Dear Fuck Up: Transitioning Would Blow up My Life
Should I do it anyways?
Dear Fuck Up,
I find myself in my mid-thirties with a good and stable life: I have a career that I can tolerate, friends, political work I find interesting, and a husband whom I love very much. At the same time, I'm often bored and restless: a few years ago we left New York City for a suburb to be closer to my husband's job, and I miss my life in the big city and the feeling of freedom I had when I was single in my twenties and felt like my options were limitless. I feel ripe for a midlife crisis.
That crisis seems to be expressing itself in deep uncertainty about my gender. I've "always" been bisexual, though I've mostly dated men; although I often felt kind of alienated from the queer cool kids for not being queer enough, it wasn't a big deal until... I got married. And suddenly I felt myself being shunted into a very specific version of life: heterosexual, committed, small-c conservative about money and career choices, concerned with buying a home and moving up the property ladder, having conversations about school district quality etc etc etc etc. I felt like I was becoming possessed by a role that I had thought I was too... what? Bohemian? Socialist? Intellectual? to fill. I want to break out of the box.
In the last year I've come out as nonbinary, realized that being nonbinary is the bisexual of being trans, in that nobody is ever going to take it as seriously as you do, and started to ask myself whether I would be happier if I medically transitioned. I fantasize about life as a gay trans man, I dream about it sometimes. I wake up from these dreams feeling like I betrayed my husband.
Last summer, at the coaching of my therapist and some trans friends, I told my husband I was thinking about transitioning, that I was considering medical transition. And he shut down, he literally had a panic attack; he told me he was straight and he couldn't stop being straight if I became a man. In the aftermath I was so afraid of my marriage dissolving that I basically shoved myself back into the closet: I have never referenced that conversation, and neither has my husband. We live as if it didn't happen.
For context, my early twenties were a chaotic morass of mental illness, shitty relationships, and lost jobs and friends. I'm lucky to have survived and to have escaped jail or institutionalization. My whole family adore my husband and are so relieved that I picked a responsible, decent human being to marry instead of the scumbags I used to date. I'm terrified of losing the stability I've gained to go chase something that feels inchoate, that I can't know will make me happy. When I'm in my husband's arms and we're talking about our future children, I'm happy. But sometimes, when I'm driving home from work late at night, I get the impulse to take a wrong turn and just keep going.
I doubt myself all the time. Am I experiencing some form of "social contagion" because so many of my friends are trans? Would I be having any of these questions about my identity if I still lived in New York, if I were in a lesbian relationship, if I had a job I liked more than the one I have now? Is there some compromise I'm missing where I can somehow have an authentic queer life and also a straight marriage without feeling like I'm suffocating? If I blow up my life will I wind up impoverished, lonely, and miserable in my thirties as well as in my twenties? Or am I just a coward?
Yours,
Ready to Explode
Dear Ready,
One thing I’ve always loved about writing an advice column for the internet is that one need not come to the role with any particular job qualifications. What gives me license to answer questions is the simple fact that people continue asking them. That being said, I do feel like there are aspects of your question that I am meaningfully unqualified to address, so I am going to side-step the whole issue of whether or not you should transition. That’s just too personal and specific a decision for me to feel like I have any right to weigh in, really.
What is more universal, I think, and thus within the purview of a person writing a column on Substack, is the rather disorienting feeling of being an unconventional person who has found themselves, somehow, living what looks from the outside like a quite conventional life. This can be especially jarring for people who have, in the past, found themselves harmed by and righteously contemptuous of the subtle and unsubtle social pressures that variously hector or entice us into marriage, out of the city, onto the property ladder. There’s a cynical reading of the past few decades in which you could actually represent the great achievement of queer politics: that a bisexual non-binary person is now able to suffer the exact sort of suburban malaise previously available only to mid-century ad executives and their prescription-addled wives.
Which is not to make light of how much you are truly suffering. Without reducing transness to a metaphor, it makes sense to me that you would be so powerfully compelled to explore why it is that the ways other people see you do not comport with what you know to be true about yourself. I don’t think you are falling prey to any kind of “social contagion,” but I do think you are experiencing envy. You are envious of your friends who don’t have to remind people they aren’t straight, you are envious when you hear about parties in the city you couldn’t attend, you are envious of people who still seem cool when you feel so boring. I think, more than anything though, you are really envious of the version of yourself who made different choices. Unfortunately, the terrible fact of choosing is that it entails sacrificing things we can never know. Maybe that version of you is happy. Maybe they would be writing to me to say how much they wish they could find a real partnership with someone they love.
There is no way of knowing who you might have been, we can only deal with who we are. So, Ready, you need to deal with it. That means no more nurturing these desires in secret and letting your husband pretend that conversation never happened. If you yearn for a more authentic life it cannot be grounded in secrecy and avoidance. And here I can speak from personal experience: I actually did leave a marriage to a truly decent man. Like you, I staggered out of the tumult of my twenties into what, at first, felt like the relief of emotional stability. The difference is that when I sat in the beautiful home we owned and spoke about our future I didn’t feel happy, I felt dread and the shame of being a liar. To remain in a marriage that was, for all its mercies, not enough for me would be to betray myself, and I arrived at the stark knowledge that the longer I betrayed myself the easier it would become, one day, to betray my husband. So I left, and I’ve spent the intervening years much happier and much more miserable than I could have ever predicted.
And that, I believe, is the actual key to escaping the constraints of conventionality, no matter where you live or who you fuck. You can be a boring sell-out queer in Brooklyn just as easily as you can be straight and square in Des Moines. It is much more difficult and unconventional to have integrity.
Maybe, for you, having integrity will eventually involve a different name or a different body or a different husband. Maybe it will simply involve doing more political work, or some new relationship to monogamy, or being less small-c conservative with money so you can more regularly travel to places that feel artistically or culturally energizing. I can’t tell you where it leads, only where it starts. It starts with you looking at this man you love and asking him to see you, for all that you are currently struggling to see yourself.
Love,
A Fuck Up
I'm a trans woman in my 40s, Despite everything I say below, it was 1000% the right decision for me, and I’m far happier and a better person for having done it. So I’m certainly not saying that you shouldn’t transition.
There’s an attraction to instability and novelty I see in your letter that’s familiar. You really want to get that nailed down (glad you’re in therapy!) because it’s has a lot of potential to make transition a lot harder and more fraught than it has to be. You also don’t want to get TOO caught up in it and lose every other part of you. Because then achieving your goal just leaves you sad and bored and aimless. Or even worse, you find out that wherever you go, there you are.
The entire queer community seems to be the fake part of the queer community. My experience has been that, while only a small number of lesbian spaces are closed off to me, around half of them unofficially have distaste for me.
Many people see me as a man. I’m at peace with that now, but it took the better part of a decade. The instant I don’t know one of the cis girl shibboleths for my generation or talk about my far past I magically become a funny gay man who somehow likes women. Or a straight man, predatory and threatening in the safe queer space. Being seen as a tourist, at best, in the spaces that you belong is a hellish feeling. Solidarity for that.
You aren’t the first leftist to end up owning a home in the suburbs, and you won’t be the last. People in our society who don’t pursue and ultimately achieve that dream are heavily punished. It’s natural to want to avoid that. It also does no good to live an unstable “authentic” life where you’re struggling to pay rent on a minwage retail job and have no time for things like political work.