The other day I got carded while buying cigarettes, for the first time in a long time. My brain registered this as a possible uh-oh moment, but my body did as it was told. I handed over my driver’s license, complete with my birth name and a photo of me taken one week after my 16th birthday. Instantly, the cashier’s brow furrowed. “This isn’t you,” he said, taken aback but unequivocal. I shrugged and said, “It just is.”
I transitioned during quarantine. Or, that would be the clear way of putting it, if transition is something that begins then ends. But unlike starting then abandoning an instrument, or sourdough starter, or wedding engagement, transition doesn’t fit neatly into the lockdown narrative. In reality, following the chrysalis phase of quarantine I have emerged less fully realized, masculine-ideal butterfly and more formless goo. However, it is true that I entered lockdown having only ever been perceived by the world as a woman, and I’ve left it now predominantly perceived as a man. It’s jarring, and there are a lot of questions that I have to answer: Why did it take me this long to realize? What kind of man do I want to be? And why aren’t there more pants with my inseam even though Mark Ruffalo and I definitively prove that 5’8” is the perfect height?
Let’s start with the first question. On a quiet subway car in the summer of 2019, I sat alone as two men stood over me. One had his arms stretched up to hold the bar above our heads, and in this position, the area of his body above his waistband and below the hem of his lifted t-shirt was exposed. It was unavoidably, aggressively in my line of sight. I couldn’t tell anything about their relationship—friends, lovers, whatever—but they were engaged in an easy and happy conversation. I let my eyes linger on that fleshy waist ring (yum!), and that’s when I started to cry. Softly at first, then sort of hysterically, then to the point that I got off the train at the next stop so these poor guys wouldn’t be like, “Why is this bitch having an emotional breakdown looking at a happy trail, and do we have to help them?”
I was 21 years old, with a brand-new degree in religious studies, working as a barista at a now disgraced women’s co-working space where I was unironically referred to as a Girl Boss on more than one occasion (“please, I prefer Non-Binary Wage Laborer!”). Needless to say, it wasn’t the best place to be figuring out my transmasculine gender identity, and my J train meltdown occurred after one of these shifts at SheWork. It’s not that I didn’t know why I was crying. That was obvious: I was overcome with longing to inhabit a body other than the one I was in. I even knew I was trans, I just didn’t know what to do with this knowledge. And between my job, my other job, and my general post-collegiate efforts to be and feel like a real person, I had plenty of everyday life to practice in order to avoid the issue.
Broadly speaking—on a societal level—you know what comes next. Specifically, I spent lockdown at my not immunocompromised but considerably hypochondriacal father’s apartment, sharing a bedroom with my older sister, Maddie. I can’t adequately express my gratitude for this setup. While I technically lived with my dad prior to finally joining the superior half of society (children of divorce), he worked a lot, and I certainly never lived with him as the primary parent in any previous time of my life. My dad is smart, practical, infuriating to argue with, and really loves jazz. For Christmas, he got me a sturdy tan button-down that he repeatedly referred to as “a handsome shirt.” I’m really glad we got to know each other. Anyway, with only part-time remote writing work, I had endless days to fill with little other than talking to Maddie about our intentions to Lighthouse each other and rushing to revisit childhood media before our trial membership of Disney+ expired. In other words, I couldn’t have been better primed for Puberty 2: This Time, It’s Personal.
One childhood media fixture I revisited while the Disney+ trial lasted was the 2000 teen romcom classic 10 Things I Hate About You, which, by the way still rules. As a kid I was obsessed with Heath Ledger. Specifically, Heath Ledger as Patrick Verona in 10 Things. I longed for him at an age and in a manner that was pre-sexual but deeply bodily: his arms, his chest, his collarbones, the register of his voice, the way his pants sat at his hips. As similar feelings toward other men arose in childhood, I had only one framework through which to understand them: heterosexuality. If I was a girl and I felt an unnamable desire for men, then actually the name was “crush” and it was totally normal. This frame hung over my entire adolescence and much of my young adult life. If anything, this pushed me further toward femininity: if I couldn’t wear a loose tank top over a flat chest or drive shirtless back from a lake with my hand on someone’s knee, at least I could have sex with the person who did.
But this argument can quickly become undone. What if I said, no, actually, I didn’t sleep with boys as a teenager because I wanted to be one? What if I did it because I was simply attracted to them, or because being desired made me feel valuable, and I was embodied in those experiences, and I may have not always enjoyed them, but that’s because sometimes sex is just bad, especially when you’re a teenager and no one is trying to make you cum, and maybe I experienced insecurity or vulnerability, but that doesn’t mean I experienced dysphoria. I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a pretty good peek inside of my brain for the seven months of lockdown before I decided to start testosterone.
It was a constant back and forth: desire, then a surge of “rationalization” that reduced, invalidated, and explained desire away. I would think, “Okay, I wish I had been born a cis man, but that wasn’t my lot in life, and I should just accept that.” I would think, “People who are really trans and transition do it because they have to in order to survive, and some of them can’t transition, and some of them don’t survive, so if there’s any possible way for me to live in the body I’m in, I should do that.” I felt crazy, I felt delusional. Any time I was misgendered or dead named, I felt angry on the surface with the person who did it, but really I felt angry with myself for thinking that I deserved anything else. It’s a hard story to tell, because it’s not linear.
The bouts of inner turmoil were often interrupted with times of learning and sheer joy. There were many viewings of the 25th anniversary performance of The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall, which Maddie, my dad and I all became deliriously obsessed with (okay, fine, Maddie and I were deliriously obsessed, but my dad did watch it with us at least three times despite his defiant claim that Phantom was just “some asshole”). There was a trip on shrooms after reading We Both Laughed in Pleasure, the diaries of Lou Sullivan, one of the first publicly out gay trans men, and lying down outside crying and laughing, feeling certain that Lou was watching over me from above, and that he wordlessly understood everything I felt with unconditional love and compassion. There was the time while playing Codenames that Maddie used “Dima” to signify —along with every insulting word on the board—brother. There was the time I realized I was going to start T, and suddenly, for the first time in a while, felt something other than ambivalent about the fact of my life having a future.
In the late spring of quarantine, I spoke on the phone with Hugo, an old friend who had begun transition a couple of years prior. They reminded me of when I cried on the subway looking at that stranger’s exposed waist. I didn’t even remember telling them that, but that’s Hugo. They told me that moment was my heart telling my body what it wants and what it needs.
It felt good to realize that I wanted to be Heath Ledger’s Patrick Verona as much if not more than I wanted to fuck him, and yes it can be powerful to reclaim the personal histories that any of the ideological forces of hegemony try to stomp out of us as queers. I wouldn’t want to take that away from anyone. But I am resistant to thinking of my life as a narrative: as long as I’m cherry picking details to construct the narrative that validates my identity, I know I could just as easily do the same to feed my fears. What matters to me now is not the effort to eradicate every trace of doubt, which I’m beginning to suspect I’ll never do, but to listen to my desires and understand that they are no less real for my inability to fully comprehend them.
In July 2020, four months before I started T, I wrote in a phone note:
- I like men who are touchy with their friends
- I like men who laugh easily
- I like men who go out of their way to make the people around them comfortable
It makes me smile now, to look back at how I was first beginning to engage with these questions of masculinity. What manhood, or something like it, could look like and mean to me. And it’s not as though I started T and then knew exactly who I was. It got worse at first. I had all the same intrusive thoughts but now the stakes were even higher.
There was a liminal period of gender chaos a few months into hormone replacement therapy, where I was getting anything from “sir” to “mama” within a span of minutes. Men were staring at me harder than ever before, by my estimation trying to make a snap decision about whether they wanted to fuck me—and what, exactly, that meant about them. It was disorienting, crazy-making, sometimes funny. Now, things have settled, and I move through the world as something like a man almost all of the time. Of course, there are other questions, like, am I being read as a 15-year-old boy trying to buy cigarettes with an adult woman’s ID? But I’ve managed recently to care less about how I am being perceived. It’s unknowable.
What I do know is that I feel better now. I breathe deeper into a body that increasingly reflects my heart’s desires. My relationships feel more honest. I haven’t had top surgery yet, but my boyfriend can attest I’ve become one of those dudes who when at home is never wearing a shirt (hopefully this is assumed, but I no longer live with my father).
The night I was carded was the same day I legally changed my name. Just that morning I had left a courthouse with a piece of paper that certified I was now Damien Kronfeld. Dima is still my nickname, and registering this change with the government is more for my ease of life and safety than anything else. Still, the timing felt too perfect, and so did the man behind the counter’s words: “This isn’t you.” Affirming, a little frightening, and philosophically thought provoking all in one! It poses an interesting question. I think the answer is, yes, that’s me. I was me then, I’m me now, and I’ll be me in the future, hopefully in a form that continues to feel even better to inhabit, and better aligned with how the world sees me. Not because I, like, need the world around me to affirm my gender or anything; it just makes it easier to buy cigarettes.