When Eli was trying to decide whether or not to transition it occurred to him that it was possible he could manage in the world as a woman. He worried for a time that medical intervention — surgery and testosterone — were things people only got to choose if it were a matter of survival, a life or death situation. But his therapist at the time encouraged him to do what would offer him the best quality of life and for him that was chest surgery and t.
Living as a man comes with its own set of challenges, and Eli continues to ask himself many questions about what it means to have made and to continue to make the choice to take t and pass in the world as male, but he’s happy and has a lot of gratitude for the relative ease of his transition.
Eli comes from a super supportive family and never felt terribly isolated in his queerness. He came out as a lesbian in his early teens and met other trans guys in his mid teens and identified with them and began to think about the possibility that he might be trans, too. He understood there were options and resources available to him and he was brave and driven enough to explore them in a sober, self-loving way.
We met a few years ago in New York, introduced by mutual friends. At the time he worked at Columbia and I worked at Barnard so it was easy to meet up for lunch now and again and we’ve gotten to know each other slowly over time. I’ve always enjoyed his company and insights, how he can, all at once, be silly and light, incredibly thoughtful and uncannily mature.
When he invited me to Keene to spend some time with him and do a trans tour interview I was super excited. He told many stories I hadn’t heard, but one thing that’s really stuck with me was hearing him talk about how as soon as he knew he might be trans he chose to seek counseling, make his decisions and take action.
***
When I first arrived Eli’s partner Rochelle was busy making the best salad dressing I’ve ever tasted and some other things also beyond compare.
After the three of us caught up a little Eli and I went to the porch where it was cooler so I could more comfortably admire his llama shirt.
Soon Eli’s friends Dana and Tracy arrived and we ate some cheese and had an exceedingly tasty dinner after which Rochelle took us all to see their garden plot.
It was a beautiful night though the mosquitoes were out in droves. Rochelle lead us to wild oregano patch and we all stocked up before going back to their place for a beautiful and fruity dessert. We chatted for a while over berries Eli and Rochelle had picked and froze the previous summer. Then I broke into the conversation and proposed we get to work.
***
I had it in my mind that what I wanted to ask people to talk about during the interview was role models. I’d been thinking on the drive to Keene about my childhood and the strange ways in which I discovered masculinity. Was it a discovery? A proclivity? How was it that I knew at such a young age that no matter what anyone tried to tell me to convince me otherwise, I was a dude? Did I decide I wanted to be a dude because I wanted to be a greaser or did I want to be a greaser because…
There’s something about the masculinity in movies like Grease and The Outsiders and Rebel Without a Cause– beautiful, tragic, rugged and yet a little bit too beautiful, maybe even a little gay — that really drew the attention of a lot of my trans friends as kids. A lot of transmen and butches I know who are in my age range identified deeply with various characters of the Outsiders. I’ve even met a few people who named themselves after said characters. But for me, except for when it was about the Fonz, it’s always been about Grease.
The movie Grease came out when I was seven years old and I remember getting a little comic book version of the movie with photographs instead of drawings and I would for some reason hide in my closet and read it out loud. There was a photo with a dialogue bubble close to the beginning where one of the T-Birds says “frickin A” and though I didn’t have a clue what it meant I practiced it over and over again.
“Frickin A.”
(me in my Fonz phase on the left below).
Then, at the age of ten, I met Carry Lynn Piatrowsky. She played on my first softball team and she was the most boyish girl I’d ever met. She was skinny as a rail, had a boy’s haircut, always wore a baseball cap, never tucked her uniform in right, she was impetuous, charming, often hungry. She could eat two Big Macs in one sitting, messily, quickly, without any trouble. I was enthralled and envious. I still sometimes feel that way around certain types of masculinity.
One of my favorite memories involves a sort of invisible or even accidental role model. Around the time Grease came out the song Stayin Alive was released on the radio. It was one of my favorite songs, especially since I thought the lyrics went as follows: “you can tell by the way I do my walk I’m a womanman, no time to talk.” I wondered over and over again why a womanman would be so busy that he and she would have no time to talk. I imagined this womanman in my head and never once doubted his-her existence but was a little frustrated by the fact that they were always in such a hurry.
My faith in the obvious existence of the womanman gave me a sense of curiosity, wonder and pride that I wish I could still access. I was incredibly proud to be a masculine child but that all changed a year or two after I met Carry Lynn.
***
As a kid Eli’s gender was fairly fluid. He lived with his mom and twin sister but though it was a home of “three females” there wasn’t any pressure on him to be any particular type of kid, so he didn’t feel terribly confined by or rebellious against girlhood. He was, simply, himself. He dressed boyishly whenever he wanted to and since rules surrounding gender expression weren’t something he was forced to grapple with or fight against he also at times enjoyed (and still does) dressing in a less masculine or more feminine fashion. He did girl things and boy things. He didn’t really have to choose one or the other and was pretty content with that scenario.
As time went on Eli felt a much greater affinity with guyness. When he was eighteen he sought counseling to figure out whether or not he was a transexual. He’d been thinking about it for a while by then and already had a subscription to GQ.
When I asked the question about role models I asked it in a broad way. I asked if there were things or people that folks looked to to emulate or things they pitted themselves against, as kids, or even now. I talked about how when I was a kid I specifically avoided doing things that would put me in the “girl camp”, i.e. I practiced the art of eschewing “girl things” and I told them of my emulation of The Fonz et all, the way I wore a dark shiny jacket, the closest thing I had to a tough looking leather jacket, over a white t-shirt and would zip it up an inch or so and strut around.
Dana talked about how they (I am going to use ‘they’ instead of gendered pronouns when talking about Dana because I don’t know Dana’s preference) wanted very much to do whatever it was their father was doing as a kid. They watched him fix things and build things and over and over again tried to engage with him during these activities, but Dana’s father always pushed Dana away because Dana was “a girl”.
Eli thought for a minute.
“I’m flashing back to a very specific moment,” he said. “My senior year of college…”
He started talking about his therapist, the one who he went to when he was looking for answers about his identity, but then he got confused.
“I’ve had two therapists in my life. My senior year of college I went to therapy with the specific goal — I was like ‘I want to go to therapy because I want to figure out whether I’m actually a transexual or not” and then I did decide that I was. And then I moved to New York and found a therapist with the intention of trying to figure out whether i wanted to transition or not and then I did decide that I did.
“One of these therapists.” He went back and forth for a minute. “It must have been Amy Jones? asked me ‘who were your male role models.'”
“It was Amy,” Rochelle said.
Eli smiled. “It was Amy…And, I was like, ‘well…uhhhhh…’
“And she’s like…’In your life.’
“And I was like Well….uh…….
“And she’s like, ‘anywhere.’
“And I was like well…uhhhh…Tintin!”
We all laughed, but when the laughter subsided Eli went on.
“Now I can think of more but at the time I really couldn’t think of anyone, any male people in my life I was close to. Maybe my dad but he’s always been not really that much in my life.”
I asked Eli how the question of role models came to the table at therapy.
“Well we were talking about what kind of man I wanted to be and trying to figure out how to go about my masculinity. Whether I wanted to transition and live as male or whether I wanted to try to continue just being a masculine female person. And she said let’s talk about masculinity and what you mean by that. Like who are your male role models and who do you see yourself as being like.” Eli sheepishly invoked the name again, in almost a whisper — “Tintin.
“Who is worth noting, is like a perpetual twelve year old. He’s an adolescent, he never grows up, he never has any romantic relationships, though he’s exceedingly competent and basically lives alone. Well, lives with this older sailor so in some ways he’s kind of a twink and he has his little dog. But he’s in all these adult situations, he has a gun, so he’s like a kid and not a kid, and he works for a childrens’ newspaper.”
Eli kept talking and as he spoke seemed to be trying to work out or wrestle with the many contradictions and ambiguities of Tintin’s character.
“His style I was exceedingly fond of, always wearing suits and his little knickers and his little tie. And he holds a special part in my life because I learned to read on Tintin books when I was three. The family legend is I taught myself to read on Tintin books.
“So it’s funny that I chose this fictional and not that masculine character [as a role model].”
“There he is wearing a kilt,” Rochelle points to the wall.
“See,” Eli points, too. “He’s wearing a kilt on our wall.”
“In a lot of ways he’s young,” Eli mused as we all looked at the Tintin picture on the wall.
“That’s the thing for me in thinking about whether or not I wanted to transition was thinking about growing up and about who I wanted to be as a grownup.
“Because I was a teenager when I was doing all this processing, trying to imagine myself as a grownup and an old person and kept ending up with little old man images. And I had this interesting conversation with my mom once, too, where she said, ‘you have this boyish charm about you and it’s wonderful but you should think about how long that’s going to work for you because as you get older you might find that you’re not able to be as boyish as you are now.’
“And I think she was talking strictly as a look and in terms of one’s physicality but that sort of stuck with me. I was okay with being this boyish androgynous person but what would happen later when I was no longer as androgynous seeming?…And seeming young. That’s the thing about seeming boyish is you always seem young. We all know this.”
Dana and I laughed because we understood.
“And not wanting to seem so young forever,” Eli went on. “Tintin doesn’t grow up. Somehow I felt like that was a key to my growing up was transitioning.”
I found Eli’s speech detailing his love of Tintin, but also his desire to move away from choices that might leave him feeling perpetually youthful, to be eloquent and profound. I find it hard to imagine a world in which Eli lacks emotional maturity, but I can deeply relate to the specific difficulties of being transgender and being in so many ways outside of the realm of what it means in our culture to be or look grown up.
***
Eli’s twenty-four now and started transitioning at twenty. He and Rochelle got together right before he started t.
For their first three years together they lived in New York and enjoyed the feeling of being visibly queer and part of a queer community with lots of trans people — where people can, if they want, be recognized as trans.
Now they live in Keene and their options for being out as a queer couple are a bit more limited. When Eli tells people he’s transexual they often react by designating him as female — calling him a girl. This happens with a lot of guys I know and so even if they would prefer to be open about their transexuality it tends to be too painful and frustrating.
Often Eli and Rochelle tell people that they both used to be gay and then they fell in love with each other, so that now they’re sort of a queer straight couple. This helps to give them some sense of queer visibility. And Eli often feels that people who don’t know he’s with Rochelle assume he’s a gay man, and that can be comforting.
***
During the interview the conversation soon veered away from the topic of role models. Rochelle talked about a book she’s been reading that intends to explain various biological differences between cissexual male and cissexual female humans but acknowledges there is often more fluctuation within these male and female categories than between them.
We wondered about scientific things — what male physiological characteristics might be chromosomal vs hormonal for example, and what prejudices and preconceived notions might drive or direct and perhaps confine scientific studies of sex and gender.
And we talked about the strange and sometimes strangely compelling binary structure of gender in our lives. Rochelle identifies as cisgender but also gender queer. She is interested in living in a world where the masculine/feminine male/female binary dissolves or fancifully explodes. Eli, Dana and expressed that we felt pretty attached to the binary– to our masculine identities.
At some point in the evening Eli recommended the book “Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano and talked about using the term cisgender or cissexual (see, I’ve already used them!) to identify people whose gender identity more or less matches their biological situation. In some ways, for me, these terms bring up more questions than they resolve, but I’m finding them to be useful.
And for a long time Eli talked about crying in great and fascinating detail. One thing that has deeply baffled him about taking t is that he no longer feels very capable of crying or at least not the way he used to.
I must admit that when I sat down to write this piece the first thing I did was go to youtube and look for Rosey Grier singing “It’s Alright To Cry” from Free To Be You And Me. Of course, what Eli was talking about had nothing to do with any stigma around men and crying, but rather, the possibility that being on testosterone has actually hormonally/physiologically affected his ability to cry.
Still, it was an excuse to revisit the mixed, convoluted, at times priceless messages the seventies tried to bring to the table about gender.
***
The next day Eli and I sat and talked alone on his porch. We talked a lot about effeminate masculinity and queerness as a deeply personal independent identity as opposed to an identity dependent upon one’s preferences, appearances and actions. He talked about two of his life-long role models aside from Tintin, gay men, friends of the family, who both wound up falling in love with and marrying women. He identifies with their lifestyles and perhaps even something about their gender expression.
I talked a bit about identifying as a straight man, or feeling like one, for the most part, and my attachment to identifying as queer even though I don’t always feel queer. Sometimes I feel straight and sometimes I feel queer. Most of the time I feel like a man, occasionally like a womanman.
After chatting, Eli showed me around downtown Keene and we went on a few adventures. When I left I felt no closer to making a decision about whether or not to start t, but I did feel a great respect for the decisions he’s made and the way he’s made them and I felt inspired to continue asking questions and looking to other people’s experiences for a greater wisdom.
Questions of the blog in the form of statements:
I’d love to hear about role models of all kinds. And I’m interested in hearing about fathers. Transmasculine people who feel a particular kinship — or lack of kinship — with their fathers or who feel their masculine identity has been particularly influenced by their relationship with father figures.