I have a rather fraught relationship with my mother.
Already I can hear the shifts in disposition, the collective groans from some and gleeful grins from others as I merrily type the single worst opening sentence a trans woman can possibly confess in an essay about her transition, her journey, her identity. Sexologists, in particular, love mothers, love the availability of so ready a scapegoat, a proximate woman to blame for a (presumed) man’s sickening, emasculating deviancies. Whether in explaining male homosexuality or transsexuality, our phantom mothers have always stood at our backs, their masculine deficiencies and feminine excesses staining us in equal measure, making us more woman-like than any respectable, untainted man should rightly be.
You can almost see sweat pouring off knitted brows, the frenzied clawing of nib against paper as sexologists compulsively tear away at sentence after sentence of condemnation, spittle flying with every written-and-recited-word to pathologize our mothers—never fathers—desperate to declare us all perverse, aberrant abnormalities so very unlike them, so very different and apart, because they could never ever be like us and being like us was wrong it had to be there was no way that we could ever inhabit the sanctified realm of the natural.
I digress.
Most stories start at the beginning and you’d think mine would too, to which I’d have to ask: which beginning? The first time someone referred to me as a woman in loving instead of mocking terms, and it felt like stumbling indoors after an interminable stint wandering around in thick, choking fog? Or the first time I was forced to leave class in the middle of the day and have my supposedly too-long hair haphazardly slashed at by a barber with rough and calloused fingers, pushing down the horror that mounted with every receding inch, feeling like my armor, my cloak, my best feature was being shorn off for no reason I could name other than petty authoritarian cruelty?
My English wife thinks that I had more of an English private school education than she did despite growing up in Mumbai, what with the gender-segregated uniforms and stringent rules about short hair and shining shoes and the inane conformity that served no purpose other than to cut off all avenues for self-expression from growing children, and manufacturing banal excuses to punish them. I rather agree.
It’s hard to question things in such an environment, not because the questions aren’t there, but because asking them is punished, doing anything other than exactly what you’re told is punished. You want to ask and the question dies in your throat. You want to imagine other ways of being, but you have to wake up groggy at the crack of dawn and put on your boy shoes and boy belt and boy shirt and, most importantly, your big boy pants. Stand in the boy line, sit with the boy groups, do the boy activities, get harassed by the boys in the boy bathroom when you’re trying to change because you’re too “shy” and “reserved” and “quiet” and other adjectives that are not exactly “effeminate and insufficiently boy-like” but amount to them anyway, to the point where you begin to viscerally, physically dread the days when you have to change into the bloody Physical Ed shorts and you start wearing them under your trousers so at least no one will try to pry off your fucking underwear while they have the chance.
No questions were brooked, but there’s a lot of answers there, now that I look.
Pity’s not what I seek. A narrative, yes, that’s something I’m building deliberately. If you want something to be digested, it needs a beginning, a middle and an end, doubly so if it’s something complex and you really need the most important bits to be distilled, to get across and be absorbed despite the many dozen confounding and contributing factors you have to leave out for brevity’s sake. Think about what’s most crucial, and think about the simplest terms to explain it without losing any nuance. I think about that sort of thing a lot. You become obsessed with structure and meaning and packing in the most information you can when everything you say growing up carries with it a risk of punishment, whether that’s a slap across the face or curses screamed at you or nails digging into your skin with fury. Or later down the line, a racist dismissal of perfectly clear speech, being marked down for “mispronouncing” a word that was merely accented.
I speak with an American accent now. My wife hates it. Calls me a yank when I’m being snotty.
A part of me considers this something of a pointless exercise. There is less value to pouring your heart out, to narrating a personal journey than there is in explaining things, in at least trying to describe complex interlocking social phenomena that feed back into each other in straightforward if byzantine ways. Yet oftentimes, when I hear the popular narratives that have popped up around trans womanhood, I can’t help but feel like I’m listening to someone describe a similar trip to a favorite vacation spot rather than something I instantly recognize and see my own experience reflected within. I did not take that route, I usually go by train. The berths are largely empty, it usually runs deserted. So let’s find a point, if we can. Let me tell you how a trans woman realizes herself without feeling like she was born in the wrong body, without longing for the sweet boys who never gave her a second look in the hallways.
India’s culture is extremely gendered.
It is best explained in harsh economic and legal terms: the labor force participation gap between men and women is catastrophic. Hindu women, comprising the majority in a nation whose property laws vary by religion, did not have equal inheritance rights to men until 2005, and even after are frequently coerced to give up their claims by male family members. To restrict income, financial rights and property is to not merely confine women to the domestic sphere, it is to shackle them perennially to fathers and brothers and husbands, to bind up their destinies with the closest available man. Domestic abuse has laughably little recourse, legally or otherwise, especially in a culture that considers these private matters and harshly punishes women for reporting it at all. Marital rape is legal.
Rape, as a whole, sometimes feels legal.
Not that legality really counts for that much in a post-colonial ruin suffering from nationwide abjection. Laws seem to matter most around urban centers, where those who cannot pay bribes find themselves restricted by them, while rapidly decreasing in relevancy the further from cities you retreat. Some places still burn widows on their husbands’ pyres, while others abandon them to poverty. Child marriage remains rampant. So does the supposedly illegal practice of dowry. Communities supersede things as trite and banal as federal laws in India, and communities bow to patriarchs, to their traditions, to their ancestral ways of doing things. As such, the various burdens of siring a girl instead of a prized son cause infanticide to remain pervasive. Those who lack the stomach to outright drown their infant girls in milk still neglect, starve and abuse them. Many never make it to adulthood.
I do not understand how, as I sit here and type this, there are no flames pouring out of my mouth.
All this to say that while gender may be present no matter where you go, it is palpable in India. It forms the fabric of everyday existence in a way that is inescapable, undeniable, and if considered in its totality, utterly and overwhelmingly maddening. I wonder, sometimes, if the eldritch tomes of forbidden knowledge that crop up in so many Lovecraftian jaunts, driving any reader to gibbering, irreconcilable lunacy within minutes of perusal, were simply feminist texts with accompanying statistics.
There are expectations in such an environment, ways of carrying yourself and behaving that you must exhibit, lest you become subject to ridicule, to ostracisation, to being marked permanently as the boy everyone else gets to torment. ‘Sensitive’ was a word thrown around by teachers and adults who expressed concern but still seemed to lack interest in actually intervening. Some even joined in, for reasons that escaped me at the time but seem the slightest bit clearer today. The nuances of bravado, machismo, of imbibing the superiority that was allegedly my birthright always escaped me, even as an act, even insincerely. There did not appear to be a way to reconcile what I was with what I was supposed to be, no way to cross the ever-widening chasm between myself and my supposed peers.
My mother likely felt no less alone.
It was a strange experience, moving back home to care for my ailing father. Cleaning his bedpan, cooking him meals he rejected for the flimsiest reasons, watching him slowly waste away, all the while having no recourse to the things he subjected my mother to. You feel trapped, like you have to stay to intercede regardless of how little difference it makes, even as all the decades of frustration and bitterness and tears and anger are redirected away from him and onto you, like they always have been. I lived in a house where the one who raised her hand the most wasn’t the one who did the most damage, because the central conceit of manhood is a complete lie. It’s not about strength. It doesn’t matter how big you are, how bulky and stocky and well-built. What matters, what has always mattered, is who holds the power, who has the ability to turn who out onto the streets and thereby keep them in line.
Mom was always a very angry woman.
Would you believe me if I told you this was her best quality? I told her once through gritted teeth that all she ever gave me was this useless pit of anger, but I lied. It isn’t useless. Anger is the fire that keeps you warm in the bitter cold of meandering, hazy roads, the bright, burning beacon that lights your way no matter how murky. Rage at your conditions, your treatment, your circumstances can keep you upright, keep you sane, keep you alive, keep you putting one foot in front of another when little else will. So many women suffer because they were never permitted to feel their rage, because they had it smothered and choked out young, because they weren’t allowed to be angry at what was being done to them. My mother, bless her, wasn’t like that. She kept her fire lit.
Until she couldn’t.
Thirty odd years is a long time, after all.
You have to tell yourself these things, I suppose. You have to tell yourself you were happy, then, you were always happy through the hard times and the harder times. You have to convince yourself that the man who slaved your existence to his own didn’t hollow you out, didn’t reduce you to a shell of the woman you might have been without him. Have to, because imagining that woman is in and of itself painful, not to mention nearly impossible in a culture so unforgiving and cruel to unbound women. What else could she have been, I think she reasons. At least she had her life.
At least she had her son.
Me, I’ve never been able to lie to myself quite like that. To others, certainly, insofar as keeping a stony countenance whenever you're called something you’re not is dishonesty. My father’s bier needed his son’s shoulder, so that he may be laid to rest in peace. I did him that last kindness. Then, as the flames rose up to consume him, I placed my male self atop his corpse and left my old life behind in his ashes.
Don’t you like that imagery? I quite do. Gives the mess of my life a certain dramatic heft. Phoenixes and flames and purification, and all that. Maybe I’m better at lying to myself than I thought I was.
Insofar as you can declare such a thing at 30-odd years old, my story has a happy ending. I live with the love of my life, I have finally transitioned and I now get to be the woman that my culture, and patriarchal-culture-at-large, tried to extinguish. I’m a lesbian happily married to a lesbian who helps me, heals me and completes me in a way no one ever has, nourishing me with a love I had at one point given up all hope of ever experiencing. To go from spending most of my twenties in near total social and geographic isolation from others like me, to living the life I never thought I would be able to is nothing short of a miracle, one that she made possible.
Which is where you might think this ought to conclude. After all, I gave you a beginning. You’re at the end. Should not the journey be complete?
Maybe it should. Though some of you might have realized by now, or had the discomfiting feeling while I rather stereotypically gushed about my wife: I forgot to give you a middle.
Didn’t I?
Truthfully, if my little narrative reads as oddly contiguous, that’s because it is. I could easily assemble a more consonant tale from my personal history if I tried, centering the unexpected “eureka!” moment of my life where I went from learning about transness in adulthood (India is quite conservative, as you may recall, and was only more so several decades ago) to realizing that I, myself, could be trans … several years later. Given that even after that realization, I still had to spend several more years with no ability to act on my revelation, not until I had a modicum of independence and control over my own destiny, that moment itself seems oddly quaint and immaterial in hindsight. A fleeting spark that could have come from any of a dozen sources, itself insignificant in the overarching picture.
No, there’s nothing quite so clean about the impetus to transition, no past spent playing with dolls or trying on dresses that I can foreground as easy justification. I would be lying if I attempted to claim an unfulfilled affinity for femininity, or a deeply-held desire to see a different face in the mirror. I’ve always quite liked my face, in all honesty, if not the thick hairs that used to encroach upon it. I’ve always thought it was pretty. I have often been told that I’m the spitting image of my mother.
What actually compelled me to transition, then, was the same feeling I’ve harbored all my life, the same corrosive wrongness that I experienced as years upon years of swallowing poison, of being force-fed an unacceptable ideology until I had no choice but to puke it all up. I, simply put, could not be a man. I refused.
I REFUSE to be a man.
I REFUSE to be a man.
This is an uncomfortable thing for people to hear, in my experience, and I’ve only ever rarely found others who would describe their desire to transition in this way. When trying to see if any others shared this sentiment, I’m usually instead told that identity should be affirmative. “I was always a woman” is something that’s never resonated though, because while I’ve been surrounded by womanhood, grown up loving women familially and romantically and all sorts of ways I don’t even have names for, I also was keenly aware that ‘woman’ was something I wasn’t. There had always been a thick barrier between myself and womanhood, and no matter how beaten-bloody my fists were against it, it remained unimpeachable.
While the thing I was supposed to be, the thing I was being forced to be, was something I simply could not abide.
Manhood is not a natural state of being, no matter how many preachers and pick-up artists ardently insist that sexual domination is stored in the balls. It is not natural, not inevitable, and certainly not biological destiny for a boy to burn away all the parts that feel empathy, to harbor and nourish a disdain for girls until they’ve become objects to consume and possess and communally debate the worth of with fellow men. Devaluation, denigration, these are behaviors that are taught, an ideology that our cultures are all immersed in and one that we are coercively expected to reproduce. Misogyny and male supremacy form the basis of our oldest institutions and seep into all the facets of everyday existence, from whose opinions hold the most weight to how we love and how we care and how we fuck. It is omnipresent, like being plunged into a putrescent, overflowing septic tank.
But you can still swim to the surface.
I do understand why, in a society still steeped in patriarchy, speaking about the rejection of manhood and the decentering of it from one’s life so regularly invites anger and backlash. Even now, when I call myself a lesbian and stress my lack of attraction to men, I am met with a truly bewildering amount of hostility for expressing something borderline definitional. I have been accused of everything from biphobia to gatekeeping, with some going so far as to darkly insinuate that my own transness makes my rejection of (there is an unspoken “other”) men myopic in some way. You could almost feel a sense of anticipation among people, waiting for me to be hoisted by my own petard, for my own man-exclusion to come back and bite me because apparently, my birth sex inducted me into a lifelong allegiance to the category ‘man’ whether I want it or not.
Fuck that. I’m not a coward.
Repudiating the societal imperative to embrace manhood may not be comfortable, may not be easy and may invite harsh repercussions, but it’s the only principle that can form the core of an effective feminism. It does no one any good to bleat about how ‘everyone’ suffers under a system of oppression, eliding that not everyone suffers equally. Some of us are more invested in patriarchy than others, materially benefit from its maintenance and have a greater stake in upholding it, in resisting any attempts to undermine its edicts and continued existence. You cannot actively resist any form of bigotry without being clear-eyed about this reality, without being willing to admit that there are oppressors who benefit from participating in oppression. Promises of a future of greater benefits after liberation ring hollow in the ears of those who benefit from oppression now.
That’s the truth I’ve always held at the burning-hot core of my identity. To love women, to really love them and be with them, you can’t not hate that which hurts them. A love that doesn’t inspire ceaseless rage at injustice, inequity, harm and dismissal isn’t much of a love at the end of the day.
Societal hierarchies are founded on violence and abuse, on those afforded subjectivity and prominence and those denied it. Subjugation to the whims, desires and demands of men is so universal an aspect of womanhood that even women’s media and marketing oriented towards them highlight this as a given, an unshakeable constant in what being Woman means. Rom coms and “chick flicks” are about finding and being with men. Make-up and fashion and beauty about being desirable to men. Even transformative fiction, a realm of putatively limitless creation, inevitably centers around sexuality that purports to be subversive but inevitably orbits the central topic of men. A colonization of the imagination in addition to the material.
Does patriarchy hurt men? Maybe. But it hurts women first.
That’s the part that matters.
It can be tempting, when discussing matters as lofty as liberation, to indulge in a little utopianism, to want to imagine what a glorious post-gender world may look like. Perhaps it’s heartening to think of a world where anatomy carries with it no social connotation, no implicit sorting of human beings into “master” and “lesser” based on assumed biological destiny alone. Knowing and reminding yourself of the new world you're fighting for can be a source of strength when the old world, in its death throes, assiduously strives to destroy it in utero.
Even so, one must ensure the old world actually dies. Every unjust hierarchy must end, and this one, this oldest and closest and most ubiquitous one, must end most of all. The entrails of the last Priest must serve as a noose for the last King whose sword must be buried in the bosom of the last Patriarch. Until then, women will not be free. Manhood as an ideology must be abolished.
My story and my own approach to my identity won’t be particularly popular or palatable, I think. So much of it is contentious, rooted in the kind of rationale that alarmists and conformists would only be too happy to exploit. There is no shortage of people willing to hold societal violence over queer women’s heads, to pathologize our identities as trauma-induced, to insist that we are transsexual or gay or anything else they can’t grapple with because men hurt us or our fathers hurt us or we had, heaven forfend, too much empathy for our mothers. To which I can only say one thing.
So what?
So what if that’s what happened?
‘Normal’ society is irredeemable. Barbaric.
There’s nothing wrong with being like me if the alternative is being like them.
"Refusing to be a man" is at least half of why I transitioned, and it's about time someone else felt the same way.
While not as direct, and not as burning as it should be, the primary start to my realization of self came in the form of no longer wanting anything to do with a maleness I had been labeled with and carried throughout my life. That everything it was ever connected to was toxic and bullshit and usually toxic bullshit. I’m still finding my place and thoughts amidst everything, but I know where I *don’t* stand.