Trans memoir and memoir adjacent trans fiction don't do what they once did for me. Validation of gender euphoria by proxy, examples of lives I might live, imagined friends on the page. I've been at this long enough that my euphoria has settled into the standard pride of a well-chosen dress and earrings or a perhaps poorly chosen lover who says my body is beautiful in a believable way. I have enough going on in my own life and with my own friends (new and old) that I don't need to borrow someone else's. I still read trans memoir, but more as a triangulation exercise, and to occasionally surprise myself with a new box of feelings from the attic.
McKenzie Wark's Love and Money, Sex and Death managed to bring back some of that old trans memoir feeling. Specifically, validation, but not of euphoria. Instead, the validation of regret. We bookend a generation -- her 14 years older than me -- but we seem to have made similar choices about lives with one foot in bohemia and another somewhere we couldn't quite look at clearly, with a swerve into a new life of responsibility as 40 crept up on us.
An epistolary memoir, with letters to eight beings from her life, it was the letter to Catherine, her wife of twenty years, that uncovered a few undusted corners of grief in my heart.
There's so many ways, over these 20 years of a marriage, that the asymmetry on which it was structured -- failed. You resent me for all of them, whether I'm at fault or not. Since I transitioned, I can't bear the blade of your resentment, your rage against life.
...
Things have been good between us lately, but I'm always waiting for you to swing back to resenting me, and since transition, I don't feel emotionally strong enough to withstand that. I no longer have that steely breastplate of masculinity over my heart to protect me from my feelings about your feelings.
I have met so many women who, like me, chose partners whose emotional dysregulation bordered on or simply was abusive. We all mistook love for learning to manage this dysregulation. Rather than deal with the grief and longing in our own hearts we poured that longing into someone else. Choosing half a life. Occasionally this works out, but usually it attracts a certain sort of partner ready to absorb all that energy and demand more. Transition -- the development of a full self -- usually disrupts this pattern in explosive ways. Partners used to us carrying the emotional burden in the relationship who are unready to handle our own uncertainty as we dive into unknown waters.
Wark lays this all bare in a way that rang true and made me trace the scars on my own heart.
Late transition is, as Wark says, a funny thing, particularly for those of us who threw ourselves into some sort of bohemia, rubbed up against the possibilities, but chose a different path. In a letter to her lover, Mu, she recounts one of those decision points from her youth.
Back at mine, we made out, inconclusively, both very drunk. And there she was, sleeping it off in my bed. I was restless. Usually, the pain of desire was that the woman I wanted I also wanted to be. An impossible desire. The desire to be you, for instance. Now, I wanted Clementine and wanted to be her -- and I could. A blind curve opens in the maze. I couldn't sleep. I let her sleep for a while. Told her I had to go to work, which was a lie. Coffee, no breakfast. I forgot all about it. Or so it seemed.
Transsexuality is the shock of the possible.
Early in my transition, when I found myself starting to feel the claws of "why didn't I sooner", one of my young friends told me that "none of that matters, we got where we needed to be" -- like Wark I owe so much to the generation of trans women who came after me
The trans people I relate to are mostly younger than me. There's so few from my era. A lot are dead or went deep stealth, or have what the younger ones think are outdated notions. I surround myself with mostly 30ish, mostly artsy -- but also mostly middle class, mostly white -- trans people. (The divisions of race and class don't spare our little worlds). Who are they to me? An inspiration. Who am I to them? I don't know.
But also like Wark, there are ways my experience and road diverges from my luminous young friends, and I still find myself longing to find the others like me. Love and Money, Sex and Death was a much-needed reminder that we are out there and made me feel a bit less alone for a spell. That, if anything, gives it a long-term place on my shelf.