Be Here, Softly

I knocked briskly three times at the back door of my old apartment. I hoped I wouldn’t have to wait long on the outside. The first day of the year is always cold in Seattle, but at least it wasn’t raining. Just the usual steel gray overcast as the sun began to climb above the jagged eastern horizon. I’d dressed for the conversation inside, not to hang out here, and I wanted in.

“It’s unlocked! Come on in!” the voice called. It was always so strange hearing my own voice from the outside.

I sighed. He must be busy with his phone. I pushed in the blue wooden door and entered.

I doffed my mask and stuffed it into my cardigan’s pocket. I saw him—me?—whatever, the version of me from January 1, 2021, sitting across the room at the big dark dining room table. The table was a mess, like always. Bills, mugs, coloring supplies, and papers strewn about.

Sure enough, he was tapping his phone. Probably wondering whether he should hit send on the “Guys, my unsubscribe notice to 2020 finally went through!” status.

I took off my shoes and cleared my throat. In my best voice, big breath in, lifting up the vocal tract, aiming for a bright resonance and a pitch between 180 and 200 Hz, I said, “Hey, January. How’s it going?”

He looked up at me, blinked, startled. “Uhh. Hi.”

“Mind if I take a seat?” I asked, gesturing to the cheap IKEA chair opposite him.

He returned the gesture. “Please.”

I sat, crossed my legs, smoothed out the wrinkles in my skirt. I fidgeted in the chair. I still wasn’t used to the way the bra straps clawed at me at random locations and times. I noticed January was staring at me.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said. “Something’s different, but you can’t put your finger on it.” I pointed at my eyeballs. “You have no idea how difficult it is, but in November you finally figure out contacts.” I pointed to his glasses. “It’s great not having those fogging up every time you put on a mask. Sorry, you’re still wearing masks at the end of the year.” I shrugged. “People don’t want to get shots. What can you do?”

He continued blinking. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like a girl.”

“I am a girl,” I replied.

He snorted, stifled a laugh. His expression turned sour. “No, you’re not. What the hell is this?”

I shifted, resting an arm on the adjacent chair. With two fingers I pulled on that side of my cardigan, showing January more of my tank top and more of my breasts. “Are you sure about that?” I smirked. I loved the sensation of the thinner, glossier skin on my face moving.

He shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re getting at. I thought we were going to talk about this year. About 2021.”

I nodded. “We are. I can tell you anything you like. Would you like me to tell you to buy Tesla stock? I can tell you to buy Tesla stock.”

“Then what are you doing showing up like that?” he asked. “Pretending you’re a cross-dresser, or trans, or something.”

I took a breath. “Because,” I said, “you don’t know this yet, but you’re trans. This is the year you figure that out.”

For a while neither of us said anything. I looked myself over, the version of me across the table. I was a year younger then, but I was in rough shape. January was obviously only shaving once every few days. His face was covered in that awful black stubble. His hair was a mess. His eyes were tired and vacant behind the glasses. He slouched in the chair, thinking me over. He tapped his fingers on the table, the gears turning, trying to figure out what to say.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “It’s not possible that we’re trans. It shouldn’t be possible.”

I nodded sympathetically. “I get what you’re saying. I understand. Yet here we are.” I shifted again in the chair, pressing my legs together, feeling soft shaved skin against skin. Heavenly.

“I don’t get a stroke this year, do I?” he asked. The concern in his voice seemed sincere.

I laughed. God, it felt good to laugh like this again, full and hard and from the diaphragm. I never used to get teary when I laughed, and now I could feel the tears welling without warning whenever something halfway funny happened. “No,” I assured him. “No, I’m healthy. You’re healthy. Or you get healthy, anyway.”

“Then how the hell could I suddenly think I’m transgender out of the blue?” January asked.

“What makes you think it’s out of the blue?” I asked back.

“Because,” he said, “you know how we felt growing up. I’m a guy. I’ve always been a guy. That’s not the trans experience. If you’re transgender, you know that you are from the time you’re a little kid. You want to be someone else from that age. It’s not curiosity. It’s identity.”

“Not correct,” I said. He looked angry. He was about to say something else. I cut him off.

“Look, that’s not true. I know you think that’s how it is for everyone, but it’s not. There are lots, lots, of trans people who experience life more like us.”

“Which is not,” he continued, “a trans experience.”

I sighed. I wondered if there was anything I could say that might have an impact. “January, do you remember what you used to like to do in class when it got boring? Do you remember how you’d look at the girls and daydream all period long about how exciting, how nice it would be to switch bodies with them? How many people do you think do that?”

He looked at me blankly. “What are you—”

“How many?” I pressed the point.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. A quarter? A third? Not everyone. But that’s a thing people do, right?”

I shook my head. “You’re off. It’s more like half a percent, maybe one percent. Whatever the percentage is who are trans.” I locked eyes with him, my brown staring into his brown. “For cis people, this isn’t a thing.”

He glanced away again, considering that.

“There’s more. What do you hate about your body the most? You’re not fat. You’re not weak. You’re not unhealthy. You’re not in pain. There are like two things you hate about your body: your eyesight sucks and you’re male. And one of those is an inconvenience. The other one is grinding you to powder.”

I continued. “You know that cis guys actively like their bodies, right? They like being male. They don’t see privilege as a reward for putting up with a shitty, disgusting existence. They’re not dreaming of being a woman every night when they’re trying to fall asleep.”

I was getting emotional. The big, new emotions that were difficult to name. They felt like everything at once. “You know that feeling, how you hate yourself, at least a little bit, all the fucking time? That’s not normal. That’s not normal self-loathing. That’s not even normal depression. It’s depression and depersonalization from gender dysphoria.” We made eye contact again. “January, you have gender dysphoria. The treatment for gender dysphoria is transition.”

He figured out what he wanted to say. “Okay, there are two things here. How do you know being female would be any better? And even if it would be, it doesn’t matter. What the hell are you—am I—going to do about it?”

I was glad to have something to work with. “So, on your first point, the answer is experimentation. This isn’t a problem you can solve with theory. You figure out, at the beginning of August, that you like how you look in a dress. Like, it’s not hot, it’s comfortable. That sets off a chain reaction.”

He raised his eyebrows. Those thick, unkempt, pre-wax eyebrows. “A dress. Like Francis Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?”

I groaned. That memory, fifteen years old, still stung. “What do you think playing Francis Flute was?” I asked him. “An honest trial of what being feminine would be like? You put on a dress so you could go out on stage and get laughed at. And they laughed at you, all right. How could that possibly be an affirming experience? You filed this away for a decade and a half as evidence of not being trans. It’s not. It’s evidence that you don’t like to get laughed at when you wear a dress.

“Anyway,” I went on. “This dress was much nicer.”

“Which one?” he asked. He appeared genuinely curious.

“You know that nursing dress Sarah has—it’s like a royal blue color?”

“I love that dress,” he said.

“Yeah, you do,” I smiled. “And that was the start. You shave your legs and your arms. You can’t imagine how wonderful that’s going to make you feel. You start doing the work you should’ve done years ago. You find out that there are other people like you, who have this aliased, Magic Eye picture of gender dysphoria hidden as generic self-loathing and an obsession with transformation fantasies. You get your ears pierced and it’s poggers.”

“It’s what?” He asked.

“Oh,” I said. “‘Poggers.’ It’s what the Gen Zers say. ‘Cool’ or ‘awesome,’ basically. They’re light-years ahead of you on this stuff. You’re gonna learn a lot from them.”

I seemed to be getting through, at least some of my words. I went on. “But to your other point: What can you do about it? There are a few things. In September you start laser hair removal of your beard.”

Again the raised eyebrows. “Isn’t that permanent?”

It was my turn to roll my eyes “Oh, come on. You’ve had a beard like twice in your life and you hated it, hated it, both times. You’re never going to want that. Just relax and zap it away.”

He shook his head, “Playing dress-up. Like the dress.”

“And how about hormones?” I asked. “Is that dress-up?”

He was breathing sharply. His eyes were darting around. I remembered that feeling of agitation and felt my own heart starting to race away. “Who gives a shit about hormones?” He asked, almost shouting. “Being male is in your—my—history. In our—literally in our DNA.”

“Why do you care about DNA so much?” I asked.

He smacked the table. I startled as the pens and markers rattled. “Because that’s real! That’s not pretend. That’s who we are.”

I was breathing quickly and shallowly now. I closed my eyes and made my diaphragm take a long and slow breath in. It was frightening seeing myself like this. The awful adrenaline surging, carrying me away to a purgatory of anger.

I opened my eyes. “January,” I said as calmly as I could. “I want you to think about something.” I lifted a magenta-colored pencil from the mug to my right. I held the base in my hand, pointing the broken tip at my partner across the table. “Let’s say I have here a magic chromosome wand. With a flick of my wrist,” I swished it about, “it can take that pesky Y chromosome and turn it into an X.” I set the pencil down. “So now your genome is 46 XX.” I paused for effect. “So what do you think happens to you now?”

He considered this. “I would guess—”

He was being dense. I cut him off. “Not a damn thing, January. Nothing. You could live to be a hundred and you’d never even know the change had happened. You’d look the same, talk the same, feel the same, be the same. But genetically, because you care about that so much, genetically you’d be a girl. For whatever the hell that’s worth.”

This seemed to get him actually thinking. I didn’t want to lose him. I continued. “Now let’s talk about hormones instead. You realize that your genes don’t actually know whether they’re in a male body or a female body, right? Every day you get a flood of testosterone and a trickle of estrogen, and that fires up the expression of the male characteristics. It’s easy, trivially easy to change that balance.”

“And do what exactly?” he asked. He was curious. This was good.

“Lay down fat according to the female plan. In the thighs, in the butt. Burn off the male fat in the gut. Put fat in the cheeks. Bone structure has a little bit to do with this, but most of what you see when you judge a person’s face to be a man’s or a woman’s is where the fat is. Grow breasts. And this skin.” I stretched an arm across the table. He hesitated, seemed to flinch.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I’m not gonna bite ya. I don’t want you to have to wait until the end of October to feel this, like I did.” I ran my fingers over the creamy skin of my wrist. My brain lit up, savoring the softness. “They make you read over a list of effects and sign that you understand what it does when you start estrogen. One of them is ‘softer, clearer skin.’ That’s an understatement and a half.”

He reached out tentatively. He tapped and let his fingertips rest a moment where the blue-green veins ran next to the tendons. I could see the flash of excitement, of recognition in his eyes, then he pulled his hand away.

His hand, I thought. Something wasn’t right about that, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

“But it’s not everything,” he said.

I nodded. “No, it’s not. You have to take voice lessons. They suck, by the way. Because estrogen does nothing to that. Your bones aren’t going to change. It’s not a magic wand. But it’s a lot. You can go through puberty again and trade your secondary sex characteristics. How does that sound?”

Across the table, the snapshot of who I was twelve months ago considered that. I was getting through to her, really getting through for the first time, I felt with a twinge of recognition. The poor girl. She was near the end of the road and at the end of her rope. She’d turn thirty-two in a month and had spent her whole life trying to be a boy, then a man, up to this time. Her body and her life had betrayed her, and she was too polite even to understand it. The middle child, only too eager to accept this obscene indignity of existing in the wrong flesh. It was going to break her soon.

“I can’t believe it,” she finally said.

I nodded. “I know. It’s too much. I can’t expect you to accept this in a conversation. I don’t know how we did this, to be honest.”

“No,” she said. “I mean, of course. Of course this happened. It’s the Magic Eye puzzle.” It was convenient being different versions of the same person. We could understand each other with the same lexicon of metaphors. “I needed to see the answer key. To know what to look for. I just can’t believe you figured it out without that.”

I was surprised that she went on, “Hey, you remember watching The Little Mermaid when we were like twelve?”

I nodded. I knew where she was going with this. “You’re thinking of ‘Part of Your World,’ right?”

She laughed. “It’s dumb. But yeah. Remember, thinking ‘I get this. I get how she feels. Because that’s how I wonder about being a girl.’”

Among other things, estrogen was really doing a number on my emotions. The tears were welling up again. “January,” I reached out, grabbed her hand. “I love you. I’m so sorry about what you have to live through in the next eight months.”

She was startled by that, pulled her hand back. “Do I want to know?” she asked.

I thought about how many times she’d be curled up on the bathroom floor, weeping about what a shitty parent she was, how incapable of being a father she felt, how she couldn’t stand being a husband anymore. I thought about how she’d stare at the ceiling every night, wishing she could wake up in another life, in a female body somewhere else. Three months from now, she’d look up directions to the Deception Pass Bridge and wonder Should I just stop existing tonight? It was bad enough living through that without knowing it was about to happen.

“Sarah and the kids are good,” I said. “You need to know that. You need to know that your marriage and your love are stronger than they’ve been any time since you got married. You need to know that that wild way you loved the kids is back. That you adore them clearly, brightly, without the crap of self-hate getting in the way.” I paused. “There are bad, bad, terrible, awful things you have to live through to get from here to there. But these things will happen, and they’ll pass. And you’ll get to where I am now.”

She considered me. “And where is that?”

“Happy,” I said. “Strange. A little scared. Excited. But happy. Glad to be living this life again. Glad to be existing in this body.”

Was it a bargain I was making? What was I trading away? My manhood, for one thing. I’d been groomed from the beginning to see that as one of the most precious parts of myself. The ability for a couple of years, maybe forever, to be seen as normal when I walked outside. The conditional love of my in-laws.

But that wasn’t the Faustian bargain. That was the one I had before. Pretending to be him, my skin making me unsafe in my own body. No. I was giving up nothing I would miss.

She was tired, and her eyes showed it. I always thought those eyes were boring, bland before. Then I saw myself, saw her in the mirror, and they seemed to shine. She looked at me.

“What did you say just now, before you talked about Sarah and the kids?”

“I love you,” I said simply.

She shook her head. “Well. I guess that’s something.”

I remembered how every therapist I’d had told me I needed to learn to love myself, and I remembered how impossible that felt every time I heard it. Like I was being told to just breathe underwater or leap into space. Love yourself, and change your gender. Two impossible things, by themselves. But possible together, it seemed.

She started tapping the table with her fingers, and I noticed I was doing the same. “You like my nail polish?” I asked, showing her the purple shimmer on the nails.

She shrugged. “So how much of this do I get to remember?” she asked.

I sighed. “None, I don’t think. You don’t get a free ride through all this. You have to actually live this life, make these decisions, it seems.”

She nodded. “Well, at least that way I have some agency.”

I nodded too. “Personally, I prefer happiness, but agency is all right too.”

I pushed back my chair, stood up. Without a word she mirrored the gesture. I crossed to her side of the table and grabbed her in a hug. It was strange feeling this other body. The skin so rough, the muscles and neckline wrong, the stubble on the face, the man-stink of the sweat. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. But serviceable. If you knew what to do about it.

“Don’t worry, girl,” I said. “You’ll figure out how to be me someday. I’ll figure out how to be—I don’t know, whoever we’re supposed to be.”

We let go of the embrace. She was smiling. “You smell great,” she said. “Sorry, I hope that’s not weird.”

I smiled. “That’s the point of the bit, man. One of them anyway.” I moved to the door, opened it, hesitated.

“Take care of yourself. You’ll get through this,” I said. January nodded, then sat back at the table, just as she was when I entered. I slid my flats back on and pulled the loops of the mask over my ears, taking care not to snag on the earrings.

The door closed behind me with a soft clunk. I felt the chill air through the skirt, through the cardigan. I gave thanks that I’d survived this year, and that I’d found hope again. I walked away, into the invisible future.