A Trans Perspective on The World According to Garp (book)
The first time I can remember hearing about a trans person in the media was on the TV show, Soap, which aired from when I was 8 to when I was 11 and starred a young Billy Crystal as Jodie Dallas, a gay man who
…is in a romantic relationship with Dennis Phillips (Bob Seagren), a professional football player. Jodie enters the hospital to have sex reassignment surgery so that he and Dennis can legally marry.
It was all part of the sitcom’s soap opera stylings, of course. And of course it presented stereotypes of gay men whilst presenting a narrative that trans women were gay men, etc. etc. While I have no direct memory of connecting Jody Dallas to myself in any fashion, I do remember the show.
I also remember Chris Sarandon’s trans character, Leon, from Dog Day Afternoon who was based on Elizabeth Eden. More to the point, I remember that the bank robbery was being committed to pay for her SRS. But I didn’t see this film until the mid 80’s when I had a better grasp of who the character was.
Prior to that, I have this awful memory of a Gallagher comedy special from 1981 or so when he was on roller skates and singing about Renee Richards and her balls. Ugh. I’m sure as a little kid, I laughed at the smashing of watermelons, but I only remember the Renee Richards joke specifically.
1981 was also the year I read John Irving’s The World According to Garp. It was a book I would read over and again through my teens. I can only say it was a comfort read for me and I never tired of revisiting it during that period of time and the presence of Roberta Muldoon was a major reason for that.
Muldoon was the first trans character that I had encountered that was presented with any depth and she was the first that I read about that was called a transsexual. This was a new term to me when I was 11. More importantly, it was the first time I recognized a term/category that applied to me, who I knew myself to be. It was my “aha!” moment and while I didn’t read the book over and again only for Roberta Muldoon, she was a comforting figure within the book.
On a tangent, some people have issues with the word transsexual. I do not. It is the historically appropriate label for who I was before and during the pre-op years. It is no longer operative because I am post-op and thus, have trans’d sex.
Does this mean I have been ‘cured’? If through medical intervention I no longer suffer the affliction that drove me to seek said medical intervention in the first place, then yes. It does.
Does it mean I am no longer trans (as a label that continues to be relevant given my public history)? No. It does not. But I no longer associated myself with the transsexual label (which I still have no negative feelings about).
Back to Roberta Muldoon.
While I have no issues with John Lithgow’s performance in the film (the film came out in 1982 and criticisms of the actor doing transface in the film are, by my way of thinking, unfair as the part is played as dramatically appropriate as possible and not for shock or comic value), I do not associate the character with the film. For me, she exists on page alone although I have to imagine that should they ever remake the movie, they will most likely cast a trans woman in the role (not a guarantee, however because Hollywood).
The character was also my impetus for researching all things transsexual, which at the time was reserved for libraries. By the time I was in my mid-teens, I was using the UCLA library and by the time I enrolled there as a freshman, I knew exactly where the small collection of books were shelved in the Powell stacks and I was able to educate myself about the medicine, science and psychology. I learned what transitioning meant and what it would cost me personally.
As a character, Roberta is probably the most emotionally stable in the book. While she is part of Jenny’s collective, she serves as a healer of the novel’s conflicts. While she has drama at times, she is steady and reliably supportive of Garp and his family. She is almost oppositional to many other trans women in fiction, who are, for lack of a better term, trainwrecks. While she is still filtered through Irving’s cis-gaze (as, let’s face it, the majority of fictional characters are — not Irving’s of course…the cis-gaze part) and so ends up being less than ideal, for me, at the time of reading, she was a revelation.
And finally, as someone gifted with the frame of a middle linebacker, Roberta Muldoon, former NFL tight end, was a like-bodied trans woman. Although fictional, she allowed me some measure of imagined relief (now actualized) that I could exist in a similar space. I can’t speak for others, but prior to transitioning, when I would imagine myself as a woman, it was not as a trans woman, but as a cis woman. That being said, when I would on rare occasions imagine how I would look beyond transition, I had to think of myself realistically and in that, having a previously imagined trans woman of similar size was comforting (and that imagined woman did not look like John Lithgow for the record).
I haven’t yet read Irving’s In One Person, of which he says:
two transgender women are the heroes of this novel
But I am curious to do so, to see how his conception and depiction of trans women has changed. I’ve also thought about re-reading Garp, which I have not done for decades. The book lives as a piece of nostalgia in my mind and I wonder how Roberta Muldoon will seem to me now — if the book will resonate as it once did.
I wonder if I should read it at all.
