Pleasure Reading: On Being Trans
Among the multitude of pleasures and horrors latent in the human body, one of its more compelling aspects is its metaphorical quality. Metaphor, as we know, is that literary device in which one thing is made to resemble another, thus revealing surprising qualities of either of the two parties in the device. In this way thou art more lovely than a Summer’s day or, perhaps, colder than a witch’s tit. In this way all the world is a stage, a blue marble, a vampire. If Murakami is to be believed, the world itself is a metaphor.
Yes, we are probably aware of the many metaphors the body holds within it, delightful as they allow us to explore the expectant rosebuds of our lovers’ lips or assholes, painful as they render us landscapes to be conquered or beasts to be exploited. The metaphor lets those of us who are, say, tall as a beanstalk lift our giggling niblings — they themselves knee-high to a grasshopper — and make them into planes and birds and UFOs. It also lets us drown in our grief, split the air with our cries, carry trauma inside like a “piece of thin ice,” as Erdrich described it.
Okay and so let’s extend how we understand what metaphor is, so that now it is the miraculously analogous quality that unites us as species. It is what makes us not “puzzle pieces from the clay” — apologies to The Postal Service — but rather free radicals that bond and destroy with reckless abandon. It’s this fundamentally analogous quality that lets us find familiar love again and again in the arms of new friends, lets us gasp with familiar joy as we’re penetrated by a different one-night stand, lets us recognize familiar unspoken agony in the eyes of a stranger. And metaphor, at least in this sense, lets us be caregivers and saviors, letting a baby freely drink from the breast of a person who didn’t birth it, letting us lift the heart from a dead man and place it in the chest of a living one. Our bodies, for all their strange and wonderful differences, are analogues. They are metaphorical.
And strangely enough, it is this radically metaphorical quality that causes so much anxiety in the minds of those who would see as necessarily distinct, private, individual. Did you know the idea of sex differentiation is fundamentally an invented one? That it has a distinct history? That it is, by and large, simply not true? At some point in the eighteenth-century, English society decided that men and women were different animals, opposite but attractive like the poles of a magnet, and that this was the way it had always been. Just like that, overnight change. The flick of a switch. It is within this period, for instance, that we get the term “Skene’s gland,” that organ in the — as they say — “female body,” distinctly absent from the male. In 2002 the Federative International Committee on Anatomical Terminology added a secondary term for the Skene’s gland: female prostate, revealing the fundamentally analogous quality of this organ that had existed all along. It is in this period that botanical metaphors for genitals — stamen and carpals that, while functionally a bit different, often spring from the same basic form — begin to fall by the wayside. What do we have left except flowers and bees, distinct creatures whose paths cross only briefly? As an aside, the bee itself had seen something of a metaphorical shift over the period, representing first Amazonian bravado and then dutiful motherhood. But then, bee metaphors have never been particularly coherent, containing within them commentary on peasants and royalty, sexuality, chastity, thievery, murder. Shakespeare probably conceptualized the monarch of a beehive as a king — in spite of its egg-laying capacity — but by the end of his life the idea of the queen bee was becoming analogous to the reign of Old Bess herself. Perhaps bee metaphors are themselves metaphorical.
Where was I? Oh right, sex. Here’s where I finally get to my point: transgender people are great poets. Often that is the case literally, but what I mean here is that transness is a phenomenon that is always in the process of revealing new metaphors. And like in great poetry, these metaphors are primal, intuitively felt. That is, we know they have always been true. The mere existence of a trans person is metaphorical, in a sense, revealing that one type of body was always already just like another. My own body was always female, but it’s true that it was once like a male’s. It’s this metaphor that I feel quite painfully when I gaze eye to eye with the tall boy I’m on a date with; it’s this metaphor I feel with strange delight when I let my lips — yes, reader, painted just like a red, red rose — touch his. He doesn’t care about this metaphor, or maybe he enjoys it too much, who can say?
Ah, and further, those medical interventions that are perhaps the most spectacular aspect of being trans — that is, they often act as spectacle for the outside observer. Estrogen wilts the stamen, renders the skin soft as satin, makes pleasant mounds of breast tissue swell from the chest as two rolling foothills — oh yes, the body as landscape is a metaphor the trans woman finds as inescapable as the cis woman. Oh, and testosterone, which makes small forests of the jawline and perhaps builds a mighty tower of the clitoris. The body makes new metaphors. And then there’s surgery, in which painter-doctors make new brushstrokes upon the face, gardener-doctors make the penis unfold and bloom into a vulva, in which the butcher-doctor — we are aware that metaphors can be used to hurt us, yes? — steals away all the apparently sacred flesh of the bosom. I don’t endorse every metaphor, but I can’t deny their power.
Transition itself is a metaphor, of course, and the very word suggests a journey across something, perhaps born in stygian fashion by a metaphorical boatman. Or perhaps it’s a journey into something, a yawning chasm or a spray of uncharted stars. Maybe it’s a journey beyond something, so that the metaphor struggles to even describe this new place (though the place itself is, once again, a metaphor). Transition can be a coming home, it can be a defiant stand against a rising tide, it can be a small shrug in the totality of a life. And you might be coming now to the end of this essay — what is reading but a metaphorical journey for the mind — and realizing that I have no real destination in mind. What’s my point except to gush (gushing is, that’s right, a metaphor)? But then, what’s the point of being transgender except to be? Ah, so here’s my purpose then: to be purposeless. The metaphor can drive a plot, surely, but it is rarely necessary in that purely utilitarian sense with which we sometimes unfortunately use to read and critique. The metaphor is, by its very nature, an indulgence that we enjoy for its mere texture and flavor. Transition is useless, and that’s the best part.
