A couple of months ago, I had a dream.
The dream itself was fairly mundane. I was at a friend’s house, it was summer, and everyone had gone for a swim. I was surrounded by friends, acting as per usual, the whole scene touched by the soft light of closed blinds on a hot day. When I woke up, however, I was struck by an unusual image - in the dream I had been walking around, as all my male friends had been, shirtless.
Only in the dream I hadn’t had top surgery.
Narratives around transition have seen a nebulous and conflicting evolution over the past few decades - even over the six years in which I’ve identified as trans. The conventional and historical narrative is based in biology - a medical model of transition wherein one is expected to undergo all available forms of physical transformation to best “resemble” one’s gender - or, at the very least, one is expected to want these things.
Increasingly the dominant (read: cisnormative) perception of gender transition has expanded to see social transition - changing one’s name and pronouns, changing dress and appearance, shifting relationship dynamics - as equally important elements of the process of transition. And yet in many ways we’re a long way from seeing social transition as sufficient in its own right.
I do experience dysphoria in various ways on a daily basis, and yet I’ve not started HRT, nor had top surgery. For years I’ve dismissed both as too expensive, too time consuming, too scary, too emotionally destabilising. They’re things I want, I would tell myself, or anyone who asked, but they’re just not possible right now. I have felt compelled to display a desire for these procedures as a shorthand for “I am a man, I am really trans, I do experience dysphoria, please take me seriously”.
In recent years as a society we’ve started, slowly, to back away from “penis = male, vagina = female”, which is an important positive step. When speaking about trans people however - and even within trans communities - it seems we’ve just relocated that focal point of gender essentialism onto hormones. Now, it often seems, testosterone = male, and estrogen = female, which is just as restrictive and oppressive a binary, just dressed in nicer clothing.
After I had this strange dream, I started to wonder if I had been fooling myself the whole time. Did I want any of it? Was I being convinced of its necessity by the cis-hetero-patriarchy and the pharmaco-industrial complex? Further interrogation into the thought of top surgery confirmed it was still very much on the “to do” list. But when it came to considering HRT, I was forced to acknowledge the fact that, for a couple of years now, it hadn’t been too expensive, or scary, or destabilising. So why was I holding back?
Ever since I was a young child I’ve had issues with the sound of my own voice, issues that got more pronounced as I got older. Always a fairly theatrical child, after I hit puberty I lost all confidence, and entirely stopped singing in front of people. Then, in 2015, some kind of revelation (most likely in the form of: I got past all that). I could sing again. And now, as when I was a child, I do it all the time - indeed to the point of frustrating everyone I’ve ever lived with.
It’s not just that I learned to accept my voice for what it is - I learned to enjoy for its particularities, qualities germane to my current hormonal make-up.
“Surely not,” I thought scoffingly, “surely you’re not having second thoughts about HRT because you don’t want your singing voice to change?!” It seems such a small and silly thing for someone who doesn’t even sing professionally.
One of the problems with the medicalisation of gender transition is, if you exist outside the binary, or you don’t experience dysphoria in that way, you’re forced to view everything through the lens of cost/benefit analysis. For example, my experience with endometriosis is a huge source of pain, physical and emotional. The fact that HRT would minimise this is a huge tick in the “pro” column. But then, I must think, do I want to risk all my hair falling out, or give up the fact that I never have to worry about shaving?
For me, this process of weighing up has come down to one question - do I want to sacrifice a small thing that makes me very happy in the present, for something that might make me overall much happier in the future?
It’s a frustrating approach to self-reflection, because it so rarely yields satisfying answers. We’re told that it doesn’t matter, that we are who we are no matter what our bodies might reflect. And yet it does matter, because every trans body must be viewed through the shadow of The Trans Body, the neoliberal ideal of someone who wants badly enough to be themselves that they’ll pay exorbitant amounts to get there. Every trans body is a representational object for every other trans body. We have to put all our discourse about gender as performative and gender as socially constructed and gender as fluid into action, and actively try to divorce the idea of a trans person from the idea of a trans body.
Charles O'Grady is a proud trans man, but doesn't take testosterone. Source: Supplied
When I think about that dream, which I do several times a week, it’s not so much the idea that I still had breasts that feels so liberating. It’s more the fact that none of the voices of my unconscious mind thought that unusual, or especially declarative of some politically-motivated choice. I was just a guy swimming without a shirt on.
Charles O'Grady is a queer playwright an director, and a proud trans man.
