To be a good man
Early in the weeks and months of understanding the very nature of being a transgender person, I struggled with my identity. This is pretty normal.
(If you identify as a cisgender person, I invite you to explore these feelings with me. Maybe you’ve never felt a need to question your gender identity. Or perhaps some aspects of this journey will feel familiar.)
Terrified to express any hint at maleness to my wife, who was – in her own way – questioning her identity as it related to me and to our marriage, I held my thoughts of “what if I am a man” deep inside, safe and protected from the threat of harm they could bring to the life I loved so dearly. The risk, as I saw it, was a loss of my marriage, a loss of my family structure, a loss of everything my wife and I had built for ourselves and our children. Facing the cold truth that my wife did not want to be married to a man was too much. I shied away from looking at that fear directly, and so I nudged around its boundaries with great care, holding my breath the whole time.
There is a common narrative that so many of us have heard; When you come out as a trans person, you will lose your marriage or relationship. You will lose your children. You will lose family. You will lose friends. It’s a myth, but the damage from it is real.
The row you hoe
My egg cracked in the worst part of winter, at a time when my isolation was at its worst. Every day was an emotional struggle, and I did not yet have anyone to turn to for company or companionship.
Deep in the throes of a soggy February, I took to my garden. I do this often. Some people devote themselves to the kitchen to cook or bake. Others immerse their minds in libraries of books and art. Many use music, created or borrowed. It feels so very human to shut off the brain and engage the body in work. Perhaps it is less about productivity than interrupting the spiraling thoughts we can’t control when we are overwhelmed.
Standing in my sleepy garden, uncovering beds and slicing into their crumbly depth with a sharpened hoe in both hands, I loosened and mixed the soil in a practiced motion mastered many years before. Holding the hoe at a thirty-degree angle to my body, my leading hand rotates the blade just slightly with each downward stroke such that a sharpened point strikes the dirt at impact. This produces less vibration on the hands than striking with the flat of the blade. In and curving toward where I stand, the soil aerates, and the hoe scoops it nearer into a pattern that shapes each bed neatly, imperfect little mounds heaped in a sequence of rows beside rows. I can clear and fertilize up to six twenty-five-foot-long beds in a half day with this method, and the subsoil suffers no compaction. Folks, I’m a pro with a hoe.
As I let my hands and body work each bed, my mind wandered out to the people I know. Many of my friends were men. And they were good people. They were people I loved and respected, people I admired, people who were kind and caring. I thought about their qualities, the aspects of their actions or relationships that held the most meaning for me as I searched for my own identity in the context of masculinity, and I decided to reach out to them.
My body knew what I needed. Connection.
A Beer
Me, sitting at a nice table in my favorite brewpub, cold beer in a glass turning around and around under my fingers: “I asked you out for a beer so you could help me with something big.”
My friend, Noah, a slightly younger man, often cocky but always ready to laugh at himself for it, sat across from me, beer poised at his lips: “Hit me with it.”
Me: “I’m transgender.”
Noah: “Awesome.”1
Me: “So… I just… I need some help figuring out how to be a good man. And I’ve watched you a lot; with your wife; with your kids. You’re present, and you’re loving, and it’s so clear to me that you WANT to be there changing diapers and being emotionally available as a father and a spouse. And I think you’re the kind of man I’d like to be. If I can be one at all.”
Noah: Sips his beer mindfully. “All I can tell you is, keep being the man you are right now. You’re all of those things you just said about me, which were painfully kind. Keep them. Don’t change the parts you love.”
The conversations with my brother didn’t go quite that well. He has been nothing but affirming and supportive since I came out to him, but the complete picture is more complex. We spent some time together with extended family, during which one of my children needed some attention. I pulled him close to hug him as I brushed cookie crumbs off his face. Yes, I did this in front of everyone. My brother was quick to correct me. “No, no,” he said, “you’ll never be accepted as a real man if you’re not toxic. You can’t display affection like that to your kids.” Yes, it was a joke. Yes, I think he really does know that’s silly and obviously a toxic masculine rule that no one should ascribe to. But he said it, and part of him meant it. And that, above so many other things, gave me pause for a very long time.
What do we think of men?
In a phone call with my parents many months later, my mother, in one of her typical rants about politics and the state of the world, said, “You know why this happened. It’s because of men.” And let me explain the venom with which she said the word “men.” It was bitter. It was laced with the kind of hatred that she has built her life upon.
Eye-opener.
No wonder I face these internal struggles. I was raised with them.
How had I approached that same concept with my children? What was I teaching them about the world with the emphasis my mother placed on the word “men”? Did my voice sound like my mother’s? (Queue my greatest fear.) And was this the real reason my wife was so afraid of me having a masculine identity?
The discussion around testosterone was laced with the same contempt, the same words of blame and accusation. T (short for testosterone) will make you angry. T will make you dominant and overbearing. It’ll make you aggressive. You’ll become violent.
As a side note, I did a bit of research to understand the effects of testosterone better, if not for myself then at least for the preservation of my marriage. It turns out that violence and anger are not an accurate portrayal of how bodies respond to testosterone. It does encourage competition, which makes sense. So why do we see so much violent and aggressive behavior from men in society? We largely have toxic masculinity to thank for that. Society provides a narrow box for men to survive within, and this requires men to perform anger and aggression to be recognized as “real men,” as valid and accepted, strong and powerful.
Was my wife afraid I would become aggressive? Dominant? Yes, she was.
More importantly, I think she was afraid I would become someone unrecognizable.
Who am I to become?
Now that I’ve invested a lot more time and reflection into my gender journey, I’ve found places where men of all backgrounds question their family roles, strive to parent their children without toxicity, and openly identify as feminists. I am not alone. I am not the first man to want to be better. I am not so different that I cannot find other fathers like myself.
I am also not the only transgender spouse struggling to redefine their marriage without fracturing it. So many of us know the risks when we come out to our partners, but is it not better to have the honesty between ourselves? This new authenticity is a relief. It’s not easy, but no marriage ever was.
Parenting feels harder now, like going to the gym and discovering whole muscle groups that hurt that you didn’t know existed (but now you can’t get off the couch without noticing them). I hyper-examine every piece of language I use and catch myself when something trained and conditioned from my youth sneaks out. I ask myself the hard questions, like, “Am I encouraging my kids to embrace emotion or restrict it?”
I ask similar questions about performing masculinity.
Am I manspreading taking up too much space?
Did I just mansplain say that out loud in the most inappropriate fashion ever?
Am I really only doing <insert whatever> because it’s masculine and I want someone to see me doing a masculine thing?2
It turns out I’m really no different than I was all those years ago. The only thing I’m not doing anymore is the pretending. Maybe I was a good man all along. Maybe I’m barely average and I still have a lot of growth ahead of me. I totally sucked at being a girl, and so it’s a relief not to keep up that ruse. And the unspent energy from that charade can go into more important things, like showing my children that their Papi makes great chocolate chip pancakes, and that I love riding bikes with them even when we have to stop every 500 feet for a snack.
My mother has taken to calling me a “good son”3 when I visit to help clean the house or repair things that have broken. I’ve not heard any more derisive comments about “men” (though please don’t ask her about Republicans or conservatives).
My brother (Mr. Toxic) is absorbing parenting methods from me as he invests himself in a step-parenting role. And ultimately, I have not – nor will I ever – stopped expressing affection toward my children. They deserve my love and attention. They need the physical contact of hugs and cookie-wiping-crumb-clean-offs. No matter who they grow up to be, I want them to look back on their childhood and feel that I was present and supportive, that I was emotionally available to them, that I expressed emotion openly, and that I modeled healthy relationships for them. I have always believed in these things, and identifying as a transman does not change that.
I want my children to grow up to be good humans. I want them to be kind and conscientious. I want them to demonstrate gratitude and generosity. I want them to give and receive love fully. I want them to laugh. I want them to be silly. And if they choose to become parents, I want them to feel all the joy of loving their children the way that I love them.
I want to be a good man. Maybe that’s more important than actually being one. Maybe the desire will keep me going, always striving to be better, never stopping since the goal is purely subjective. And that feels like enough.
Your trans friend,
Robin
It doesn’t always go like this – coming out to someone you care about, baring your soul in the hopes that you’ll be accepted, desperately praying you don’t end up drinking beer alone while your insides are crushed from rejection. But it CAN go like this. And it DOES go like this more often than that stupid mythology of transness would have you believe.
Obviously, no. I mean, doesn’t everyone obsess over having an immaculately clean garage? Those tools aren’t going to sort themselves by size and function on the pegboard.
I was definitely not a “good daughter” before, so this is progress on two fronts.