part of that community, it's a little more complicated than that, but it's still something to be cautious about. My sexuality, which for years I've been used to considering inherently transgressive, now risks reinscribing the male gaze.

(Not that I consider myself straight now. If there's one thing I've learned about sexuality from this whole transition business, it's that "gay" and "straight" are untenable identities. Also the last person I made out with was a gay cis man, so whatever.)

It's very weird, though. I'll hear mention of something very lesbian, and instinctively think, "That's me!" – and then, almost as instinctively, "No it's not."

In the end, I guess I think of being a lesbian in the same way I might think of a place I used to live: with fondness, recognition, and a degree of nostalgia, and also with the understanding that it's in my past, that I am no longer the person I was back then. I don't live in Lesbitopia anymore.

How I Would Like To Live

I am not at all a long-term thinker – on some level, I'm surprised every time I wake up and the world is still here, trundling on as usual, and hasn't become a post-apocalyptic wasteland – but I think I have figured out the living arrangement I would like to have once I am no longer in dorms.

I would like to live with between two and five other people. We would be the most important people in each other's lives. I would not be romantically involved with any of these people; they could be involved with each other in any configuration they chose, but nobody would want or have children. We would just be a little chosen family of three to six adults who wanted to hang out with each other pretty much all the time.

I realize this is a very, very unlikely scenario, because it involves finding a group of Best Friends who also think this is a good idea. Still, in an ideal world, this is how I would like to live.

I want this to be my life, is basically what I am saying.

Liminality

Right now, I look androgynous.

People don't know what to do with me. When I go to a grocery store or a restaurant, I sometimes get called "sir" and sometimes "ma'am." If I'm with a male friend, I tend to get read as male, whereas I seem more likely to get gendered female when I'm with women.

Often, I just confuse people. I notice it when the waiter takes our order, addressing each of my friends as "sir" or "ma'am," then getting to me and saying, "And for you...?"

Or there was the time when the Banana Republic fitting room attendant was telling each person in line, "Sir/Ma'am, your room is ready." On seeing me, he asked me my name - which obviously helped none, because he ended up just saying, "Max, your room is ready."

Or the time at Eucharist, when the presider had been saying to each communicant, "My sister, the body of Christ! My brother, the body of Christ!" When it came to me, there was a very long pause; and then, "Max, the body of Christ!"

At first it was fun, destabilizing people's neat little gender categories like that. I hadn't been so ambiguous since I was sixteen and beholden to a ghastly and neutralizing school uniform. I felt like a gender warrior, smashing the crap out of the stupid gender binary simply by existing.

I'm getting a little tired of it, though.

I don't want to spend my whole life thinking about gender every damn minute of every damn day. I don't want going out in public to be this big exhausting palaver of will-I-get-misgendered-today. If I could be certain that I would only ever get seen as male or neutral, I would be okay with it; but, in a world of binaries, visible androgyny carries the risk of being read as female.

(I've had more than enough of that for one lifetime.)

In a world where the vast majority of people didn't feel the need to instantaneously classify everyone they see as either M or F, perhaps I could be happily androgynous forever. But we do not live in that world, and I don't want to spend my life in the in-between space.

I'm a guy. I just want people to see me that way.

Transgender Jesus

“Jesus exists precisely to be a blank sheet onto which we can write, project and reinscribe our longings and fears. The narrative locations in which Christ comes to find himself are multiple. This does not undermine but rather expands his historic specificity. The ultimate palimpsest, Jesus gives up and gives over the authorship of his signification into the hands of others. A queer understanding of Jesus makes clear that colonial authority is to be resisted, since the latter elides multiplicities of stories. Rather, difference and diversity are written and overwritten here, the parchment becoming denser and darker as spiralling narratives feed off and subvert one another.”

Susannah Cornwall, Controversies in Queer Theology

I read this paragraph for class weeks ago, and I keep coming back to it. It gets me very stoked about the constructive theological possibilities of rewriting Jesus; but it also troubles me enormously.

I do believe very strongly in constantly refiguring Christ to reflect the face of the outcast, whoever that may be. This is basically the core of my theological praxis: to reinscribe the Christs who look like me, and to encounter others' reinscriptions of the Christs who look like them.

The part that bothers me is the “blank sheet.”

Is that all Jesus is? Is he nothing but a mirror, an empty page, the reflection of our own deepest needs and longings? Does he have no substance in himself?

I do not like what this implies about my God.

In researching a paper this past couple weeks, I have been surprised at the apparent lack of a sustained theological treatment of a transgender post-resurrection Christ. People have likened the hypostatic union of the incarnate Christ (fully God and fully human) to being transgender; it's been suggested that, if God encompasses all genders, then becoming incarnate as a male was for Jesus a kind of gender transition; Virginia Ramey Mollenkott most famously combined parthenogenesis with an intersex condition to propose a chromosomally-female, phenotypically-male Jesus, suggesting that intersex people and trans guys most closely resemble the historical Jesus – but nobody has done much work on this with the resurrected Jesus.

I'm thinking of something like Nancy Eiesland's Disabled God, where she explicitly claims the post-resurrection body of Christ as a disabled body and draws out some theological implications for the reconciliation of PwD with their own disabled bodies and with the body of Christ that is the church.

Without wanting to appropriate the Disabled God or imply a conflation of transness with disability, I don't see why we can't borrow this method for imaging a Trans Christ. If we can claim the post-resurrection body of Christ as a trans body, maybe we can draw out some theological implications for the reconciliation of trans people with our own trans bodies and with the body of Christ that is the church.

I think this has some enormously liberating possibilities. My own relationship with my body is so hopelessly conflicted and tangled up that I don't know where to start seeking reconciliation with it. I do know that there is more hope for that now than I ever had before.

I've only been living as a guy for a few months, and already I look back on my time as female like a kind of imprisonment. I do feel liberated, and I haven't even started making the big physical changes. I want there to be a theology of this. Justin Tanis' Trans-Gendered is the best I've found, but I'm trying to do more.

I'm trying to remake Jesus in my own image. Should I be?

After Prison: An Allegory

A part of him had always known that this was prison; but when you're born in a prison and have spent your whole life there, you'll go to extraordinary lengths to deny that you are, in fact, in prison.

It wasn't a bad prison, as prisons go. There was a comfortable bed, and decent food, and only occasional beatings from the other inmates. Most importantly, there was a television.

His whole life had revolved around that television. On television, there were other places, other lives, other things a person could be. He lived for that television. Every spare moment he had (and there are a lot of spare moments in prison), he turned his attention to the luminous box of wonder and the marvelous stories it told. He lost himself in those stories. At night, he fell asleep in front of them, and dreamed himself inside them. His dreams were the best times.

Still, it's not like he was delusional. He knew that television was television and reality was reality. All those incredible stories and beautiful places and different lives – those were mere fictions. Reality was here, this place he had been born into. These were the cards he had been dealt, and he would just have to deal with it. That was the mature thing to do: accept that all of life existed inside prison, and spend it watching as much television as humanly possible.

Then, one day, a crack appeared on the wall above the television.

It was the tiniest of hairline cracks at first, so faint he couldn't be entirely sure it was there. But, as the weeks and months passed, it grew and deepened. It never widened much, but it delved deeper and deeper into the gray stone wall, as if somebody were oh so slowly driving an invisible nail into the wall.

One day, unmistakably, a pinpoint of light shone through the crack.

He began spending less and less time in the television's thrall. Now his hours were spent worrying at the little hole in the wall with the plastic spoon that was his only utensil. Each day, he never seemed to have made any visible progress, but it was undeniable: the hole in the wall was growing larger.

Finally, several years after the crack had first appeared, he mustered all of his courage, approached the hole, and pressed his eye to it.

What he saw astonished him. Not the bleak, impassable void he had assumed must (if anything must) surround his prison; but color and wonder and excitement, a bustling metropolis full of people and noise and smells, a veritable scene from the television lay all around.

Dazed, he reeled backward from the wall. His dreams, he realized, the television – it existed. Not all of it, of course. But some of it. The parts that mattered.

With new eyes, he looked around the cozy little prison that was all he had ever known. He began walking, past the television set, past the comfortable bed, to the door of his cell. He put his hand on the door. It swung open, as a part of him had always known it would.

The bright light dazzled him. Standing on the threshold, he shielded his eyes, and turned back to take a last glance at everything he knew. My God, he realized, I have been in prison my whole life.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped outside and entered his own life.

Deconstruction and Taylor Swift's 'Red'

Do you remember the first time you heard Taylor Swift's ubiquitous single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together”? I do. After reattaching my mandible, I laughed until I cried, and then listened to it eight more times in a row.

So, naturally, when the album dropped this week, I just had to give it a spin. Okay, a bunch of spins. And it is my contention that Taylor Swift's new album is a remarkable work of smart, self-aware, post-structuralist deconstruction.

This is what a post-structuralist looks like.

How does Taylor Swift's new album enact the destabilizing process of deconstruction? Let me count the ways:

1. It's called Red. Obviously, this harks back to King Crimson's classic 1974 prog-rock masterpiece of the same name. By recalling a landmark record of cerebral, instrument-heavy progressive rock, Swift teases the listener with evocations of a style of music quite unlike her own, perhaps inviting us to reconsider whether there is really so much difference between seventies prog and aughts country-pop. (We also are reminded of Krzyzstof Kiéslowski's Trois couleurs: Rouge, a film which focuses on the French Revolutionary ideal of fraternité and has been described as an “anti-romance,” thus hinting at the record's deconstruction of romantic categories.)

2. Self-awareness. In the second verse of “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” Swift sings about a lover who copes with fights by “hid[ing] away […] with some indie record that's much cooler than mine.” The way she sings it, you can positively hear her rolling her eyes. Similarly, in the impossibly infectious “22,” there's a laugh-out-loud spoken-word moment as Swift sings, “This place is too crowded, too many cool kids,” and a voice in the background asks, “Who's Taylor Swift anyway? Ew.” Swift is well aware of her general perception as deeply uncool, and she's not afraid to laugh at both herself and her haters, breaking the fourth wall in endlessly recursive ways.

Swift also displays a strong self-awareness of the public scrutiny of her romantic decisions, and the fact that she is perhaps most famous for writing songs about breakups. “I Knew You Were Trouble” is fairly self-explanatory, and could be a sequel to “22”: “You look like bad news – I gotta have you.” There's a degree of maturity here, a sense of taking responsibility for one's own decisions while still lamenting the more regrettable consequences thereof.

3. Self-contradiction. From start to finish, Red is shot through with ironies and contradictions. Here are just a few hand-picked examples:

• In “22,” Swift sings about “dancing like we're 22.” Of course, Swift is 22 (holla at a fellow '89 baby! – though the Berlin Wall was still up when I was born, and had fallen by the time Taylor Swift entered the world), so these words seem puzzling until you remember that she's been in the public eye since she was 17. The years since high school, which I spent studying and privately figuring out my many issues, are the years Taylor Swift spent growing up very publicly and documenting it all in song. No wonder it takes a special occasion to make her feel like an ordinary 22-year-old.
• “I Almost Do” addresses an ex-lover for whom the singer still has feelings. These feelings are expressed through a striking inversion of the expected order of events. To tell an ex that every time you almost call them, you don't, would have the nuance of a kiss-off, an assertion of proud singledom; Swift sings instead, “Every time I don't, I almost do.” The hysteron proteron stresses the strangeness of this phrasing, which is much more memorable than its inverse, and highlights the singer's understanding that her feelings make no sense.
• On its own, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is rich with irony: everything about the song, but especially the gratuitous “ever”s in the chorus and the repeated verbal tic “like” in the spoken-word break, suggests that the singer doth protest too much, and will very likely get back together with the song's addressee. This idea is heightened by the song's placement in the album's running order – in between the wistful longings for an ex expressed in “I Almost Do,” and the bubbly love song “Stay Stay Stay.” The segue from the closing “We are never ever getting back together” into “I'm pretty sure we almost broke up last night” raises intriguing questions: Are these songs addressed to different lovers? To the same lover at different stages of the relationship? Or is it that they simply are, coexisting in the post-structuralist tension of self-contradiction and inviting a neverending cornucopia of interpretive responses?

In short, this is a record of which Foucault and Derrida would be proud, and I strongly urge you to at least listen to the three standout tracks – “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “22,” and “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” – and to consider the multiplicity of hermeneutic possibilities as well as the layers of deconstructive tensions contained therein.