Be A Woman! Chapter 1
| [This post is part of a series. You can navigate by using the following links: Introduction | next chapter (coming soon)] |
Chapter 1: Be a Woman Who Looks at What’s Right in front of Her
You are going to die!
Nice way to start a book, huh? I know, but I want you to let this thought sink in: You are going to die. This is the truest reality there is. This is what makes us all the same. It doesn’t matter how rich we are, or how popular we are, or how powerful we are: we are all going to ‘kick the bucket’ one day. Isn’t that a nice thought?” (9)
That is verbatim how Father Richards begins his first chapter. What better way to appeal to the Youths than with an edgy hook? Nevertheless, I think his opening words work quite well for our purposes, too. Because he is right: we are all going to die some day, and while he doesn’t say this next part outright, how we orient ourselves towards this inevitable event—that is, how we spend the finite amount of time which comprises our singular lives on earth in light of death—is a kind of ethics, or an attempt to answer what it means to live a good life. As a reminder, my goals in this project are 1) to get you to be a woman (that is, to transition), and 2) to counter the rhetoric widely espoused by prominent figures in the Catholic Church which perpetuates strict and harmful gender roles. In this chapter specifically, I’d like to talk about fear, and how it relates to transition. Towards the end of Chapter 1 of Be a Man!, Father Richards states, “Fear of death makes us slaves. You can either decide to spend your life in slavery or spend your life in freedom” (26). I intend to show you he’s right. By the end of the chapter, we will have a working starting place for encouraging transition.
Father Richards titles his first chapter, “Be a Man Who Keeps His Eyes on the Final Goal.” You might extrapolate from this title that he is calling upon his readers to prioritize getting to heaven over earthly goods and endeavors—to place more importance on the next life than the present one—and you’d be correct; in addition to being both clunky and awkward to try to parody (which will be a bit of a trend), his chapter title immediately contextualizes his memento mori warning salvo as a persuasive (or coercive) tactic to convince you that you need to become a good Christian man, and fast. You only have so much time in this life, after all. You’re gonna fucking die one day! Stop wasting time! …But we do actually have some time now, so I’ll come back to this point in a couple of paragraphs.
There are some interesting things to remark on in the first chapter’s contents. One such point of note is that Father Richards echoes a statement I made in my own Introduction to this series. He writes, “[God] is the ultimate truth. He can take any kind of doubt. He can handle it. He can take your doubts” (20). His reassurance maybe falls a little flat within the context of the 19-page guilt trip he’s written, especially when, for him, it is a foregone conclusion that your doubts will apparently lead you to believe in the Catholic God. But the even more curious thing in the chapter is that at no point does Father Richards make any sort of claim about what exactly a man is. So I apologize to any men or aspiring men reading this, but we still don’t know what the hell you are. We may never at this rate. Granted, the book was published in 2009, predating the more recent hand-wringing around defining ‘man’ and ‘woman.’ (Matt Walsh had not yet asked, “What is a woman?”, a question no one had ever thought to ask before, let alone attempted to answer.) Now I, for one, am not a stickler for rigid definitions of gender, or of anything for that matter—in my opinion, prescriptivism generally does not a good philosopher make. So just to be clear, I am not expecting from Father Richards some ultimate description of Man which must fit every man everywhere. But it remains odd to me that he skips providing what I thought was the main premise of his book. If by the end the reader is to be a man, surely he would want to establish what a man is so that the reader can become one. He probably takes biological essentialism for granted and expects those born with a penis to be his primary audience—which is precisely why his approach stands out to me. From a scan of the table of contents, Be a Man! seems to be arranged around not what a man is but what a man does: a man puts God first, a man loves others, a man chooses to live how he was “created” (read: as someone who embraces having been born male), etc. Those are surprisingly existential assertions from someone who will just as quickly tell you that sex is immutable and can never actually change no matter what you do. The closest intimation Father Richards makes in the chapter about how to achieve manhood is at the end, where he says, “If you want to be a man [you don’t], then be a man of God” (27). While Father Richards may not believe it’s possible for a man to become a woman, he clearly thinks it’s possible for a man to fail to be a man. And we can work with that—failure to be a man is at least a partial success as far as we’re concerned.
A lot of Catholicism is just like that in practice—with its leveraging of failure, I mean. That’s what the Ten Commandments fundamentally are: Thou shall and Thou shalt not. Failure to uphold these Commandments jeopardizes your ability to get to heaven (at least in Catholicism). And if you don’t go to heaven, you go to hell, and hell sucks! You do not want to go there. I think generally we can all agree that certain rules like “Thou shalt not murder” are pretty good to have around, and that if there is a heaven, maybe murder would be one of the sins that might give God pause before letting someone in. But there are gradations to sin; not all sins are created equal, after all. Intuitively we all understand there’s a difference between a man committing family annihilation and a woman killing her psychotic husband in self-defense as he tries to annihilate his family. The Catholic Church has the perfect answers to all of these concerns: there are venial sins (bad stuff but not bad enough to keep you out of heaven—instead you go to purgatory first and then eventually get to heaven after serving your spiritual time out); mortal sins (really bad stuff that functionally kills your soul and keeps you out of heaven); and the Sacrament of Reconciliation (aka Confession, in which you tell a priest your sins, and that you’re sooooo sorry, and that you won’t do them again, even though you probably will, and then you’re good—heaven is back on the table). If this all sounds a little contrived, it’s because I’m being flippant, and because it is a little contrived. But put yourself in the shoes of 17-year-old me: I was once told by a different priest, in a somber yet gentle voice to a chapel filled mostly with teenagers, that committing a mortal sin is like looking at Jesus dying on the cross, knowing that he loves you so much that he died for you—then giving him the middle finger and walking away. Conveniently, the Catholic Church considers premarital sex, masturbation, and pornography all to be sins of the mortal category. All I’m suggesting is that maybe there are better ways to talk to horny teenagers about this stuff, even if you believe it. Not my job to figure it out anymore, but I am happy to problematize it for you.
Fear became a regular part of my life, to the point that I didn’t recognize it was there. It was as mundane as the air I breathed. Not to rely too heavily on personal anecdotes—I’m not trying to make grand, sweeping statements just based on my own experience. But when I was immersed in that world, I truly did not realize how manipulative it was until I could no longer sit in a church without having a fucking panic attack. To bring this all back to Father Richards’… reminder that death is inevitable: death and heaven are the most common bargaining chips in the book (I mean metaphorically, not just the specific book we’re talking about). The selling point of Catholicism is that one day, your life on earth will end, and you’ll have a chance to be unimaginably happy in heaven with God, but if you fuck it up, you’ll miss out and be unimaginably miserable in hell, and it will be because you didn’t love God enough. It will be because you couldn’t stop masturbating or gossiping or stealing silverware from Applebee’s, or weren’t sorry enough for doing those things. So you have to keep coming back to church and keep confessing your sins. It is a fundamentally humiliating process, and yet can become perfunctory to the point of numbness. Catholicism uses and abuses your fear and shame as tools to keep your ass in a pew—and that’s without even addressing how the Catholic Church leverages these emotions to manipulate and exploit its many, many sex abuse victims (a fate I miraculously avoided). Catholicism in practice is a religion which predicates its promised rewards—which you cannot touch in this lifetime—on how bad it can make you feel about yourself right now. Father Richards writes, “I tell people to always seek truth because truth will always lead you to God. The problem is too many people just are not interested in seeking truth. They just live for today, they never think about what might happen tomorrow” (19-20). I think he has in mind here a notion that, broadly speaking, people are hedonistic, and that that is a problem. I have philosophical reasons for thinking he is dead wrong on all counts (if you are curious: they involve alienated labor and nihilism, but that is a blog post for another day), but my main criticism of this notion is that it utilizes this sense of fear and urgency to compel you to prioritize getting to a place beyond our material, mortal world—and that doing so can and often does come at the expense of the joy you can experience in this life, here and now.
So what does all this have to do with becoming a woman? Is all this Catholic shit even relevant to someone who’s not Catholic who wants to transition to female? Unfortunately, yes, I think it is—at least to some arguable extent. The U.S. is a country built upon the baggage of Christianity, and even now, it still clings to its Puritanical roots (which has resulted in a heinous brand of American Catholicism all its own, too, despite the American founders hating those duplicitous pope-worshiping traitors). Whether or not you, the reader of this blog, lives in the U.S., is not as important as recognizing the particular role religious shame plays in your societal situation. For instance—I spent several years living (and transitioning) in Japan, a country with plenty of secular shame, but far less religious shame, and Christian religious shame lacked any institutional or cultural power outside of fringe cults. This dynamic has changed drastically throughout Japanese history; I mention it only to show that being in a societal situation where I did not have to worry about prejudice grounded in religious zealotry made a marked difference in my comfort and willingness to transition. If you are not in such a situation, combating the fear and shame and self-loathing will be harder, and you will be less inclined to advocate for yourself and to take your life into your own hands. Societies with strong patriarchal and misogynistic influences want to stop you from transitioning, and utilize an economy of fear to convince you not to start, or even to give up after you already have (cf. the prominent outspoken TERF movement in the U.K., which would love for every trans man to detransition, and for every trans woman to have never existed, or the next best thing, to die). There will always be another reason to put off transitioning till tomorrow: another obligation, another inconvenience, another workplace situation, another part of your body you’ve found reason to be dissatisfied with, another person you care about who if they saw you in a dress you would die from embarrassment even though you want to wear one, another family member who you would risk alienating by choosing to express yourself in a way that complicates their perception of you; and even if all of those conditions are gone, there is still heaven to worry about after all of this is over—so it’s best not to transition at all. The present suffering will be worth it for the future joy of heaven, or at the very least, it will be worth it for avoiding the painful consequences of transitioning on earth. And if you are Catholic, unfortunately I think you have it especially hard, because suffering is often framed as good and virtuous, insofar as it can be considered a sacrifice to God. After all, imagine how much happier God will be with you if you offer Her the pain of not being a woman for the entirety of your one life on earth—the only time you can transition—and join Her in heaven where there will no longer be any distinction between woman or man for you to transition between…
If I were a different kind of person (i.e. a shitty self-help writer like Richards), this would be the part where I say something like, “Is that what you really want? To live your entire life as a man and lose your only chance to be what you want to be? Father Richards was right, fear of death does make us slaves. Do you want to choose the freedom to be a woman or enslave yourself to manhood for the rest of your life out of fear of the potential consequences?” But the economy of fear goes beyond negotiating your happiness away; and in fact, it is often used to negotiate your happiness back to you, as my hypothetical interrogation illustrates. People often encourage others to transition using fear as a motivator as well. To be clear, I am not equating religion with the trans community (the former is typically a system of institutionalized power structures centered around a set of beliefs, and the latter is half comprised of a bunch of girls who have no systemic power and mostly like spending time on the computer). Fear is a protective emotion; it is not inherently bad. Everyone uses fear to rationalize certain choices and behaviors. I don’t want you to fear fear. As it turns out, sometimes framing life in this way does yield genuinely helpful results. For many trans women, if we hadn’t acted urgently out of fear for our futures, we may never have transitioned, or may not have lived to see the rest of our lives at all. Fear is useful, and its use only becomes immoral when it is used to manipulate and control. But it can also paralyze us and prevent us from pursuing what would help us. Despite its utility, many trans women, including myself, accepted our transness and embraced womanhood out of desperation when we felt we had nothing left to lose. The results were inarguably beneficial—life-saving, even—but the road to that point can be harrowing and the pain scarring. I’d like to help you choose to transition without having to reach that point if I can, and I’d like to do it without committing the same ironic mistake as Richards: telling you not to be a slave to the fear of death while at once leveraging it against you.
Personally, I have mixed feelings about scaring people into transitioning. On the one hand, sometimes people need to hear “There’s still time” so their fear of not transitioning can compel them to finally take inventory of their lives as they exist right now. A bit of fear now can help people find some sense of inner happiness and congruity that has evaded them and save them from future regret (I definitely wish someone would have scared me in this way a decade ago). On the other hand, we as trans women are a demographic that is already heavily burdened by feelings of fear and guilt, and in spite of the best intentions of I Saw the TV Glow, it can be overwhelmingly daunting to try to commit to transitioning when you just feel more guilty about not doing it the longer you wait. Maybe your peers want to help you transition, but you fear what will happen if you do, and you want to find a reason beyond the fear of the negative consequences of not doing it. Regardless of your particular anxieties at the prospect, I’d like to offer another way of thinking about transition, one which neither requires you to discern whether your fear is being used to help you or to control you, nor requires you to feel like you have nothing left to lose. It involves no moral imperative, no “You should” or “Thou shalt not.” I’m going offer you a reason to be happy, and you are free to do with it what you will. It’s not a promise, only an affirmation.
The affirmation is divided into three parts, which are as follows:
- You are allowed to be happy in your one life on earth.
- You deserve to be happy in your one life on earth.
- Being a trans woman is something to be happy about. :)
That’s it. I think the third claim is the most radical among them, even among many trans people. Internalized transphobia, misogyny, and shame (which all leverage fear in some way) have conditioned many of us to think of our transness as a deficiency. I reject that. I refuse to view transition the same way as my oppressors; I will not adopt the same view of my personhood as so many people who would tell me that being trans is a mental illness and that I should not exist, and who fundamentally view femininity and womanhood itself as inferior. I find it beautiful that a degree of change is possible and achievable, that the the lot we are given in life is not set in stone and can be torn down and relaid by our own hands, even if only a little bit. I find it beautiful that in spite of the things we can’t control, the things we can control, like our identities and how we express them, deserve to be given just as much importance, if not more. No one gets to decide who you are for you. I consider being trans a sign of freedom and something to celebrate. And, perhaps most importantly, I assert that these three statements are applicable to the world you live in right now. These are not lofty or unachievable ideals but reasonable expressions of your right to equality during your time on earth. It is nihilism to believe that your happiness and well-being do not matter in the grand scheme of things, and that they should be surrendered to achieve some nebulous “final goal” or to satisfy the rules of a world immaterial or the whims of any Being who lives there, whether anything beyond our material world exists or not. Stop and look at the realities right in front of you, sister.
Again, my goal in this chapter is just to offer a starting place for encouraging transition. I don’t expect you to reframe your thinking overnight. I’m also absolutely not telling you to just be happy instead of miserable, because that doesn’t tend to work. But I do invite you to think of what must be done in order to disagree with point 3). One must make the case that transition is bad—that it’s unnatural, or harmful, or regrettable, or disgusting, or disordered, or immoral, or sinful. Every single expression of transphobia, externalized or internalized, is reducible to that sentiment, no exceptions. Many transphobes who think themselves clever will claim they do not literally have a “phobia” of trans people, but their repugnance towards us can’t be boiled down to anything but. Internalized transphobia often sinks its claws into a startling number of trans women, who then become dejected and basically take a fatalist outlook towards their own bodies and life predicaments. Some trans women are disparaging enough of their own transness to only consider transition an undesirable but necessary last resort. And some may even come to hold these views precisely because of the material realities of their lives, which are inordinately oppressive. I am sympathetic to these women. Being trans is at times a herculean task, and as I said above, a lot of forces do not want you to transition or to see transition as something worth doing. It is hard to be on the receiving end of so much hatred without becoming embittered and vindictive. But that pain is exactly the reason I want to try to counter these toxic ideas with life-affirming ones, to help reorient ourselves to look at our existential realities through an alternative lens of joy rather than one of fear. Maybe, in reality, you don’t have to spend your life as a man who feels dysphoric, or even just embarrassed for embracing womanhood and femininity; maybe you have as much right to feel aligned with your gender and to express it as any cis person; and maybe, despite its difficulties, to forgo manhood in favor of womanhood is in fact natural, constructive, worthwhile, beautiful, dignifying, loving, and wonderful. I want to encourage all of us to insist as much. One would have to consider womanhood bad to insist otherwise. And yet so many people would sooner see you deny yourself your happiness for your entire life if it would mean they don’t have to see you transition. They want you to fear life and death alike not for your ethical benefit, but for their own comfort and convenience. It’s important to me to at least try to flip that on its head so that, out of an inkling of self-love, you can start prioritizing yourself as a person whose free and happy existence as a woman matters in this world. If nothing else, that’s a much less scary way of looking at transition at the outset than looking at all of the consequences of doing or not doing it—and it’s a million times preferable to prioritizing a presently inaccessible heaven at the cost of your happiness and at the behest of people who fucking hate you. Besides, if any speculative God would deny you heaven for transitioning, I’d call that God transphobic; and I especially don’t want to hear it from the God who gave us Transubstantiation.
Jamie Barne
I hope you settle down, I hope you marry rich
I hope you’re scared of only ordinary shit
Like murderers and ghosts and cancer on your skin
And not your soul, and what he might do with it
-Noah Kahan, “The Great Divide”