The True Price of Salt: On the Book that Became “Carol”

In her 1989 afterword to her seminal novel, The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith reflected on how difficult it was to be a lesbian in New York in the 1950s, as well as the challenges of finding a publisher for a book with two female protagonists who were romantically involved. She had just written her first novel in 1950, Strangers on a Train, a violent psychological thriller that had been marketed as a ‘novel of suspense,’ which had been sold to Alfred Hitchcock for a film adaptation, and her agent and publishers wanted her to ‘write another book of the same type.’ She was afraid of being labeled a ‘lesbian book-writer’ if she wrote a book about a lesbian relationship and thus losing the momentum she was gaining as a novelist, as it was potential mainstream suicide at the time to be an openly queer writer.

But the idea for the novel entranced her. She could not let go of it; it was that door of memory with a faint lamp-lit glow she kept coming to and peeking inside. The idea had come to her like a kind of mystical vision, which she never forgot: 1948, New York, near Christmas, at a vast department store in Manhattan, at the counter for dolls, where she had decided to work as a salesgirl because she was running out of money. The store was a chaotic labyrinth, with parents flooding its aisles in search of dolls that would travel from their shelves into boxes under Christmas trees, but one customer stood out to Highsmith. ‘One morning,’ she put it, as if beginning a great tale, ‘into this chaos of noise and commerce, there walked a blondish woman in a fur coat.’ Highsmith was enchanted: something about the woman made her stand out, and she even, Highsmith recalled, ‘seemed to give off a light,’ as though she were an atheist’s angel, for the nonbelieving Highsmith had no time for the angels of religion. The woman simply purchased a doll at her counter and had Highsmith write down her name and address on a receipt for delivery, and then she was gone. But she filled the hallways of Highsmith’s mind. She was the novel. That night, she would return to her apartment and sketch out ‘an idea, a plot, a story about the blondish and elegant woman in the fur coat.’ She wrote eight pages. ‘It flowed from my pen,’ she wrote, ‘as if from nowhere—beginning, middle, and end.’

So she decided to write the book anyway, under a pseudonym. Unsurprisingly, her publishing house, Harper & Bros., rejected it, and she had to find another publisher. But the resulting book was to become one of the most popular and revolutionary novels featuring lesbian characters in America in the last century, even as it has faded, somewhat, into obscurity. It would be about Therese Belivet, a salesgirl in a toy store, and her mundane yet extraordinary meeting with Carol, and the trans-American love story that would result from this chance meeting.

And queer readers resonated with the book. Letters from her fans — addressed to Claire Morgan, the pseudonym Highsmith had written the novel under — flooded her mailbox from week to week. ‘I remember receiving envelopes of ten and fifteen letters a couple times a week and for months on end,’ Highsmith wrote in her afterword. And even after the deluge slowed, she still received letters from both women and men right up until the time she wrote the afterword, over three decades after the book had first come out. It was a breakthrough for many of them to find a text about queer woman that had a happy ending — or, at least, the possibility of one—rather than one that ended in defeat or devastation.

Highsmith herself was aware of this, writing that ‘[t]he appeal of The Price of Salt was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters, or at least they were going to try to have a future together. Prior to this book,’ she continued, ‘homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing—alone and miserable and shunned—into a depression equal to hell.’ Indeed, it was this ending, more than the mere fact that it contained an explicit romance on the page between two characters of the same gender, that made the book revolutionary for so many of her readers. ‘Yours is the first book like this,’ one letter read, ‘with a happy ending. We don’t all commit suicide, and lots of us are doing fine.’

Of course, not all of the letters were so filled with optimism or complacency. One of the letters, which could as well have been written in 2016 as in the early 1950s, read, ‘I am eighteen and I live in a small town. I am lonely because I can’t talk to anyone….’ In such cases, Highsmith sometimes acted as a counselor of sorts, giving such letter-writers advice. ‘Sometimes I wrote a letter,’ she said, ‘suggesting that the writer go to a larger town where there would be a chance to meet people.’ But, of course, not everyone possessed the economic ability to move. And that letter of loneliness would have meant so much more for someone whose skin was clearly not ‘passably’ white in an age where Loving v. Virginia would not even occur for over ten years, and where casual racism would almost certainly only be made worse if someone were also openly queer.

It is a testament to America’s evolution on LGBTQ rights that a letter like that, if it were written in 2016, can seem at once like the tale of someone in unfortunate circumstances and like the most mundane revelation. Many of us will recognise that loneliness, and some of us will not, having grown up in a world where we always felt more accepted for our queerness. In a way, we have come far, and we also have not come far enough. There are many American readers for whom The Price of Salt would still be a revolutionary, shocking, immoral novel, the kinds of readers who have never, to their knowledge, met a lesbian or bisexual or pansexual woman before and who imagine us all as monstrous caricatures. This is all the more so if you are trans or simply a woman of colour at all, and especially if you are someone the media still often erases, like non-binary, intersex, and asexual individuals; there are books with all such characters in them, most notably, perhaps, Keri Hulme’s novel of an asexual relationship, The Bone People, but we have far to go. I know that many readers from my own home in Dominica might well be shocked by the content in The Price of Salt, given that queerness is still deeply unusual, deeply radical, deeply subversive there, as it is in so many other parts of the world.

And Highsmith knew well how difficult it could be to be queer even in a much larger community. As she says in her afterword of the era of the novel, ‘those were the days when gay bars were a dark door somewhere in Manhattan, where people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway a station before or after the convenient one, lest they be suspected of being a homosexual.’

Certainly, The Price of Salt is a relatively quiet novel, tame in comparison not only to later lesbian novels like Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle but also in comparison to Highsmith’s own previous novel, Strangers on a Train. While Strangers on a Train is subversive in its casual presentation of violence and maniacal characters, starker in both than a novel like Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, The Price of Salt is much more of a slow-burning love story. Earlier lesbian novels, like Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu or The Well of Loneliness, tended to be far subtler in their descriptions of intimacy between women; Carmilla, perhaps even more important in the history of vampire literature than Dracula, is only able to depict a queer relationship by making it literally monstrous, with a homicidal romantic vampire named Carmilla attempting to bewitch and seduce a seemingly heterosexual girl named Laura before preying on her. Highsmith openly depicts lesbian lovemaking, and there is no moral imparted onto it. It is what Therese and Carol want, even as they are complex in their desires, and that is enough for the novel.

But if the novel is open about intimacy, it is also clear about the lack of a future for a lesbian couple in this time in America. Carol sums this up well when Therese asks her whether they could just run off together. It is not possible, she casually tells Therese, and Therese understands this well; it is all a pipe dream, richer and more beautiful than dream by Kubla Khan, but a dream all the same. And when Carol and Therese’s relationship becomes obvious to their former significant others, it becomes clear that the mere mention of being in a queer relationship may be enough to destroy their social standing, to rip them from their families via court cases. It is chilling that, even with our progress today, there is still that stigma attached to being queer, that sense that you cannot be a respectable parent—as Carol is told—or that you cannot really be together. Therese’s own former lover believes that lesbianism is nothing more than a ‘phase’ that can be cured by the right man, a sentiment that would be utterly unsurprising today if uttered by an evangelist. The true price of salt, of course, is still a mystery to so many.

This is a book that does something positive for queer representation by not trying too hard to do so. Writing for activism is not the same as writing for art; it’s dangerous, ironic as it may seem at first glance, to write queer characters solely or even primarily for the purpose of promoting an activist view. The danger of writing overly sympathetic queer characters is that they can so easily become solely that, characters: they become nothing more than symbols of social change, avatars of social justice, rather than what they would do best to be, which is to be like real, complex human beings on the page. The best way to help with queer activism as a writer of fiction, ironically, is by not trying too hard to be an activist, is by putting art first and activism second, if activism need be there at all. The most representative representation is the one that shows us not as a medievalesque binary of angel or demon, but rather as people who simply are whatever they are.

And perhaps that, finally, is why readers loved The Price of Salt so much, myself included. Early on, when Therese is driving with Carol to the latter’s home for the first time, she is so flushed with excitement that she suddenly wishes for them both to die, for the tunnel they are driving through to ‘cave in and kill them both,’ so ‘that their bodies might be dragged out together.’ It is at once absurd and understandable. It is possible to be so filled with something that you wish for its destruction, simply so as not to lose it. There is something so real in even the maddest moments here. And this is why I think this novel must endure: it does what the best such books do. It does not, like I saw a certain celebrated queer novel from 2015 do, attach a label to its back that says, essentially, ‘ACTIVIST BOOK HERE.’ It simply presents a narrative of people, one that may well leave salt in its readers’ eyes. And that is enough, and more than enough, sometimes.

Skydiving in Two Genders: An Essay on Trans Visibility

This Thursday, March 31, is Trans Day of Visibility, a day that was created to celebrate the trans people who are alive and making themselves known in the world. Autostraddle is a website for and about queer women, and that will always, always, include queer trans women. In order to highlight just a few of the trans women we love, respect and admire here at Autostraddle, we asked several to take pictures of their day-to-day lives and answer a few questions. We’ll also be featuring several essays related to trans visibility by trans women this week.

I am living as a woman the second time I prepare to leap out of an airplane, 7,000 feet above Florida, the world filled with the drone of the plane like the rumble of some metal giant’s stomach. The plane has one seat—for the pilot—and my back is pressed against it. I am facing the man I will be strapped to when, in 30 seconds, we step into the space beneath the clouds. I am not as nervous, this time, as he checks the harness.

The door of the plane cranks open, and it’s like the rush of a storm has entered the plane. I imagine I am being pulled out as my partner tells me to crawl towards the open door and I begin grabbing at the controls on the flight deck on instinct to have something to hold, until I realise the pilot is yelling at me over the twin roar of wind and plane to let go.

Let go.

I have skydived in two genders. The first time I’d gone on a tandem dive was years before I came out as queer in any sense, out of the same plane over the same patch of Quincy, Florida, but living as a male. It had felt like a strange nightmare. I was partly to blame, as I had gotten the idea of skydiving for the first time after a bad romantic breakup so as to briefly stop hearing, through sheer adrenaline, the station in my head that kept playing unhappy music. But the other reason I had not enjoyed it was my sense that I had to act masculine during the whole process, lest the girl in me become too visible, lest I seem queer — the thing I feared so much. I felt I had to move and answer my dive partner’s questions a certain, masculine way, or he would suspect something. And, to be honest, I was scared. I had to practically be pushed out of the plane because I was so afraid that I couldn’t step out of the door. We had rolled through the freefall rather than falling in a controlled way — awkward from plane to parachute.

As silly as it seemed, I wanted to look like the girls, any of them, in the photos the dive shop put out of their first-time divers on social media. It was superficial, in a way, caring about the photo more than the experience; but when you have no photos of you, but countless of someone people think is you, even something as pedestrian as a picture takes on an outsize significance. I’d had no idea I would dive again, years later, as one of those girls, both on and off the camera.

I bring up this memory because I remember, that second dive, how much visibility and trans-ness mattered. I had told no one at the small skydiving school that I was transgender; I just wanted to go as a woman, no other specific nonvisual label applied. It’s part of a project I’ve embarked upon to correct the contours of my life since coming out. I will do the big things I’d done, as a ‘male,’ as a woman, letting myself feel free to write my future by remixing my past—not erasing it under the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind, but making it right. Doing it better. Months later, when I snowboard at Breckenridge for the first time, I feel exhilarated, not just at fulfilling a dream of a largely snowless upbringing but because I’m doing so as a woman, as a person my fellow snowboarders — all strangers — call she. My womanhood feels visible, in this way small and vast all at once.

Before I can get on the plane to skydive a second time, I’m nervous, but not for the obvious reason. The fear comes from visibility. Everything is flipped from the first time; now, I want no sense of a past life’s masculinity present. The night before the dive, I worry for hours about if I can ‘pass’ at all if I tie my hair back, revealing the profile of my face, and I consider, seriously, whether or not to wear makeup simply so as to mask any trace of visual masculinity. Incredibly, there’s a tutorial on YouTube for skydiving makeup. The compass of myself is spinning madly. I watch the tutorial twice. I decide I’ll test the durability of a BB cream by Tarte at thousands of feet in the air, then feel ashamed at worrying so much about how I look, then feel the dread again, that all this might go completely wrong, not because I’ll fall to my death, but because I’ll be reduced to my past. I don’t want to be called ‘sir,’ to have that old ghost summoned by a word. I don’t want to be non-gendered, that neutrality that, sometimes, is a form of transphobia — a way of denying even the gender you present as because they cannot bring themselves to name you as such. I just want to let go, and be myself.

All seems well, I think.

When I lean back, this time, to fall off the plane’s edge, I grin like it is the best day of my life.

On this day, we celebrate the triumphs of transgender people — all transgender people must be included and championed, binary and non-binary alike — and look at how far we have come, as a global community of sorts. And I am so happy to be alive now, able to feel, for the first time in my life, that I can tell someone I’m ‘transgender’ and not necessarily expect them never to have heard this term before. I’m so happy to be alive at a time when trans women of colour are fighting fiercely against being pushed to the margins or forgotten. Janet Mock’s autobiography, the first by a trans woman I ever read, still resonates with me deeply, still helps me articulate how it means to define and redefine the ‘real.’ Jennifer Finney Boylan’s own, though a bit older, is resonant, as well. And there is so much in our growing literature of trans-ness to be proud of: we are writing fiction by and about trans persons, addressing the fact that, for a long time, most of the literature of trans experience was nonfiction autobiography. We are in the media. We exist. In my mind, this day proceeds with the carnival atmosphere of walking through the French Quarter of New Orleans, where the possibility of the wondrous seems always in the air.

We cannot only celebrate, cannot only let go.

And, just as the atmosphere on Bourbon Street is thickened for tourists’ satisfaction, we cannot allow our day of visibility to become some kind of commodity for the kind of cis persons who think giving support is merely being ‘polite’ by not using the wrong pronouns.

In my home country, like in most of the Caribbean, laws protecting or even addressing gender identity do not exist. In Iran, sex-change operations can be funded by the government, but only on the extraordinary premise that everyone is really heterosexual, and that a transgender person — who must be binary in this worldview — is merely a heterosexual person born in the wrong body. In Brazil, transgender people are attacked and killed more than anywhere else in the world, even as Brazil has increasingly adopted progressive laws regarding LGBTQ persons. Sixty-five years ago, Christine Jorgensen, then the world’s most famous trans woman, was a sensationalistic story in newspapers; only this month, Lilly Wachowski came out after being threatened with being outed by The Daily Mail. In 1989, Akira Yasuda transformed a cis female character for Final Fight, Poison, into a pre-op trans woman, justifying this by arguing that it would be more acceptable to beat up a transgender person than a ‘real’ woman and that ‘hitting women was considered rude’ in America, a statement that implicitly isolates trans women. Decades later, I am still accustomed to seeing people refer to this character as ‘a man’ and making jokes about how ‘gross’ it would be to ‘hit’ that in another sense, jokes that many trans women, like myself, are accustomed to hearing applied to ourselves. I left my home — which declared earlier this month that anal intercourse is still illegal — to find a safer life in another country because being openly transgender is far from safe everywhere. I am often afraid to go to the doctor simply because I fear my voice, if not ‘right,’ will cause someone to ask me why I am using a woman’s ID—as has happened to me before.

When I wrote a piece for Slate in January about using the women’s restroom as a trans woman in the wake of fear-mongering anti-transgender laws, I was unsurprised at the vitriol in the comments; this is just how it is in 2016, the idea that we are, despite our social gains, ‘predators’ and ‘perverts’ and ‘freaks.’ And when I was lucky to write a piece for VIDA about visibility as trans women in the Caribbean, I was reminded just why I needed to write such a piece to begin with.

We are beginning to be accepted, loved; we are still hated. And some of that hatred often, unfortunately, comes from within ourselves.

To celebrate is to focus one’s gaze, to relegate the terrors to the shadows, at least for a bit. Perhaps that’s how we do anything as humans, focusing our gaze. In his essay ‘On the Pleasures of Hating,’ The English critic William Hazlitt—famous for the acerbic way in which he took down writers in his criticism—argued that it’s impossible not to hate. “[H]atred alone is immortal,” he said. The sun is temporary; the dark is forever. I don’t want to feel hatred towards those who hate us. It’s hard for me to hate, when face to face with someone. But there is so much loathing for us out there, looping the world. And most all of it is rooted in the same ignorance from which we get misogyny, fundamentalisms, and homophobia: the belief that there is solely one, conservative way to view reality, and that anything that deviates from that must be deviant, must be evil, must be detested and destroyed. I often want to just look another direction, drifting away on an air-stream of happier dreams. But I can’t. Won’t.

On this day of beautiful diversity, we must remember, too, to celebrate ourselves, if we have spoken out against the mind-sets that would rather such people as myself never speak at all. Let us not forget: celebration, sometimes, is itself worthy of celebration. To celebrate how far we’ve come, after all, we must not hate who we are; we must love ourselves, so we can be happy for ourselves, and for others like us.

I remember standing in front my bathroom mirror a few days before I began to write this. A faint orange-yellow lamp in the background, the sink in shadow, me like a figure in a chiaroscuro. I put a hand over the space between my legs. I turned one way, then the other. For a while, I just stood there, imagining myself as if there had never been anything but a vagina there. I smiled, but I was sad. The organ I had been born with seemed, in that moment, a kind of secular curse, like the pig’s tail certain members of the Buendia family would be born with in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. It was not a curse. I would not have been me, really, had I been born without it, had I been born like so many cisgender women. I would not have been better or worse, even if I might have been better or worse off in other ways; I would have had an utterly different life. There it was again, that pleasant-pedestrian-painful reminder: I was always a woman, but I would have been a different woman had I been born cis. I don’t even know that that other person, that smoky dream-self that only exists in the space where genies’ wishes do, is ‘I’ at all.

This is as obvious as can be, but so easy to forget, and so important: we are who we are, and we would not be if we had been otherwise. If we wish to celebrate ourselves and others, we must start by banishing the desire, if we have one, to have been born something else. I say this, but I feel like I am surrounded by smoke as I write this, and it is not from a cigarette or a candle.

After the second dive, I’m sitting in the main room again with Cindy, the woman who runs the place, and another woman who is filling out the paperwork for her first dive. “It’s all girls today,” Cindy says to her. “No guys signed up.” I feel elated.

The other woman steps out for a moment. Cindy turns to me. She smiles and tells me she had read an essay I wrote about being a trans woman before the dive, after I’d added the skydiving school as a friend on Facebook. “I say, go girl!” she exclaims, chuckling and putting a fist in the air. She says that voice must be difficult, but that because I am from the Caribbean, I can perhaps compensate for it slightly by my accent.

At first, I feel deflated. Sad. I’d thought no one there knew. Then, as I consider it more through the day, I realise that, whether or not Cindy and my dive partner knew I was trans, they had treated me in such a way that I had no way of knowing. To my partner I was simply a woman, undefined as any category of that term; and to be a trans woman, after all, is to simply be a woman in its own category, just as it is a category to be a Dominican woman, a tall woman, any woman at all, and categories often intersect. My dive partner had neither explicitly looked down upon me for being a trans woman nor congratulated me for it; he had simply called me ‘girl’ and ‘girlie’ each time in a way that seemed natural to him. I was simply female to him, and wasn’t that, I wondered, the best possible outcome, where, ‘read’ as transgender or not, you are treated as the person you are in such a way that you wouldn’t know if anyone else had read the book of your history in your face, your body, or somewhere else?

I remember the rush of the fall through the air, and how, this time, all I felt was bliss as the air rushed into my face like a vast waterfall in reverse. And I remember when the parachute opened, and the roar of the wind stopped, replaced by a beautiful, calm stillness, as we descended on the wind to where we had set off from.

Let’s celebrate the future by taking from the past, and making it better in the present.

On Noise, Richard O’Brien and Transphobia

Two thousand years ago, as he sat in a room above a public bathhouse in Rome, a Stoic philosopher decided that noise wasn’t so bad for his writing after all.”‘I cannot for the life of me,” Seneca the Younger writes in his short proto-essay on noise — aptly titled On Noise — “see that quiet is as necessary to a person who has shut himself away to do some studying as it is usually thought to be.” For Seneca, although intermittent noises could still be disturbing, it was possible to train yourself to become so absorbed with your work that the noise would fade away into a kind of mysterious surrounding silence. Enter the door of yourself, and, if you close it just right, you may be able to keep out the outside.

This is easier said than done, as Seneca himself says. After paragraphs extolling the virtues of learning to ignore background noise, Seneca suddenly admits that all of this was a ‘test’ and that he “shall shortly be moving somewhere else.” Even a Stoic, the lesson seems to go, can only endure so much.

I think of Seneca’s essay, which I first read a few weeks ago, when a new piece of aggravation floats into my view today. It’s yet another article about a famous figure who’s decided to inform the world, with the grim satisfaction of a contrarian, that trans women are not women. This time, it is Richard O’Brien. I like contrarianism when it makes sense — but then again, Donald Trump believes himself to be a contrarian of sorts by saying the things he claims are true but that no one else would dare admit. And when it comes to simple transphobia, I can as easily imagine this coming from Trump’s mouth as from O’Brien’s.

O’Brien had been asked by Metro magazine for his views on the trans-exclusionary radical feminist views of people like Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries, both of whom have recently made statements that argue that transgender women are men rather than women. (Trans men are often left out of these conversations altogether, as well as non-binary persons, but O’Brien will take the unique route of excluding everyone but non-binary individuals.) “I agree with Germaine Greer and Barry Humphries,” O’Brien told the magazine. “You can’t be a woman. You can be an idea of a woman. You’re in the middle and,” he finished with a kind of naïve condescension, “there’s nothing wrong with that.”

As a trans woman from the Commonwealth of Dominica, I am accustomed to the din of transphobia in the brief instances that transgender people are given a platform to speak. On social media, this din is particularly difficult for me to block out, as it is not uncommon for men to casually post that they want to gun down trans women on sight or that we should murder all LGBT people altogether. But I have learnt how to breathe deeper and better, like a scuba diver, and let other things fill the world in front me instead. And when people make such comments, I have learnt not to argue back, even though I sometimes can’t help myself. The last time I did, I was called an “abomination,” a “lost soul,” “not a woman,” and other such endearing things, and was advised to change my lifestyle because God had created men and women. The Garden of Eden is too small and ghostly for me, really, but I have given up saying that. I try to drown out the noise. And sometimes the noise and the music are so blurred together that they become one thing. “Noise-sound,” the composer Luigi Rossolo called music that strove to imitate harsh noise in 1913, and I feel it in my head when I let such comments resonate too deeply, like a terrible metallic echo through a cave. So I try to focus on other things, try to play other songs.

Then I saw O’Brien’s comments, and I felt stung. Here was a person who, incredibly, has been vocal about not being a member of the gender binary, a feeling that O’Brien suppressed for over fifty years. In 2013, O’Brien, who appears to mainly use male pronouns, described himself to the BBC as “probably…about 70% male, 30% female.” He said that he ticks the “M” box when asked about gender but would prefer that there be an “Other” option — and, indeed, we should not have a gender binary on forms but should allow everyone, binary and non-binary alike, to identify, even if that just meant a box marked “non-binary” on forms. I was surprised that O’Brien, who seemed enlightened about the nuances of gender identity, of how you can explore the caverns of yourself and find two mirrors side by side, each showing you a different person who is unquestionably you, seemed so crassly dismissive.

He had been on hormone therapy like many binary trans women, having taken oestrogen for over ten years. When he said to the BBC that “I was six-and-a-half and I said to my big brother that I wanted to be the fairy princess when I grew up,” I understood that feeling of societal contradiction based on appearances and gendered desires, whether or not — which shall remain undisclosed — I wanted to be a similar sort of princess. (Okay, more of a sci-fi princess, in a high-tech deep-sea submersible or on a starship near a Venusian planet, and perhaps I wanted to be one of the Fey, too.) Gender identity, for me, was never about my actions or roles but purely in terms of how I saw myself, how the map of my mind and body had been drawn up; I see myself as a woman not because of what I played with as a child or the clothes I wear or any other such things that have no relation to gender identity, but rather simply because the switch in my mind had been flipped to “woman,” and I felt confused and frustrated by my body, by the name of my birth, by everything. I understood the pain of suppressing who you are for so long, as I waited over twenty years to finally let myself begin to bloom, as me.

So why this new crudity from him?

But then I saw something I had missed earlier: that O’Brien, back in 2013, had rejected the idea of a gender binary altogether for the majority of people. “It’s my belief,” he declared, “that we are on a continuum between male and female. There are people who are hardwired male and there are people who are hardwired female, but most of us are on that continuum.” Suddenly, I began to wonder if O’Brien’s comments were a transphobic-sounding version of this belief about gender: that few people are binary at all, and to call trans women women and trans men men — though he left the latter out — would be to live in too binary a way. I wondered, for a moment, if I was being too hard on him, if what I had taken to be dissonance was really just poorly put-together sound.

Of course, this is a charitable interpretation. I didn’t really believe it. It is almost impossible to read the dehumanising statements of Germaine Greer in particular and say you agree with them without understanding what you are aligning yourself with. I believe O’Brien simultaneously dismisses trans women as women due to his (to me) too-absolutist beliefs about a continuum — and due to his genuine, if ironic and self-loathing, transphobia. He is not as bad, perhaps, as Milo Yiannopoulos, a sexist gay conservative who frequently makes the extraordinary claim that all gay people wish to be straight and that no one could want to be gay, but he is out there. And it’s binary trans people he wishes to erase.

I have no desire for their speech to be censored; I would prefer that people stand up to such rhetoric or protest it at a speech or simply ignore it rather than banning it, since the latter tends to only cause more problems. I would rather people know enough to say no to bigotry rather than have bigotry hidden away like a small forbidden treasure. But I worry when I imagine how many outlets will take O’Brien’s words and, once again, give people something to casually pass around on social media about how transgender people are delusional — and they will gain power because O’Brien himself doesn’t identify as cisgender. More noise, more din, more sound and fury.

I want us to keep speaking up about who we are, so that statements like O’Brien’s and Greer’s stop filling a void with hate. I am glad that this is already happening. And I want it to happen more. I’m tired of people lazily conflating genitalia with gender, with them binding us to the descriptions of our bodies we were assigned at birth. I’m as willing to accept  and respect anyone on a continuum or off a continuum as I am to accept and respect binary individuals like myself. And I’m tired of being told, over and over, that I will never be what I am. I am tired of how these arguments all lack nuance and empathy. I imagine telling O’Brien is it so hard to understand that my map of my mind, in terms of gender, was simply drawn differently from yours, that what is cognitive dissonance for you is the simplest of body-music for me? Are your arguments any different, I think, from the people who erase lesbians and gay men by saying that everyone is bisexual, or erase bisexuality by saying everyone is one or the other, or any other tortured, absolutist configuration?

But I will not move away from the din of these voices, like Seneca. The din is my life. I left some of the noise behind when I left my home in the Caribbean—the happy noises, like the sound of cricket balls being hit and the way the wind sounded like a river at night in the mountains where I lived, and the sad noises, and the neutral noises. I became accustomed to crying at night at my own decision not to return home—a new sound, then an old one. And transphobia, too, forms part of the background noise I will not avoid. Let us continue to speak against this lazy, yet widely shared and destructive argumentation like O’Brien’s, so we can finally, one day, perhaps have a bit more peace. There is better music to listen to, and to make.

Making the Dive and Loving Myself Dangerously

It’s Trans Awareness Week, the week leading up to Trans Day of Remembrance on November 20th. When we say that Autostraddle is website primarily for queer women, we want to be 100% clear that that includes queer trans women and that it’s important to honor trans women year-round, not just in obituaries. So all week long we’ll be spotlighting articles by and about trans women, with a special focus on trans women of color. We hope you’ll love reading everything as much as we’ve loved writing and editing it.

Learning to love yourself is a lot like learning to breathe.

I have been learning, again, how to live, to love, to breathe.

When you begin to transition, sometimes the world seems like a new place, terra incognita, the patches labelled ‘here there be dragons’ on an old map. I know this was the case for me. In some ways, it still is. I’ve been fully out for almost a year, and I’ve both learnt new confidence and failed to unlearn some of my old fears from my earliest days of presenting as a woman. I still, sometimes, hear my heart beating in my head when I step out the door in a dress, wondering if today is the day that wearing that dress will cause a man to call out to me in front his friends, then, realising I’m not the cis woman he wants me to be, turn his call into curses and kicks or worse. I still hesitate, sometimes, before picking up the phone, even when I know I must make or take a call, worried that the voice I have worked on for so long will vanish and that I’ll be reduced to a ‘sir’ by a stranger. I still use the restroom quicker than I should on some days, avoiding eye contact with the women in it, hoping I don’t give off such an overwhelming aura of nervous energy that I’ll cause the very thing I want to avoid: everyone turning to me.

Getting over these fears, and choosing to live with fear rather than live in fear, is an act of self-love. Learning to control your heartbeat so you don’t hyperventilate, learning to breathe normally in a crowd: these are lessons of love. These are ways of embracing ourselves.

I’m still learning.

The first day I taught a class of undergraduates presenting as female made me think, later on, of learning to scuba-dive in the Caribbean Sea. The two were many islands apart, me teaching in my new home in Florida after having learnt to dive in the Commonwealth of Dominica, the verdant island I grew up in between Martinique and Guadeloupe, but they felt quite close, all the same. Both set my heart going like the erratic wingbeats of a bat.

I’ve loved the ocean for as long as I can remember. As a child, I spent hours looking up information about the denizens of the deep sea, the realm that fascinated me the most. I was particularly intrigued by the enigmatic giant squid, and I remember with embarrassment the day I sent an email to one of the world’s most eminent squid scientists, Dr. Steve O’Shea, proposing what I thought was an obvious solution for capturing the then-as-yet-unseen behemoth on film. Why not, I wrote, just attach a camera to the back of a sperm whale, since they eat the giant squids? O’Shea, a gentleman, wrote back soon after, politely telling me that my idea was rather unlikely to succeed.

I loved the sea so much that it came to terrify me as I learnt more about the creatures that lived in it. I knew well it was unlikely I would encounter any of the creatures I’d read about just by going snorkeling on a family trip to the beach, but my imagination always ran wild. I was unable to wade more than a few steps most of the time, my mind filled with images of rushing tentacles, barracudas, and the barbed tails of stingrays. Beyond that, I was never a strong swimmer. My mother’s tales of old friends being dragged out to their deaths by currents in certain fatal patches of water — which she would repeat whenever we drove past the beach or estuary where someone had lost their life — would echo through my head. I would panic as I took a few steps into the water, the sand swirling around my feet in clouds, and begin to hear my heart hammer. I at once knew too much and nothing at all. If we were at Champagne Beach, where the beach was more rocks than sand, the ground lizards and the occasional iguana might leer at me as I retreated from the water, as if considering whether or not to run from such a comical specimen.

But, like embracing the woman I am, I couldn’t stay back from the allure of the waves. The pull of my trans-ness and queerness, of course, would always be stronger, the strongest impulses I have ever known. The sea, like them, was a place that represented a kind of forbidden love. I needed to overcome my fears or I would feel that I was holding myself back from living authentically.

So, contrary to all the walls my fears had erected between the sea and me, I decided to learn how to scuba dive.

Learning to breathe with your scuba gear is a kind of act of faith. It seems contrary to all expectations if you’ve never done it before, especially if you’ve experienced the sudden lack of air from poking your head too far beneath the surface while snorkeling. Yet somehow it works. You just breathe, as normally as you can. And the world is your air: your breaths become loud and constant. As you learn to descend, though, the sea reminds you it is there. You feel its weight, your having come from the surface, when you descend a few feet and there is a pain in your head. You learn to pinch your nose and blow out to equalise so that you can slowly descend further into this blue world.

Illustration by Yao Xiao

And then there is the terror, which you must face, of simulating having your dive mask knocked off, where you must suddenly either close your eyes or come face to face again with where you are and either way put it back on. You learn to control your breathing so you don’t kick back up too fast to the surface when your gear stops giving you air, as once happened to me about 50 feet below the surface — for returning too fast can be your death sentence. And then, of course, you must learn how to control your fear when the old nightmares appear: when you encounter the creatures where you are diving. I learnt not to fear the enormous stingrays, the blue morays with their mouths hanging open that swayed in the current, the rare spotted eagle ray that once found its way into the area I first learnt to dive in. I even learnt, on my first and only night dive, to gradually not fear being surrounded by the darkness, only our flashlights, the pale moonglow, and the bursts of phosphorescence softening the black.

So much of this reminds me of walking outside presenting as a woman for the first time. Of having men call out to me, of having security guards in museums proposition me when no one else was around and my heart suddenly wanting to burst from my chest for the very person who I thought would protect me might become my enemy if I say the wrong word, and if I speak in a voice that does not ‘pass,’ what will happen next? I remember the many, many nights I stayed in instead of going out, even for something as routine for groceries, for I was terrified of being clocked as a trans woman, of being laughed at, stared at, followed.

I remember when all of my optimism about shifting my voice into the kind of voice I had always wanted came to an end, when I was humiliated over the phone. I’d had to call Tallahassee Memorial Hospital to pay a bill I couldn’t pay online for some reason, a bill that was under my new legal name and gender. I tried to raise my voice the way I’d tried before, thinking it sounded all right in my head. ‘How can I help you, sir,’ I heard seconds into the call. It became worse. My account number wasn’t coming up, so the man I was speaking with transferred me. The woman who answered brought up my information, but wouldn’t believe I was Gabrielle Bellot. I couldn’t be her because of my voice, she reasoned.

To prove I wasn’t a criminal, she asked me to verify my gender. I’m accustomed to verifying my first car, my best friend in secondary school, and my mother’s maiden name, but I had never been asked to verify my gender. I imagined, suddenly, that she had asked me to strip over the phone. I told her my history with transition over the phone. She sounded relieved.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said.

My eyes began to sting, and the world felt heavy. My gender said ‘F’ on my file, but her pronouns wouldn’t shift. I didn’t even imagine, at the time, that the woman was transphobic; I imagined that my voice was simply so non-F, somehow, that her own instinct couldn’t align it with the ‘F,’ couldn’t fit the contours of the right word. I didn’t love myself enough to even correct the woman.

It was a humiliation that echoed what would happen soon after on a trip to New York, where a receptionist at the Neue Galerie, a museum I had longed to visit for years, gendered me female on sight, then shifted without a blink to ‘sir’ as I blurted out that I couldn’t find my student ID for a discount. It was such a quick, cold switch that I left the museum after fighting with myself for half an hour, because I had come to hate myself so thoroughly. I had come to not see the paintings in the top floor properly through my stupid tears. I felt imprisoned by my fear of my old voice. Clearly, I was not ready to descend into the world, not to these depths.

Now things have begun to change. I enter the world with more confidence. I know the privilege to pass that I have; all the same, I’m prepared for the looks and questions I do get. I have worked on my voice for months because I wanted to, not because there is anything wrong with keeping your old voice, but because I didn’t want that voice, didn’t feel safe with it, didn’t feel right with it, didn’t feel happy with it, felt embarrassed teaching with it, hid because of it. I learnt to change the timbre of my voice through breathing differently — quite literally — and hundreds of recordings and hours of research. It may not be perfect, but it’s hard to express how happy I feel when I can pick up the phone, call a stranger, and — most of the time — expect to hear ‘ma’am.’

It was a labour of love to reach this far — and the labour, I realised, signified the love. To be lazy in such things was to be love-denying, to see myself standing at my own door and to shut it instead of letting myself in.

I remember descending over the largest stingray I’ve ever seen on. It was resting on the silty bottom near the wreck of a small liner we were exploring. The stingray looked like a muddy magic carpet with eyes. I remembered my terror of stepping on one before I learnt to dive. I was still, floating, the sound of my breaths a reliable muffled rhythm, the bubbles floating up to the surface like currents of little jellyfish.

I remember smiling like a fool. I had learnt how to love a world I once feared.

Now, I must do it again. I must learn to be brave wearing a new wetsuit, getting a new diver’s card with the right name and gender on it. Diving for the first time since coming out scares me. I wonder at the dangers of diving in a group of strangers, where someone learns you are trans and decides they do not like it. I think of how I still avoid going to the beach because I have never worn a woman’s swimsuit in front of anyone but my reflection. In my worst moments, my past dives begin to seem like dreams.

But I’ll do it.

“Create dangerously,” the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat advised in Create Dangerously: the Immigrant Artist at Work, “for people who read dangerously,” for people who, she says, soon after, “may risk his or her life to read” your words. To that I would add: love dangerously, so you don’t regret the breaths you could’ve enjoyed.

I cannot return safely to the place I learnt to dive as a queer trans woman, but I love the lessons it taught me, which I only understood better later, when I began to become myself.

How to Write About Trans Women

Begin with the title. Never forget that you must include the word ‘transgender’ or ‘transsexual’ in each headline, preferably in quotation marks. No exceptions. How else could your audience process the story to come? Acceptable subheadings, subtitles, or extensions for titles are as legion as hacktivists or biblical demons cast forth from pigs: make sure it includes ‘surgery,’ ‘sex work,’ ‘gay agenda,’ or ‘is not a woman.’ The latter holds the distinction of being both catchy and classy. It is critical that you separate trans women from real women as early as you can; if you do not, your audience might assume you actually respect transwomen as women, and that might lead your readers to assume you are gay or bisexual if you are a cis male writer, or not conservative enough if you are a cis female writer. Be careful. You are at stake as much as your subject matter.

The photo on your cover or hanging above your article comes next. Go for broke here. Images of hairy legs in high heels or emerging from tutus are classics you can’t go wrong with, like Strauss’ Blue Danube waltz or light summery pastas with basil and garlic. The goal is to suggest that trans women must look like comical parodies of womanhood, like clueless men. Avoid women of colour at all costs, as well as, or including, women wearing a hijab, al-amira, a faded t-shirt and jeans, pareo, or anything that suggests that transfemininity might exist across cultures and continents, might be mundane rather than marvellous, the latter in the surreal sense Alejo Carpentier used it in.

Illustration by Yao Xiao

On the other hand, you may select a photo of a trans woman who looks very much like a cis woman, usually one who would be beautiful by the standards of the society you are writing in. All the better if she is posed suggestively, wearing noticeable and flawless makeup, and has long, shiny hair, the bigger and longer the better. Make no mistake: this is not to show her beauty or to talk about standards of the gaze or how female bodies in this society are portrayed. No, dear writer. This is a setup to take her appearance apart in a special way unique to trans women.

If she has committed the mortal sin of wearing bold makeup in particular, like red lipstick, this is far worse than if a cis woman followed those legion demons in like manner, since trans women who wear makeup and have manicured hair are obviously parodies of stereotypes of women, individuals who have never passed through the magic door marked Socialisation that would have cured her forever of wanting to highlight aspects of her appearance she wishes to. Real women do not wear makeup or take care of their hair or wear form-flattering clothing of any kind. And it is impossible for trans women to be aware of their choice to appear as they do; they cannot have personal agency to look the way they wish to, cannot be embracing a freedom to wear or not to wear that is itself aware of the social politics of such embraces of freedom, cannot be anything but stereotypes of the heterosexual male’s gaze, the sole gaze one should talk about.

Do not even approach the example of a Muslim trans woman who covers her hair but wears makeup; this is not only un-Islamic by all definitions of the word, obviously, but is something no Muslim cis woman would do. Do not bring up, either, a Jamaican trans woman who might decide to adorn herself and dance and shake like a cisgender dancehall artist; the cis artist and her fans, you see, are just doing something common in the culture or buying into the male gaze, but the trans woman is projecting the gaze onto their own body because their eyes are still not a non-lesbian woman’s. Avoid the subject of androgyny, especially the idea that androgyny can even sometimes be associated with strength, as in some anime and manga. Trans women who do not wear makeup must be manly; trans women who do wear noticeable makeup must look manly, or have manly gazes. Clever, you may think to yourself. This was a trap they could never have evaded, inescapable as Dream’s sister, Death.

Pronouns are your choice. Do not read work by other writers on transgender issues, especially not work by trans women themselves. You don’t want to be influenced, like any good artist. You may gender your subject the way you think is obviously correct, male, like those leading lights of empathy and scholarship Daniel Thwaites in the Jamaica Gleaner or Gavin McInnes in Thought Catalog. This is especially effective when discussing the dangers of trans women using the women’s restroom. It helps portray the loo as a kind of wartime trench for women, who have been forced to accommodate the presence of urinals.

However, you may choose to gender your subject with female pronouns if you preface this by saying that you respect people’s wishes to be called whatever they want but that you know they will always be what they really are. You may also bring up references to people who identify as vampires, elves, and Sonic the Hedgehog, or, alternatively, those people who believe they were literally Cleopatra or Marilyn Monroe, or both, in other lives. You may mention Rachel Dolezal and racial reassignment surgery. This saves you, makes you look both generous and, in your mind, liberal in that wonderful way conservativism can sometimes be liberal. After all, you’re being polite to lunatics, the kind of people who probably couldn’t string two meaningful sentences together. If you bring up people who identify as non-humans, never mind the real science of binary transgenderism or the false equivalence of the comparison, since these other things do not exist; the point is to show that trans people, broadly, are out of it, man, their sanity abducted by aliens strategically released from Area 51 on a lonely strip of rural American highway. As for Rachel, never mind that she is a human being who, despite needing to be called out for her lies, has been through a lot; no, you need to show that if she can identify as something, anyone can, absurd as ‘transraciality’ is outside of the context of interracial adoption. Screw context and screw her — but not the trans woman, just to clarify quickly, because that would be, well, no homo, as you, if you are a certain kind of cis male author, may say to a fellow male when praising something about him. Be careful. Remember that someone’s reputation is at stake here.

Now that you have begun writing, dissect us like the surgeons you may have referenced in your subtitle, or the way you imagine they do, an image of an American classroom in which frogs are being taken apart for science lessons. When giving statistics, if you are an American writer, be sure to use only American stats even when you are talking about transgender persons across the globe. After all, Americentrism is manifestly the destiny of the world. There are no trans women from Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Brazil, Australia, India, or Uganda, indeed anywhere throughout ancient history, as trans women are solely the products of phytoestrogens in soymilk and things the American government has slipped into the water. They also, like homosexuals, did not exist before the word ‘transgender’ or ‘homosexual’ was coined, as they are entirely socially, not in any way biologically, constructed. By the way, remember that the word ‘transgender’ is most commonly used as a noun, preferably the plural form of ‘transgenders,’ and ‘transgendered,’ indicating the affliction that was put upon one of us, is the preferred, if not the most chic, adjectival form.

Be sure to reference Paul McHugh on gender reassignment surgery. He is the god of transsexuality, and the rest of us, trans women especially, are simply heathens for thinking we know what might be best for ourselves. Be sure to also reference a website about sex change regret. Do not look into actual statistics about the lack of regret after sex change. Especially do not look into the biography of the person who created the site, or you may learn that he was not even transgender to begin with; aim for quick, selective snippets of information, not research.

Be sure to show, preferably in unretouched photos, the person engaged in activities that, though not inescapably ‘male,’ retain connotations of male gendering, like lifting weights, shaving the face with a beard full of cream, or even playing videogames, especially first-person shooters. For the latter category, latch onto if they play a female character, like Maya from Borderlands 2 or Princess Peach in Mario Kart; this is further evidence, peer-reviewed by your instincts, that this person merely wants to be a woman in a fantasy world, fed the laughable illusions of a brain in a vat. If possible, show your subject either prior to transition or in ‘male mode’ if they are not yet full-time. Show that this person is simply a one-stop shop for male privilege. Do not talk about their fear of coming out or of dangers they may face if they do, if these are available as facts. Eschew the possibility that your subject’s presentation may, in fact, be due to them identifying as gender-fluid, bi-gender, or genderqueer in any way. Remember: select.

Always use their birth name, especially if it is not unisex or does not seem androgynous to your mind. If you obtained this name from the work or school email you used to correspond with this person, as they have not yet legally changed their name, disregard their name preferences. Clearly, this person has no need to fear being outed if they trusted you with the story. Be strong.

You may grin at this point as you write and paste. You’re about to reveal a lost gospel to the pagans — not the Neo-Pagans, you don’t know who they are — and you are excited, if not a bit smug. You will destroy the lies of the transgender agenda. You will probably be shared in memes on social media, on websites about government conspiracies, and on YouTube clips. If of a special prophetic inclination, you will especially look forward to being shared in countries where LGBTQIA legal rights are scarce or non-existent, as this will teach the ignorant people over there what to correctly think about transgender people, as well as, possibly, anyone who is queer. You want to stop this before it spreads. If you are actually living in such a country, write even more quickly. The moral fate of your nation retaining its discriminatory laws may be influenced by you or, if you are the prophetic type mentioned earlier, it will rest entirely on you.

Never mind how much pain you cause. Never mind how many nights of terror and deep-sea loneliness you contribute to. Never mind how you have already begun to put us on display in your mind and in the minds of potential readers like humans on display in cages, things to be laughed or pointed at like specimens. Never mind the way you fill the halls of a mind with ghosts that should not be there. Never mind that you may contribute to why one of us flees from a small island, from a country, a too-fast continental drift of bodies, may be what relocates home to the place of old dreams, where shipwrecks slumber, not because we are all that fragile but because enough of most things will lead to erosion. Never mind that your piece may be what pushes one of us into the death lights of a train or truck or into the vampire’s embrace of poison flooding our system. Out, out, brief candles; we are candles, queer objects, not serious people you would think of seriously. And if your words did contribute to such a cutting of a life’s string, you must simply shake your head, for you knew it would happen; our suicide rate is high, and you cannot imagine you are part of the explanation, for you have already determined through reason and logic that we kill ourselves because of those foreign hormones we may take or because the few of us who have had gender reassignment surgery clearly went madder than Conrad’s Kurtz after it. The horror, the horror is not the loss of life or empathy; it is that we were allowed to transition in the first place, not fixed by a good therapist or, if you are so inclined, a religious minister. (The two are often mixed, with religiously motivated conversion therapists the most highly recommended by those who really know.) You are allowed to sigh, if you have thought of any of this.

Finally, smile with genuine satisfaction and press Send. You’ve done it. You’ve revealed the truth about ‘trans women.’ It will be breaking news, like bones and glass. It will help stop the spread of a disease. You are a gentle, well-meaning Morpheus. Congratulate yourself on showing what ‘the media’ will not.

Look away. Look away. Look away. Do not think of the woman you’ve written about. After all. What’s another piece about those people, really? It won’t matter.