I often try to imagine what it must feel like to be trans. I have several openly-trans students, at least two confusingly-trans students, and one openly-trans colleague. If I’m to be a good friend and mentor to these members of my community, I’m obligated to try to imagine life from their perspectives.
It’s so tough though because I feel in every ounce of my body that I am a guy. To be cis-gender is to have a reinforced sense of clarity, to have the world confirm your deepest feeling about yourself; whereas to be transgender is to experience a double-reality where your inner feeling does not match with what the rest of the world is telling you they see.
It’s a world that — literally — tells you that your deepest feelings about yourself are false. To put it in philosophical terms, Descartes argued, “Cogito ergo sum,” which can be translated as, “I *experience*, therefore I am.” But to be confusingly-trans is to say, “I experience, but what I experience as me is actively denied by everyone I see, therefore, what am I?” It’s a denial of the certainty of one’s primal identity.
Where do you go from there? How do you climb out of that negative reinforcement of your experience of reality?
I said at the end of some blog post related to atheism that if I was ever going to understand or explain the intuition at the heart of the revelation I received, I’d have to develop a rigorous concept of play.
A friend of mine, when talking about this with me, said that he enjoys play, and he listed some of the ways he does that — “I love play,” he said. “I love playing whenever possible, I love watching my kids play, I love playing with them, I wish that all I did all day was play various games.” — but a rigorous concept of play is bigger than that. Play is not just a verb we engage in; it’s also a noun that means “the space in or through which a mechanism can or does move,” as in, “The skyscraper may sway in the wind, but it’s completely safe, because the architect gave it a lot of play.”
It’s “a space through which something can move.”
I imagine that being trans can often mean feeling like you’ve been beaten down into a deep dark hole by your family and by society, every message from the outside coming in like a fist, telling you over and over, pounding it into you at every opportunity, you are not what you feel you are. I asked earlier how someone starts to climb out of that.
I think it starts by testing for play. Is there room enough to move, and if so, is there room enough to start climbing up the wall, back up towards the exit, where you’ll finally be able to feel a sense of equilibrium with the world around you (let alone attempting to stand up and be heard)? At the very least, is there room enough to breathe?
How does one access that play, that space through which something *can* move? How does one get the strength (or the relief from the pain) to even test for its existence?
Again, I think the answer is in play. There’s a reason why trans individuals are some of the most playful people you can meet, and why so many of them wind up acting flamboyant; it can sometimes be more fun to play the role to the hilt than to keep fighting for the right to stand offstage and live a life of peace and quiet.
When I say the answer is in play, I mean it’s all about a concept that relates to both dancing and dodging, the kind of beautiful dexterity that is revealed in football, basketball, and, in fact, dancing and dodgeball. In each of those activities, the beauty is in the artist’s discovery of an unexplored and potentially previously-unseen space, the running back who finds the hole, the small forward who spins into the lane, the flamenco dancer who puts her leg where a leg should not be able to go. It’s about the discovery of an emptiness that seems to lie almost too close to an absolute presence, like the play of space between an actor’s character and an actor’s person: the difference in the “not them” that seems to exist “within them,” the discovery of the internal space between their “them” and their “not them.”
To come out as trans demands a physically- and spiritually-rigorous definition of identity, or at the very least, a level of self-awareness that can seem almost supernatural to a person of cisgender.
One way to discover that definition is to test it for play. One must put on (and take in) a whole lot of identities if one is to discover the difference between their “them” and their “not them.” It’s like putting on a series of tragic and/or comedic masks and performing that role to the best of your ability, trying to fool everyone around you into thinking you are *that way* in order to test whether their reactions match your intentions, a play-test of yet another identity while in search of the “real* one.
How difficult that must be when your experience of being trans does not match against the stereotypes — and I don’t just mean the stereotype of being *trans,* but the stereotype of anything. Because you can only experience what you experience, you don’t really know what it feels like to be a boy or a girl — you only know what it feels like to be you, and everything you are tells you you’re not what everyone tells you you are.
At a certain point, in all of that play, you come to the divine reality: the truth of who you are, and that is someone who is different, someone who exists in a space not occupied by any other absolute presence, a space where something can — and now does — move, and in that difference, you are someone special — someone (something) significant — the only one, the first and last of the endangered species of you, an existence whose every moment is worth saving and savoring.
Play is the thing that allows us to get there, to get to a life of meaning when God’s grace has been taken away.