P. Carl - Becoming a man: The Story of a Transition

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2020 by P. Carl

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition January 2020

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Interior design by Jaime Putorti

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-1-9821-0509-9

ISBN 978-1-9821-0511-2 (ebook)

For Lynetteresilience, strength, beauty

and LeAnn

and Lenny

Becoming foreign. To yourself and others. So thats what a transition looks like.

Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

When bodies gather as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are also making broader demands; they are demanding to be recognized, to be valued, they are exercising a right to appear, to exercise freedom, and they are demanding a livable life.

Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly

I have been living as a white, Midwestern woman for fifty years and ten months, until one weekend in March, I cross a line. It comes unexpectedly on this particular day, but Ive been thinking and expecting it for as long as I can remember. The Hotel Chandler in Midtown Manhattan: seven months on testosterone, I check in at about 6 P.M. Good evening, sir, how are you? This isnt my first sirthey have come and gone my entire life, and more often in recent weeks. But its the start of something that from this sir forward will be my new life. On March 16, 2017, I become a man.

What changed from yesterday and the day before yesterday? What is this fine line of gender that makes me a woman one day and a man the next? Did my jawline get just square enough, my voice deep enough? Did my hairline recede enough? All I know is that from March 16 forward, I am finally me. I take a selfie and send it to my wife, with a text message: Im me now. I cant fucking believe it. I am finally me. I am visible for the first time, just two months shy of my fifty-first birthday. This rite of passage, this moment of being welcomed into the world as embodied is something most people experience at the moment of birth, or even earlier, at the moment of those ultrasound pictures of unborn babies that all my friends with children have, already sexed by their obstetrician and their parents. Some of us are never announced into the world and some of us wait fifty years.

I am finally announced into being in this moment in a random hotel in Manhattan unraveling my past, present, and possible future. There are so many political ramifications of this new bodyramifications I both know and cant know until I begin to live them.

The next morning, I will go down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Good morning, sir, what can I get you? Coffee, sir? I will read the news on my phone: a white supremacist is being asked to resign from the White House; its the lead story. Second up, another judge has granted a temporary restraining order on the presidents newly revised travel ban, from seven countries to six. This judge also thinks it is discriminatory, even with Iran dropped from the list. My waiter is from India I learn after he brings me my oatmeal; he tells me he and his wife recently immigrated here. Just in time, I think to myself. They both work at the restaurant. He forgets to bring me my orange juice. I will get free breakfast for the rest of the week, with many apologies to this newly minted white man. When I ask for more coffee, he calls me boss, a term I will hear often from now on from men of color in service positions: valets, waiters, taxi drivers. I am stunned and embarrassed by the term, the sudden privilege and power that emanates from my white male skin. I dont feel it in my body yet. But the world can see it.

I come into being as a white man in 2017. White male supremacists occupy the White House. Immigrants are deported and denied entry to the United States. Black lives dont matter to the politicians controlling Congress. I am announced to the world as a man eight months before #MeToo will fill our social media and news feedswomen will unsilence themselves and begin the arduous process of dismantling the lives of individual men, one by one by one, for unspeakable acts of discrimination, harassment, assault, and abuse. No part of this two-year stretch has been more divisive than the Republican Partys insistence on appointing Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. No moment has been more despairing than listening to Susan Collins, a woman, a senator, say that Christine Blasey Ford was likely assaulted but that it wasnt by Kavanaughto hear one woman say to another woman that she doesnt believe her, among a chorus of white men who decry what has been done to Kavanaugh, that he is the victim, not Blasey Ford. Depending on who sees me and in what context, my body is grouped with these men and Collins in this moment in historya threat not just to women but also to a fragile democracy on the brink of collapse, in part over a gender divide that has never been more volatile.

This book is a laypersons anthropological exploration of living a double life, Double consciousness, to borrow a term from W.E.B. Dubois, is a permanent condition of a trans person who has lived a life in one body and then another. The nuances of doubling require an untangling of two bodies, two distinct perspectives, two lives lived. I seek to do justice to the complexity of this emotional travel as I write this book in a number of different cities and through an evolving bodily transubstantiation where in one moment I am material subject matter to be consumed and in another I feel like a holy essence, my body and blood both sacrificed and blessed into being.

For most of my life, this process of becoming feels lethal, the disparate parts always at war with one another. I am born to the name Polly, but I never feel like her. I spend decades trying to know her, shape her into something that I can bear to live with. I medicate her, I dress her like I imagine Carl would look if he were allowed to live. On two occasions, I try to kill her off. The moment at the Hotel Chandler when I am lifting my hands over my head and jumping up and down and taking photos and posting them everywhere is the beginning of revelations, the ones I will try to convey to you in these pages. I become solid enough to share with you how my becoming is filled with contradictions and questions, and sometimes I have the courage to look back and tell you about what Polly went through and other times I want to convince you I was always only Carl.