TW: gender dysphoria; rockstars and their sexual misconduct
The first rule is not to tell anyone. Tinder taught you that much.
One summer, you’ll be bored and make another Tinder profile, and you will make sure to leave your gender toggled off. Since you were seventeen, you’ve identified as gender fluid. That meant that gender felt like moods, passing days. Now, for the first time since February when you felt a shift before going to bed, you will feel like you have woken up as a man, and you won’t know what to do with it. Tinder’s right there. It’s going to tell you: “hush-hush.”
You get stuck on the sign-up page. There are only two options here. How do you want to be shown to people? It’s a menu, you know this. Desirability really means working within the gender binary. You will weigh your options, weigh what you can pass as, and tell your profile to show your card to people looking for a woman.
“People.” (You should laugh now.) What those “people” really stand for is straight guys. The woman option was never fully true, not with your in-between days, the nowhere days that made up most of your freshman year, but now, with masculinity, that new assuredness, confidence, swagger, you’ll start to question what you’re doing when you keep matching with guys who want to call you a “good girl.” You know without them your feed would feel empty — admit it, you’re collecting them all! — but you’ll wonder if you could stomach it if you were honest and weren’t able to match with a single guy at all. What would it be like to lump yourself with men? Tinder’s made for them. You’re lucky to be allowed onto the menu. For a while, you will convince yourself that you’re the only one who has to know it’s gay, and for a while, it will be enough. (You’ll still long for the day someone calls you their boyfriend. That day will feel far, far away.)
You’ll see many openly trans women and match with a trans lesbian. She will be upset with how infrequently you respond. You’ll fight over that new pronoun on your Insta: “he” (ugh). You’ll spend the next couple of days promising her to do better. But for all of your reassurances, you will have no follow-through. You’re no better, really, than your own bad exes, and (although you won’t realize this at the time) you should have just said you lost interest. She asked. Jordan, I’m sorry, is what you’ll be thinking. Below that? You will feel ashamed.
You will have a crush on Jack White. You will have a crush on Maynard James Keenan. For one week, your family will go camping, and you’ll spend the time away from them singing and masturbating to the music. After your first listen-through of Undertow, you will learn about Keenan’s sexual assault accusations. A late-night Reddit dive will uncover what sounds like an (allegedly) guilty response. You will fall asleep fighting with —yet admiring— the composition of “Prison Sex.”
After all of that, you will still make Maynard James Keenan your profile photo. If asked about it, you’ll tell yourself that you have a good reason. (You have a good reason. Right?) It’s a photo you found from the early days of A Perfect Circle. You found it when you typed “sexy” before his name into Google, but when you saw what you now call “the mermaid,” a picture of him in a brown wig, femininity, eyeliner, something settled into place deep inside of your gut. You’ll know he was leaning into character drag — you suspect he does it (partially) to better perform his music, although he says he does it to hide — but it will be his look of relaxation, the way he seems more sure of himself, more there when he’s wearing early 2000’s women’s blue yoga pants that makes you realize that sometimes you’ve felt the exact same way. These things are easier to recognize in others’ bodies. You can map them to your own. You’ll type “I think I might be a gay man” into your Notes app. On Pinterest, you’ll find more of the mermaid photos on your lunch break. You’ll save them to a new board you call “gender euphoria” that you scroll through at night when trying to map out the possibilities across your own skin.
You will realize that being a man could mean that. You will realize that you, too, could be a man.
But if gender always came in phases, who’s to say that this one would last? After the nothing freshman year came femininity. You wore short shorts during the summer. Was that all just another form of drag? Was this? Would this be? You’ll know that any form of trans identity comes with its doubts (if you have to question it, that’s usually your answer), but what about the genderfluidity, the joy you get from braids, the worry, and the self-doubt, and — god forbid — the possibility that all of this was just internalized misogyny? Would any of this mean the same to you a year from now? How fixed is identity, really?
You’ll tell yourself to stop thinking about yourself so much. You’ll feel lost and worry that you don’t think about yourself enough. And when you hit it off with someone, you’ll fear having another “Are you straight?” conversation, because that answer would always be too much.
What was it with being wanted, anyway? That’s what the Tinder profile always comes down to. When you don’t have an answer, you’ll spend the nights thinking of the bad dates, the good ones, and realize most of them, really, were just sex. What would that be like, going forward, knowing now that you were a guy? Would you now call it being a bottom? Being a sub was like a free ticket to kink. Would that feel too feminine now? Too small?
Would you have to buy a strap-on? Would you be expected to take control?
One brave morning when your family’s still around, you will shove a pair of socks in the front of your underwear and experience such a wave of joy that you keep them in the entire morning. Before work, you’ll take them out, afraid of them falling out or of someone seeing them on the bus, but when you do, it will feel like a part of your body is missing. You will think about (and hesitate on) buying a packer, lying to yourself that, at night, it’s still safe to wear socks. What if someone saw it? What would that mean when attached to your body, which seemed almost too small to be able to call it masculine?
Your bulge will make you think of the clay penis breaking in The Opposite of a Person. Your bulge will make you think back to your other role model rock star crushes. You’ll start with Robert Plant. He’s the one who made you realize genders could mix. Did he assault anyone? Probably. It was the 70s, which meant children. (You already know about Jimmy Page. You already know about Kurt Cobain taking advantage of a disabled girl. And though they weren’t trans men, these stories don’t give you much hope. You’ll worry over what kind of a man you might become.)
Why did masculinity always carry that risk: assault? You’re a metalhead. Wasn’t music violent enough? What was it with the hard-ons, the whiny songs like “4°” begging someone who clearly said no to say yes? You’ll ask: I can’t even get a hard-on. Will that make me seem like less of a man? What about all the people you didn’t disclose yourself to? Would they be offended? Chalk up your nondisclosure to assault? You have never heard anyone outside of conservative rhetoricians say something like that, but you’re an English major; you know you pay rhetoric too much mind.
The worries will lessen when you’re walking back from the break room. Modeling the mermaid, you will move more easily, and you will find that it’s easier for you to talk. You will not only add “he,” but will make it the first pronoun on your Instagram profile, and you will see something of yourself in your new profile photo’s expression. It will make you laugh.
You will feel sassy again. You will know how to flirt (or at least feel like you do).
And you will find another role model crush in a cartoon. This time, it’s Wallace Wells. You’ll start Scott Pilgrim Takes Off and watch an episode where Wallace, taking advantage of his director, uses a scene to make out with his male co-star, Todd Ingram. When Todd has a gay awakening and, making a mess of himself, declares his love, it’ll be like listening to eu-phor-i-a syncopated in double time, and what you’ll realize is that nothing would be better than to be in his place. To be one of two guys falling in love, two guys surviving a gay awakening. God! To be two guys making out in a trailer. It doesn’t get any better than that.
You’ll start watching Scott Pilgrim to model Ramona’s personality. If she someday becomes a role model, fine, just know that you’ll first leave with Wallace Wells.
He dumps Todd because the relationship only lasts as long as their movie does. When Ramona asks future Wallace if his sugar daddy days are over, he will reply, like a good divorcé, “For others, we’ll see.” But you’ll know that once there was a husband, a boyfriend, and a want. The possibility was always there. For some, the future’s a mystery, but for Wallace, it’s not (he’s there), and someday (maybe just someday), so will you.