Monroe, James……and Me

One way of understanding what it is to be trans is to think about what a trans life consists of, and to read a lot of trans memoirs and life-stories. A human life has a certain shape and, although every one will be different, lives have a certain pattern. The idea of strange attractors is useful in thinking about this. A strange attractor is a pattern which emerges from a lot of events in a system. When made into a map or a diagram they will form a shape, something maybe you can see an image in, like a smile or a cross or a mountain, but not always. Lives do have a certain patterned quality which is strangely attractive. It suggests that we have meaning and significance. When you narrow down the range of lives which you survey the pattern becomes more particular and we might seem to find, say, astronauts more likely to divorce, or displaced indigenous people more likely to become drink-dependent, or novelists to beget big families. But is it possible that some lives actually produce a radically different pattern from the majority of humans? The question comes up with trans lives, which seem to be defined by unique events like the experience of dysphoria and transitioning and maybe a number of collisions with public conventions which mark our social existence as different. When we look at Munroe Bergdorf’s recent memoir “Transitional”, we find that, like a number of other such memoirs, it is not a straightforward account of events, but an argument for existence, and for Munroe’s particular existence. In that way, then, a trans life has a different cast to it. Munroe also plays down questions about where her dysphoria came from. Where many life-stories are at their most interesting when describing the rich panorama of childhood she moves quickly on to her emergence as trans. In this too she is typical of many trans memoirists. A strange attractor begins to emerge which may be different from many human lives. To complete this divergent tendency Munroe seems to find the actual source of her restless dissociation from others not in trans itself but in being a black trans in a racist society and confronting that identity. A trans life then, if Munroe’s is in any way typical, is not a life-story but a life-argument, where the emphasis is on collisions with society not upbringing, and is not concerned with gender but other more precise issues of identity. A good comparison of her memoir would be with a book written 50 years earlier, “Conundrum” by Jan Morris which describes her life from boyhood to a fully-transitioned female integrated into society. We could spend a lot of time comparing the two periods of history, the radical 1960’s and the contentious post-2000 years. We could also dwell upon the differences between the social circumstances of the two women, one travelling a long way into and through a male professional world of success and parenthood before transitioning, the other negotiating their dysphoria early in the thick of college, clubs, drugs, fashion and media. And we can find interest in how one became a trans activist and the other a national institution. Jan, of course, died recently at the age of 94, and Monroe is now 36 with hopefully a lot of trans life ahead of her. The real use of reading two such different lives is however in the ways they extend and fill out the strange attractor and reinforcing the shape which is the trans life. It doesn’t, for example, feel useful to value one life against the other, to pit entitled Jan against streetwise Munroe. It is their dissatisfaction with their given identity which unites their stories. They are also united by their quest for acceptance, although they define this differently. And they have, - one recently dead, one very much alive, - found themselves on a quest. Trans stories are almost invariably about a journey. I find myself comparing both lives with my own trans life. Mine has been less high-profile and mediated than theirs and so less affected by public opinion, and therefore it is more like most trans lives being lived now. I didn’t begin my quest to resolve a dysfunctional relationship with society but to take that relationship to a new level and to achieve a fuller satisfaction in my physical, sexual, and emotional spiritual existence. Like Munroe but unlike Jan/James my family situation was unsettling and I had to leave it behind to find belonging, travelling to where I had wanted to be in my beginning but wasn’t. I have been perpetually homesick for the world. There are many ways of being trans and my unique way involves many kinds of performance, an insistence on a separation of personalities, and a deep need to be acknowledged for what I do as trans. I don’t wish to disappear into otherness but nor am I acting just to feed off the attention of others. Belonging is, of course, what all of us have sought – belonging with others, belonging within a society and belonging to ourselves, living on our own terms. Another aspect of living which unites us is our commitment to creating and expressing – looks, books, fictions and facts, the artificial and the truthful. Acts of making are part of the Trans life and however much they respect the worlds of art, performance, media, literature and fashion they are in the end about power and influence, our capacity to shape our lives and the demands people have placed upon us, - to give an account of ourselves. These lives-as-arguments are about the part we play in creating a unique shape for ourselves within the overall attractor of trans and that shape, I often find myself thinking, is in the shape of a smile. But it lays awkwardly across the attractor of human lives generally, so that together they would look like two crossed swords, but just as the smile of the Cheshire Cat gradually fades so the two shapes merge eventually. The trans attractor was always also boomerang-like so that we do the T S Eliot thing and eventually return and ‘know ourselves for the first time’. In my case it was coming home to somewhere else. That’s a lot to lay on memoirs and life-stories which seem to be about adventures and parties and make-up and clothes, but we trans have always been different. It’s also why we are more or less queer in our orientations. That journey, it was a pilgrimage, a progress into sainthood. Now there’s a species of life-story with a unique strange attractor, - trans lives are probably not absolutely unique in their patterning, but belong within that other drift of stars in the great constellation of existence, the one which contains - the Lives of The Saints and the Lives of The Poets. Let’s call our constellation Transopeia, for now. ~ [A longer and more complete version of this introduction can be found on the attached link]