on the argonauts and gender and love

I finished Maggie Nelson’s book The Argonauts the other day. It was a book I read with great interest because of the ways in which it is about love and gender and loving someone (the artist Harry Dodge) who is not cisgender, and because the search for love (which looms larger in my life right now than anything else) and my own gender quest are one and the same journey, for as I wrote in November of 2013, at a certain point “I realized that even the tremendously self-involved process of transition would have been utterly pointless and meaningless if it didn’t bring me to a place where I was better able to connect with and love others.”

The Argonauts is Nelson’s book, not Dodge’s, but I get the sense, reading it, that Dodge is better able to love and be loved because of the things he’s done to live what feels to him like a more authentic life. Of accompanying Dodge to Florida for his top surgery, Nelson writes:

Over and over again we emptied your drains into little Dixie cups and flushed the blood stuff down the hotel toilet. I’ve never loved you more than I did then, with your Kool-Aid drains, your bravery in going under the knife to live a better life, a life of wind on skin, your nodding off while propped up on a throne of hotel pillows, so as not to disturb your stitches. “The king’s sleep,” we called it, in homage to our first pay-per-view purchase of the week, The King’s Speech.

The two great hurdles of my own transition, the facial feminization surgery I went to Thailand for and the SRS I had in Arizona, I faced alone. (Well, in Arizona there was a woman I was casually tentatively dating who actually misgendered me both before and after the surgery, so clearly that wasn’t going to go anywhere.) I guess what I believe in is the possibility of a love that might one day come along and feel so true that it will retroactively be almost as if they were there, as if they were always part of this journey, because if I do meet such a person, there is a very real sense in which the journey will have been for them. There are ways, as Nelson writes, “in which we are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance, but from the start and always.”

One of my favorite moments Nelson shares from her relationship with Dodge involves a conversation, maybe something approaching an argument, that the two of them have after watching the film X-Men: First Class in that hotel in Florida. 

While we talked we said words like nonviolence, assimilation, threats to survival, preserving the radical. But when I think about it now I hear only the background buzz of our trying to explain something to each other, to ourselves, about our lived experiences thus far on this peeled, endangered planet.

I love this because I often think about how different talking about film (or games, or books, or art) is with some people than it is with other people, how for some people it seems to exist separate from life, purely for entertainment, purely a diversion, a film is “good,” it’s “funny,” and that’s about as far as it goes, and for others, talking about these things is another way of talking about and trying to make sense of life and of our lives. And maybe I don’t need a partner who loves games quite as much as I do or who is as excited about seeing that new critically acclaimed foreign film as I am, but I do at least need someone who can hang with the fact that when I talk about these things, I’m also often talking about life.

And one thing I’ve learned about life, having been on this crazy journey I’ve been on, is that there are so many things about ourselves that we may think are simply true and unwavering expressions of the self that we may find are actually very much subject to change. Nelson writes of the impact of hormones during a time when she was pregnant and Dodge was still relatively new to testosterone treatments and had just had his top surgery:

A few months after Florida: you always wanting to fuck, raging with new hormones and new comfort in your skin; me vaulting fast into the unfuckable, not wanting to dislodge the hard-won baby seed, falling through the bed with dizziness whenever I turned my head–falling forever–and all touch starting to sicken, as if the cells of my skin were individually nauseated. 

That hormones can make the feel of wind, or the feel of fingers on one’s skin, change from arousing to nauseating is a mystery deeper than I can track or fathom. 

…Even now–two years (after giving birth)–my insides feel more quivery than lush. I’ve begun to give myself over to the idea that the sensation might be forever changed, that this sensitivity is now mine, ours, to work with. Can fragility feel as hot as bravado? I think so, but sometimes struggle to find the way. Whenever I think I can’t find it, Harry assures me that we can. And so we go on, our bodies finding each other again and again, even as they–we–have also been right here, all along. 

I have waged a kind of war on my own hormones, my testosterone levels once much higher than normal and requiring some work to get things to a point where the estrogen could do its thing, could do much of anything at all. Then, after my recent surgery, I was concerned that my interest in sex might have been too low, so now, even though testosterone has been a kind of scourge of my existence, I am trying to make a kind of peace with it, taking tablets of esterified estrogens and methyltestosterone. I hate the way these questions can call into question everything about identity (What is my “true,” correct level of interest in sex?) but still, here I am, turning the knobs and twisting the dials, trying to find a setting that feels right, and knowing that sex is somewhat more complicated and confusing for me than it is for most and hoping that someday someone is willing to shoulder this with me and be patient as we, our bodies, find each other.

image

On July 10th, I go to get my name legally changed. I’ll be glad to have it done but I wonder if it will make my life less complicated or more complicated in terms of the kind of moment Nelson is writing about here. Not too long ago, I went to a coffee shop, and paid with a credit card, and the employee took the name for the drink off of the credit card, apparently seeing no discrepancy between the male name on the card and the person standing before him. I still have a very hard time accepting that this is the case, but it often is. Will there be more moments of puzzlement and confusion when my driver’s license, credit cards and so on actually have my name on them? Will people look for a female companion so they can ask, “This is her card, right?”

After the Q&A at this event, a woman came up to me and told me that she just got out of a relationship with a woman who had wanted her to hit her during sex. She was so fucked up, she said. Came from a background of abuse. I had to tell her I couldn’t do that to her, I could never be that person. She seemed to be asking me for a species of advice, so I told her the only thing that occurred to me: I didn’t know this other woman, so all that seemed clear to me was that their perversities were not compatible.

Even identical genital acts may mean very different things to different people. This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.

This is a difficult point for me. There are people to whom I don’t say “I miss you” because I know that if we both said “I miss you” to each other we might well both mean it but it would mean such different things to each of us. There are people whom I feel strange embracing, because for one of us the gesture is a way of establishing parameters, a way of saying I care about you in more or less the same way I care about many people I might embrace, and for the other it is a moment of wishing that the parameters could be obliterated and a different kind of closeness could be achieved. When I want communion with someone, using the same words or actions to mean such different things is painful for me. I try to avoid it, and stick to the places where some understanding and communion is possible. 

I know now that a studied evasiveness has its own limitations, its own ways of inhibiting certain forms of happiness and pleasure. The pleasure of abiding. The pleasure of insistence, of persistence. The pleasure of obligation, the pleasure of dependency. The pleasures of ordinary devotion. The pleasure of recognizing that one may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margin, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again–not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.

I’m definitely trying to be less evasive and more present than I have been in the past, and while I recognize that I keep telling the same stories over and over again, if there’s one truth I’ve learned that I don’t think I need to relearn, it’s that there is nothing ordinary about ordinary devotion.

When we visited your mother in the hospital, she would sometimes say how glad she was that her daughter was there with her; the nurses would then wheel around the room, looking for her. When we take Iggy to the doctor now, the nurse always says how happy it makes her to see a father helping out with the baby. Conversely, there’s at least one restaurant we don’t go to anymore because the waiter had a Tourette’s-like addiction to calling everyone in our family “ladies” every time he so much as deposited a bottle of catsup at our table. He thinks we’re all girls, my stepson would whisper to us in bemusement. That’s OK–girls are very, very cool, you would tell him. I know, he would say back. 

I know I talk a lot about the pain of being misgendered by the world, by people in coffee shops and restaurants, and it is painful, but I really don’t think it’s painful so much because that specific individual, or so many individuals, or “society,” doesn’t see me as a woman. I think the real pain for me is in these being reminders of my fear that this is something that will always thwart my search for love. It’s not that everybody needs to see me as a woman. I’m not naive. I know that will never happen. It’s that somebody (not just anybody) needs to see me and want me and love me as a woman.

In the book’s acknowledgments, Nelson says to Dodge, “Thank you for showing me what a nuptial might be–an infinite conversation, an endless becoming.”

There’s a great Jens Lekman song on which he sings:

Now I’m going to explain to you 
What it is I like about you
It’s ‘cause I never get to the end of you
Every hour is a minute
Every minute has an eternity in it
I never seem to get to the end of you
Our conversations don’t end with conclusions
They grow up like branches on a tree

and I feel like maybe I needed to do some becoming on my own but I’ve taken that as far as I can. Now I need someone to talk to.