Archive

[Hello! Long time no newsletter; this has been for many reasons, but most of those reasons boil down to “My brain abruptly stopped being chill about sharing my writing with other people; existing in the world is hard right now.” My sincerest apologies.

The piece below is one I started writing roughly two years ago, which I have come back to and edited and changed and considered publishing and not published and edited some more every single time JK Rowling’s rampant transphobia has hit the news cycle. Or, to put it another way: I’ve spent a lot of time on it. I’m publishing it now because I've realized that I'm always going to feel like there's something else I need to add, some other angle or aspect I need to include, because this whole piece is about trying to pin in place the sensation of having an unwinable argument with myself; an argument that spans too much ground to ever cover entirely. I’m publishing it here instead of pitching it somewhere because even if I could get it picked up, the risk inherent in handing this particular work over to a cis editor right now just doesn’t feel worth taking. Maybe it would in a year or two, but I think I need to get this one out of the ol' mental garage.

This should go without saying but I'm saying it anyway: I’m absolutely, utterly certain that the emotional experience I’ve attempted to capture here is NOT how every trans person feels about all this, because we are not a monolith and the human experience is vast. I’m sure this won’t even be how I feel about it in a few years’ time, at least not entirely. But it is how I feel now, the conversation I’ve been having with myself over and over these last few years as I’ve watched things escalate, and I want a record of it somewhere outside my Notes app. If it speaks to you, fantastic, and if it doesn’t, fantastic. If you catch yourself trying to extrapolate this out into a treatise about how all trans people feel about all things, no you don't.

Hope you’re all as well as you can be here in hell world. Good luck out there.]

I have started volunteering once a week at a local farm stand. This is for many reasons — not least of which is I get a box of free vegetables in exchange for my time, which I will admit is what drew me to the gig in the first place — but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t mostly because it’s reminding me how to exist as a person in the world.

Interacting with and being perceived by other people doesn’t seem like the sort of ability a human being should be able to lose track of. It’s not like riding a bike, which, regardless of the famous phrase about it, involves balance and coordination and muscle memory and man-made machines, and so seems, in fact, entirely reasonable to forget. Interacting with other people is more like eating or breathing: doing it is more or less an inevitability of being alive. Sure, there are ways to avoid it, circumstances that can limit our opportunities to do it, reasons we might or might not be able to do it well, but if nothing else, all of us who survive past babyhood do that with the help of another person. Humans aren’t like sea turtles, who are born small but fully mobile, who can and must forge their own path into the ocean without anyone to guide them; we scream our way into life totally helpless, not able to so much as lift our own heads, and even the most independent among us need years of support before we can survive in solitude.

I have, despite this, utterly forgotten how to act with others. I know the knowledge is within me, because it must be, right? Surely I spent decades walking around this planet, exchanging pleasantries and having conversations, without having to puzzle my way through every agonizing step as though attempting it for the first time. This must be true; I remember it, even if that memory is clouded with a haze of unreality, like all my memories of life before time lurched sickeningly out of its track. I was always a little odd, but I know that I once possessed in spades the ability to say things to other people without feeling like ladywithmath.jpeg after every accursed word. It seems wrong on a cosmic scale that I am now reduced to biting back little shrieks of frustrated confusion during every interaction I have, but that’s where I am, and I can see — in their eyes, in the way they carry themselves, in the things that they say — that most of the people I encounter are there, too.

It is hardly the worst of what the pandemic has done to us. The worst, of course, is the millions of deaths, and from there, there is a long and incalculable list of harms and losses which cannot be ordered, a roiling cauldron of grief and despair and anguish and horror. That so many of us have forgotten how to exist amongst each other does not rank on this scale, which is, itself, quite horrible. If I were to go back in time and tell myself at age twenty that someday I and nearly everyone I know would forget the basics of person-to-person interaction, and that, in the scheme of things, this would be a relatively small problem, the twenty-year-old version of myself would have no choice but to conclude that he was hurtling towards the apocalypse. In a way he was; in a way we all were. For all we try to pretend and posture and pontificate about what comes next, the only thing anyone can really say for certain is the world we once lived in is not coming back. It never is, of course — the world is changing every second, and each of us along with it — but it feels particularly stark just now.

• Every happily married couple on earth has a totally different experience of marriage from every other happily married couple on earth. This is because people are all different from each other! All human relationships are inherently unique to the participants involved. Despite this, a staggering number of married couples are inexplicably but irretrievably convinced that every experience of marriage but theirs is wrong. This is called “hubris.”

• Sometimes there’s this thing that will happen when you are happily married, which is that somebody who is unhappily married will try to get like, buddy-buddy with you about how much you both hate your spouses? And then you have to have this very awkward conversation where you’re like, “Actually I uh... love...the person I married. Sorry? I mean I’m not sorry, but like... sorry....” and then they’re like “Oh! Uh... I mean I guess I’m sorry... but like good for you guys or whatever, obviously.” Then both parties sidle uncomfortably away. Nobody ever leaves this conversation happier than they were when it began, but that does not seem to stop it from happening, though I wish very much that it would.

• I will never again be fully absorbed in a narrative where somebody’s spouse is replaced with a clone or an alien or a Face/Off type situation and they simply don’t notice it. I would know an imposter of my husband in, at absolute most, a single day, and I don’t actually think it would take more than an hour. I wish I could say that this was solely due to the depth of my love for him, and certainly it’s partly that, but mostly it’s that we do so many weird, hyper-specific things within the privacy of our own marriage that an outsider would betray themselves in incredibly short order. Marriage, as it turns out, is where you get strange, and the intersection of our individual oddities is as distinctive as a fingerprint, and unmistakeable.

• Once you get married people start saying “What about kids? Have you thought about kids?? When are you gonna have kids???” as though it is inevitable and unavoidable and something everyone always does. This, it turns out, is true even if your marriage consists of two trans men who have made it very clear, many times, that they do not under any circumstances want or intend to have children. For the first few months this confused me, but then I realized that this particular behavior is probably at least part of why I know so many adults who had deeply shitty parents who generally acted as though they didn’t want their kids. Probably don’t tell people who don’t want children to have them, is my theory at this point! Convincing someone to have kids they don’t want will never go well for anyone. Redirect that urge into doing an escape room, or keeping a sourdough starter, or just honestly anything else.

• On the topic of weddings, as opposed to the unions they begin: so many people go into their wedding day like “Everything has to be perfect,” and I am here to tell you that this is a trap. Very rarely is any day perfect, let alone a day that typically involves: a high-stakes emotional commitment, various members of multiple families all gathering in one place, the public ranking of one’s close friends, at least one person who should really never be in a room with at least one other person, alcohol, and people who aren’t professional public speakers giving speeches. That’s a day with a LOT working against it, and that’s why when it comes to weddings, the best policy is simply to follow what in our house we call “fiasco rules.” Assume the worst will happen. Choose to find it entertaining. Embrace the chaos. When you are one of the people getting married, a wedding is a five to seven hour endurance event in which you express serious, personal emotions in front of everyone you know and then have a brief, semi-private conversation with absolutely all of them. Even for the most extroverted person that’s a lot; why add the pressure of making sure it all plays out beautifully? If you instead remember that everything that goes wrong is a story to tell later, it’s a lot easier to spare yourself the indignity of snapping at your Aunt Cynthia when she drunkenly puts an elbow into your cake or whatever. Release your expectations into the ether and just strive to have some fun.

• Relatedly: the kindest thing you can do for a person at their wedding is bring them either a) an alcohol of some kind (if they drink; if not, any thirst-quenching beverage will do), or b) some of the food they so carefully selected and haven’t had time to eat. If it is your turn to go to speak to the happy couple, then for god’s sake, bring an appetizer.

• Being married to someone you truly love is wonderful but it is also terrible, and this is because of something best expressed by Joanna Newsom: “Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that that’s hopefully after many, many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose. When it registers as true, it’s like a little shade of grief that comes in when love is its most real version. Then it contains death inside of it, and then that death contains love inside of it.” The intensity of this quote is cut somewhat by the fact that she is talking about Andy Samberg (good for you, Andy! Good for you both!) but honestly only a little.

• I have a brain which can be neatly summarized with the following phrase: [slaps brain] this baby can fit so many problems! So perhaps it will not shock you to hear that I love my husband and part of loving my husband includes my being regularly barraged with intrusive thoughts about terrible things happening to him. In the age of coronavirus this problem has only worsened, perhaps for obvious reasons if not in obvious ways; the other night, for example, a car backfired nearby, and I could not stop thinking that maybe it was a gun, and maybe the bullet had somehow gone through the exterior wall of our apartment building, entered our third floor bedroom, and struck him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. He was unfazed about this possibility when I mentioned it, having not in fact been killed instantly after being struck in the back of the head by a wayward bullet from a gun that was never fired in the first place, but I suspect he would be unfazed even in the middle of being eaten by a collection of carnivorous goats. It is my lot in life to be fazed by almost everything — spiders, mice, little bumps in the nighttime, perceived dislike, how many days something’s been in my fridge — so I wisely married a man who is largely unsurprised, and sometimes even delighted, by life’s little horrors.

• Here is a true story: a few years ago I was in our apartment and I went into the bathroom and there was a bee in there. A bee! In my bathroom! I am aware that bees are good for the world and pollinators without whom we’d all die, and I wish them the best, but there was an incident in my youth with another child and a rock and a beehive and a swarm, and I never quite managed to recover. And yet there it was! In my bathroom! I tried to ignore it; I tried putting on many layers of clothes and tying a bandana over my face to go trap and remove it; no joy. The fear defeated me. In the end, I trapped it in the room with a towel shoved hastily under the door and texted my husband, who had been hearing about all of this with presumably some amount of entertainment, that I could not do it. I could not remove the bee. He, a good person, said I could come get him from work, so I drove there, picked him up, brought him home, and send him into the bathroom, from which he returned after several minutes with the intruder trapped under a glass, and informed me, quite amused, that it was in fact a striped fly. I think this illustrates two things: first, that I am an absurd and absurdly lucky man, and second, that Joanna Newsom is right. Of course there is a shade of grief in every story of real love, because someday — although of course you hope desperately that it is many years away!! — the catalog of little strangenesses and kindnesses and acceptances and devotions and coming home from work to trap the bee that’s really a fly, the small daily choices and actions and feelings which make up love between one person and another, will have to reach its final page. This harsh reality is the striped fly in the bathroom of my heart, a horrible sentence that is nevertheless true, and when it buzzes around I have no choice but to accept that it cannot be caught in a cup and released. Love is beautiful and horrifying and utterly worth it, and this is no more or less than what it costs.

• Sometimes this weird thing will happen where you and your spouse are thinking about the same thing at around the same time for totally different reasons; I am publishing this newsletter today, for example, because it’s been written for a while, and it closes by discussing a topic that my husband opened his own newsletter by discussing today. Neither of us talked about this in advance, or knew the other was doing it, and, to borrow a phrase from Marge Simpson, I just think that’s neat. Here it is:

• About twenty times a day I find a post on the internet that my husband will enjoy. This — fluency in the language of someone else’s preferred content — is its own kind of intimacy, especially for people as online as we are. Sometimes I send him these posts, but often I simply hand him my phone, or lean over to hold the screen a few inches from his face. To be completely honest with you, I suspect this little habit drives him up the wall  — I’m not trying to interrupt him with my latest image of a snake in a tiny hat, or video of a small cat doing Big Crimes, or this, but inevitably I sometimes do. Still, I cannot stop this practice (unless he ever actually expresses that he wants me to, in which case I’ll figure it out), and that’s because when I get it right, when I find something online I think my husband will enjoy and then he does indeed enjoy it, he makes this one specific face that appears exclusively in the wake of an internet delight. I am completely addicted to this face. Seeing it actively improves my whole day. If someday the world wide web achieves full sentience and flees to a less horrifying plane of existence, i’ll have to take up finding snakes in real life and putting little hats on them, because I am not giving up that face for anything. This isn’t something I think is true about marriage in general; it’s just something true about mine. It does lead me to the thing I believe most about marriage at large, though, so here we go:

• You should marry someone who you enjoy making happy, and they should enjoy making you happy, too. Maybe it’s the hubris talking, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got that one right.

Strawberry season is coming to an end this week. It’s one of the bright spots of living in Ohio, the way that for a handful of days in June, I have the ability to drive a mere thirty minutes and bite into the sweetest, ripest berry you’ll find anywhere. Never mind that the brief drive puts me squarely in the middle of a community that doesn’t care for me, that wishes passively or actively that I would do them the favor of ceasing to exist; never mind the part of me that’s afraid of what would happen to my husband, to me, if the car broke down. Fear is part of life, and it’s worth it to offer snacks to the brood of chickens that lives on our preferred farm, to greet the rabbits in their hutch. It’s worth it to see look on my husband’s face when he spots the bright orange barn cat, barely past kittenhood, asleep in whichever sun-soaked spot he‘s chosen. It’s worth it to bite into a strawberry picked a scant few hours ago, and let the taste burst to life on my tongue: something bright and clean, simpler and more beautiful than the petty complications of my life.

The nature of strawberry season is to be fleeting. You know going in that it won’t last, that you must maximize the time you’ve got before the plants close up shop for the year. In spite of this, every spring I end up in a state of strawberry-induced euphoria, becoming convinced on some level deeper than logic and knowledge that there will be strawberries just like these every day, forever. No matter how much I try to brace for it, the season’s last bow always sneaks up on me, and it always hurts, in this very small and specific way. It’s not the wrenching pain of losing something forever, or horribly, or too soon; it’s more like those few days at the tail end of autumn, that swell of bittersweet regret as even the most stubborn leaves begin to curl in defeat. For all its cruelty, the way time ends so much only to bring it around again is a strange sort of kindness. It allows us to believe, in whatever way, that we have an understandable place in the hierarchy of experience. It allows us the knowledge that what is impermanent can also be gorgeous.

I have been writing less lately, and it is because a season of my life is ending. I lived so many years disconnected from myself, doing my best to avoid my literal and figurative reflection, that I’ve only recently learned to identify the signs of this kind of event. For a long time I was the sort of person who would realize that I had changed, or that my life had changed around me, only well after the fact; this ability to notice the wilting flowers within myself, the curling leaves of an internal autumn, is both new and a little unsettling. I can feel myself changing, the weather of who I am shifting in a different direction, and it’s good — the only way forward — and sad, the way change can’t help but be.

Like strawberry season, this change is one I knew was coming, and one that managed to sneak up on me in spite of this knowledge. Unlike strawberry season, this part of my life will not be returning to me next year, or any year after that. A human life is more complex than the life of a berry, and sometimes what goes away does not come back again, or returns only in a different form, in different circumstances, with different people. The hurt that comes along with this can be more bitter than sweet, even though in a real way it is as natural as the bleed of fall into winter. Seasons end. Change blows through every life. Accepting this is the work of being a person, for all that that’s something easier said than believed.

AM I TRANS?
Yeah.

NO BUT LIKE LISTEN: AM I TRANS?
Enormously so, yes. Big time. Someday it’s going to feel ridiculous that you ever didn’t know.

BUT HOW CAN YOU BE SURE THAT I’M TRANS?
Well, for one thing, obsessively wondering “Am I trans? Could I be trans? But what if I’m trans????” isn’t, like, a particularly cis thing for you to be doing.

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?
Okay, so being cis — based on my understanding, which is admittedly inherently limited — means you’re more or less comfortable with your assigned gender, right? Couldn’t be me, but that’s what I hear. So, you know, feeling so uncomfortable with that assigned gender that you constantly wonder whether you’re trans, what life would be like if you were trans, how it would feel to be trans, whether or not your feelings of discomfort with your gender could possibly in some universe count as being trans.... that’s some pretty trans shit to be getting up to, if you see what I’m saying here.

I don’t have ADHD; I’m just lazy.

I don’t have ADHD, I’ve just: spent insufficient time outdoors, watched too much television, played too many video games, eaten too many processed foods, stood too close to the microwave, gotten too many x-rays, wasted too many hours on the internet, or been poisoned by my cellular phone.

I don’t have ADHD, I’m just grotesquely spoiled by the culture of instant gratification that has so generously been granted to me by the people who built the society in which I live, and for which I am insufficiently grateful.

I don’t have ADHD, because ADHD presents exclusively as a little child jumping up and down, knocking paintings off of walls, and refusing to sit still while shouting “I have ADHD!!” at a cartoonish volume. Anything else is just: being annoying, being too much, being weird, speaking too loudly or too quickly or too often, not paying attention out of selfishness or disrespect, being too sensitive, or failing to adequately live up to my potential (whatever the hell that means).

You get home after a long day of work; you’re feeling tired, frustrated, maybe even a little stoned. You pull out your phone, look at it for a few minutes, and find the urge overtaking your — growing stronger with every moment — you try to resist it but you can’t hold it back — you — must — POST!

Does this ever happen to YOU? Have no fear: the solution is here. Reach out to Stop Posting Incorporated today! Please feel free to browse our menu below to get a sense of how we can best serve your needs.

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[A note to trans readers of this newsletter: this particular issue of hyperfocus is, eventually, about the onslaught of horrific legislature that’s lately been directed at trans kids. If you’d rather, say, jump into a swimming pool filled with mayonnaise and wasps than read anything more about that, I completely understand, and please feel free to skip this one in favor of doing something that brings you joy, or screaming into a paper bag, or whatever the hell else you want.]

•

I was a dramatic child.

This isn’t, strictly speaking, a particularly fair description; what I actually was as a child was bright, talkative, and possessed of the kind of ADHD that wouldn’t be diagnosed until I reached adulthood, but that would, in retrospect, would make my childhood make a lot more sense. This combination of traits was responsible for comments like “Keeps the other children awake during naptime,” on my absurd little child report cards, and, presumably, for a lot of frustration from the adults in my life who wanted but one single moment of peace. It wasn’t quite dramatics, because “dramatic” implies the intention to create drama; I was Just Like That, whether I wanted to be (which I didn’t) or not.

Do you feel UNHINGED? Like a DOOR somebody REMOVED from its FRAME and then threw down a long flight of STAIRS? Does THIS [short clip of a man checking the news, tipping his head back, and watching a large cloud of black smog appear from his own mouth] ever happen to YOU? Are YOU preoccupied with the FUTILITY of EXISTENCE? Do YOU vibrate with the effort of holding back your SCREAMS all day?

Luckily, there’s help. Try “making a big fucking pot of risotto and then eating off of it like a gremlin all week” today! STIR all your worries away, and then STIR some more, and then CONTINUE TO STIR until it is done. You can’t control the world, but you CAN control risotto!

SPRING RAMP AND SAUSAGE RISOTTO:

INGREDIENTS:

• Like listening to a 45-minute loop of car tires screeching on pavement, and feeling the same overload of adrenaline you’d feel if you were in an actual car skidding across the actual pavement for the entire 45 minutes

• Like walking through a cursed forest late at night knowing perfectly well that it isn’t safe but not having any other route available, and every few minutes some guys sticks his head up out of a bush and yells, “IT’S DANGEROUS OUT HERE,” as if you don’t know — as if you aren’t incredibly familiar with this cursed forest, as if you don’t walk through it every night — and then vanishes without offering any help or solutions

• Like you’re at a party, and you’re talking to an otherwise inoffensive person who is telling you something totally wrong with perfect confidence — something hideously, obviously incorrect, like “The sky is green,” or “Turtles can fly,” — and every time you open your mouth to say, “Hey, listen, that’s totally fucking wrong,” Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” starts blasting from a speaker directly next to your face

• Like putting your feet in your slippers and realizing too late that they’re both filled with corn syrup

Hello. It’s nice to see you again — yes, it really HAS been a long time. What a wild year, am I right? Can’t say I’ll miss it, that’s for sure!

I suppose I should mention that I’ve turned into a cryptid. I mean, you’ve probably noticed; I’m sure the way I scuttled out from behind the door was something of a clue. I imagine the matted hair and faint smell of bog water aren’t subtle either. Once, before this all began, I was a human person, like you — that’s all over for me now. I‘ve become a cryptid, there doesn’t seem to be any way to undo it, and that’s all I have to say about that.

Oh, you... you want to go to a restaurant? I mean, I guess it’s fine, since we all got fully vaccinated and then strictly followed the CDC’s guidelines about how long you should wait after vaccination before going to a restaurant. It’s just... I mean... you know about the screaming, right? You know that halfway through the meal I’m going to look up, and my little cryptid eyes are going to send the image of the room full of unmasked people to my little cryptid brain, and I’m going to scream and scream and scream until I can scream no more? It’s not personal, of course. I won’t be doing it on purpose. These are just the realities of my life as a creature forged in the fires of despair; sorry if that’s inconvenient for you. Maybe it would be better for you to go without me.

You want to come inside my house, you say? You want to come into the place where I live and behold it with your only eyeballs, which I will not be able to replace if horror melts them out of your skull? I’m terribly sorry, but it simply will not possible. Even if you could bear to let your gaze rest upon my tchotchkes and trinkets, my unholy selection of dirtied laundries — even if I could bear, after all this change that’s been wrought, to watch you see the way I live now — we still couldn’t do it. These days I make my home at the bottom of a swamp, you see, and somewhere up there there’s a little door, constantly moving, that’s only big enough for me and my husband. If anyone else tries to get through the door the swamp swallows them whole, and the would-be intruder is surprised to find themselves pop up miles away, in a totally different pool of brackish water. It was the only way to be safe! But it would, I’m sure you can see, put you in an uncomfortable position. I’d like to spare you that, as a friend.

It’s still Passover — even when you’re not keeping it, it’s eight full days of guilt — so here’s a story about one of wildest days I’ve ever had at work, which is, conveniently, also about Passover.

So the first thing you have to understand is that when this happened, I was working at a grocery store in one of the west side Cleveland suburbs. There’s actually a huge Jewish community in Cleveland that dates back to the early 1800s — a couple of Jewish guys moved to town and then sent letters home like “Cleveland is a fine and affordable place to live,” which is how most everyone ends up here — but those Jewish Clevelanders largely don’t live on the west side. On the east side, where I grew up, you’re always within 15 minutes of a temple, but on the west side you’re just in Ohio, where it’s totally normal to encounter folks who’ve never even met a Jew before. (There is certainly a separate conversation to be had about the incredibly complicated dynamics of the east side and the west side in Cleveland, which are about a lot more than just Judaism, and I’m fully prepared to have that discussion as soon as I’m sure I totally understand everything involved. I’ve lived here all my life, and am hopeful I’ll be ready to revisit this complex and intricate topic in roughly 40 years — but like, honestly? No promises.)

I live on the west side for one simple reason: I don’t want to run into people I went to high school with, friends of my parents, my childhood rabbi, or any of my former teachers while I’m in line at a store holding nothing but Triscuits and wine. I’m not looking to lock eyes with my old pediatrician while selecting toilet paper at CVS; it’s not dignified. And because many people who live on one side of Cleveland are inexplicably stymied by the half-hour drive to the other side, living where I do effectively solves this problem for me. It just comes at the cost of having a couple of really weird conversations about Judaism a year — conversations that are sometimes antisemitic, but usually just uninformed and odd.

I wasn’t the only Jewish person working at the grocery store where this tale takes place — after about a year of employment, I discovered at least one more — but I was the only Jewish person in the prepared foods department, which boasted a team of about fifty. This was a strange position to be in, because sometimes the food we prepared was, in fact, Jewish. The store was part of a national chain, and Cleveland’s higher-than-average Jewish population meant we were allocated a certain number of specialty dishes during the Jewish holidays. These dishes did not really move at our store for the reasons I laid out above, but they did so well at our sister stores on the east side that the company kept sending them along anyway, numbers be damned.

My fifth grade teacher once wrote “Superman is not brave,” up on the board while we were all at lunch.

I promise I don’t intend to bore you with the tales of my fifth grade exploits, none of which were thrilling. But because, at least for me, fifth grade was so long ago and in such a different reality that it feels like it happened in another age of human existence, have some context in the form of some of things we did that year:

• Learned the preamble of the United States Constitution from a Schoolhouse Rock video;

[Or, for those not familiar with the Yiddish: Man Plans, and God Laughs.]

It’s another weird pandemic Passover, which I find myself in the strange position of being grateful for; shortly before the era of social distancing began, my husband Rowan and I attended an event which made it clear that a branch of my family was pretty deeply transphobic. I’m not going to go into details on that here, even though well-meaning cis people in particular always seem to think they want them. “How did your family take it?” they often ask, when the subject of my being trans comes up — their tone of funereal seriousness never quite hides the less savory aspects of this curiosity.

The truth is that transphobic family stories are largely pretty boring. The trans people involved are interesting, of course, but bigotry isn’t actually novel, and it, by nature, doesn’t really change. I think sometimes cis people are hoping for an after-school special kind of tale, a confrontation that ends with a slammed door, a shouted, “You can’t stop me from being who I am!” and a tremulous but proud smile into camera as triumphant music swells. I’m sure that sort of thing happens sometimes — there’s a lot of people toddling around on this earth, so almost everything does — but usually reality is a lot less climactic. Most of the transphobic family stories I’ve heard (and I’ve heard a lot of them) boil down to, “A bunch of people told me for years that they loved me unconditionally, but it turns out they had a couple of significant conditions they forgot to mention in advance.” It’s not salacious or satisfying, just shitty, wearying. It just makes you wish, fruitlessly, for a world populated with better people.

I’m lucky enough not to have lost my whole family to transphobia — the people closest to me, thankfully, turned out to be supportive — but that’s a bit like saying someone is lucky enough not to have lost their whole house in the fire. Obviously it is better, if there must be a fire, for the conflagration to leave some rooms unscathed, but the gratitude for what remains doesn’t magically repair what was charred and consumed (and, of course, the only way to have been truly lucky would have been not having the fire at all). I am glad for the family I have left, but the smell of smoke lingers on memories of birthday parties and life lessons and childhood milestones, on dozens of items that once brought me comfort, and on all of the Jewish holidays.

So, let’s set the scene: it was February, 2008, when my shitbag boyfriend said, “Hey, you want to go camping with me this weekend?”

(A note on the shitbag boyfriend: in February, 2008, I was an 18 year old college freshman with absolutely no idea I was a closeted trans man. There were a number of signs, of course, in retrospect — there’s a photo of me on a beach in the middle of summer, wearing jeans and a long-sleeved denim button down, which has a lot to answer for — but largely I’d repressed myself so successfully that even I didn’t know what I’d done. This variety of repression has consequences, and mostly, for me, they were things like “low self-esteem,” and “inability to set boundaries,” and “feeling like the way I was treated by others didn’t really matter, you know, in the scheme of things, since I felt terrible all the time anyway.” These circumstances, in a cruel twist of fate, are like chum in the water for shitbag boyfriends.)

This particular shitbag boyfriend — neither the first nor the last in a string of them, I am sorry to say — was one I thought of as “quirky” and “fascinating” at the time. He was a fellow student, a few years older than me, in a more demanding course of study than mine; his parents had unusual jobs, and being their son had allowed him to travel the world at a young age. This in and of itself does not necessarily a shitbag make, but the rest of the evidence is fairly damning. He liked to go on “night adventures,” and would wake me up at three in the morning to demand that I check him for ticks. When he got wasted he would pretend, poorly, to be Australian. I once saw him crossfade on alcohol, Benedryl, and malaria prevention medication before a spring break trip to a continent I’ve never been lucky enough to visit. He was a white guy with a sticker that said “Namaste” on his bedroom door. Do I really need to go on?

Anyway, it was February, 2008, and this charmer said, “Hey, you want to go camping with me this weekend?”