There and Back Again

A word on a detransition.

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The shrink I saw was a violinist, gypsy-jazz was his style. ‘We just have to make sure you’re not crazy,’ he said, which sounded simple enough to me. In as many words, he reassured me that there was no need to fabricate a long personal history of dressing up in my mum’s garments, playing with Barbies and wanting to be Ginger Spice (I’m a redhead)—the stereotypical narrative of having ‘always known’ was no longer necessary, I inferred, and I didn’t need to pretend to any extreme heteronormativity or traditional femininity. Provided that I could convince this charming, musically talented Scottish man that I was sane, the gates to womanhood would be opened, and a bright future await me.

In retrospect, it’s clear to me that I was crazy. And so was he. And so were some of my friends, of both the trans and cis ‘ally’ variety. We were all loony, without our marbles, a dozen screws loose, certifiably something or other, off our rockers, but then, how could we have known? Who’d notice another madman round here? When you are in the grip of a culture-bound syndrome, the individualising tools of modern psychiatry are useless. It’s like going to an AA led by someone who is currently drunk. Transition is a trip which society has got high on, its promise of a kind of restored relationship to the body—an always problematic thing—pulling in new users by the day. I later discovered that the fiddle player I had paid to confirm my mental soundness had been sued for telling a woman that her responses under hypnotism were ‘repressed memories’ of real abuse. She had cut off her family as a result. He was crazy! I was crazy.

If I was crazy, I didn’t know it then. I was happy. Transition was structured like a variety of what Lauren Berlant called ‘cruel optimism’ in her 2011 book of that name, an ultimately chimerical promise which, nonetheless, provides a sense of anchoring in the present. At twenty-four, I was still basically adolescent. I had not become used to the testosterone pulsing through my body, especially not the furious sexual drives it produced. Becoming a woman meant, somehow, having an identity I could be sure of. A source of strength. And I wanted that. Which returns me to the beginnings of the whole strange sequence, a beginning not in jazz, but another genre—horror. Permit me to describe, then, how a frustrated adolescent ‘discovers’ his inner femaleness in The Exorcist (1973)…

It was innocent, at first. We all like a good scare. And I was far from distinctive in developing a sort of havoc-loving sympathy for the monster. Like the supervillains in superhero comics, monsters in horror movies are not infrequently more compelling than the human beings they try to petrify or destroy—the victims being clueless, ridiculous, outright deserving of their fates, sometimes all of these at once. Worst of all, these human horror fodder could be criminally boring, at least by contrast with the anti-establishment majesty of the demon. A species of what writers call the ‘villain problem’ in which the sheer effectiveness of the bad guy makes him more compelling than the white hats is common to the horror viewing experience, and it was in the crucible of that experience that my own gendered sympathy for the devil crystallised.

In truth, I don’t know which film came first. It might have been Ringu (1998), whose ghoul Sadako’s crawling out of the television set to assault reality felt like a gauntlet thrown down before me, and a temptation: are you going to stay safely in the zone of fantasy or will you break through to horrify the consensus, to frighten its patriarchal arrogance? It might have been Let the Right One In (2008) or Near Dark (1987), whose vampire females were as impressive to me as they were frightful. Then again, maybe it was The Exorcist, for it seemed to me that Regan MacNeil was not merely ‘possessed’ by Pazuzu, some malevolent external force, but was, rather, expressing a repressed rage against the system, mocking and attacking in turns church, family, the state and even, in the form of her beleaguered Hollywood actress mother, capital and its handmaiden pop culture. The demon wants to wreck the very arrogance of American, phallocratic, technological modernity: Regan, or Pazuzu, or what the character stands for (to me, a practically metaphysical feminine rebellion), tells her mother’s astronaut friend, ‘you’re gonna die up there’. That I felt such a strong sympathy for this force of pure negativity, what the theologian Karl Barth called ‘das nichtige’, nothingness, can only be explained by my misapprehension of it. The demon, I believed, was the enemy of my enemy, and thus doing some good in the world. Didn’t the America that murdered millions in Indochina deserve this? Wasn’t all that bound up in the hypocritically sanctified patriarchal system which the demon-girl was acerbically, graphically and gutturally critiquing? I couldn’t see the demon as such, but only a metaphor for something, something I wanted: feminine power.

When I first saw The Exorcist, I had no conscious transgender identity. All I knew was that it spoke to me. I watched a whole slew of horror films at that time because nothing else seemed to have the same negative force that I was looking for. There was an outlook on the world, a kind of gaze I seemed to share with these films. I admired, I wanted to be the vampire girl Eli from Let the Right One In (who, not incidentally, starts off as a boy in the novel), Mae from Near Dark, Sadako. Plainly, they were cool. It happened that, around October 2015, with Halloween approaching, ideas of painting myself a goth-grunge witch and making my first obliquely socially permissible attempt at cross-dressing began to congeal. Just a year before, Against Me’s Transgender Dysphoria Blues had been released, and lead singer Laura Jane Grace’s assertive punk styling, all in black, furious and rebellious and proud of ragged edges—‘chipped nail polish and a barbed-wire dress’—spoke to me too. And so it began. I let it all out.

A whole story seemed to unspool from there. I began to retcon my very existence, searching for ‘clues’ from my past that I had always already been trans as well as, more synchronically, finding evidence in my everyday life that I was really something other than a man: restless legs? Gender dysphoria. Sexual anxiety? Gender dysphoria. Romantic troubles, somatic tension, gut distress? Dysphoria, dysphoria, dysphoria. Chuck it all in the trans bucket. It explains everything. I read my life back in the gloomy shade of my decision: I am not now and have never been a boy. That what I thought I was discovering I was really inventing, that I wasn’t just having feelings and interpreting them but that my interpretations were creating my feelings, was something that some people with older and more developed brains gently suggested to me. I didn’t hear it, though. The feelings were too strong. I was adolescent.

And so I ended up sitting in a psychiatrist’s office in Glasgow handing over hundreds of quid for a one-hour consultation, because apparently the pills they would give me would grant a hard, material reality to what had only been a fantasy and vestimentary up to that point. Never mind that I was getting the tablets from, guess who, the state. But regardless of cognitive dissonance about what I was supposedly rebelling against, the physical effects of the process—eighteen months of testosterone-blocking injections and orally administered synthetic oestrogen, not to mention the finasteride for hair loss, various regimes of antidepressants, a brief experiment with viagra to counteract the hormones’ anti-tumescent effects and countless, very painful facial hair removal appointments—I could not have predicted. At no point did I feel or look female. Maybe, had the hormone replacement therapy actually done anything to feminise me, I might have persisted with it. But when I looked at my naked form in the mirror and, indeed, the nude shapes of other transitioners (thank you to Reddit and other less mentionable websites), I saw something limp, eunuchised, a kind of hybrid, but certainly not female. The devil is the father of lies. I began to ask if I had been deceived. I woke up in the middle of the night, one winter in the thick of the process of transition, in that almost hypnagogic state in which your life appears to you strangely new and directly, unencumbered by the habitual impressions we have previously made and thus permitting new interpretations, and said to myself, ‘you did what? You did what?’

Indeed, was the transition really an expression of an inner, abiding self? Maybe I wasn’t ‘letting it all out’—maybe I had let something in, a force from outside that was unhelpful to me, and should have been unwelcome. If I had watched The Exorcist without my prism of reductionistic materialism, I might have been more afraid of the real danger of evil coming into my life and having its way with me. It seems to me now that I lived with an imp from the age of twenty-two to twenty-six, before I recognised my mistake. The mischief-maker was not so easy to banish, however. The afterlife of my transition was four years of low testosterone, for much of that time well beneath the level healthy for any adult, male or female. I had been told that my hormones would normalise after three to six months off HRT. Not so. Another unpredictable. That I am now, as far as I can tell, an intact and hormonally healthy thirty-something male, is a blessing for my mental wellbeing and my bones—their sturdiness now vouchsafed me, somehow, after having broken my femur at twenty-seven, a frightening event partially caused by the drugs. Tariq Goddard says of his novel of demonic possession The Picture of Contented New Wealth (2009) that ‘the reason why it was so disturbing and upset quite secular atheistic reductive materialistic people is because I believed in the truth—and I mean truth in the naive, emergent, old fashioned sense—of irreducible evil as some sort of metaphysical force in the universe that takes possession of us and that we do the bidding of.’ Rather than the demonic as a sociopolitical metaphor or a Freudian phantasm, Goddard writes a novel about its metaphysical reality. Similarly, there may have been something metaphysically evil or, to be less melodramatic, impish at work in the way I was (and let myself be) tricked into a falsehood during those transitional years.

I live in the wake of it. It was destructive. It was seductive. Transition, I Imagined, would be a creative destruction, a dialectical movement towards the good-life dream of trans womanhood. That was the lie. As the process wore on, I sensed that it had made me less a man, but not more of anything else. The truth is, and I say this about my own transition only, the imp I lived with was evil in the Barthian sense. It had no positive existence, nothing really to offer. It was destructive, yes. It was seductive. But in the end, it was wholly das nichtige. It was nothing. What transition taught me was that we don’t really know our own wills. In fact, what Charles Taylor calls the ‘porous self’ of the pre-modern world never went away. We are subject to imps, to devils we do not understand. We get invaded by them, they play us like puppets, and some are never noticed and still less exorcised. Whatever forces in the market, in hegemonic discourses, in pop culture, or in the faerie realm wrought mischief in my life for eight-ish years I was vulnerable to because I failed to understand this. I hesitate to conclude with pat self-help advice. But I’ll tell you what, in the wake of transition, I try to do: nowadays, I always question my desires. They may not really be mine.

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