REVIEW: Cyrus Dunham's *A YEAR WITHOUT A NAME* - A Nuanced and Eloquent Trans Narrative
In my November 16 post (the "Transgender Lack of Awareness" post), I returned to a recurrent theme: that the mainstream transgender message doesn't make me feel included and recognized. Quite the opposite. Even when there's an effort to mention nonbinary trans folks and emphasize that a person's gender is valid regardless of their body, I feel left out, omitted.
Well, I'm currently reading several books that are likely candidates for what are called "comps" in the world of querying lit agents and publishers: books that your own book can be compared to because of similarities. One such book is A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Dunham.
Dunham refuses a lot of blocky klunky binary either-ors and dives straight into the gooey ambivalent conflicted territory he had to transit, and shoves it back at us, demanding that we consider it. He opens with a preface in which he indicates that his testimony of gender identity being a complex and nuanced thing without certainty could be seized upon as evidence that transgender identities are being embraced by people who will get buyer's remorse later and wish to de-transition.
And that's a big part of why so many trans people embrace the mainstream narrative. "I always knew I was born in the wrong body and was actually a [person of the opposite sex's gender], that's a solid irrevocable fact", goes the narrative. "I had to transition and get a new name and new pronouns because that's how you do it, and to do otherwise would make me horriby disphoric and suicidal, whereas transitioning totally makes me whole and comfortable in my own skin and validated". If you don't say it that way, the world looks back at you with dubiety and tells you "You don't seem like [that gender] to me, and since you aren't sure yourself..." and suggests that you're disturbed in the head, that these weird notions are obviously delusions brought on by the stress and so on and so forth.
But Cyrus Dunham appears to recognize that there's a problem with that: if young people contemplating these matters are led to feel that authentic trans people have that kind of absolute certainty, where everything is quite clear, where the correct identities and the correct courses of action are obvious and compelling, but that isn't how they feel at all.. isn't that, itself, telling them that their identity isn't real and valid?
It takes a special courage to step forward and say "My identity and understanding is not clear and sharp and plain. But that doesn't mean it's less important than yours or doesn't count for as much". And to testify directly about the ambivalences, the worries about compromises, the contemplation of alternatives, and the presence of conflicting feelings and attitudes and inconsistencies in thought.
Dunham doesn't tell us that each gender identity exists objectively and that a person comes to recognize which one is authentically theirs. "The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the 'truth'. There were so many truths; I didn't know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying...I hesitate to call the exhausing day-to-day of embodiment 'dysphoria', that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn't align with one's sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness...And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I'd have to deal with the fallout. I'd have to decide whether to do something about it".
He also asks the complicated question "Why do I need this?" rather than positing it as self-explanatory, rather than embracing "this is what you do if you realize you are trans". He writes:
"My story isn't resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender-confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. At the very least, because I know I should. Because it's my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.
But it's not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacaphony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender".
Cyrus Dunham accepts the turmoil as a legitimate part of identity and does not set out to vanquish it in the name of certainty. At least not internally. When he decides to proceed with top surgery, he -- like so many other trans people in his situation -- finds it necessary to oversimply for the moment, to package his situation in terms that the world is prepared to understand:
My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body. That I had the soul of a man. Which implied that I believed in such a thing as a man in the first place. Which implies that I believed that, were I to live as a man, I would finally be okay.
But I didn't have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me...
The week before the surgery, I got a letter from my insurance provider:
A request has been made for coverage of "top" surgery to help with your change from female to male gender. We are unable to approve at this time. We require that you must have a desire to live and be accepted as a member of opposite sex for at least six months. The letter from your therapist indicates only "recent months". Therefor [sic], you don't meet our requirements that you desire to live and be accepted as male for at least six month [sic].
Cyrus Dunham's willingness to show his actual unedited internal processing in all its vulnerable uncertain state allows for a rare thing: he describes someone like me as a hypothetical possibility in his writing:
If I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as co-morbid rather than contradictory
I do like to feel truly transgressive, it's a confident brave look, but in truth I've spent my life unsure. Unsure if I were embracing this 'explanation' because I so badly needed an explanation, not because it was the right one. Unsure if claiming an identity that had no specific external objective characteristic had any substance at all to it. (My sociology research professor once told me gay men could be studied because you operationalize them as men who have sex with men; crossdressers because you operationalize them as men who dress in clothing designed and sold as women's clothing; but you can't operationalize 'thinks of himself as one of the girls and not one of the boys' because that only takes place inside his head). But yeah, I have a sex (male), I have a gender (girl, femme, woman, sissy), and my transgression is to insist that neither one is wrong, neither one needs to be changed. I'm not a transitioner.
So -- interestingly -- Dunham's openness creates a space for me to feel included, whereas the conventional/mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans, with the litany of officially sanctioned viewpoints, never has.
It was my intention from the start that in Within the Box I was going to put my own internal processes, including self-doubts, on display. So that makes A Year Without a Name a very good choice for the comparable lit section of my forthcoming query letters.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
I have a third book, Within the Box, which isn't published yet, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
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Well, I'm currently reading several books that are likely candidates for what are called "comps" in the world of querying lit agents and publishers: books that your own book can be compared to because of similarities. One such book is A Year Without a Name by Cyrus Dunham.
Dunham refuses a lot of blocky klunky binary either-ors and dives straight into the gooey ambivalent conflicted territory he had to transit, and shoves it back at us, demanding that we consider it. He opens with a preface in which he indicates that his testimony of gender identity being a complex and nuanced thing without certainty could be seized upon as evidence that transgender identities are being embraced by people who will get buyer's remorse later and wish to de-transition.
And that's a big part of why so many trans people embrace the mainstream narrative. "I always knew I was born in the wrong body and was actually a [person of the opposite sex's gender], that's a solid irrevocable fact", goes the narrative. "I had to transition and get a new name and new pronouns because that's how you do it, and to do otherwise would make me horriby disphoric and suicidal, whereas transitioning totally makes me whole and comfortable in my own skin and validated". If you don't say it that way, the world looks back at you with dubiety and tells you "You don't seem like [that gender] to me, and since you aren't sure yourself..." and suggests that you're disturbed in the head, that these weird notions are obviously delusions brought on by the stress and so on and so forth.
But Cyrus Dunham appears to recognize that there's a problem with that: if young people contemplating these matters are led to feel that authentic trans people have that kind of absolute certainty, where everything is quite clear, where the correct identities and the correct courses of action are obvious and compelling, but that isn't how they feel at all.. isn't that, itself, telling them that their identity isn't real and valid?
It takes a special courage to step forward and say "My identity and understanding is not clear and sharp and plain. But that doesn't mean it's less important than yours or doesn't count for as much". And to testify directly about the ambivalences, the worries about compromises, the contemplation of alternatives, and the presence of conflicting feelings and attitudes and inconsistencies in thought.
Dunham doesn't tell us that each gender identity exists objectively and that a person comes to recognize which one is authentically theirs. "The more I suspected people thought I was a liar, the more impossible it seemed to tell the 'truth'. There were so many truths; I didn't know how to locate one. Lying was embedded in every gesture, every statement, every interaction; every time I reaffirmed the presumption that I was female, which was constantly. I resigned myself to being incapable of not lying...I hesitate to call the exhausing day-to-day of embodiment 'dysphoria', that catchall for the pain of having a body that doesn't align with one's sense of self. What was a sense of self, after all: a delusion; mental illness...And if I admitted I was dysphoric, I'd have to deal with the fallout. I'd have to decide whether to do something about it".
He also asks the complicated question "Why do I need this?" rather than positing it as self-explanatory, rather than embracing "this is what you do if you realize you are trans". He writes:
"My story isn't resolved enough for me to believe that I have an unquestionable right to my own gender-confirmation surgery. I do believe it, in one part of myself. At the very least, because I know I should. Because it's my body, and I have to live in, with, and as it. Let me pilot it.
But it's not that simple for me. My brain monologue sounds like this, spoken in a cacaphony, not a linear progression of ideas: My breasts have felt invasive since they started to grow; every time I remember they are there, which is constantly, I am defeated; I have the right to augment my body in order to make it livable; the only reason I need the surgery in the first place is because the tyrannical gender binary has made me believe that my breasts are incompatible with my felt gender".
Cyrus Dunham accepts the turmoil as a legitimate part of identity and does not set out to vanquish it in the name of certainty. At least not internally. When he decides to proceed with top surgery, he -- like so many other trans people in his situation -- finds it necessary to oversimply for the moment, to package his situation in terms that the world is prepared to understand:
My confession of utter transness sacrificed nuance for legibility. I defaulted to the trope that I was born in the wrong body. That I had the soul of a man. Which implied that I believed in such a thing as a man in the first place. Which implies that I believed that, were I to live as a man, I would finally be okay.
But I didn't have time to be rigorous. I just needed them to believe me...
The week before the surgery, I got a letter from my insurance provider:
A request has been made for coverage of "top" surgery to help with your change from female to male gender. We are unable to approve at this time. We require that you must have a desire to live and be accepted as a member of opposite sex for at least six months. The letter from your therapist indicates only "recent months". Therefor [sic], you don't meet our requirements that you desire to live and be accepted as male for at least six month [sic].
Cyrus Dunham's willingness to show his actual unedited internal processing in all its vulnerable uncertain state allows for a rare thing: he describes someone like me as a hypothetical possibility in his writing:
If I was truly transgressive I would be able to tolerate the simultaneity of my breasts and masculinity and see them as co-morbid rather than contradictory
I do like to feel truly transgressive, it's a confident brave look, but in truth I've spent my life unsure. Unsure if I were embracing this 'explanation' because I so badly needed an explanation, not because it was the right one. Unsure if claiming an identity that had no specific external objective characteristic had any substance at all to it. (My sociology research professor once told me gay men could be studied because you operationalize them as men who have sex with men; crossdressers because you operationalize them as men who dress in clothing designed and sold as women's clothing; but you can't operationalize 'thinks of himself as one of the girls and not one of the boys' because that only takes place inside his head). But yeah, I have a sex (male), I have a gender (girl, femme, woman, sissy), and my transgression is to insist that neither one is wrong, neither one needs to be changed. I'm not a transitioner.
So -- interestingly -- Dunham's openness creates a space for me to feel included, whereas the conventional/mainstream narrative about what it means to be trans, with the litany of officially sanctioned viewpoints, never has.
It was my intention from the start that in Within the Box I was going to put my own internal processes, including self-doubts, on display. So that makes A Year Without a Name a very good choice for the comparable lit section of my forthcoming query letters.
-----
My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women's Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It's a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
I have a third book, Within the Box, which isn't published yet, and I'm still seeking advance readers for reviews and feedback. It is set in a psychiatric/rehab facility and is focused on self-determination and identity. Chronologically, it fits between the events in GenderQueer and those described in Guy in Women's Studies; unlike the other two, it is narrowly focused on events in a one-month timeframe and is more of a suspense thriller, although like the other two is also a nonfiction memoir. Contact me if you're interested.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for both published books.
-------
This DreamWidth blog is echoed on LiveJournal and WordPress. Please friend/link me from any of those environments on which you have an account.
--------
Index of all Blog Posts