That Old Familiar Feeling




Atthe beginning of my transition, I would go to the big chain bookstore in the strip mall at the edge of town and buy any book written by a trans person. I had moved to a semi-rural area (hence the only bookstore being a big chain inside a strip mall). There was not much in the way of “trans community,” and what there was centered around the local college, so the people were much younger than I was. It felt creepy to be involved. I had come out in my late thirties — not late, for a trans person of my generation, but my experience of being seen as a straight wine mom did not prepare me to interact with other queers, and I knew it. There was a culture of which I was largely ignorant. There were rules I never learned how to follow.

So my relationship to gender was mediated (isn’t it always) by capitalism. I could not meet another trans man who could tell me how to behave, but I could shop for one. I could buy distilled trans expertise, and tell myself I was putting money back into “the community;” I was engaged in political action, redistributing my middle-class cash to support people I had never met, but whose welfare was, nonetheless, my business. I went on trans book sprees, shopped my way into a sense of community, until I had been out at work for about six months, at which point until I discovered — accidentally, by clicking a Twitter thread in which several prominent trans men and mascs were discussing me — that on at least two occasions, I had bought (and vocally recommended!) a book by someone who hated me.