Trigger Warning: The following story contains graphic discussion of violent threats, sexual violence, hate crimes, child abuse, harassment, and suicidal ideation.
This is the lede I was going to write: Every weekday around 3 p.m., Asha, which is not her real name, treks up the hill leading away from her high school, her book bag full, her calves flexing in the steady street climb. She is wearing a skirt, or pants and a top, but feminine; it's 40 degrees outside, or 100, in this town that won't be identified. But whatever the weather or the outfit, she is not going home. Most days, she goes to a friend's house to change her clothes, so she can hide from her parents that she's trans.
“How I came out of the closet was I wore a dress and fake boobs to school on the last day right before summer break in my sophomore year,” she says. Dressing that way eased her gender dysphoria some. She kept everything hidden at home, though—clothes, truth—because, she says, she'd heard her mom making fun of trans people.
Asha's story sounds like it could be another record of another trans teen's hard road: the isolation from her family; a battle between blood and selfhood, happening on an actual uphill. And it is. But it is also a record of the staggering triumphs embedded in the context. That Asha, who was assigned male at birth, is permitted to attend public high school dressed, and accepted, as female; that she regularly takes this walk on the same route at the same time in broad daylight in a small city; that the friend's mother who opens the door to let her in to change is sympathetic, and that to some degree, so, apparently, are the unknowable number of other parents in this tight community who drive past her or witness her from their lawns and don't tell hers.
That Asha, as a teenager, can conceive of living openly transgender, much less be doing it—and with so many allies.
Her pseudonymous story, which I happened to encounter in the course of regular life, was the opening to a story I'd been writing in my head called “The End of Straight,” for which I was jotting down and mentally collecting an ever increasing number of threads. For a year. I had way more than enough material, more than I usually do, to pitch a feature, but I never wrote the e-mail that would sell it, because I was telling myself I was taking a break from work and I was.
And.
And I was becoming increasingly aware of whom I was really talking to, with my fattening file of data and experts and anecdotes, about Asha, or about a middle-schooler in the rural Midwest who turned in an essay about his favorite color and ice cream flavor and how, despite what his files say, he's a boy, or about a birthday party in San Francisco for a five-year-old genderqueer kid. “Who is this story for?” I started asking myself, sometimes out loud, shaking my head or laughing softly—sadly—when I thought about it while washing the dishes, or happened upon another potential scene or source. Increasingly I was aware, which is to say I had reached the point at which, despite heroic resistance, I could no longer deny, that what I was chronicling wasn't that Asha could live as trans but that I could.
One night the January before last, I sat in a booth in a tiki-themed karaoke bar watching a slim white woman in a crop top flail her arms and hair during the musical breaks in “Proud Mary.” Committedly. Compellingly. I hadn't walked in feeling good, and her performance was further agitating my already raw nerves.
“Do you ever miss the option to present like that?” I asked my friend Julian, gesturing at the stage.
He looked at me blankly, then asked me to repeat myself. “No. No. I didn't…,” he started. “I wasn't,” he continued, shaking his head, waving his hand, looking for strong enough words to describe how there was not one second in his life, though he'd been raised female, when he had tried or considered presenting like that. He'd been butch and awkward then, but several years into transition now, he was a heartthrob, mussed hair, cute scruff. Masculinity so unquestioned that—incredibly—the first time we met, a waiter told us a joke about what it's like to have a dick and then nodded at Julian, saying: “He knows what I'm talking about.”
I wouldn't have identified myself as someone who looked like the woman onstage, either—I didn't wear makeup, and frequently left the house in sweatpants—but at five feet nine, 120 pounds, with delicate features and often long hair, whatever I did and didn't do to project a popular conception of female desirability, I was made out of it. We were at this karaoke bar, though, so I could sing my go-to number (okay: “Redneck Woman”) ceremonially. Finally. While I could still reach the high notes. The next day, I was going to start injecting testosterone.
I had waited. I had waited and deflected and denied and waited more; I had held out until my chances of continuing to survive were zero. Until years after it'd already gotten bad enough for me to tell a therapist that all I wanted was to saw my breast tissue off with a jagged blade and smash it into a stone table with my fists until it was particulates of pulp, dust. Until I'd gotten cis-hetero-married twice, wearing long white dresses, and finalized my second divorce and continued to fight it still.
Until, several months before, I'd bolted upright in the middle of the night, having seen myself, again, as male, and started panicking (Not this again). But instead of pushing it away, again, I didn't, and then managed, after another brutal month of making peace with my own inside war, to say to myself in a burst of light and relief: I'm trans.
“The solutions are imperfect,” a gender therapist, who is also trans, said to me about medically transitioning after I'd already decided that I would do it, had to do it. And though I understood what he meant, lying in bed later with the sun coming through the blinds and my body full of bright shimmer, I'd thought: Not for me. For me, they are perfect.
By the time I got to karaoke, I recognized that femaleness was slowly killing me—sometimes not so slowly; I'd spent the several hours before walking out the door curled in a sobbing ball, breathing myself through the pain by clutching the little vial of hormones I'd start shooting soon, soon.
But I did not know, until I started dismantling that femaleness, that I thought that if I wasn't a pretty girl, I was worthless. I'd been indoctrinated to believe that if you're gonna be a person with a vagina, the most important thing to be is nice to look at. By an entire misogynist culture. By movies, where pretty girls became objects of obsession and efforts to save, frequently without even talking. By a formative figure, who used to snake his arm around my waist with his fingers gripping my pelvic bone and ask people, “Isn't she beautiful?” No amount of higher education or professed feminism or professional success, apparently, had managed to mitigate it.
Indeed, my career as a journalist had often only reinforced it. At a variety of fancy functions, my very presence at which might imply I had other talents, multiple high-ranking editors brazenly talked about my body or having sex with me; a senior male colleague regularly reminded me where my merit lay when he put his hand on my upper arm, my lower arm, my waist, my thigh, my thigh, my thigh. On location, a cameraman leaned his body into me until a producer intervened and said, “I'm gonna need you to tighten it up, man.” Before an interview, a source offered me his hotel-room key; after the interview, he kissed me on the mouth. That's an incredibly truncated list. You could argue that it was just the purview of predatory men, but that would put aside the female superior who regularly commented on my weight, and it wasn't until I started transitioning that I understood how thoroughly I, too, had internalized the message that desirability wasn't an asset but the asset.
At the tiki bar that night, and for months afterward, I was nauseated by the certainty of my impending loneliness. As hormones started to take effect, a friend came to visit, and I fretted to her for hours that no one would love me after I shed my slick female packaging. When she tried valiantly to reassure me that they would, I fought with her. “You cannot know that,” I said. And she couldn't. Not for sure.
The morning after karaoke, after another trans friend had pulled the syringe out of my arm, we'd sat in silence, almost eerily still. “What's your favorite thing about testosterone?” another friend asked me two months later. And I told her: The thickening. The feeling of more surface area of my thighs touching, a rapid and thorough filling out of my frame and flesh along with my vocal cords—even my wrists straining against a new bracelet—though if anyone had ever told me, when I was trying to be a girl, that this was my deepest desire, I would have been highly skeptical. “Finally,” my elder sister said when she saw me, “those [broad] shoulders fit, eh?” I had never felt like an adult woman. So I had never felt adult at all, physical female maturity an excruciating prison of unfulfillment until I had, at 37, the glorious, unsteady legs and voice crack of a fresh teenage boy. When I had top surgery, I gaped, almost as soon as the hospital staff woke me up: I made it. The next day, I sobbed a flood of pent grief, repeating over and over that while my body had been so beautiful, I'd been so fucking lost in it.
And.
Nearly everyone I told I was transitioning—friends, colleagues, even ex-boyfriends caught cold off guard—responded instantly, “Congratulations!” After surgery, I watched with wide-eyed awe as my friends tirelessly attended to my recovery, despite seeing who and what I was. And despite none of them wanting to fuck me.
And still. After several months, when everything in my body said it was time to redouble the dose of testosterone I'd already doubled once since I'd started, I lay in bed in terror for days before taking it. Even though the morning I'd taken that first shot, when I'd finally broken the silence, it was to ask my friend, a nurse, if he couldn't have injected it directly into my heart.
Masquerading as a grown female, I had been assaulted. I'd been threatened, and ceaselessly harassed. At college, at work; around this country and outside it. On the other hand, personally—unlike uncountable millions of women—I hadn't been murdered.
“I know it's false, and imperfect,” I whimpered to a friend about the security of my very white femininity the night before I took my new, bigger dose. “But it's the only security I ever had.”
Certainly I felt safer underneath it than outside straight-looking cis white privilege, which I'd have had to be out of my mind to give up easily. When I was 18, a series of increasingly short haircuts prompted the groping formative figure to yell: BE A GIRL. I shaved my head, then went to college. Mere weeks after I arrived on campus, Matthew Shepard was tortured to death. A year after that, Boys Don't Cry came out, and I saw that what the figure had long told me in private—that I'd be killed if I didn't play nice, play pretty—was true. The arm around my hips or shoulders while I talked to other adults was a constant reminder.
And.
And being a nice, pretty girl might mean that he would enter me more like a lover—in the front, from the front: partners, albeit with his hands around my throat—than like anal punishment, pinned facedown by the back of my fragile little neck for being a boy.
I tried introducing that with dozens of alternate transitions. None of them felt less jarring. That's how it felt to me, too, the first time it happened, like that: Fast. Shocking. Different from the pressing fingers that made me feel good—that's right—and maybe loved but also so, so awful. Would it have been easier if I had preceded it with a strict, foreshadowing rebuttal?
The figure, for the record, adamantly denies he did any of this.
For decades, I could not begin to consider that I was trans, because I didn't want to die. (Under his weight, all those times, I'd internally begged: Please don't kill me.) At the same time, the pain of being closeted and trans absolutely made me want to die. (Under his weight, I'd also internally begged: Just kill me.) My dysphoria had been leaking out for years, quite unsubtly for the past 10. I'd stuffed it in the containers holding the rest of my suppressions: so much sexual torture. The older, fatter man with the dog whom the figure took me to (the figure, for the record again, says none of this ever happened), who was really nice to his dog but insulted me while he forced his erection into my mouth. A dad at a sleepover who sensed compromised prey and carried me into an empty room, telling me he loved me afterward. When I started really remembering, in my 30s, what I forced myself to forget, it was quite unwelcome. Nobody sold the story that I was fine—perfectly fine—harder than I did.
Nobody had more to lose from the truth.
When I saw hints of my history, I shut them down, until exactly one—the precise shape of the sleepover-dad's dick—got through in an ayahuasca ceremony, commencing years of sober, if initially confusing, recall I'd desperately avoided. But I had to remember before I could face it.
And also this: the gut-churning homophobic terror (well, and hate-crime terror) that rape had made me a faggot. I'd identified as bisexual since I was 12, but even my supposedly female partners had been practically—or actually—boys. The night I woke up in a panic over being male but didn't ferociously fight it was made possible by 18 wrenching months (well, and a lifetime) of accepting that I might be gay; that night, I was finally able to tell myself that being a survivor was in fact a fine reason to be trans, too, if that turned out to be my reason.
Any reason, including no reason, is a good reason. For either. Both. If I wasn't born all these things and still chose them, what would that make me but brave?
As it happens, the figure had explicitly named my transness as a cause for violence (Do you know what happens to little boys?). So I did what he said. And once out of his incessant grasp, I continued to ease and disarm and un-threaten and de-escalate men by passing as the kind of gal they liked, hundreds of thousands of times. I let people see what they wanted, for fear, for love. I couldn't discern when I had sex because I wanted to from when I had sex because I needed to feel like I mattered, or because I wanted someone to hold me—he did. He did—like everything was okay, and I couldn't imagine another way of getting anyone to do it. Rape hadn't made me queer. It had kept me living, cis and scared and suffering, straighter.
As my chest surgery healed and my testosterone levels rose, I began to feel, finally, like a real person. For the first time in my life. After a lifetime of feeling like a facsimile. There were consequences to suddenly being, feeling, human; shortly after I increased my shot, I had to call a suicide hotline, also for the first time in my life. “Before I transitioned, I felt like I was watching life on a screen,” said the trans person who answered the phone (Transmasculine, my entire system sighed when I heard his voice). “Exactly,” I howled back at him, “and I NEEDED THAT SCREEN.” I narrowly survived the night, unable to handle a reality where what had happened to me had happened to an actual human, much less feel what it's like to be that human.
At the same time, I was viscerally aware that to much of the rest of the world, of course, I'd become less human. Unhuman. Human-ish. To legislators, to comedians, to more than half of average American adults, who, according to the Pew Research Center, don't believe in trans people. It'd been only a couple of years since epic amounts of therapy had finally kicked my reasonable fear that men I passed on the street might try to hurt me for looking female, but shortly after surgery, I gave some guy directions on an otherwise deserted road in the middle of the day and then instinctively turned around after we passed each other, in case he'd turned around, too, in case he'd only asked so he could use my voice as a tiebreaker to confirm that my face and chest were not lining up right and he should beat me to death.
It is hard.
Some of the hardness was new to me because of how I was able to play my biology before, and how thoroughly the world bends to accommodate able-privileged, acceptably gender-conforming people of my race.
It is harder for others. I cannot begin to imagine how much scarier interactions with police or landlords or the general public could be for a trans person of color.
It has also never been easier. Every time I have to say “trans” and don't have to explain what it means, I am overwhelmed with gratitude for everyone who went before me. And whatever other indignities precede or follow, I have never had to explain what it means, not to anyone, rural or elderly or doctor or cashier. I got my testosterone for free under my insurance. The friend who injected me with it the first time got his, when he started transitioning years ago, black market, off a guy whom he helped pay for top surgery by stealing flea medication to resell online.
Trans health care still isn't covered by Medicaid in the state he lived in then. But it is, at the time of press, in the state he lives in now, and by Medicaid in 18 other states and D.C. Make no mistake that there is an onslaught of discriminations and violences, and that they cost lives. Insert a data dump of statistics, with personalizing anecdote, about LGBTQ homelessness/suicide/harassment/assault/bullying/sex-abuse/dropout rates here. LGBTQ hate killings in America are up—way up, to one murder per week in 2017, with black trans women murdered the most—in recent years.
But it is also true that there is no returning in the least to the total straight supremacy of my eighth-grade world, when The New York Times called a weak, wildly controversial closed-mouth kiss between Roseanne Barr and Mariel Hemingway on TV “a small step forward for the stirring of homosexuals into the American melting pot.”
Nearly half of the generation now coming of age identifies as queer. In the recent Ben Stiller movie Brad's Status, there's a scene where two “entitled and pretentious” children are represented as sitting at the table with their parents and saying, in turn, “Dad, don't be so cisgender,” and “Yeah, Dad, don't be so cis.” In the movie (which was written and directed by a cis queer man), the point being made is that these children are assholes. But they have been educated and emboldened by TV characters and YouTubers and Miley Cyrus's pansexuality—which I had to look up in the dictionary, though I've been having gay sex since Miley Cyrus was three—to stand with aggressively marginalized members of a long and bloody movement for human rights.
I have a flashback from when I was younger. One of hundreds. In this one (the figure, to reiterate, says I invented all of this out of whole cloth), there is the head-screaming of What did I DO? and the Please, no of being turned over, plus the soul-screaming conflict of the ways I was physically less accommodating to anal rape than to vaginal—versus the way the former was the only thing in the world that validated my boyhood, all together tearing me to pieces inside. Even after, on the outside, I had adapted enough that I didn't bleed from any kind of rape anymore. It would take a lot of words to describe the total desperation I had for someone to come save me then. For a cavalry to arrive. And while it's true that none ever did, in the ways I need now, it finally has.
I had so many great potential set pieces for this feature. It seemed like every time I read the news or had a conversation, there was another one: A high school in Texas with a gay homecoming king. The Department of Children and Families in Connecticut, which is actively recruiting gay foster parents. A gay-straight alliance club at a school in conservative southern Oregon. The entirety of the Chicago public-school system, one of the nation's largest, which has clear anti-discrimination policies protecting trans students. A queer-youth center in Dothan, Alabama, or homeless-queer-youth shelter in San Antonio.
A sidewalk, anywhere, where a transitioning adult thinks a passing stranger might attack them, and feels a little more hope to exist every time one doesn't.
I don't need to illuminate The End of Straight with investigative reporting. By arranging, just so, scenes and quotes from experts into that argument. Heteronormativity is so dead that ringing that knell is already belated, regardless of whether the people participating in its backlashing death throes can admit it yet. Even homonormativity is dying, now that establishment gays are finally campaigning for poor and trans and POC queer rights. Transnormativity has forever been challenged by the nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid, who have more platforms than ever, and who increase the permissions for every one of us by pointing out the colonialist absurdity that the number of genders encompassing all complex humanity could be two. Consider that you are currently encountering any of the preceding words in Gentleman's Quarterly. In my envisioned lede, the line that should be showstopper—That Asha, as a teenager, can conceive of living openly transgender, much less be doing it—is already years stale, unsurprising, at this point, to any American reader.
I don't need to convince anyone that straight is over. Though my most singular, agonizing wish since I was a child was to be safe and to be loved, I've staked my life on it.
It's too late for me to live my youth, or my 20s, or most of my 30s, uncaged. But last summer, I was in a Whole Foods, where, like everywhere then, most every gaze I passed lingered with curiosity or confusion or hostility. And. As I stood amid the bins of the bulk section, each breath I took was expansive possibility, exhaling deep, dead grief. Not passing as either accepted gender, I was as visible as I could be—and there I was, buying lentils like anyone, stunned and ecstatic to be alive.
It's too soon to know whether younger Americans' broader acceptance of genders and sexualities will translate to fewer votes for legislators and presidents who would endanger Asha, or if there will be fewer murders as the people who hate her die off faster than they're being replaced, as nearly every survey of this country's generational attitudes indicates. Either way, her bold walk (to her own house, now, as she's since come out to her parents) and every other LGBTQQIP2SAA+ person chips away at a system that can't rebuild itself quickly enough. We chip away at rigidity and oppressions and silence that have long recycled into more pain, more violence.
I have moments when I still can't believe I'm queer or trans or both. Yes, sometimes like I can't believe this is happening, or like maybe I could've come to embody womanhood if I had just kept trying, tried harder, forever. But more often like I cannot believe I can be this special, to be born into this lineage.
Certainly one of the kids currently suffering sexual abuse—Child Protective Services discovers another every nine minutes, according to RAINN—is queer or trans or both, too. Whatever else he's telling himself—that he deserves it; that he is broken; that he is unloved by God—to keep his rage leashed and directed inward as he bides his time, he at least knows, if he has access to a television or computer or smartphone or newsstand or library, that people like him are people. That if he can just manage to survive, there is a place in this world for people like him to have jobs, and families, and the light on their face. Even if his parents ultimately punish him, or wring their hands lamenting why, why their child is like this, or grieve him like he's died, there are also already people all over who, when he reveals himself to them, will instinctively celebrate that he has, that he is, a gift—variance, the key to evolution—their eyes and voices suddenly bright when they say, Congratulations.
Gabriel Mac is the author of two books and a three-time National Magazine Award finalist.
Additional Resources:
- Trans Lifeline's peer-support crisis/suicide hotline is 1.877.565.8860 (US) or 1.877.330.6366 (Canada).
- The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network operates a 24-hour hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673) as well as live chat and additional resources online here.
- The Trevor Project has a 24-hour, confidential suicide hotline for LGBTQ youth at 1.866.488.7386. Or chat here.
A version of this story originally appeared in the August 2019 issue with the title "The End of Straight."
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ryan Pfluger
Styled by Oceanna Larsen for Aubri Balk
Grooming by Preston Nesbit for Aubri Balk