How I Became the Man I Had Always Been: Narrating the Self in Recent English and German Life Writing by Trans Men

Abstract

Lived experiences depicting the complexities of transgender and non-binary identities are well represented in life writing in the Anglophone and Germanophone spheres. Such texts are subject to competing demands on life writing which create a push-pull relationship between the general public’s appetite for engaging accounts, minoritized authors’ desire to claim a space to express themselves and readers’ expectation to serve as role models for other people who are questioning their gendered position in life. In this article, I focus on the accounts of trans men. As Liam Konemann writes, trans women ‘bear the brunt of the cruelty’ in public debates on transgender issues but:

The push against trans men is more subtle. While trans women are presented as sexual predators and deviants, trans men are presented as fragile or deluded women who have fallen foul of internalised misogyny – often framed as self-hating lesbians pushed into transition by a society intolerant of masculine-presenting women. We are also occasionally used as a cudgel by gender critical types, who insist that our comparative absence from these ‘conversations’ is not because of their rampant transmisogyny, but rather because our voices are drowned out by domineering trans women.¹

This article explores the lived experiences of trans men as expressed under the conditions of largely transphobic societies and with standardized expectations towards transition narratives. The corpus was selected to show the commonalities and differences of trans men’s lived experiences in the United States, Canada and Germany. While trans communities and their detractors are globally interconnected through the internet; famous activists’, artists’ and writers’ media presences; and tours, the historical, political, social and cultural circumstances differ in the United States, Canada and Germany. Taking a comparative approach, therefore, opens up nuances and drifts in these connected yet distinct discourses.

The aim of this article is to explain the tension in trans life writing which is burdened with the task of presenting an intelligible account of a gendered life which may be hard to comprehend for readers with a fixed understanding of genderedness. Concurrently, many of these texts intend to convey better insight into cultural, social and political dimensions of liberatory practice. Harry Nicholson, a gay trans man, describes poignantly how autobiographical disclosure becomes a precondition for social acceptance and political support from cis people who form the vast majority of our societies and readership of trans life writing. Reflecting on a pride march he writes:

And if you look closely, you’ll notice that any attempt to convince the general public to support trans rights includes a personal narrative – a story of what it’s really like to be trans. This wins empathy by humanizing us. The result, however, is that it demands we tell our stories, do away with any privacy and expose our vulnerability in order to prove that we deserve a very basic human right – the right to exist.²

Trans persons who write are thereby exposed to the risks of hypervisibility and exhaustion for being constantly scrutinized about whether they adhere to the ‘right way’ of being trans. Obviously no one right way exists, which is a difficult position to hold when there are powerful voices in social and political discourses flatly denying the viability of trans lives.

Readers, critics and literary scholars have perceived a shift in what kind of trans life narratives are available on the book market. Increasingly writers who describe a broad range of trans and non-binary identity formations are getting attention. Kate Drabinski, Sarah Ray Rondot and Erin Ramsay insightfully analyse their chosen texts using a matrix of development over time from what Drabinski describes as twentieth-century ‘transnormativity’ to ‘contemporary’ pushing of boundaries.³ However, these changes go back to at least the late 1980s with Sandy Stone in ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ taking a decidedly anti-transnormative and anti-assimilationist tone:

Could not ask a transsexual for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing, to be consciously ‘read’, to read oneself aloud — and by this troubling and productive reading, to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written — in effect, then, to become a (look out — dare I say it again?) posttranssexual?⁴

For heuristic purposes my analysis employs a similar dichotomy marked by the groupings ‘trans-as-condition’ (adhering to a medicolegal notion of transition) and ‘trans-as-movement’ (being politically queerfeminist and trans) as used by the influential activist and writer Leslie Feinberg and more recently the scholar Ruth Pearce.⁵

Given that these mainstream (trans-as-condition) and queer (trans-as-movement) modes of modelling trans identities have been in parallel existence for nearly four decades, it does not seem sensible to maintain a modernist discourse of the new overcoming the old. I argue in the following that the authors’ use of either model of trans identity formation has a marked influence on the structural role that transition events play in the analysed texts. Transition events include coming-out as trans, taking up hormone therapy, being recognized in one’s correct gender and undergoing gender-affirming surgery. Mainstream trans life writing aims to give a coherent and comprehensive account of the author’s life structured by transition events in context. Queer-themed texts foreground one or more transition events while omitting others, or even refuse to offer autobiographical depth by focusing on the near present and its socio-political struggles.

Mainstream transition narratives feature tropes such as having been born in the ‘wrong body’, having known from an early age that the individual firmly belonged to the ‘opposite’ binary gender category, enduring a psychologically painful transition period and seeking a ‘full’ social and medical transition. These standardizations presented in many examples of life writing by trans authors mirror medical discourse on ‘transsexuality’ (formerly) and ‘gender dysphoria’ (more recently). By contrast, queer-themed texts deviate from mainstream tropes as listed above by querying the notions of a teleology of transition and a binarity of gender which opens up space for greater potentiality and plurality in expressions of transness.

Researching trans life writing

Minoritized people’s claim to a ‘voice’ in mainstream discourses is entangled with the issues of authenticity and authorization. As Jay Prosser puts it, in the doctor’s office autobiography is a symptom of a trans identity whose presence is tested by a professional assessment for whether ‘a recognisable transsexual plot’ emerges from the patient’s narrative.⁶

On the mainstream side of life writing, many autobiographies project a simple notion of authenticity even if the text has been produced in collaboration with a ghost writer. The aim is to reclaim in life writing the authorization which has already taken place in medicolegal processes. There are, however, other examples of trans and non-binary narratives which show a high level of insight into the complexities of creating a voice in life writing. As Leigh Gilmour explains in her book on feminist Autobiographics:

the autobiographical subject is a representation, and its representation is its construction. The autobiographical subject is produced not by experience but by autobiography. This does not diminish the autobiographer; rather it situates her or him as an agent in autobiographical production. For the discourses of truth and identity are varied and complex and when an autobiographer wishes, for example, to represent herself in opposition to a certain standard of ‘truth’, I would argue that she knows what she’s doing rhetorically and is not merely telling what happened.⁷

The standard of ‘truth’ to which Gilmour refers is set in the case of trans people’s life writing by a combination of social prejudice and the dominance of medicolegal processes in the sanctioning of intelligible and unintelligible life stories and the identities they produce. In response, Jay Prosser stresses ‘transsexual agency’ in life writing and seeks to acknowledge ‘the transsexual as authorial subject’⁸:

Prioritizing transsexuals’ own accounts over the medicodiscursive texts, I suggest that transsexual narratives place us in a stronger position to understand how dynamic and complex are the relations of authorship and authorization between clinicians and transsexuals and to reexamine the whole problematic of the subject’s construction in postmodern theory.⁹

A productive way of analysing the complexities of trans and non-binary identity formation through the construction of an autobiographical subject is to follow Christa Binswanger and Andrea Zimmermann who have established the queer ‘palimpsestic subject’ as a key metaphor to illustrate their methodology:

We can conceptualize the complexity of the subject by using the palimpsest as a metaphor for subjectivity, for the layering of different, eventually deviant (or in Freudian terms: ambivalent) aspects of the affective subject. Cultural and historical guidelines as well as personal experiences form the involuted, affective subject, which is marked by the blurring of boundaries and at the same time equally blurs the boundaries of immediacy and representation.¹⁰

The authors’ understanding of the palimpsest is that all its layers are co-present and – in queer defiance of simple modes of temporality (such as erasure or suppression) – interact with each other and with stimuli from their environment in the present.¹¹

In another publication, Binswanger limits the role that contingency plays in the queer-timed palimpsestic subject by adding the model of social scripts in the realm of sexuality.¹² The model of a palimpsestic affective individuality, therefore, steers a course between the seemingly aleatoric mechanisms of radically queer gender constructionism and the forced teleology of medicolegal discourse. In the context of gender identity, mainstream transition narratives align with medicolegal frameworks acting as social scripts, whereas queer-themed approaches mount challenges to these social scripts and create new scripts expressed in genderqueer epistemologies, terminologies and communities.

The palimpsestic queer subject resembles Paul B. Preciado’s model of the archival trans body but projected onto the affective complexities of the individual rather than their embodiment. Preciado’s Can the Monster Speak? documents a speech the author attempted to give at the 2019 conference of L’École de la Cause freudienne [School of the Freudian Cause]. He repeats the formula that he speaks ‘as a trans man, as a non-binary body’¹³ and asserts that he is a ‘real man’ but he never wanted to be a man in a ‘normal’ way.¹⁴ His body is an archive of many varied past experiences, a ‘somatheque’ rather than a conventional cis body. It embodies the full potentiality of human existence rather than a binary reduction of it.¹⁵

Cognisant of trans authors’ agency and bearing in mind the models of the queer palimpsestic self as well as the somatheque (trans body-as-archive), the following analysis explores the similarities and variance in life writing by trans men from the United States, Canada and Germany within and between the rough categories of ‘mainstream’ and ‘queer’. I show that ‘mainstream’ and ‘queer’ serve well as heuristic categories, but that there are further commonalities between texts from both groups which offer a more unified perspective on trans and transition narratives.

Mainstream transition narratives by trans men

Max Wolf Valerio’s Testosterone Files (2006) is the oldest text discussed in this section. Early in the narrative, the author introduces his first testosterone shot in 1989 as the most important transition event, as he does not believe that surgery would have been equally important.¹⁶ Valerio’s terminology reflects twentieth-century discourses, for example, ‘sex change’ and ‘transsexual man’ (TF, 2). The autobiographical subject professes a firm belief that men and women are fundamentally different, and that only a few ‘translators’ or ‘agents provocateurs’ like Valerio can understand both sides. He feels that he has always been a man who had to learn to speak the language of women (TF, 2–3). As a straight man, Valerio claims a ‘natural’ and socially privileged propensity to being responsive to visual sexual stimuli and to offers of sex work (TF, 23, 176–77, 187). He worships at the altar of ‘the holy church of St. Cock’ (TF, 200) and derives pleasure from the gender binary. Consequently, Valerio ridicules the proliferation of queer and gender-nonconforming identities which became more prominent in the early 2000s (TF, 6, 196–97).

With regards to his upbringing in the USA, Valerio describes a blissful pre-pubescent tomboy phase which was only marred by being forced to wear dresses to church and a difficult and shame-ridden puberty, when he realized his difference and the only available information on transness came from sensationalist and exploitative accounts (TF, 41, 77–79). Later, Valerio outwardly identified as a lesbian, ‘an off-beat punk rock bohemian lesbian feminist’ (TF, 8), but states that he never understood what it meant to be a woman or to have sex with another woman as a woman (TF, 47–49). According to his autobiography, Valerio’s identity has always been male, and he only spent time as a lesbian woman as a ‘cover-up’ (TF, 106).

Published fourteen years later, Benjamin Melzer’s autobiography shows some similarities and significant differences when compared with Valerio’s book. Melzer is a media personality in his native Germany. His 2020 autobiography Endlich Ben: Transgender – Mein Weg vom Mädchen zum Mann [Finally Ben: Transgender – My Journey from Girl to Man] was co-authored by the journalist and ghost writer Alexandra Brosowski.¹⁷ Melzer, who was an elite track-and-field athlete in his youth, extensively used fitness training to shape a masculine physique, modelled and drew attention to himself by being the first openly trans man on the cover of the German edition of the glossy magazine Men’s Health. He describes, like Valerio, positive experiences with being a tomboy. His outward status as a girl allowed him access to feminine girls who perceived him as superior to boys (EB, 35–36). On the other hand, at age fourteen he presented as a cis boy and formed a relationship with a straight girl. When his assignment as female became apparent, there was some upset, but the relationship continued regardless (EB, 39). Unlike Valerio, Melzer managed to escape the pressure to wear feminine attire by not attending church or other set-piece social events (EB, 46). By the time Melzer seriously questioned his gender identity, role models such as the US American Chaz Bono and the German Balian Buschbaum were visible in the media, offering validation by their presence (EB, 71–72). This marks an important difference with Valerio’s earlier account. In addition, for Melzer a ‘full’ medical transition including the transition event of a phalloplasty was the only conscionable option and he saw it through despite medical complications whose descriptions take up a considerable portion of the book.

Although there is a strong notion of linear teleology to this transition narrative, the book offers two separate end points. The first one lies in Melzer using his newly constructed and healed penis whilst having sex with his partner Karina whom he describes as fitting his ‘Beuteschema’ (EB, 159). The term ‘Beuteschema’, which translates as a predatory animal’s prey pattern, is used in German colloquially to express someone’s ‘type’. For Melzer, as for Valerio, being a man is embedded in being straight, sexually aggressive and driven by visual stimuli. Both books construct an autobiographical male self which appears unapologetically heteronormative. Valerio’s account expresses hypermasculinity in the context of gritty urban life. Melzer presents the sanitized Men’s Health version of it. Still, Melzer’s book offers a second endpoint in a reflection on living one’s life in the public eye and constantly being reminded of one’s pre-transition identity. Melzer, who simply wants to be perceived as a ‘Typ’ [bloke], knows that the perception of his masculinity will always be predicated by his trans status until such time that society becomes genderless (EB, 210).

Far more introspective than Valerio’s and Melzer’s books, Sebastian Wolfrum’s Endlich: Ein transsexueller Pfarrer auf dem Weg zu sich selbst [Finally: A Transsexual Vicar on His Path to Find Himself] was published in 2019. The narrative, which was co-produced with the ghost writer Daniel Staffen-Quandt, works extensively with the notions of death and resurrection.¹⁸ It opens with a transition event which is Wolfrum’s coming out as a trans man to his congregation, employing the wrong-body trope (E, 14, 144). He has rehearsed his speech and despite his nerves, the experience is less frightening than his coming out as a lesbian was (E, 14, 17, 29). The autobiographer does not give an explanation for this difference in the coming out experience, but it may be the case that members of the congregation perceived gender reassignment as a process of normalization, as the lesbian vicar was about to transition to a straight male vicar.

It is not only Wolfrum’s profession which adds poignancy to this transition narrative, but also his teenage and young adult adherence to unusually strict evangelical and socially conservative beliefs which the author in hindsight describes as a process of radicalization and subsequent liberation (E, 37). By not following the largely socially liberal culture of the established Protestant church in Germany, pre-transition Wolfrum created an escape from romantic and sexual entanglement which would have forced a more sustained engagement with gender and gender dysphoria. Living as a woman, Wolfrum was profoundly unhappy and troubled with persistent fantasies about torture and extreme acts of violence (E, 52–53). His Christian faith was tested when young Wolfrum was pressurized into a clandestine sexual relationship with a married vicar. The only escape from this relationship that Wolfrum could imagine was to get married, but the husband turned out to be as controlling and emotionally abusive (E, 70–71, 78). Later, having come out as a lesbian and living with a female partner, Wolfrum feels smothered by the partner and let down by the church authorities who dismiss his complaints of abuse at the hand of the senior vicar (E, 91).

Two life-changing experiences facilitate Wolfrum’s acceptance of his trans identity. First, he falls ill with cancer and undergoes a hysterectomy. He speculates that his body may have rejected the female sex, and he takes the absence of a uterus as licence to explore medical transition (E, 44–45). Second, he makes peace with his traumatized pre-transition self in a process which takes nine months from Trinity 2017 to Easter 2018. This process comes with emotions of motherhood and the feeling that Wolfrum gives birth to himself, that he, too, is resurrected at Easter. In an act which perfectly illustrates the metaphor of the palimpsestic self, Sebastian vows that he will keep pre-transition Silke safe from abuse inside himself forever (E, 63). In an implicitly queer take on procreation charged with powerful symbolism, the autobiographer thus gives birth to himself as a man whilst creating a safe haven inside his metaphorical embodiment in which to carry his pre-transition female representation. This level of complexity reflects the training and spiritual education Wolfrum has undergone as a vicar. It is not clear, however, how much of this extended metaphor was created by the ghost writer. On a more concrete level, Wolfrum is assertive about God endorsing trans health care. According to the autobiographical self, taking testosterone is like taking insulin which God has given to humankind to deal with diabetes (E, 80–81, 124). This memoir leaves the reader with assurances that Wolfrum is in a fulfilling relationship with a new female partner, and that his family have taken his transition well (E, 131, 136).

The three books by Valerio, Melzer and Wolfrum discussed in this section exemplify mainstream trans-male narratives of transition. They have in common that the autobiographical subjects constructed by their authors, and where applicable by their ghost writers, transition from a fixed starting point to a mostly fixed end point, both marked as opposite binary genders. The result is a state of straight maleness which may still be indexed with a trans history. Authorization of this maleness is rooted in adherence to the gender binary, whereas authorship is linked to a notion of authentic expression of a true self even in books co-written by professional writers.

Regardless whether the individual favours hormones over surgery or follows the notion of a ‘full’ transition including phalloplasty, there are striking common tropes beyond the ‘wrong body’ which include self-knowledge of a fundamental difference in their genderedness from an early age, happy memories of a prepubescent tomboy-ness and distress at being coerced by authorities inside and outside the family to dress in feminine attire and to behave in ways compatible with traditional notions of good feminine conduct. While the older generation represented here by Valerio had no positive role models for trans maleness, the younger one does, with Melzer referring to one German and one US American autobiographer.

Wolfrum’s text gives more space to the discussion of past trauma. While Valerio metaphorically and in a camp manner worships at the altar of ‘the holy church of St. Cock’ (TF, 200), the vicar Wolfrum creates a highly symbolic spiritual transition process which aligns the liturgical calendar with the process of pregnancy. His fantasy of trans embodiment chimes with the notion of the palimpsestic self, as it creates a method for folding his history of trauma and transness into a structured co-presence. Wolfrum’s book queers the process of giving birth without making queerness an explicit point of reference. Wolfrum’s queering approach chimes with the camp elements of Valerio’s style and Melzer’s second ending setting a marker for a potential future genderless society. These features open up correspondences with the texts from the queer portion of my corpus discussed in the next section.

Queer life writing by trans men

Before we come to these correspondences, the shared characteristics of the texts discussed in this section need to be established. They mainly differ from the previous set by the ways in which they positively refer to queer communities and display an open-ended understanding of transition. For many trans people transition has turned from a teleological process, in which the individual transits as rapidly as feasible between two fixed binary gendered positions, into a state of transition with divergent movements, speeds and vectors. In some cases, the individual reaches a point where they perceive themselves as transitioned rather than transitioning. The autobiographical subjects in this sub-set of texts are as constructed as those from the previous group, but they are constructed following the lava flows of a less restricted discourse which Ruth Pearce calls trans-as-movement.¹⁹ An additional question for the texts discussed in this section is whether their different take on transness and transition also generates a difference in the ways the body-as-archive and the affective palimpsestic subject are presented.

For example, Linus Giese, in his 2020 book Ich bin Linus: Wie ich der Mann wurde, der ich schon immer war [My Name is Linus: How I Became the Man I Had Always Been],²⁰ states that he retains very few memories of his pre-transition past. His coming out as trans is the precondition for having identity and retaining memories from thereon:

Im Gegensatz zu meinem Bruder habe ich fast keine Kindheitserinnerungen. Eigentlich habe ich fast gar keine Erinnerungen mehr. Alles, was vor meinem Coming-out geschah, ist für mich kaum noch greifbar. Die wenigen Erinnerungen, die ich habe, sehen aus wie eine Handvoll verwackelter und verblasster Polaroid-Fotos.

[In contrast to my brother, I have hardly any childhood memories. In fact, I have close to no memories at all. Everything which took place before my coming out is more or less beyond my grasp. The few memories I have look like a handful of shaky and faded Polaroids.] (IBL, 96)

Giese’s autobiographical self is a stranger to itself when it comes to the memories the author states to have lost. Still, from the blurred and faded images, Giese reconstructs a debilitatingly shy young person who is bullied at school, enters a romantic relationship with a girl and starts to self-harm when this relationship ends (IBL, 96–102). Beyond this, Giese does not present much of a coherent, authorizing backstory.

Much more space is given to recent experiences as a newly out trans man covering topics such as seeking an official diagnosis of gender dysphoria, being targeted by online trolls and Giese’s love life. Interestingly, the chapter on love does not address romantic love but sex and the author’s difficult relationship with his body and sexuality before and during transition. He describes his teenage years as celibate and barely mentions relationships he had with women when he presented as a lesbian woman. The overwhelming issue which breaks through the biographical narrative is the detachment, disgust and shame the author has always felt towards his body, with these emotions focusing on menstruation and the vulva (IBL, 87–88). Since starting hormone therapy, Giese finds that he is attracted to men as well, but his dating life suffers from discrimination at the hands of gay cis men, tellingly by those men who want to have sex with him and those who do not. Some potential sexual partners reject him outright for being trans, and those whom he meets misgender and verbally abuse him as a ‘Freak’ [freak] and ‘Schlampe’ [slut] (IBL, 93).

He has unsubscribed from gay dating apps many times but keeps returning to them when he is lonely and depressed. He states that sometimes he feels he deserves the abuse (IBL, 94). Positive change comes from four directions. First, Giese finds some erotic representations of trans men online which help with his identification. Second, he starts referring to his genitals as his penis, declaring that any person, regardless of anatomy, should have the liberty to use the terminology which makes them feel comfortable (IBL, 68–69). Third, Giese takes inspiration from androgynous and feminine-presenting cis men in his environment and in the media (IBL, 89). Finally, he follows the recommendation of the cis author Kathrin Passig and purchases a Magic Wand vibrator which he names Brad. Brad helps him create a positive relationship with his embodiment through reliable orgasms (IBL, 108).

Through writing his book, Giese comes to the realization that his transition is not motivated by self-hatred but self-love. The autobiographical subject consciously sheds the narrative of the hateful ‘wrong body’ (IBL, 107) and actively chooses not to represent an affective palimpsestic self. The narrative offers minimum engagement with pre-transition memories and focuses on a largely presentist account. In so doing, the book offers readers a rich picture of lived experiences in the early stages of transition rather than an established point-to-point finality. Therefore, it acts like a peer mentor to readers who are questioning their gendered position in life without subjecting them to the pressure (or, in Sandy Stone’s words, ‘textual violence’)²¹ of having to create a seemingly coherent ‘recognisable transsexual plot’.²² Giese’s narrative is a momentary intervention for peer readers like the phone call sixteen-year-old Giese had with a trans man (IBL, 102), his first face-to-face meeting with a trans man and his meeting with a young person in ‘egg mode’ in a Berlin café. In trans people’s discourses, pre-coming out trans individuals such as this young person in a café are described to be in ‘egg mode’. Giese reflects on the egg as a protective and nurturing environment (IBL,165–66). The nurturing environment of the egg mode transitions into the peer support of trans men. Giese’s book follows this trajectory by focusing on social interactions rather than medical transition.

This trait becomes even more prominent in Giese’s second book, Lieber Jonas oder der Wunsch nach Selbstbestimmung [Dear Jonas or the Desire for Self-Determination].²³ It is shaped as a letter from a peer mentor, Giese, to a young trans man named Jonas. Some years into his transition, the author discusses how he deals with the expectations of being a trans writer in the public eye. He feels a sense of frustration that he cannot always give people who question their gender and approach him for advice the attention they deserve (LJ, 8). By now, the autobiographical self is more settled in queer and trans communities (LJ, 17) and in his embodiment which he has started to understand as a somatheque:

Mein Körper wird mein ganzes Leben lang trans* bleiben, auch weil ich kein Bedürfnis nach so etwas wie einem Penis-Aufbau habe. Ich wünsche mir auch nicht, dass meine Narben nach der Brustentfernung restlos verblassen – ich mag diese sichtbaren Narben, sie sind ein Teil von mir.

[My body will remain trans* for my entire life, partly because I have no need for anything like constructing a penis. I also don’t want my mastectomy scars to fade completely – I like these visible scars, they are a part of me.] (LJ, 15)

Giese’s writing favours trans peer support and queer community and makes peace with the archival trans body as a somatheque. It mostly denies the palimpsestic psychological self. In contrast to this approach, Thomas Page McBee in his 2014 memoir Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man²⁴ goes to great lengths to decode the palimpsestic layers of not only his past, but also those of his parents and wider family before he can move on and ‘become a man’: the bearded and shirtless man he has been seeing in his dreams whom he understands to be a representation of his true self (MA, 44–45, 70).

His narrative is set for the most part in two timelines: the very recent past around his thirtieth birthday and the 1990s describing McBee’s upbringing in the rural South of the United States. The timelines connect through the autobiographer’s attempts to come to terms with experiences of violence and the possible entanglement of masculinity with violence. These experiences are sexual abuse at the hands of his father when he presented as a girl, and being held at gunpoint in a street robbery as an adult. McBee is prompted by the fear of death to return to South Carolina to trace his family history. He writes that ‘this is an adventure story about how I quit being a ghost’ (MA, 8), indicating that his work on the family history hidden in the palimpsest of family lore will serve the purpose of solidifying his identity in a transition from a ghost haunted by the unspoken to a shirtless man who has nothing to hide.

At the time of his return to the South, McBee has undergone top surgery and is not considering bottom surgery, as he is reasonably content ‘to blur’ the gender binary. This blurring, which faintly echoes Giese’s metaphor of the blurred Polaroid pictures, means that McBee needs ‘to squint’ in the mirror to see the correct version of himself (MA, 52–53). These references to a lack of clear vision extend to a metaphor which takes up the image of the ghost once more:

A few months ago, I’d started a tattoo on my chest that began: Love your. It was supposed to say, Love your ghosts, but I’d stopped the tattooist short. I wasn’t so sure I could commit to that, and now the space above my heart was fill-in-the-blank. (MA, 48)

McBee here pre-empts the affective palimpsest, the co-presence of the most painful layers of his lived experiences, because he is concerned about how much of his father’s legacy will haunt him should he complete the sentence and his transition: ‘How could I be sure there wasn’t something terrible and destroyed lurking inside of me?’ (MA, 48). This monstrous inheritance is twofold. On the one hand, it refers to the actual sexualized violence McBee suffered as a child. On the other hand, he is afraid that living as a man may set him up to become a violent perpetrator himself. The autobiographer draws close parallels between his abusive father, the criminal who held himself and his girlfriend at gunpoint and himself (MA, 107).

With regards to the sexualized violence, at age ten McBee disclosed to his mother that his father had been abusing him for six years. She seemed distant and absorbed by her own hatred for her husband rather than angry on behalf of her child. The author describes feeling like a marionette, an early version of the ghost, while telling the story of the abuse (MA, 16). When the father apologized to his child, it felt worse than the actual abuse, as adults did not have the right words and those words missed the child’s true self (MA, 22–23). The town’s police chief got involved in the matter and proposed an impossible alternative to the child which was to accept the apology or to pursue the issue further and ruin his father’s life. The child learned that ‘no one will rescue you’ (MA, 31). Cut adrift from the love and protection of family and community, young McBee became a ghost to himself.

Talking to family members in South Carolina around 2010, McBee learns that his father, too, was abused by an older male relative (MA, 76). This insight offers validation through a coherent narrative whilst fuelling the anxiety that McBee may continue the cycle of violence and abuse. The next steps for McBee are to email his father to enquire whether he abused him because he was female presenting at the time and whether Roy hated women. In parallel, McBee arranges for DNA tests to establish whether Roy is his biological father, which it turns out he is not. McBee experiences warmth, light and freedom at this news (MA, 74, 100, 111, 113). Further closure is provided by Roy apologizing again for the abuse he perpetrated and by sharing insight into a culture of sexual abuse in which he grew up where male cousins abused female cousins and older men abused children (MA, 147–48). McBee’s mother eventually fills in the gaps in the family narrative by explaining that she had a chance sexual encounter with a man at a conference and, becoming pregnant, had planned to be a single mother. In spite of having hidden McBee’s true parentage for thirty years, she assures her child of her continuing love throughout transition (MA, 134, 165–67).

McBee’s transition narrative is interwoven with the decoding of his family history. On the way to Mexico for a holiday with his girlfriend Parker, the autobiographer reflects:

I tried to read the in-flight magazine and not think about Roy or my chest. The two felt connected, like I couldn’t allow my body to masculinize without confronting him in real life. In the meantime, the twin man in the mirror was growing more solid while my current, softer face became more and more transparent. I know which body was a ghost. (MA, 120–21)

The tools for solidifying his male identity include choosing a new name (MA, 128, 130, 142) and getting a prescription for testosterone whose application results in rapid changes which are too quick for Parker:

‘Now that you are a guy, talking about yourself means something different’, Parker said. The exhaustion in her voice scared me. ‘You don’t know what it’s like’, I could hear myself yelling, but I was not the man whose veins pulsed in helpless rage, I wasn’t the kind of man who didn’t know who he was. I could feel myself trapped in the wrong story and the right body and she cried and said I was right, she didn’t. (MA, 159–60)

The transitioning body as the ‘right body’ in the ‘wrong story’ is a simple yet powerful variation on the wrong-body narrative which illustrates the strain that existing romantic relationships can experience in the process of transition. Although the partners reassure each other of their love, in the final passage of the book, going for the last swim of the summer, the autobiographical self understands that by the next year he will be settled into a new self without Parker by his side. He dives into the water which makes Parker and the horizon disappear (MA, 169–71).

An attempted dive into the unknown features prominently at the beginning of Jayrôme C. Robinet’s 2019 book Mein Weg von einer weißen Frau zu einem jungen Mann mit Migrationshintergrund [My Journey from Being a White Woman to Being a Racialized Young Man].²⁵ Upon entering the men’s changing room of a Berlin gym, the autobiographical self recalls how, as a sixteen-year-old girl in Northern France, he attempted a ten-metre high dive at the public pool. The girl probably did not know she was trans, was not seeking validation through a daring masculine pursuit and did not present as a tomboy. Instead of achieving an oceanic rush of emotions, the girl literally performed an embarrassing climb-down.

In the present day, the author experiences his anxiety of entering the gym for the first time as a man through the palimpsestic presence of the high-dive scene from his pre-transition past. He is wearing a breast binder and a prosthetic penis to enhance his male presentation in addition to having been on testosterone for some time. He is uncharacteristically early, which adds to his anxiety, as he waits for a butch female friend to arrive as moral support (MW, 9–13). Robinet is also concerned that he may not understand the unspoken rules of male spaces such as the changing room or his male position in gendered spaces such as the gym floor. While he is getting changed, he notices that one of the men is showing pictures of his weight loss transformation which the author assumes is not an invitation for him to show pictures of his pre-transition self (MW, 23–24), as there are double standards of gender-affirming transition which only afford cis-to-cis transformations with general social acceptance.

Where Linus Giese’s autobiographical account of early transition is characterized by the continuing loneliness, self-loathing and anxieties of the autobiographical self, Robinet’s narrative depicts a person who is more self-assured and embedded in queer friendship circles. Robinet emphasizes the continuity of friendships, even though some relationships undergo adjustments: a pre-transition female friend challenges the author over his transness but reconciles with him by the end of the book (MW, 29–30, 210–11). Robinet’s gay friend Niko regrets the loss of his female best friend and confidante (MW, 41). One of the author’s exes is trans himself and confirms that he had an inkling that his then-girlfriend may come out as trans at some later stage, although she seemed heavily invested in her feminine presentation at the time (MW, 33–34).

Like Giese, Robinet skims over sexuality in the teenage years, claiming that he has no clear recollection of the first sexual encounters (MW, 70). Unlike Giese, Robinet goes into more detail with regards to presenting as a lesbian, arriving in Berlin and quickly immersing himself into queer scenes, culminating in literally becoming a poster girl for lesbians on the cover of a magazine (MW, 78–81). Not unlike Giese, Robinet presents the autobiographical self as having a complicated love life, but for markedly different reasons: Robinet falls for his flatmate Karim who is an asylum seeker. Karim shows no interest in Jayrôme as a potential sexual or romantic partner (MW, 85, 88, 95) but is in love with a cis man (MW, 133, 144). There are moments of tenderness between the two. However, having shown Robinet how to shave his face, the author is convinced that he has finally blown his chances with Karim by presenting as too feminine (MW, 167, 171–72). When they eventually have sex with each other, the narrative is interspersed with images of dying migrants, memories of the Transgender Day of Remembrance and the terrorist attack on the Bataclan music hall in Paris (MW, 205). This overlaying indicates that their individual moment of bliss is of little importance in comparison to the continuing suffering of people in their interconnected dynamics of violence and victimhood which claim a palimpsestic and co-present intersubjectivity in the moment of greatest intimacy.

The presence of Karim in Robinet’s life and the autobiographer’s growing insight into the difficulties of living as an asylum seeker offer an opportunity to reflect on the role ethnicity plays in this article’s corpus of life writing. Valerio describes his ancestry as a mix of Latinx and Native American with some possible Sephardic Jewish influence (TF, 34–39), which in the space of his narrative enhances his status as a ‘translator’ in a majority white and male-dominated US society. Robinet, on the other hand, experiences a puzzling additional transition in which fellow white people attribute him with the racialized status of having a Migrationshintergrund [literally ‘background in migration’] (MW, 145–46). In German discourse, this term is usually reserved for people who are visibly non-white, although it obfuscates the issue by using a seemingly neutral formula which should cover white migrants as well. The author, being from Northern France with Italian heritage, previously had not considered his background as a non-white racialized trait. Robinet arrived in Berlin as a white cis lesbian with an attractive bonus of Frenchness. Subsequently he has through his visible transition to a male embodiment gained racialized risk factors (MW, 176–79, 184, 188). This experience of being racialized and put under suspicion helps the autobiographical self to understand why Karim has to be circumspect; if the German authorities learned he was in a relationship with a person who has a vulva, it could undermine Karim’s main claim to seeking asylum in Germany, which is founded on his gay identity that puts him at serious risk in his homeland of Egypt (MW, 182).

Robinet comes out to his family via email prior to attending a funeral in France. In person, his mother reacts positively and so does his younger sister, whereas his older sister remains initially distant. His brother challenges whether Robinet’s transition is deserved, as he has not shown signs of lengthy anguish (MW, 113–20, 159). At the funeral, adding a new take on the transition event of coming out, Jayrôme Robinet introduces himself to his uncle’s corpse with his new name (MW, 128–29). In a semi-private ritual, he inscribes his continuing but renewed identity into the family’s heritage.

The book ends with two celebrations of difference. Before he has a house party with his friends, there is a queer and intersectional street protest at which Robinet reflects that he should continue identifying as white in order not to become one of the ‘perpetrators’ encroaching on safe spaces for People of Colour. At the protest, Robinet gives a well-received speech addressing young trans people specifically:

Liebe trans* Jugendliche, ich weiß, wie es ist, sich einsam zu fühlen. Ich hatte so viel Angst nie geliebt zu werden, dass ich mir Liebe lange nicht gönnte. Geschweige denn das Glück. Liebe trans* Leute, wir dürfen lieben und geliebt werden. Ich bin nicht ein Mann gefangen im Körper einer Frau, ich bin nicht ein Mann im falschen Körper, ich bin ein Mann in diesem Körper!

[Dear trans youths, I know how loneliness feels. I was so scared that no one would love me, that for a long time I didn’t allow myself love. Let alone happiness. Dear trans people, we have permission to love and to be loved. I am not a man trapped in the wrong body, I am a man in this body!] (MW, 209)

Overcoming loneliness is also a main feature in Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy (2023). He mentions early realization of gender non-conformity in that he knew aged four he was not a girl and asked his mother aged six whether he could be a boy.²⁶ Around the same time, he started to engage in what the author calls ‘private play’ in his room which entailed creating fantasy worlds in which he would write love letters signed ‘Love, Jason’ to imaginary romantic partners (PB, 14). Page’s writing has, therefore, been linked from the start with creating intimacy and community in which he would play a differently gendered role than the one assigned to him at birth.

A prominent theme in Page’s book is the pressure to remain closeted which is exerted in the family, in public spaces and in the film industry. Page suffers homophobic abuse both in the streets of US American and Canadian cities and at Hollywood parties (PB, 20–21, 63–73, 89–99). Abuse in the film industry extends from traumatizing actors with the methods used to squeeze emotionally taxing performances out of them to sexual harassment in words and actions. For example, Page’s anorexia threatens to spiral out of control after having performed as a severely traumatized young woman called Sylvia:

And I could not shake Sylvia. I thought of her all the time. No role had stuck with me like that. Flashes of the basement. The hunger. Forced to eat her own vomit. Screams ignored. ‘How about you try putting cheese sauce on your broccoli?’ a well-meaning therapist suggested. (PB, 82)

The notion of the palimpsestic self comes to mind here with the added complexity that for the actor Page there are not only pressures to repress and conceal important aspects of his subjectivity only for them to interact more forcefully with the present. There is also the bleeding through of a character’s trauma, the real trauma of performing fictional trauma and the carrying forward of both of these into everyday life. The circumstance in which Sylvia’s screams in the basement were ignored becomes co-present in the sense of the palimpsestic queer self with Page’s experiences of feeling unseen and unheard in his father’s family, hiding even severe illness and injury from the family for fear of not being taken seriously and his father’s ongoing inability to recognize his first child’s emotional needs (PB, 151).

The emotional support Page does not experience in family life manifests itself after coming out as gay/queer; he has many good experiences with queer women as friends and lovers. The final step is to address the unresolved question of why he has never felt like a girl or woman:

The first time I acknowledged I was trans, in the properly conscious sense, beyond speculation, was around my thirtieth birthday. Almost four years before I came out as trans publicly. ‘Do you think I am trans?’ I’d asked a close friend. They answered hesitantly, knowing that no one can come to that conclusion for someone else, but they looked at me with a quiet recognition and said, ‘I could see that …’ A sturdiness shining through, a light from under the door. (PB, 193)

The doubling of metaphors at the end of this passage is reminiscent of McBee’s imagery in which the bearded, shirtless man in his dreams becomes more solid while the physical body starts to feel ghostlike (MA, 120–21). Page’s future embodiment is like a film projection (a light through a gap) and manifests a promise of solidity (sturdiness) which his pre-transition body does not appear to possess.

There are not only similarities between Page and McBee. All four authors whose books are discussed in this section share the view that there is a great deal wrong with our transphobic, misogynistic and violent world which positions their writing in the realm of a wrong society. Page puts this most strongly:

The world tells us that we aren’t trans but mentally ill. That I’m too ashamed to be a lesbian, that I mutilated my body, that I will always be a woman, comparing my body to Nazi experiments. It is not trans people who suffer from a sickness, but the society that fosters such hate. (PB, 196)

Three of the authors in this section strongly reject the wrong-body trope and insist that through self-love (Giese, Robinet) or the acceptance that every body is worthy of love (McBee) one can come to terms with the body one inhabits. This acceptance does not preclude medical transition, but it removes reliance on one of the most frequently used elements in the construction of a widely intelligible transgender self: the wrong-body trope. Page, on the other hand, avoids the exact phrase of the wrong body but refers to the alienation experienced ‘if existing in your body feels unbearable’ (PB, 197).

Mindful of the risks associated with being new to a male gendered position in a patriarchal society, McBee (MA, 117) and Robinet (MW, 128–29) share the affirmation they have felt exercising their masculinizing bodies. However, they do not take matters as far as Melzer who strives to present perfectly sculpted hypermasculine embodiment. Giese orients himself more towards androgyny and feminine-presenting cis men and reveals that his self-acceptance has been partly facilitated by using a sex toy designed for people with a vulva.

The topic of shame towards one’s female embodiment is strong in Giese’s memoir, and it has present-day consequences. The German word Schlampe is marked grammatically and semiotically as female and its use by a cis gay man in reference to a trans man amounts to misgendering as well as shaming the ‘bottom’ in penetrative sex. In Page’s memoir, too, shame features strongly and it is connected, as it is for Giese, with the notion of deserving humiliation, as the autobiographical subject suffering from depression accepts the idea of being monstrous (‘an abomination’ (PB, 195)).

McBee’s take on the trans somatheque is informed by his coping with sexual abuse at the hands of his father. Most of the book is set in the autobiographer’s childhood and present, but there is a telling passage which recounts a rare exchange between Roy and his seventeen-year-old child:

Our bodies had changed since his fingers held my thighs in place. His hair was more silver, his movements stiffer with age. I looked so much like a teenage boy that I’d mostly forgotten my difference. It was only at odd moments that I’d pass a mirror and see shapes that shouldn’t be there, a stranger who looked like me but wasn’t me at all, a stranger like a kick in the chest. (MA, 96)

The child’s thighs are still the teenager’s thighs, but the violence of sexual abuse remains unspoken between father and child. Instead, there is the quasi-physical violence which comes from the teenager being reminded of the body becoming more feminine in shape. This paragraph encapsulates the close relationship between embodiment, violence and emotional conflict which characterizes McBee’s book. The autobiographer at this stage in the narrative has not resolved the tension between a trans identity and the fear that masculinity may be inextricably entangled in perpetration. The equally unspoken insight here is that one can be a victim as a child rather than as a girl. Transition does not equal defection to an opposite camp.

McBee and Giese both employ images and notions of blurring and detachment but with opposing starting points. Giese claims not to have many memories pre-transition and only allows traces of his palimpsestic self, including his deadname, to appear towards the end of his memoir when they have lost their power to distract him from establishing his identity as an androgynously presenting trans man.

While these books situate the autobiographer in a queer context rather than as assimilated straight person, which is a late echo of Sandy Stone’s rallying call against erasure, it is Robinet’s memoir which most strongly employs queer sociality as the site of trans-as-movement and transition as a fluid state rather than a linear journey. Early and late in the narrative there are descriptions of queer people’s house parties, the autobiographical self takes an ostensibly straight cis woman to a lively queer bar and the book’s political message is literally proclaimed at a street protest which is queer and intersectional. This latter moment is also the point in his development where Robinet rejects the racial fluidity projected onto his body and decides, slightly at odds with the book’s title, not to let it enter his self-identification.

Page’s memoir, like Robinet’s, ends on a note of queer celebration which is the author and his childhood friend Mark attending a concert by the artist Peaches in Toronto. The experience is communal, physical and genderfluid: ‘Taking a deep breath, exhaling down to my toes, I wanted to hold on to the feeling, pocket the joy, the fleeting moments of self-love’ (PB, 265). Self-love in a communal queer space, be it virtual or material, is what characterizes all four books discussed in this section.

Conclusion

My article offers insight into patterns and particularities of its selection of trans men’s life writing from the United States, Canada and Germany. It shows that a parallel approach of studying the representation of archival trans bodies (Preciado’s somatheque) and queer palimpsestic affective subjectivity can be fruitful, as long as the researcher is mindful of the diversity of manifestations either or both may produce in any given text.

Like other scholars before, I have used a simple juxtaposition of mainstream and queer transition narratives. The texts fall heuristically into two categories which were described using Pearce’s differentiation between trans-as-condition and trans-as-movement. For those autobiographers who employ the former, the autobiographical self is an individual with a condition which is fixable by completing a point-to-point transition to become the man they have always been. The latter perspective of trans-as-movement is characterized by a more open-ended understanding of transition and tends to be oriented towards queer collective rather than individual struggle.

Unlike previous research into transition narratives, I have avoided applying a notion of progress in which mainstream narratives would be superseded by queer narratives. Both modes have been in use concurrently for four decades. There is no strong reason to assume that change is imminent. Ethically, it is not the researcher’s place to judge trans authors who employ either understanding of transition in their life writing. However, a main finding of my analysis is that any interpretation of trans narratives needs to account for the position the transition narrative is assigned in the text. Some writers go into great detail to create a comprehensive lifespan account, others focus on key episodes and yet another group avoid autobiographical depth in favour of a focus on the near present in its social and political contexts. The trajectory is that the more the autobiographer subscribes to mainstream views of transition, the more likely he is to offer a comprehensive life narrative structured by major transition events. However, there is also an undercurrent in mainstream life writing by trans men which works against this trajectory: that is to state that the autobiographical self has always been male which necessitates the downplaying of transition events.

Furthermore, it is important to acknowledge the similarities between texts from either grouping. There is a campness to Valerio’s celebration of hypermasculinity which is not entirely unrelated to carnivalesque queer joy. Metzler engages in trans advocacy and he acknowledges that, although he would prefer his maleness not to carry a trans history, this would only be possible in a utopian genderless society. Wolfrum’s book offers the best illustration of the palimpsestic affective self and it queers pregnancy and motherhood without making any references to the concept of queerness. The explicitly queer author Giese, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge a queer palimpsestic self, even claiming memory loss which contradicts the circumstance that his issues with shame have carried over from his pre-transition self. Page, finally, asserts his queerness and, if only obliquely, cites the mainstream trope of being born in the wrong body.

This article also contributes to research into trans men’s life writing by taking a comparative approach rather than focusing on a single language area or political environment. It offers a corpus-based view grounded in a significant number of texts rather than pursuing the comparison of two exemplary texts. There is enough evidence in the texts presented to extrapolate some differences between US American, Canadian and German life writing by trans men: Valerio, McBee and Page evoke US American and Canadian settings, both urban and rural, which are familiar to European readers at least in a mediated fashion. What their accounts have in common is a sense of threat, violence and abuse. The template for cis masculinity which bleeds into notions of trans masculinity appears rough and standoffish. The German texts show a more permissive society at least for trans men and in particular for trans men who subscribe to a heteronormative view of masculinity.

Still, there are important similarities between books from all three countries. McBee and Wolfrum arguably have more in common than Valerio and McBee. Addressing the trauma of sexual abuse, both authors take great care to fill in the gaps of family and transition narratives, creating a virtual place of safety for the autobiographical subject. In so doing, their books, prominently Giese’s and indeed all books presented here, address the need gender-questioning, trans and queer readers have for literary peer mentoring.

Notes