Metamorphosis

by Breanna Claire

The epochs of our life are not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought by the way-side as we walk; in a thought which revises our entire manner of life, and says, — “Thus hast thou done, but it were better thus.” And all our after years, like menials, serve and wait on this, and, according to their ability, execute its will.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is a science to miracles. To the curious, nothing ever comes from nothing. The history of anything can be traced back billions of years to the origin of the universe, if one only has the tenacity of a young child to repeatedly ask “why?” to every simplistic attempt at a conclusion. What are called miracles are nothing more than inflection points of history, at which an agglomeration of causes, hitherto unrecognized as such, reach a critical mass; and after which one cannot live as before. The proof of a miracle comes only in time; it wouldn’t matter how bright the heavenly light was, or how loud the voice, or how long he was blinded, if Paul had gone into Damascus afterwards and been ignored.

My road to Damascus was Interstate 40, on one of my work commutes. And just as Paul had lately persecuted those with whom he was soon to make common cause, I had been a public educator, the worst kind of persecutor of the freethinking, the nonconforming, and the differently abled, herding the youth of America through the narrow defile of institutional knowledge, sapping their creativity. From seemingly out of nowhere came the inspiration to dress for work in women’s clothes. I had first experimented with women’s dress, albeit privately, in college, when around-the-clock proximity to my peers, combined with the cultivation of a professional essence, made me feel a more acute sense of difference and inadequacy than ever before. I had put aside that inclination when I met my wife and, by entering into marriage, achieved the only satisfactory end of a suffocatingly teleological manhood. Now there it was again, and this time the desire was to dress like a woman publicly, not just behind closed doors. Like a river that disappears underground as a trickle and reemerges a torrent, the woman in me had continued to mature the whole time I played a man.

Some of the first people I came out to wondered if that epiphanic moment was real, but I wondered rather if anything in my life before that moment was real. At the instant my identity shifted, I recalled the past as with a different hippocampus. Shameful experiences became sources of pride. Exceptions became rules. Heartbreak and tragedy turned into opportunity. I felt a strange conflicting feeling of familiarity and distance, as though I were remembering someone else’s life as well as one remembers one’s own. Or – to give the reader a better sense of the emotional gravity of that moment – it was as though I was never my wife’s husband, but had only lived inside his mind. If some moments seem to last longer than others, it is because they contain the memories of years.  

The lesson of life is practically to generalize; to believe what the years and the centuries say against the hours; to resist the usurpation of particulars; to penetrate to their catholic sense.

- Emerson

Our fascination is with the cataclysmic. But, the spectacles of Chicxulub and Pompeii notwithstanding, the prevailing theme of natural history is tedium. Before the earthquake are years of tectonic plates moving at the growth rate of fingernails. The supernova is the outcome of billions of years of fusing hydrogen into helium. Libya turned to desert over a thousand years or more, not by Phaethon’s ill-fated attempt to drive his father’s sun chariot. The principal qualification for a scientist is to be willing to ruin a good story, even as their careful studies are outpaced by the raconteurs of ink and oils, who have no obligation to objective reality. Scientists labor in the obscurity of the earth’s depths, or inside bodies, while outside, the visual circus is in full swing. Did my studies in the humanities hinder or aid my realization? Hutton and Lyell were the unfashionably prosaic contemporaries of Fuseli and Turner. But the art historian is also trained to see causality, and to see it in the details. We are paleontologists of paint, scanning to demystify, demoting the artist from divinely infused genius to flesh-and-blood plaything of society. Yet we give our field a bad name if we dwell on minutiae for their own sake. I want to note the differences between the various versions of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, and find their basis in the patronage, but only because of the powerful stab these pictures make in the never-ending fight between love and duty. The best scholars in the arts, like the best scientists, keep their eyes on the details while keeping their minds on the totality. In identifying the temporal in art, by process of elimination we arrive at its timeless essence. We observe the small to understand the great.

‘I felt a strange conflicting feeling of familiarity and distance, as though I were remembering someone else’s life as well as one remembers one’s own.’

She will give you all the minute particulars, which only women’s language can make interesting. In our [men’s] communications we deal only in the great.

- Jane Austen, Emma

There is a species of salamander in the mountains of northern California, brown with rather inconspicuous blotches that, as one follows the Sierra Nevada and the Coastal Range as they fork to the east and west, respectively, gives way to gradually more blotched varieties along the one mountain chain, and less blotched ones along the other until, when the mountains join together again at the foot of the San Joaquin Valley, they have become two distinct species, non-interbreeding, one profusely marked, and the other monochromatic. The herring gull of Britain, with its silvery wing back, takes on fewer and fewer of its distinctive features as one observes their brethren while moving ever westward, through North America and across Siberia until, back in Britain at the completion of the circle, it has morphed into the lesser black-backed gull, now so distinct from the herring gull that it will not mate with it. I learned of these curious cases of taxonomic intermediacy in a book by Richard Dawkins, the eminent biologist. Platonic essentialism, he says, is to blame for our late acknowledgment of evolution, just as it gives rise to civic discord, as in the invention of racial stereotypes, and in the abortion debate, made a mess by the insistence that there is a single moment at which an embryo becomes a person. “There is no such thing as essence,” he concludes. “In a world of perfect and complete information, fossil information as well as recent, discrete names for animals would become impossible. Instead of discrete names we would need sliding scales.” So the reader can imagine my disappointment when I heard the same Richard Dawkins calling for “sex-based” rights for women. Those who identify a rule, no matter how invaluable, waste their good will when they claim the exclusive right to name the exceptions.

Transition is the order of the ages, in time as well as space. No two-legged human ever had four-legged parents. Archaeopteryx, feathered and toothed, is variously described as a reptilian bird and an avian reptile. We search in vain for the pebble that made a spinning ball of rock into Earth. Transgender people speak of transitioning as though it has no end, but equally intriguing to me is whether it has a beginning. Like a dream, one drops into a gender transition somewhere in the middle, and narrative coherence is scant. I am in high school, and the girl who sits next to me in math class is practically begging me to ask her to the prom, but I demur – because I’m too much of a nonconformist to go to prom, I tell myself. I am at a college party, and I see men plying women with alcohol, and I get away in fear of what will happen next. I am in my twenties, rejected by one dating partner after another, handicapped by my stunted social growth. I am sitting at a dinner table, having the same conversation with my wife that we had a month ago. Through all those years, I saw only those links; by the time I saw the chain, it was too long for me to trace back. Ariadne’s thread leads me into the maze, not out of it.

In my moment of realization, my vaunted intellectual powers availed me nothing. No amount of rationalization could tell me I was anything but a lady. No cost-benefit analysis was needed to determine my course of action. There was not even a distinct future in which to act; like Arjuna seeing with Krishna’s divine eye, I saw past, present, and future merged. What were the clues I missed? When did my femininity first manifest itself, and how frequently thereafter? Some of my acquaintances have told me that this inquiry is fruitless, as no single clue is determinative. But this is no academic exercise. I am not trying to figure out what I would have done if I had had a girlhood, because I did have a girlhood, if only lived in my head. My act of mnemonic bricolage is naught else than what everyone does: an attempt to find something timeless amid so much change, the inclination behind religious faith and scientific study alike. It is the awareness that the woman I am was always there, becoming bolder and bolder, that keeps me from disappointment at having spent half my natural life in the wrong identity. If I am content, it is not because I have eliminated crisis from my life, but because I have given my crises a shape. But not for me the facile timelessness of dogma. Born with an unusual brain chemistry, reared in a culture of skepticism, educated to a mentality of inquisitiveness, I have to find the eternal for myself. My faith is that I will get to the bottom of this mise en abyme of revelations, but in the attempt, I am brought into conflict with those who insist on stopping with one revelation, who impiously claim the authority to decide when enough change is enough.

John Donne writes of Copernicus arriving at the gates of hell and being refused entry because, even after his findings, people still believe in God. To what can we attribute the persistence of the divine in the human consciousness? Is it the timelessness of God, or the very opposite? God has gone from walking in the garden in the evening, to living on a mountain, to being everywhere at once; from being immaterial to being made flesh, then back to immateriality. They began by identifying in the plural, creating both male and female in their image, then excised the feminine from their disposition and indulged in masculine hyperaggression and emotional disconnection. They have been by turns compassionate, cruel, insecure, and aloof; alternately inscrutable and rational.

The religion of our ancestors is the product of skepticism, not faith. Abraham predicts that God will provide the sacrificial sheep, knowing full well they will not let him slay his son. Jacob vows to make offerings to God only if they protect him and keep him alive. And even to the voice from the burning bush, Moses insists he was poorly chosen. There is no better preparation for epiphany than a youthful bout of unbelief. I consider myself fortunate to have had my principal religious initiation at age thirteen, at the outset of the rebellious years, at the intersection of childhood dreaming, gathering conscience, and social pressure. A proper son of the commandment never accepts a commandment as such.  

Now God has gone from creating humankind in their own image, and loving everyone; to somehow seeing flaws in their creation, and condemning an ever-expanding list of sinners to eternal suffering. Self-appointed judges invoke God to make their political ideology timeless, but they only make God temporal. Even conservatism must change, or else it becomes denialism. Of course the reactionaries will spread spurious fears about “irreversible” gender-affirming treatment; they are invested in the reversibility of all things, including the extension of civil rights. But each mortgage with the bank of history must be paid back with interest. Time has revealed the folly of those who claimed that the sun revolves around the earth, or that the universe is only 6,000 years old, just as it will reveal the folly of those who yoke gender identity to biological sex. Religion ought to be stronger for being stripped of its dogma by science, and God ought to be more godlike for not having to involve themself in the everyday. Religion is a wonderfully counterintuitive thing, wherein wisdom is achieved through humility. We need only say we were created thus, and that is religion enough.

But if we cannot just accept what is, if our existence must mean something instead of simply being a fact, we might do well to admit the mutability of God. Certainly, a god who can transform into a charioteer, or a bull, or a shower of gold dust comes with problems. A god not recognized is a most effective spy. The possibility that we might make our god into breakfast sausage, and thereby ensure our own eternal term in the smokehouse, explains the resistance to this idea. But there is opportunity as well as danger. When a god withdraws some of its divine power, humanity is empowered to an equal degree. Now we all have the blessings of Iphis; we need no divine intervention to change our identity, or to love whom we will. If there is nothing timeless in the heavens or on the earth, I will take a God who changes their mind over one who has their mind changed for them.

Ideologies are pyramid schemes of lies, which collapse under the weight of gathering facts, and can only sustain themselves through exclusion, weeding out those to whom the old assumptions are found not to apply. Qualifications and exceptions pile up like so many Martian epicycles, and words like “American” and “Christian” are defined to death, just like “man” and “woman.” There is no need for revolution, because no institution can withstand the great truth of equality. The more humanity are pressed together on one planet, the more readily they will realize that all are alike human. The nation and the church shrink as humanity expands. And while it may take a few years of my not disturbing children in restrooms before all are convinced of my unexceptionality, proof is no burden when it consists merely of living one’s life.

Once a thought is relegated to tradition, it can no longer inspire. No words so quickly deflate passion as “That’s just the way it is.” The Judeo-Christian scriptures, so subversive in antiquity, are ill-suited for the role into which they have been pressed. Can no one read the verses of Isaiah, and not feel the prophetic itch? Do the words which called the Apostles to leave comfortable lives to minister to the poor and sick now call us to nothing but a parroting mediocrity? The same could be asked of our secular foundational texts. Is the dissolution of political bands only to happen once in the course of human events? History gives freely of itself; it will not be the servant only of today, but of tomorrow too. It is not generational antagonism pure and simple that makes the young the foremost champions of liberty, but the still-glowing embers of creativity within them. Who are their parents to go forth and conquer, and then close the gates behind them? Those who insist on the maintenance of tradition do so not out of any affinity to tradition as such, but because the autocratic adherence to tradition preempts people’s awareness of their agency. If new scientific and moral truths are affirmed, we will wonder what other rights we might demand. The powerful would be better off jumping in front of the parade than resisting change; the industrialists of the nineteenth century wouldn’t listen to Owen, so they had to deal with Marx.

None of the above is to cast my lot with the so-called progressive faction. I have never known anyone who deserves this label. Alternately, all ideologues can be called progressives for all having a goal, all alike suffering from the delusion that “progress” is anything but stumbling in the dark. Progressives and conservatives believe in the same god, only in different heavens; no one is immune from bigotry who worships at the altar of opinion. Self-serving and callous is the progressivism that measures progress in political victories rather than in units of justice. Still more suspect are the agents of radical change, who make transformation a matter of degree rather than of kind. Righteousness is not measured by the volume of the voice. And revolution is its own form of stagnation. Enough of setting cars on fire and throwing rocks at police. After a quarter of a million years, can we not come up with any better tools for change than fire and rocks? Radicalism is just conservatism with one added change. Socialists and libertarians, fundamentalists and atheists, are all bound in common by the fetters of certainty.

If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?

- Henry David Thoreau

My first major purchase as a lady was clothing, about three weeks after my realization. A friend met me at the mall after work; my instructions to her were threefold: make sure I don’t buy too much, make sure I don’t buy too much pink, and make sure I don’t talk too much. We didn’t do so well on the last of these goals, and I had to be set straight a few times by my friend and the saleswoman on what matched and what didn’t. We didn’t do well at all on the first goal; there was barely enough room on the fitting room hook for all the clothing we picked out. Since my transition began, I have never felt like I have enough clothing. Every event, every weather condition, every mood, wants a different ensemble. I don’t know if this is typical of women; I prefer to think it is typical of the truly self-loving.

We enjoyed short-term success on the second goal, though on a related issue, I did have a disagreement with the saleswoman and my friend about a mid-length houndstooth dress: they thought I needed to wear tights with it; I wasn’t so sure. Over the next few days, without my friend to restrain me by tactfully reminding me of my age without explicitly stating it, I would extend this propensity to bare my legs; for example, by buying a particular brand of sweatshorts that I had only ever seen on women twenty years younger than me, and by going for a walk in slit-leg pants on a windy day. And I allowed myself to buy all the pink I wanted. Pink hooded shirts, pink buttonless jackets, shirts with pink hearts, pink hairbands with a cute bow, and pink flamingo earrings. If one makes no apologies for who one is, then there need be no apologies for what one wears. Even if such were needed, I could be forgiven for not having had a girlhood at the usual age. And if pink was good enough as the color for my groomsmen’s bowties at my wedding, it is surely good enough now.

After all my disparagement of those who presume to declare an end to change, who am I to say that I have arrived at my true identity? Part of accepting change is not knowing when it will end. The dinosaurs won the loaded dice game of the Mahabharata of evolution, but tens of thousands of verses later, what once made them kings became their undoing. I don’t know if I will always wear pink, or always wear miniskirts, or always love horses, or whether it is all just a delayed teenage phase, so how can I be sure of my gender identity? I can’t. That I cannot is itself evidence. The most useful advice I have received during my transition is that, in a society that tells us our gender is assigned at birth, doubt is inevitable. Every day, I have to ask anew whether I am really that one person in a hundred. “One must ever wait for the last day of a man’s life, and call no one happy until he is dead and buried.” From this one verse of Ovid, Montaigne spun an entire essay. There could be no subject more fitting for the inventor of the essay, who, by bestowing that name on his writings, conceded that they were but trials of ideas, not definitive answers. When, after several years of vegetarianism, I contemplated eating meat again, I found that the only way to resolve the dilemma was to eat meat. So it is with a gender transition. The essay of life is nothing but transition; every conclusion is provisional. Do not be afraid of dead ends, for life itself is a dead end. I am my true self today, and that is enough.

‘If there is nothing timeless in the heavens or on the earth, I will take a God who changes their mind over one who has their mind changed for them.’

There are numerous proofs of my gender, which I here enumerate in ascending order of conclusiveness. There is my intuitive understanding, acquired early in my transition, for what style suited me: in clothing, jewelry, makeup, and hair. There is my complete willingness to live the remainder of my life in celibacy – despite my curiosity to verify Tiresias’s experience – after years of emotional dependence on a romantic partner. The instant I realized, my burning need for romance vanished. We know we have found our true identity not when we are willing to sacrifice certain cherished things for it, but when it feels like no sacrifice at all. I love better, if less often. And there is my sudden happiness upon realization, which beggars belief for those who know me only by my persecution. 

What was the “dream” that Kafka’s Gregor Samsa awoke from on that fateful morning but what he had heretofore called “life”? His suffering comes not from being an insect, but from being an insect in a world made for humans. In nature, the onus is on the organism to adapt to its environment, on pain of extinction. But when the organism conflicts with an artificial environment, it is the environment that must yield. There would be no dysphoria if society did not give us too much to bear. Disorder is a failure of the order.

Change in the self is but realization in disguise. How long can two girls lasciviously sport with each other on the pretext of practicing for their future boyfriends before they realize that there need be no future boyfriends? As in life, so in art. In the best works of fiction, the end is the least important part. The staying power of myth lies in its etiology; the destination is a given from which the journey is spun. Jupiter had to make himself into a bull and make off with Europa, or else we wouldn’t be here. In a Jane Austen novel, one can easily guess early on whom the heroine will marry at the end. Austen became the greatest of novelists by trusting in her reader's intelligence; her ‘character development' is merely an acceptance of what the discerning reader can see beneath the surface all along, and most of her plots are comically misguided flirtations with illusion: Elizabeth Bennet with judgmentalism, Emma Woodhouse with matchmaking, Anne Elliot with class consciousness.

Revolution, properly speaking, is not a movement from what is to what should be, but the other way around. Rousseau’s volonté générale can never be changed, only obscured by selfish, frivolous, or illusory ambitions. Equality comes not when people accept me, but when they accept those like me who have existed since the dawn of humanity, kept from writing confessional words like these by the forlorn attempts of governments and their religious handmaidens to enforce that which is not. The cherished return to Eden comes when God relinquishes control over human behavior, ceases to involve themself in human conflict, and reverts to a mere creator, giving us no commandment but to be fruitful.

Gender-affirming care is denied to children on the premise that children have insufficiently developed rational faculties. But that is exactly why children know themselves so well. Thinking gets in the way of seeing. Compared to other animals, our childhoods occupy a larger portion of our life; and some of our youthful traits persist into adulthood. This is both a blessing and a curse – a curse because it means more time to train the imagination out of us, and a blessing because it gives us a sliver of a chance to reclaim our childlike insight in adulthood. A child’s desire to present opposite their assigned gender is rarely wrong. With an entire life ahead of them, aspiration is their most powerful self-expression. When they tell us what they want to be, they are really saying what they are. Alas, childhood is regarded as a way station rather than selfhood in its barest form. Surveys show that adults are happier with their careers when they pursue their childhood career interests, yet barely one in five do. The dinosaurs went extinct from the earth in a sudden cataclysm, but they went extinct from our minds from normalcy. A would-be paleontologist is told not to keep dreaming, but to brush up on their math. Anyone who would find their proper course can start by looking back. To be a pilot, one not only has to learn to fly, but to relearn the exhilaration of flight. My most enduring career goal as a child was to be a writer – incidentally, a more popular vocation with girls than boys – but it took a change in the most fundamental aspect of my identity to rekindle my literary fire. My words are the autobiography of a subconscious half of a life.

I would not say that my newfound gender identity made my writing possible; it veritably demanded it. Krishnamurti spoke of a state of “choiceless awareness” which, like all forms of enlightenment, has no frontier. One simply finds oneself in the middle of it, and then comes the challenge of overcoming the fear of disorientation, the worrying at the absence of worry, the feeling of an empty space where anxiety should be. Despite the peril of being openly trans in the current political climate, the option of staying closeted never entered my mind. I did not even choose my name, in accordance with Thoreau’s notion that people should take on names only later in life, befitting the character they have developed. I had the two names together in my head the weekend after my realization, and could not get them out. So much did the names seem to be me that even to use a last name would compromise my self-expression with an external association. My mother thought the name was rather WASP-y, and I sometimes feel it to be too modern for my disposition, but I have not tired of it, and at least my initials are fit for a Jew.

I’m ceded – I’ve stopped being Theirs –

The name They dropped upon my face

With water, in the country church

Is finished using, now,

And They can put it with my Dolls,

My childhood, and the string of spools,

I’ve finished threading – too –

Baptized, before, without the choice,

But this time, consciously, of Grace –

Unto supremest name –

- Emily Dickinson

I fail to see what is so desirable about choice, or why people should die for freedom. Choice is in the act of buying toothpaste, or cheese crackers. I sometimes get terribly anxious at the supermarket, with all the differently colored packages, all the brands, projections of human cleverness, in an agoraphobic array. Solicitations are everywhere I turn. Choice brings conflict. According to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the deceased is reborn not as punishment for a lack of virtue, but because they choose the familiarity of the womb over the ominous beyond. Perhaps we cherish choice because the only choiceless state we can envision is death. While still alive, and therefore not definitely free of the fear of dying, I can at least say I have lived with death.

Il est incertain où la mort nous attende, attendons la par tout.

[It is uncertain where death awaits us; let us await it everywhere.]

- Montaigne

Yesterday is as remote from me as a past life; memory is but a mirage of the retrospective gaze, the knowledge of which fact bestows the peace of powerlessness. My past transitions along with me, and I die to my yesterday. Of all proofs of my gender, the absence of choice is the most definitive that can be, until I die a happy old lady. This is no mysticism. Science, the destroyer of illusions, has choice as one of its next victims. Freedom is only so much neurochemistry. The path is clear for the self-aware.

Who will be happy for Gregor Samsa? Who will postulate that he was really an insect all along, unsuited to the responsibilities of a man? Who will dare suggest that the abbreviated lifespan of an insect was a small price to pay for his realization? That the physical torments he suffered were nothing compared to the working man’s psychological torture of believing that just a bit more hard work would pay off? That there were greater rewards than the conditional support of his family? That his death was a liberation from suffering?

Every now and then, I have a dream that Mary Ann miraculously revived on the hospital gurney, and that I am holding her in my arms again. Then I awake, and as with Orpheus when he glances back at Eurydice, I experience widowhood all over again. But my story as Orpheus ends not as the ancients told it, but as in Monteverdi’s revision: not with me bitterly shunning all female companionship, but by being taken to the heights, to gaze down at my Eurydice, along with all the universe; to see her features in the sun and the stars, and in me, and know that she has returned to her enduring condition; and to gain the wisdom that comes from seeing broadly, to find continuity in the midst of change.