The Argonauts (7 page)

To my surprise, you did not share my outrage. Instead, you raised an eyebrow and reminded me that, just a few years ago, I had expressed related fears, albeit not articulated in exactly the same terms, about the unknown changes that might be wrought by hormones, by surgery.

We were standing in our kitchen when you said this, at the same countertop where I suddenly remembered scouring the teeny print of a Canadian testosterone information pamphlet (Canada is light-years ahead of the United States on this front). I had indeed been trying to figure out, in a sort of teary panic, what about you might change on T, and what would not.

By the time I was scouring the pamphlet, we’d been trying to get pregnant, without success, for over a year. I stayed busy trying to puff up my uterine lining by downing gobs of foul-smelling beige capsules and slick brown pellets from an acupuncturist with “a heavy hand,” that is, one who left my legs covered with bruises; you had begun to lay the groundwork to have top surgery and start injecting T, which causes the uterus to shrivel. The surgery didn’t worry me as much as the T—there’s a certain clarity to excision that hormonal reconfiguration lacks— but part of me still wanted you to keep your chest the way it was. I wanted this for my sake, not yours (which meant it was a desire I would need to dispose of quickly). I also discovered that I harbored some unexamined butch bravado on your behalf, like—
You’ve had a beard for years and already pass 90 percent of the time without T, which is more than many folks who want such things can say; isn’t that enough?

Unable to say such things, I focused on the risks of elevated cholesterol and threats to your cardiovascular system that T might cause. My father died of a heart attack at age forty, for no sensible reason
(“his heart exploded”);
what if I lost you the same way? You were both Geminis. I read the risks aloud ominously, as if, once revealed, they might scare you off T for good. Instead you shrugged, reminded me that T would not put you in a higher risk category than that of bio males not on T. I sputtered a few half-baked Buddhist precepts about the potential unwisdom of making external changes rather than focusing on internal transformation. What if, once you made these big external changes, you still felt just as ill at ease in your body, in the world?
As if I did not know that, in the field
of gender, there is no charting where the external and the internal begin and end
—

Exasperated, you finally said,
You think I’m not worried too? Of course I’m worried. What I don’t need is your worry on top of mine. I need your support
. I get it, give it.

As it turned out, my fears were unwarranted. Which isn’t to say you haven’t changed. But the biggest change of all has been a measure of peace. The peace is not total, but in the face of a suffocating anxiety, a measure of peace is no small thing. You do feel grief-stricken now, but only that you waited so long, that you had to suffer so acutely for three decades before finally finding some relief. Which is why each time I count the four rungs down on the blue ladder tattooed on your lower back, spread out the skin, push in the nearly-two-inch-long needle, and plunge the golden, oily T into deep muscle mass, I feel certain I am delivering a gift.

And now, after living beside you all these years, and watching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness—as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to
argument
, however loose)—I’m no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.

How to explain—“trans” may work well enough as shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes (“born in the wrong body,” necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some—but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some, “transitioning” may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others—like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T—it doesn’t?
I’m not on my way anywhere
, Harry sometimes tells inquirers. How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy?
I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don’t want any of it
. How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK—desirable, even (e.g., “gender hackers”)—whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality—or anything else, really—is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

The
presumptuousness
of it all. On the one hand, the Aristotelian, perhaps evolutionary need to put everything into categories—
predator, twilight, edible
—on the other, the need to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.
Becoming
, Deleuze and Guattari called this flight: becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-molecular. A becoming in which one never becomes, a becoming whose rule is neither evolution nor asymptote but a certain turning, a certain turning inward,
turning into my own / turning on in / to my own self / at last / turning out of the / white cage, turning out of the / lady cage / turning at last
.

It’s painful for me that I wrote a whole book calling into question identity politics, only then to be constituted as a token of lesbian identity. Either people didn’t really read the book, or the commodification
of identity politics is so strong that whatever you write, even when it’s explicitly opposed to that politics, gets taken up by that machinery
.

I think Butler is generous to name the diffuse “commodification of identity” as the problem. Less generously, I’d say that the simple fact that she’s a lesbian is so blinding for some, that whatever words come out of her mouth—whatever words come out of
the lesbian’s
mouth, whatever ideas spout from her head—certain listeners hear only one thing:
lesbian, lesbian, lesbian
. It’s a quick step from there to discounting the lesbian—or, for that matter, anyone who refuses to slip quietly into a “postracial” future that resembles all too closely the racist past and present—as
identitarian
, when it’s actually the listener who cannot get beyond the identity that he has imputed to the speaker. Calling the speaker
identitarian
then serves as an efficient excuse not to listen to her, in which case the listener can resume his role as speaker. And then we can scamper off to yet another conference with a keynote by Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, at which we can meditate on Self and Other, grapple with radical difference, exalt the decisiveness of the Two, and shame the unsophisticated identitarians, all at the feet of yet another great white man pontificating from the podium, just as we’ve done for centuries.

In response to a journalist who asked him to “summarize himself in a nutshell,” John Cage once said, “Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.” He knew his name was stuck to him, or he was stuck to it. Still, he urges out of it. The
Argo’s
parts may get replaced, but it’s still called the
Argo
. We may become more used to jumping into flight, but that doesn’t mean we have done with all perches.
We ought to say a feeling of
and
, a feeling of
if
, a feeling of
but
, and a feeling of
by
, quite as readily as we say a feeling of
blue
or a feeling of
cold
. We ought to, but we don’t—or at least, we don’t quite as readily. But the more you do, the more quickly you can recognize the feeling when it comes around again, and hopefully you won’t need to stare as long.

Throughout my twenties, I meditated weekly at the Russian & Turkish Baths on East Tenth Street on the impossibly ancient body of the woman whom I thought of as the ghost of the baths. (If you went to these baths on women-only days in the ’90s, you will know who I mean.) I meditated on her labia, which drooped far below her pale pubic hair, her butt cheeks dangling off the bone like two deflated balloons.
And I said, do labia really start to hang? She said, yes, just like men’s balls, gravity makes the labia hang. I told her I never noticed that, I’d have to take a look
. I tried to learn everything there was to know about the aging female body by staring at hers. (Now I realize I should say “the elderly female body,” but in my youth, as in the culture at large, the space between “aging” and “elderly” women is often collapsed, treated as illegible or irrelevant.)

In my day job as a graduate student, however, I expressed only offense at Allen Ginsberg’s descriptions of female genitalia in his poems, as in “the hang of pearplum / fat tissue / I had abhorred” and “the one hole that repelled me 1937 on.” I still don’t see the need to broadcast misogynistic repulsion, even in service of fagdom, but I do understand being repelled. Genitalia of all stripes are often slimy and pendulous and repulsive. That’s part of their charm.

I realize now that such moments in Ginsberg have a different shine when held in the bowl alongside his go-for-broke encounter with the naked body of his mother, the mad Naomi, in his great “Kaddish”:

When I read this passage now, I feel only moved and inspired. “What, even, smell of asshole?”—this is the sound of Ginsberg cajoling himself as far out onto the ledge as he can go, even if it means pressing into the speculative, the fictive. Beyond the “Monster of the Beginning Womb” to the mother’s anus, which he leans into and sniffs. Not in service of abjection, but in pursuit of the limits of generosity.
She needs a lover—am I that name?

The result of all this pushing? “Later revolted a little, not much.” O glorious deflation without dismissal!

I remember, around age ten, beholding the scene in
The Shining
in which the hot young woman whom Jack Nicholson is lewdly embracing in the haunted hotel bathroom ages rapidly in his arms, screeching from nubile chick to putrefying corpse within seconds. I understood that the scene was supposed to represent some kind of primal horror. This was
The Shining
, after all. But the image of that decaying, cackling crone, her arms outstretched in desire toward the man who is backing away, has stayed with me for three decades, as a type of friend. She’s part baths-ghost, part mad-Naomi. She didn’t get the memo about being beyond wanting or being wanted. Or perhaps she just means to scare the shit out of him, which she does.

At one point in her book
The Buddhist
, Dodie Bellamy takes Jonathan Franzen to task for the following description of a middle-aged woman found in his novel
Freedom:
“Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence—the drama of being her—was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity.” Bellamy responds: “Due to all the stagy point of view switches the novel apparently employs, I’d thought of assigning it to students, but after reading the above passage I was like, not in 100 fucking years…. Middle aged women are such easy prey, like they’re supposed to walk around with eyes averted, hanging their heads in shame at their wreckage.” She then offers “a sappy image of a crone to wipe out the evil Franzen-view.”

I won’t reproduce the image here, but I encourage you to find
The Buddhist
and consult it. What I will do is tell you about the stable of people I have come to think of as my sappy crones (except that they aren’t really sappy, and they’re not really crones). You’ve already met some of them. For a while I was calling them my good witches, but that wasn’t quite right. If it weren’t such a lengthy moniker I might call them “the many gendered-mothers of my heart,” which is what poet Dana Ward calls everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Barry Manilow to his father to his grandmother to his childhood neighbor to Winona Ryder’s character in
Heathers
to Ella Fitzgerald to Jacob von Gunten to his bio mom in his amazing long poem “A Kentucky of Mothers,” which accomplishes the nearly impossible feat of constructing an ecstatic matriarchal cosmology while also de-fetishizing the maternal, even emptying the category out, eventually wondering: “But is ‘mother of’ precise? / Should I say ‘singers of’ instead? … Is it good to call these others as my moms the way I have? Is it care, & if it is have I gave honor in my song?”

My college professor of feminist theory was named Christina Crosby. I tried my very hardest in her class and she gave me an A-. I didn’t get it then but now I do. I was cruising for intellectual mothers, unconsciously gravitating toward the stern and nonmaternal type. Christina would show up for class on her motorcycle or sleek road bike, blow into the room with her helmet under her arm, the whip of autumnal New England in her hair and cheeks, and everyone would quake with intimidation and desire. I always think of her entrances when I start a class now, as she always showed up just a smidgen late—never
actually
late, but never the first one to the party. She was radiant and elegant and butch, not stone and not soft, just her own blond, professorial, athletic, windswept kind of butch.