But it had not, as I discovered in November of 2019. Chatting on FaceTime one day, Nat mentioned that he was visiting a nearby L.G.B.T.Q.-aid organization to explore the feminine side of his personality. At first, I assumed it was identity tourism, a kind of dabbling in alternate selves. Then he made clear that he wanted to be changed utterly—to become a woman.
This came as a shock. To me, he was a man, a lovably androgynous person with a Y chromosome and a visible Adam’s apple. Why did he want to become a woman? Nat tried to explain, and at first his wish seemed entangled with his periodic depressions—which were deeper and darker than I had realized. When lost in their depths, he told me, he felt absolutely hollow. “I don’t feel like I have any reason to live,” he said.
This was a painful exchange. Melancholy, we often believe, is an occupational hazard for creative people, and Nat, a poet, visual artist, translator, and d.j., certainly fits into that demographic. But “melancholy” is also a pretty word for depression.
Of course, depression, for many people on the brink of transitioning, can be a red herring. Friends and family will often counsel against making such a weighty decision in the midst of emotional turbulence, not grasping that a profound sense of misalignment is what is feeding the turbulence in the first place. I went down that road myself, urging Nat to tackle the depression first.
“I understand that you are responding to a deep impulse,” I wrote him in a long e-mail. “An impulse that deep and consistent should not be ignored. But what is it telling you? I don’t see how a regimen of hormones, or smoother skin, or a redistribution of body fat, is going to ease the sort of disquiet that you were telling me about.”
I was fighting it. That’s obvious. In my e-mail, I cast the impulse to alter his body as naïve literalism—as if the body were just an industrial container for the interesting person inside.
Yet Nat had already begun to say goodbye to his old body. He had been struggling during those weeks with pneumonia. This meant long days at home, full of fatigue and shallow breathing. He binged “The Sopranos,” drank bone broth, took numerous baths. In the bath, he told me, he would study his body in the water, and recognized that he would be leaving it behind. He felt a kind of grief, he told me. But this didn’t change his mind—it was just the cost of changing, of sloughing off the old self.
I sensed myself tiptoeing through in our next few exchanges. I didn’t want to drive Nat away. I also didn’t want him to turn into a woman. It was that simple, which is to say, not simple at all.
For weeks, I felt an impending loss: the precious fact of having a son was about to be taken away. I wasn’t hung up on dynastic issues. Yet I think there’s something raw, some product of the primitive brain, that makes a father identify with a son. You see yourself in this other, beloved being. I was afraid of losing that.
The fear entered my dreams. One night, I was a woman, alone in an apartment, a stalker waiting outside the door. Myself-as-woman was both Nat and me: she vulnerable in transition, me powerless to stop it. I told Nat none of this. I could grieve for the son I was losing while preparing myself to have a daughter.
I meanwhile chose the crisis-management technique favored by most bookish people: books. I read Jan Morris’s “Conundrum” (1974), marvelling at the hypermasculine roles Morris had inhabited before transition—soldier, climber of Everest, political journalist, father. She had transitioned so long ago that the vaginoplasty was performed in a mysterious clinic in Casablanca. Yet her description of awakening in a dark room after the procedure, the indecipherability of the space a metaphor for her slippery self, could have been written yesterday.
I also read Rachel E. Gross’s “Vagina Obscura” (2022), with its portraits of the gynecologic surgeon Marci Bowers creating, with almost sculptural skill, vaginas attentive to pleasure. It left me wondering how long before the bespoke became indistinguishable from the “natural,” and whether Nat, despite his hesitations, would someday alter himself that way, too.
