MY NEW BODY: PUBERTY, DETRANSITION, AND ARCHANGELS

When I was five, I used to carry an illustrated children’s Bible around with me. I took it everywhere—parties, walks in the countryside, school classes, trips to my parents’ workplaces, appointments with doctors and dentists. I can’t remember understanding any of what I read, or if I could read the book at all. What I do remember is recognising in the stories something beyond the very conscious make-believe of most other forms of children’s entertainment, from Cartoon Network to panto to Harry Potter. Whoever wrote these stories, I thought, believed them to be true in some way, if not always as historical accounts. There were no fatuous ‘it’s behind you’s in these pages. They were different from the ‘myths and legends’ of dead cultures as much as from the deliberate fabulations of children’s literature, and so they could transport me to an other world more tangible in its modal realism than those more obviously confected imaginaries, which risked being as enchanting as dusty toys in a junk box.

For that reason I carried the book about, its physical form—at that age a weighty tome in my little hands—as important as the words and pictures inside it. I wasn’t religious. My parents weren’t religious. I didn’t know what that word meant and, fortunately, was yet to have divided up the conscious universe into the scientific, the fictional, the religious, the mythical, the historical, the real and unreal and so on. Still, I didn’t carry it with me forever. At some point, The Bible was replaced by The Beano, which later stepped aside for The Simpsons and then The X-Men until, at some point, I may have tried reading a book without pictures in it. My religiosity remained, however, though now in a repressed state. I couldn’t consciously admit to it. I certainly wouldn’t admit religiosity to anyone else, because—of course—I wanted to be clever. And being clever meant knowing the difference between fairy tales and ‘reality’, a dimension that was fascinating, infinitely mysterious perhaps, but ultimately disenchanted and categorically distinct from human thought. What it meant to be ‘real’ was to be ‘material’, and what it meant to be ‘material’ was to be mute: unconscious, that is. So if I was indwelt by something seemingly grand and indescribable when I listened to music like that of Hildegard von Bingen or viewed a painting like that of Christ’s transfiguration by Raphael, that was an enjoyable feeling to have, maybe even a life-affirming one, but it did not, could not point to any kind of truth about the cosmos. Such feelings could be explained by history and sociobiology, and whatever yearnings I had in that regard would have to be satisfied in this life, with these things—material things—which I had or could find, demand, or make.

The arrival—or, perhaps, eruption—of puberty could have threatened such a worked-out, plain and simple worldview. For it was in that chaos magic of newly emergent energies, a Koyaanisqatsi cut-up of mediatised masturbation, face-reddening flirtations, nearly violent insurrectionary experiments and countercultural pretensions that the body, probably for the first time, could have come under question. As it happened, I tried to ignore it. I was sure everything I was going through was ‘perfectly normal’—I had been taught as much. Save a brief-lived anxiety that I was an abnormally and immorally high-volume onanist (a slightly older boy reassured me), I resigned myself to accepting the feelings and forces in me, all of them, as much as I could and even, at times, celebrating my new body, my morning wood, I thought, like some alien monolith and my new height, initially anyway, promising a modicum of confidence. Acne, as it does for many teenage boys, would essentially crush the potential for any physical self-assuredness, however, and become an overwhelming focus. The plague would sadly drag on into my twenties, long outstaying its welcome and playing, I suspect, no small part in my retreat into cerebral things—that, too, probably a type of sublimated masturbation. No, at first I didn’t have a major quarrel with my new body. It was biology doing what it does. In my mind ‘nature’ had a kind of hypostasised, almost anthropomorphic agency. I could not, should not resist its working out. So I didn’t.

Then, when I was twenty-two, something happened. A something which upended my pre-existing view of my post-pubertal body, though without challenging the basic naturalist paradigm with which I was working. In a word, trans happened to me. How it happened is still somewhat vague in my understanding, seeming to have been set off by viewing a slew of horror films and becoming fascinated by monstrous vampirettes, possessed girl children and other female demons. When Halloween rolled around it was time to embody these figures of fantasy myself and, having made myself available to it, thereby the imp got in. Initially, though, I had not decided my body was wrong and that I wanted a new one. It was only as the obvious disjunction between seeking to imperson a kind of female presence and feeling myself within a male body became more obvious that I began to explore my options. And the options were whatever science could afford me, firstly through the use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT). The yearning inside me for a transformation of my body had an answer. A scientific answer. I revelled in the connotations of artificiality, of becoming ersatz, replica, which the transition process suggested. The transsexual motif in cyberpunk and sci-fi worlds, seeming to represent a cutting-edge, future form of body modification, so that the cyborg and the trans woman were alike sigils of a brave new world, amused but also delighted me. I cringed reading Nick Land’s ‘theory-fiction’ in which ‘Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude’ etc. etc. But I couldn’t help being turned on by it as well. Maybe I too could get ‘[b]litzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs’, if I was smart enough about it. I didn’t mention this to my doctor. It was crucial to maintain to the outside world that my desires were not only medically answerable but civilisationally normative. All I wanted was to be a young woman—a middle-class, white, educated woman, unimpeachably normal, despite having had an atypical, oblique way of getting there. The strangeness—the queerness?—of the wants and urges that brought me to the doctor’s surgery, the psychiatrist and the so-called ‘Gender Dysphoria Service’ were to be excised or at least toned down from my accounts, so that I could get the drugs I demanded. Whatever it took, I would transform my body.

Regret came, ultimately, not because I realised that the attempt at such a transformation was wrongheaded or morally suspect, but primarily because it didn’t work. I could not lie to myself that the body I saw in the mirror was female. It didn’t feel female. I didn’t feel female. Moreover, I began to wonder if I had ever really wanted a merely sexual change in my body. I had physical frustrations, dissatisfactions, feelings of restlessness and tension and anger, as many of us do, but was the answer to be found in gender? I sought release from my body. I somehow wanted to fly, to be lifted out of myself, but not to lose my materiality. The feelings in me found a gendered expression because, when my transition began in 2014-16, I reached for the ideas that were lying around. Later, when I abandoned my transition, there were other ideas lying around, and I reached for those. Yoga. Fell running. Nutrition. These seemed to work better than gender and sex did, but that was in part because I didn’t expect them to provide comprehensive answers. They were tools, temporary solutions, and they helped me work with a wanting inside me but did not pretend to satisfy it. What could ever satisfy that inchoate but driving need for a physical transformation that the world could not give me? C. S. Lewis wrote that ‘[if] we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.’ I was operating, though, with a dualism that could not permit such an other world to impinge on my life. If there was such an other world and, much more so than the Bible-loving boy I had been, I was sure there wasn’t, then it could only be spiritual in the sense of purely immaterial. I was not interested in spirituality because it sounded wispy, nebulous, a lot of air. We all think in metaphors and the metaphors we use powerfully shape the choices we make, often behind our own backs. If I had seen in the Christian promise of a resurrection body something that mattered—not in the sense of being substantially identical to the perishable body of this-worldly life, but in the sense of having a tangibility and a heaviness in it, I might have had a better idea about where my yearnings were leading. As it happened, I was not interested. I didn’t want to be a cloud.

Thus ‘spiritual’ answers were unsatisfying. Because I could not see the transformed body described in Christianity as anything other than a weightless and hazy kind of unreality, I was unmotivated to question whether its supporting discourse was anything more than a genre of false consciousness. And I went on thinking like this. I could not do otherwise. How is a mental framework overthrown? For me, it was by a painting.

Behold Massimo Stanzione’s The Seven Archangels (1620). I don’t know how I found it. Maybe it found me. I can’t pretend to have seen it in person, and the low-resolution Google image I saw might even have been cropped or filtered before it got to me. And yet what I saw in this painting of these chiefs of heaven cut through a lifetime of pretensions which had built up since those early years carrying an illustrated Bible around. There was a harsh punctum in the secret correspondence I felt, almost without reflection, between myself and the heroic figures of the image. The graceful and strong androgyny in their features called to me. Spoke to me. I understood at last what I had been running towards and why I couldn’t get it with drugs. There is nothing mistaken or shameful in the will to transcend the sexed body. It puts us in touch with our natural movement towards the divine. Moreover, there is no flight from the physical about it. The soma pneumatikon, the resurrected body of the age to come, will be no thing insubstantial and airy. I see a weight and a corporeality in the archangels, representatives of the heroes we could be. It is a gritty kind of being.

What more can I say about it? I am a lay believer and a primitive one. Still, doesn’t its relative unknowability, unlike the predictable procedures of medical transition, make it all the more convincing? I hope so.