TRANSITIONS

A father reckons with his child's transformation, and with his own.

- BY JAMES MARCUS

What do I know about being a woman?” Nat said. “Sometimes I have to ask myself. The thing is, I don’t know shit about womanhood.”

It was December of 2019. For most of the previous decade, I had understood Nat as a gay man, his identity blurred only by the erosion of the old rules about sex and gender that had shaped my youth. Now my twenty-six-year-old son intended to become a woman. We were on FaceTime—I in New York, Nat in Berlin. His hair was long, the light of the laptop whitening his eyes. He wore an orange tank top, silver necklaces, and dark nail polish, and sported a tattooed eye on his biceps that seemed to study me in return.

A few days earlier, Nat said, he had been hit hard by the idea that transition might be an affirmation, not an escape, as he had thought. “I wept buckets,” he said. “I never do that. I never cry.” He thought estrogen might open this well.

I wanted to protest—wasn't the association of women and weeping a cliché we had spent decades dismantling?—but said nothing. I only looked and looked at him, sadly wondering if this version of Nat, with his faint stubble and familiar shape, was about to slip away.

As if reading my mind, Nat said, “I’m not sure where this ends up.” Whether he would follow up the hormone treatments with surgery was still an open question. He also intended to keep his current name, and lots of his current wardrobe. “I like the silhouette of my clothes,” he said. “I’m going to keep wearing them.”

I clung to that. Same name: good. Same sweaters and corduroys: also good. But the physical being would be transformed, and perhaps the soul, which didn’t go its separate way but was always a co-conspirator with the body. Each conversation, then, felt like a goodbye.

For many trans people, the misalignment is there from the start, a stark sense of having been born into the wrong body. That kind of clarity makes for a simpler story, a simpler diagnosis.