CREATIVE NON-FICTION

Why I Ration the Trans Tragedy Porn I Produce Now

When you have to regularly prove you’re human enough to experience the full range of emotions beyond pain…

In a recent post that I wrote for Prism & Pen called “Musings on Being a Trans Man in the South”, I wrote:

[A]t this point in my life, I’m trying to ration out my tragedy porn and feed you as many of the thoughts you actually need to consume as I can manage, so let’s skip to the good food.

I wanted to take a moment to unpack why that attitude would feel necessary to me as a trans man writing publicly.

As I entered the meeting, my boss, who is cis and gay, introduced me to several other coworkers who are cis and heterosexual. The first thing this person told my coworkers about me in this introduction was something that I had privately shared about one of the unique and rather embarrassing dangers of being a trans man in the South of the United States. I had only felt comfortable sharing this because of a feeling of shared solidarity with someone else who I considered to be part of my wider LGBTQIA+ community, someone who I had already spent hours getting to know on a more positive, professional note.

I felt humiliated to be introduced to people outside of my community as a person who was initially defined by this pain, embarrassment, and danger. Not only did this portrayal of me make me feel humiliated; it is simply inaccurate by omission. I actually have a wonderful life in many ways. I am loved and have had many opportunities and accomplishments that have given me a sense of pride and fulfillment in my life. I was not in this space because I required pity or a rescue; I was in this space because I am highly qualified and have a valuable service to offer. Entering on this note made me feel that coworkers outside of my community might not have had the opportunity to formulate an impression of me as a whole human defined by a collection of positive, negative, and neutral thoughts, emotions, and experiences.

I’m realizing that this experience wasn’t just my loss.

It was the loss of everyone in that room who left with a stereotype of my people reinforced. It was also my people’s loss. My humiliation was not a singular event; it was a collective event because it taught a mainstream audience, however small, something harmful about my people. It taught them that the main function of my people at their table is to be pitied, rather than to offer something valuable in exchange for our place at that table.

These past two years, I’ve experienced something that is new to me.

I’ve had the experience of being made to speak for an entire group of people every time I open my mouth or write something in a public space like this, even among people in my wider queer community.

If I tried to tag this writing under “transman” right now, there would only be 163 stories under that category. It is far more lucrative to tag this as “LGBTQ” with its 62,000 stories, or even as “transgender” with 21,000 stories, though it pains me to do this without tagging “transman”. “Testosterone” does a little better, with 1,100 stories, but Testosterone isn’t the only thing that defines me as a trans man.

I was a trans man before beginning to transition medically and would continue to be one had I never taken testosterone. I want to write about other aspects of my existence, too.

When the world believed I was cis, I had the privilege of being able to write exclusively for myself. When I say “privilege” here, I’m not making a judgement on whether this privilege is positive, healthy, or a luxury. These are different words for a reason. A privilege is nothing more than a resource that was available to me, that was not available to others at that time. In this case, my privilege was simply that I didn’t need to explain to my readers that, as a person perceived to be cis, I was human enough to experience the full range of emotions in my life.

What gave me that privilege?

There were no shortage of people who looked like I used to look in the media, experiencing all kinds of positive and negative things. If I wrote exclusively about pain, I could trust that it would be understood that I was more than just a collection of writings about pain. I was still capable of experiencing all of the human emotions.

The absence of adequate representation of my experience means that, if I write, I cannot just write for myself.

When people read my writing, they read it as speaking for an entire people in the absence of other examples of trans men. As soon as I became aware of this, I realized that my public writing would always be either a service to my people or a disservice to my people. The absence of my public writing or speaking is the absence of a voice for my people. That’s both incredibly motivating and a lot of pressure.

I have to think about this now every time I quit a job or leave a public space. I have to think about the fact that there is probably someone like me in the closet in that space who needed my voice in the forced silence of their own.

In the absence of stories of trans men, it is possible that someone even in my own LGBTQ+ community is seeing these words for the first time as you read one of my writings. It is possible that you are misunderstanding the meaning of the word trans man as you read, assuming that you don’t need to look up the meaning to understand. It may not have occurred to you that someone can transition to become (more visibly) a man because that’s not a story that is shown very often in media. I don’t blame you for that, because until relatively recently, I didn’t know that people like me existed either, despite having come out as bisexual for the first time at age 14, making me a long-time member of the LGBTQIA+ community.

When my story is shown in media, it is often shown as either a tragedy or a comedy. If it is a tragedy, it is brutal. If it is a comedy, it is not real. The comedy version of my story is that a woman wants to become a man to obtain his privileges, but goes back to being a woman as soon as she has received the desired benefit, while likely having a gender role reversal experience with a cis heterosexual man played for laughs. The movie Disclosure does a wonderful job of unpacking these tropes.

The fiction is that no one would ever actually want to be me.

It is very rare for me to see a version of my story where someone like me wants to be seen as a man and is happy with the end result of this for its own sake as an affirmation. I have yet to find a road map to a happily ever after life as a trans man. I need to make one, and not just for myself.

The trouble with just flippantly writing a “happily ever after” story for my people is that it can feel a bit like gaslighting to show a trans man’s experience exclusively in this positive light. At least for me, there has also been a lot of pain inherently in this experience, particularly while living in the South of the United States.

In my writing, I want to find a way to walk the tightrope line needed to make a bridge between our painful experiences and the happiness that my people deserve to experience as humans, the happiness that we genuinely do feel.

The only way that I know to do this is to share a collection of truths that focus mostly on the good or neutral things that I have experienced as a trans man, while acknowledging the pain in small doses.

When the world believed that I was a cis woman, I didn’t have the weight of this responsibility when I spoke or wrote publicly. If I wrote about the most intense pain of my life, I knew that the reader would understand that this pain was not the entirety of my existence.

Oddly enough, this particular loss of privilege has been good for my soul. I used to write about pain a lot, and in hindsight, it wasn’t good for me. I had forgotten that there was a lot of joy in my life because the world around me took it for granted that I experienced the full range of emotions in life; I took that for granted, too.

I am grateful now to feel called to share my happiness in larger doses than my pain as a service to my people.

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