MEN’S RITES
before I began to transition, I tried my very best not to transition, for the following reasons:
• It might be well and good for other people, but I was uniquely unqualified.
• I could not trust either my knowledge of myself or my own desires.
• I could not trust my own happiness, such that if transition were to produce a new kind of peace or serenity within me, it would merely be further evidence of my capacity for self-deception, just another set-up before an increasingly long fall.
• I was too old, had in fact been too old since the age of 12.
• I was used to being a woman, and I liked women and couldn’t imagine my transition as anything other than an act of – at the very least – impoliteness towards women.
• I would lose my family.
• Cis men would be indifferent and cruel to me if I did.
• I would lose my sense of self and my place in the world.
• Transition wouldn’t work on me anyway.
I had worked out a sort of tortured mathematical equation in favour of never making a decision or sharing my feelings with anyone – I was just susceptible enough to the rhetoric of transition to make my continued existence as a cis woman unbearable, but to guarantee that actual transition would bring with it any relief, which meant that my only option was to suffer in silence. The more I longed to transition, the stronger the evidence that I should not do it; the very fact that I desired it to the exclusion of all other desires meant that I was being stubborn and irrational and in need of restraint. I knew I could not trust my own feelings, because I agree out of politeness and affection, but their hearts wouldn’t really be in it, and I would in fact have trespassed on their good natures by asking, making such an outrageous, selfish request.
