The Trans Experience

 

Sometime on the night of Monday, September 4, 2017, at my parents’ apartment in Manhattan, I took advantage of their HBO subscription and watched The Sopranos. I know the exact date because I took a photo of my parents’ TV screen, lit up and high contrast against their dark apartment, of Edie Falco as Carmela Soprano, wearing a snake-print blazer, long-ass fingernails, a huge diamond ring, and an expression of dismay, distrust, or both. I posted it to Instagram. I captioned it “me.”
 
The week after that, I transitioned. Carmela made me trans.
 
Well, obviously, it’s more complicated than that. But soon after I watched that episode, I had a nervous breakdown. It was partly related to PTSD, and largely related to realizing I did not want to be a man anymore. I had recognized something in Carmela — not only in her clothes and hair, which reminded me so much of the older women in my life, but in the way she carried her pain. The alternate, possibly better lives she had given up to make her current life work.
 
At the time, I was an egg, compartmentalized and scared, pretending that the strictures of my life were inevitable, and even somehow morally correct. This is a common trans experience, the assumption that, no, life cannot get better, and yes, you always will be repressed; you “crack” when you realize that you can do whatever the fuck you want (at least within the limits of our transphobic, material reality).
 
Seeing a woman whose aesthetic I could yearn for, but who was herself emotionally, socially, and sexually repressed, made the prospect of womanhood seem realistic for me. I could not imagine being a woman who was happy and free. But I could imagine being Carmela.
 
Trans people have existed for eons, but each new trans person made in this world largely has to make themselves. As writer on trans history Morgan M. Page recently pointed out, we are constantly rediscovering the very idea of transness as if it’s the first time, thanks to the erasure of trans history and the impact of institutional transphobia — in prisons, a lack of health care, and societal neglect. This is changing; the bonds of transness between generations are strengthening. Nonetheless, transitioning is still a deeply isolating experience.
 
To vastly oversimplify it, you start at point A and need to get to point B. At first, the Grand Canyon seems to separate those points. Eventually, you learn to build a bridge to get across. But first you need to have a beacon at point B — lights to guide you on this lonely, scary journey, during which you might lose friends, family, a sense of security, a sense of self.
 
On September 4, 2017, I was at point A, staring at Edie Falco’s face on my parents’ TV, stunned at the recognition I felt when I looked at her. At first, I thought it might just have been because of the character’s styling — the animal-print tops, the long fingernails, the blonde hair, the jewelry. The Sex and the City women had been gaudy too, in their own way, wearing expensive statement dresses and impractical heels. But Carrie did not feel like a point B to me. Carmela did.
 
Falco has said that the elements of Carmela’s look weren’t accoutrements, but integral parts of the process of becoming Carmela — so powerful that they pushed her into being a different person. “If my father was to put on the fingernails and the hair, he would end up becoming Carmela as well,” Falco said in an interview. Falco felt the role was entirely out of her wheelhouse: “Not being a real girly girl in that way, it was very fun” to play her.
 
I grew up in New York City. My mom is from New Jersey. We’re Jewish, not Italian, and my parents were not in the mob (as far as I know), but many of the women in my life looked like Carmela. She is, to me, the ultimate example of a kind of vaguely ethnic white womanhood. What might look gaudy to some to me just looks like my grandmas: my dad’s mom in her sequin tops and big hoop earrings, my mom’s mom in the fur coats she wore for her daily walks through lower Manhattan.
 
Carmela, like both my grandmas, had pride in the stoicism she exhibited as she carried her pain. She had a deep sense of obligation to her family even as she yearned for more, and she, like my grandmas, found joy where she could — in her clothes and style, in her ability to bring family together around a table, in her conviction that if she kept going, at least her children’s lives would be a bit better than hers. Yet she also spends all six seasons of The Sopranos trapped in a cycle of complicity and victimhood, benefiting from her husband Tony’s crimes even as she bemoans them. There is much that is not unique about Carmela; she is one of countless representations of repressed and complicit women in movies, TV, fiction (see: Skyler White, Anna Gunn’s character in Breaking Bad). But Carmela’s repression felt closest to mine, felt closest to that of my family members.
 
Carmela is a woman trapped in her circumstances — if she leaves Tony she will lose money, her friends, her lifestyle, her family — but she is mostly trapped in a cage of her own psyche, constantly battling her own expectations of herself, her desire to raise a family and provide for them, and her desire to feel an individual freedom made impossible by those things. The character spends much of her time lamenting how much she’s let happen, confessing to priests, a psychiatrist, her friends about her complicity. She spends the rest of her time offloading her life choices onto others, blaming her kids, Tony, her mom, everyone, for her predicament. When people tell her to allow herself peace, she chastises herself for how bad she is. “I have forsaken what is right for what is easy,” she tells a priest early in the first season. “Allowing what I know is evil in my house. Allowing my sweet children to be a part of it. Because I wanted a better life for them. Because I wanted this house. I wanted money in my hands.”
 
When, midway through season three, a psychiatrist tells her she’ll never feel happy unless she leaves her husband, she willfully misunderstands him over and over again, softening his words, telling herself that she needs to set boundaries and internalize less conflict, and ignoring the doctor’s blunt warning. Carmela may be a mob boss’s wife, but she also is the embodiment of a womanhood that many, cis and trans, yearn for, against their better instincts: one that replicates the infantilized yet secure state of the suburban housewife, where we can be both victim and perpetrator, but mostly have our agency taken away from us.
 
Writer Jamie Hood elucidated this conundrum through the story of another of TV’s notorious-yet-loved matriarchs, Betty Draper, in an essay for the New Inquiry. “Isn’t this the Betty Draper problem writ large?” Hood asks. “Longing for the lobotomization of the Stepford Wife yet trapped in the trauma of being?” Feminism has not completely liberated us — we may work alongside men and lead lives independent of them, but we still feel unsatisfied, a certain true liberation (economic, social, sexual) missing from life. We can see that contradiction in the music of Lana Del Rey, and in the tradwife aesthetic. It could be the Betty Draper problem, or the Carmela Soprano problem, or the P.E. Moskowitz problem: It is very normal as a white woman to yearn for the security of white, patriarchal oppression, even as you recognize your complicity in it, and the limits it forces upon you.
 
We’re drawn to Carmela and women like her because they allow us to play out a fantasy that we know we need to leave behind.
 
When I called Carmela “me” back in 2017, that’s what I was yearning for: to become a white woman, with all the fun and all the fucked-up shit that entails. I wanted the girlboss attitude. I wanted to strut confidently down the street in designer clothing and have people recognize my power. I wanted the oppression and the complicity. I wanted the whole package.
 
But when I rewatched The Sopranos recently, I felt a new distance from Carmela. I am a trans person in 2021, a committed anticapitalist, someone who believes in gender liberation. I know that just because white trans women must make a more concerted effort to be perceived as women, that does not erase our ability to oppress others. I still felt pangs of recognition as I watched Carmela glide around her Jersey mansion — her desire for glamour, her insistence on the importance of family above all else — but now I felt a need to move beyond her, and beyond the false choices presented to women like her, and women like my grandmothers.
 
The most haunting scene for me in The Sopranos is late in the third season, when Carmela visits a museum with her daughter, Meadow. They pass a painting of Jusepe de Ribera’s The Holy Family With Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria, and Carmela begins to cry. “Look at the little baby’s hand against her cheek,” she says. “She’s so at peace. Beautiful, innocent, gorgeous little baby.” Carmela so yearns for this innocence, to be uncorrupted, to be given back a kind of moral virginity — to lift off all the compromises she’s made to feel comfortable, afford the clothes she wants, and give her kids the lives she feels they deserve. She wants out.
 
But Carmela stays. She retreats into her corrupt comfort.
 
At one point, when I felt no agency over my own gender and thus little agency over my own life, I might have found this scene moving and sad. Now I find it kind of sick. She has the choice to stop yearning for something so impossible, and over and over again chooses to keep yearning. I know I don’t have to do that. I can leave. I can move on, past the beacon at point B to something better. I may not necessarily be happier, but I can be more fulfilled, more complete, less complicit in all the moral compromises women like Carmela felt they had to make.
 
Yet I recognize that the first thing I did when I was assigned this piece was to calculate how much of my check I could spend on a flashy designer coat. I wrote it while wearing a leopard-print top. There are still a few things Carmela got right.

I Couldn’t Imagine Being Happy. But I Could Imagine Being Carmela. By P.E. Moskowitz.Vulture, March 3, 2021

When I was a toddler I would push on the head of my penis until it disappeared inside itself. I would watch in fascination as it slowly unraveled into its usual form and again in fascination how easily I could make it disappear. I thought it looked like a rose blossoming and — more miraculously — unblossoming.
 
This is the kind of story I grasped onto and shared when I was first accepting my identity as a trans woman. It seemed to confirm that I was different and had always been different. I told myself this memory proved my transness and therefore proved my womanhood. Of course, I could just have easily been a curious little boy exploring his body.
 
Last week during the Senate hearing on the Equality Act, Senator Kennedy began by saying that he believes gender dysphoria is real. He then directed a series of questions to the witness, renowned transphobe Abigail Shrier. “Would this bill require schools to open up a junior high school women’s locker room to a boy who identifies as a girl?” he asked. “Would this bill prohibit the boy with gender dysphoria from exposing his penis to the girls?”
 
If you’re a cis woman reading this in good faith, your response to these questions is likely disgust. You think of yourself as trans-inclusive; you have trans friends, you date trans people. Maybe you’re my friend, maybe you’re dating me. You recognize and protest against this obvious transphobia. But conflating genitalia and gender is not exclusive to the Senate — nor is it exclusive to intentional, obviously malicious transphobia. It’s ingrained in you. It’s ingrained in me. It’s why I felt like I needed proof of bottom dysphoria to be a woman. It’s why you carelessly say things that make the dysphoria I have so much worse.
 
I spent years not thinking about my penis — or, at least, thinking about it as little as possible. I did not share the dick obsessions of the other boys my age. I didn’t partake in the measuring contests or the group masturbation sessions or any of the other super gay things supposedly straight boys do with their hormones. When I did start masturbating, I always watched cis lesbian porn — or more esoteric penis-free content like the opening moments of Barbarella. I came directly into the toilet desperate to reduce the length of the experience — and the clean-up. My sex dreams never involved genitalia. One moment my body was pressed against another body and the next I was waking up covered in shame.
 
When I started having sex, my penis maintained this same level of importance. My first girlfriend and I mostly had what straight people call foreplay and I’d call one-sided lesbian sex. We’d make out and grind against each other and then I’d go down on her until she came. The end was mere obligation — I’d put my penis inside her to quickly release my desire while dissociating away from the moment itself.
 
The specifics changed slightly, but this is pretty much how I had sex until I came out. I wanted the intimacy and the release and to do a good job. But I didn’t care about my own pleasure beyond a drive to appear normal. I continued to masturbate directly into the toilet.
 
After I transitioned, my penis became the most important part of my body — at least, to other people. The disinterest I’d felt all my life disappeared with my self-ignorance. Suddenly, my detachment turned into active disdain. This increased dysphoria was made worse by the watchful eyes and invasive questions of those around me. I wanted to shove my difference in people’s faces with a punk defiance, but sometimes I just felt like hiding. I’d wear tight pants that showed off my bulge all the while oscillating between feeling rebellious and feeling insecure. In the four years I’ve lived openly as a trans woman I’ve struggled between proudly declaring myself a chick with a dick — even saying the phrase “chick with a dick” — and wanting to pivot my life choices so I could get rid of that identity as soon as possible. There is a difference between one’s politics and one’s feelings.
 
The fraught nature of my body increased once I was single. Dating as a trans woman in the lesbian community is challenging. But it would be more accurate to say that I have dated adjacent to the lesbian community. I don’t date lesbians. Or, rather, they don’t date me. I’ve had sex with one lesbian and our pants stayed on — if you call that sex. Of course, that doesn’t mean cis lesbians aren’t interested in me. But if cis men are likely to fuck a trans woman in secret, the cis lesbian counterpart is drawn out emotional affairs with no follow through. There’s just… something… missing. Wonder what that could be.
 
This is not exclusive to cis lesbians. Plenty of other cis queer women and AFAB non-binary people are perplexed by my body. Some avoid me, others fetishize me. And while the obvious answer is to just date other trans women, there’s no guarantee with those experiences either. The most fetishized I’ve ever felt was with another trans woman. We’ve all been raised with the same transphobia.
 
To quote the prophet Mitski: I don’t want your pity. I’ve also had a lot of great experiences — relationships, flings, one-night stands — that have allowed me to uncover new parts of myself while connecting with others. I feel totally confident in my ability to find love and sex and chaos and anything else I seek. But this essay isn’t about any of that. This essay is about penises.
 
The most frequent microaggressions I experience involve AFAB people talking about how they don’t like dicks. Or how they don’t like men and expressing that by referencing dicks. Or talking about how they do like dicks but immediately associating those dicks with cis men. Everyone may be obsessed with the genitalia of trans people, but AFAB queers are obsessed with the genitalia of cis men. I get it. It’s easier to talk about “dicks” than it is to talk about patriarchy. It’s easier to lament a body part than confront the trauma of compulsory heterosexuality or the trauma of sexual assault. It’s easier to say you “miss dick” than to admit that as a bisexual person you are still drawn to cis men despite the harm other cis men have caused you. But as cathartic as it may be to blame penises for abuse and desire, these feelings are misguided. They allow cis men to evade responsibility for their actions, blaming innate biology for their harm. And they imply that trans women are not only men, but men to be feared.
 
You can learn people’s pronouns and post things on Trans Visibility Day and tweet all about how Trans Women Are Women, but if you are still associating genitalia with gender then you have done a whole lot of surface work and changed none of your core beliefs. And so, when I hear these comments, it’s unsurprising when you don’t want to date me. And so, when I hear these comments, it concerns me when you do.
 
It’s exhausting to spend so much time defending a part of my body I don’t even want. People stifle their feelings for me because of my penis without realizing they might never even see it. The only dick I’m fucking you with is my strap-on. And if I do eventually trust you enough to let you interact with my penis it certainly won’t be the same as whatever experiences you’ve had with cis men.
 
But this would never be my rebuttal, because my loyalties do not lie with some cis woman and my desire to get laid. I will always care more about trans women who will never have access to surgery. I will always care more about trans women who don’t even want surgery. I will always care more about trans women who do want their dicks sucked. Because discomfort with one part of your body does not make you trans and does not make you a woman. The same way a cis man is still a man if he doesn’t like getting head. The same way a cis woman’s gender is not changed by wanting someone to deep throat her realistic strap-on. Trans and cis, our bodies vary, our relationships to our bodies vary. Sex is about discovering and connecting across those variations. Good sex anyway.
 
The fact is I don’t think any of the discrimination and fetishization I experience is really about my penis. No body part is that powerful. My penis is simply a representation of my transness, of my difference. Some people feel it invalidates their queer identity. Other people feel it validates their queer identity too much. And most frequently it just makes people uncomfortable when attached to someone with such good tits because that goes against the cis white heteropatriarchal worldview that was forced upon us all.
 
I am tired of educating people on this history. I am tired of educating people on the most basic principles of biology. I am tired of first dates turning into gender studies classes. I am tired of not knowing why things didn’t work out with someone and then finding evidence in their microaggressions months later. I am tired.
 
As the transphobia in media loses its subtlety and an unprecedented number of bills targeting trans people — especially trans youth — arise across the country, I feel more certain than ever that visibility and mere acceptance are not enough. The only way to fight transphobia in a way that’s substantial, effective, and permanent, is for our culture to shift its very notion of gender. That is not going to start with transphobes. That’s going to start with people who consider themselves trans-inclusive, but have so much internal work left to do. That’s going to start with a queer woman who respects my pronouns, but is still uncomfortable at the thought of my penis.
 
I’m not asking for perfection. But I am asking for effort. Not for my sex life — I wouldn’t date most of you anyway — but for my humanity, for the humanity of so many. Don’t repeat platitudes. Really unlearn your binary connections between genitalia and gender. Really unlearn the associations you bring to bodies you’ve yet known. Really unlearn these things and start seeing trans people as individuals, as people. Unlearn these things because if you don’t trans lives will continue to be debated in the Senate and I will not fuck you.
 
Those things are not of equal importance but I know at least some of you care about both.

This Is an Essay About Penises.  By Drew Gregory. Autostraddle ,  March 25, 2021