Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders

1. Things Fall Apart - Summer 2005

Summer 2005 Aman is standing in the shower. It’s the weekend, it’s Saturday, it’s sunny, he’s in his thirties, his early forties, taking a long, hot weekend shower, listening to his family—first one child, then another, then three together—screaming happily with their mother, the woman he has loved and been loved by since he was seventeen. It’s the weekend, it’s Saturday, he is taking a long, hot shower listening to the intimate noise of his happy family. It’s a moment of private, steaming leisure that happens over and over. Some part of the man is glowing far away, or far below, or somewhere within. This glow is happiness, he tells himself. There is another feeling, too, a burning sensation, like magnesium blazing in water, a white-hot flame defying the cold, numb element— him—that threatens to smother it. That’s love, he tells himself. He is burning with love for his family, glowing with happiness at the sound of their happiness, and yet he is far away, or far below, or somewhere within, watching the blaze of his most intimate connections shimmer as though through fathoms of water. These are among the strongest feelings he has ever had, and yet he cannot feel them. Because he is the kind of person who always talks to God, he says to God, “You see how much I love them. You see that I’m happy. Thank you, it’s enough for me, it’s more than I ever 21 1 Things Fall Apart imagined.” And then he adds, “I’m so tired, God.” And then, as the pain of the distance between himself and the life he is living overwhelms him, he prays a prayer he knows can never be forgiven: “If it’s okay with you, and it would be okay for them, please let me die.” Eventually, the man gets out of the shower. The happiness, the love, the pain—so intertwined he can’t imagine one without the others—sink to bearable levels. He settles back into his sleeve of numbness: skin, shirt, trousers. When he opens the bathroom door, he smiles. He knows this will happen over and over. It is a sign— the stigmata, he might have thought, if he had grown up on the right-hand side of the Judeo-Christian hyphen—of a good life, the very best life he can permit himself to imagine. And someday, he promises himself, this good life will finally be over, and he won’t have to endure his distance from it any longer. There are reasons for his distance, his despair. The sex of the body he was given is at odds with the gender of what therapists might call his psyche and religious people might call his soul. He calls it his “self,” and, although it is faint, wispy, formless, without a life or a body to live it, although no one, not even he, has ever glimpsed it, it is the only part of him that has ever felt real. His insistence on—or is it knowledge of?—the reality of the least lived aspect of his life has terrible consequences for the other aspects. They hardly feel real—they hardly feel—at all. He knows that this absence of feeling, this unreality—and the ache and vertigo and desire for death that accompany it—is called “gender dysphoria.” He knows that gender dysphoria has always been with him; he knows it will never go away. What he doesn’t know is that every day that he fails to live that unrealized self, his gender dysphoria will grow worse. More painful. More disorienting. Harder to live with. More costly to ignore. I spent the summer of 2005 trying to learn how to make frozen coffee for my wife. During the semester I spent teaching at Tel Aviv University in 2002, my wife discovered that, when the temperature reaches the eighties, frozen—not iced—coffee becomes the height of pleasure. Frozen coffee is expensive, and, in a family of five Part One: Who Will Be 22 subsisting on the income of a bottom-rung academic, it was a taste she couldn’t often indulge. So she dug out the unused blender I had bought her as a birthday present in a display of husbandly obtuseness—“Why did you think I would want a blender?” she...