QUEERLY TRANS
The Trans Ghost Who Lives at the Back of My Closet
Haunted by the shadows of one’s former and future selves and those who may never be
Nancy was a workmate 20 years older than me. She’d have been in her mid-40's at the time, which I now know to be quite young. She’d had quite a full and well-travelled life. She was also a stalwart LGBTQIA+ ally. Most of her friends, even her long-time best friend since high school, were gay men.
She called me Eldin after a character in the sit-com, Murphy Brown; I had been painting the inside of Nancy’s house, as had Eldin for Murphy in the show. That was the gag: the man never finished painting. He was an eccentric artist and became an ever-painting fixture in her home off of whom she bounced problems and ideas. I suppose he functioned as the proverbial device of the court jester, an informal advisor and foil to the monarch’s status. Nancy had worked for the BBC and, like Murphy Brown, she’d been in the television news division. I took to calling Nancy, McGill (Magill), a Beatles reference* (outside link to YouTube) I’ll leave you to sort out.
There was no attraction between Nancy and me; that wasn’t our relationship. Nancy had travelled the world, lived in London, was well-read, and erudite. She spoke with elegance and poise. She was an actress and smoked Dunhill Blues. If not a proper flower child, she’d at least been ‘hippy-dippy’ in the late 60's San Francisco and we loved the same music. As a teen she’d seen the Beatles’ last concert at Candlestick park. She told me Mick Jagger brushed up against her at Altamont and she got some of his Glimmer Twin glitter on her arm. I looked up to Nancy.
Her house was old, creaky, the lighting dim. Some corners were dark in a way that you could almost see something standing in them, poised to emerge and scare you out of your wits at any moment. While painting one afternoon, as the shadows drew longer outside, the topic of ghosts came up. Smoking a Dunhill, Nancy told me about a friend she’d had when she lived in England, a trans woman. I remember the story keenly because I wanted to be a girl for as long as I could remember, but was deeply ashamed and repressed about it. What are you to do with that sort if thing knocking about your head when you are supposed to be a boy and everything you see in media, in your home, and in the schoolyard tells you it is something to be embarrassed about? At the time, I was still going to church, very hung-up about sex, sin, hell, and desperately trying to stop crossdressing. I’d manage it sometimes for months before I could no longer handle it. So, any time the topic of what was then referred to as transsexuality came up, I was immediately and intently drawn to listen and absorb every detail.
I think back and wonder if maybe she had read me and that is why she told me the story in such detail; Nancy was perceptive and wise. She was cool — I would love to be a woman like she was. As I listened to her tell it, I kept painting, feigning only mild distracted interest as I hung on her every word. My heart was racing as I tried not to wonder if it might one day be something I’d experience… because I secretly wanted to and then I’d hate myself for thinking that.
“Nope, not me,” I’d desperately think, my habit was to deny, find a way not to countenance it. “I am only a crossdresser and I am going to stop soon. I am NOT a transsexual!”
Nancy related how her friend had been transitioned and living a woman’s life for several years, but shortly after her bottom surgery, when she had physically become female to align her body with her consciousness, a male shadow figure began standing at the threshold between her bedroom and walk-in closet. He came at night when the woman was just abed, preparing to sleep. At first it was so faint, just a vague impression, and she convinced herself there was nothing there, that she was imagining it. But the figure also appeared in her dreams and over time, she felt she could more clearly see his form as she stared at the closet.
She began to leave the closet light on and close the door. When she did, she couldn’t see him, but sensed he was still there. Eventually, his faint form began to show in the dark, in front of the door just barely against the bulb light filtering under it, a dimmer area barely visible against the dark.
“No, there was no longer any doubt,” Nancy said. “A man was standing in her closet with no face. He never spoke or did anything, he was just there — a vague but still discernible presence hanging about. Even when she couldn’t see him, she knew he was there. My friend described him as lost and out of place — at least that was the sense she got. Over time, he became more persistent and present.”
After this had gone on with increasing frequency and intensity over a couple years, the woman called a psychic to come help her.
While inspecting the house, the psychic noticed that at the back of the walk-in closet sat a collection of male clothing neatly folded away in open boxes. Some expensive suits and jackets still hung on the dowel above a collection of men’s shoes nestled like yin-yangs or ‘69s’ in their original boxes.
“Do you have a husband or boyfriend who died?” The psychic asked.
“No,” said the woman, “I thought you knew… I mean, they are my clothes… well, they used to be… er…or I guess still are… I suppose.
Looking expectantly at the psychic, the woman held a pause and then broke it. “I thought you knew, I mean I thought it was obvious….I was born a boy, I was a man and I transitioned to living as a woman.”
The psychic apparently hadn’t read her mind. Either way she’d not clocked the woman.
After some discussion, she told her to get rid of the clothes, that the shadow figure was a projection, some faint aspect of her still clinging male ego. “You won’t complete your transition, until you let go of them, because they symbolize some part of you still holding on to ‘him’, to your former self.”
As advised, the woman took the clothes up to a charity where she unceremoniously set them down at the door and walked away. The figure of the man appeared one more time that night. The woman spoke to him, said he he needn’t fear, that he would always be a part of her memory, but it was okay for him to move on.
Nancy told me that story 30 years ago. It’s all a bit dramatic, but she was like that with stories. Myself? I am still a male, still transgender, and I still crossdress — although, now I own it without the shame. I look at it with wide curiosity.
Well, I say I’m not ashamed, not embarrassed, but then I guess if all the shame and hang-ups were really gone, I’d transition... Maybe?
Or perhaps it’s that I still value something about being “a man” more than I do the unknown territory, living out-loud as a blatant trans-feminine person. The fantasy is safe and predictable to me. If I go out to achieve what I wish for, that’s where the heavy work really happens and I move deep into the unknown. A part of me is also afraid of who I will become and the power that person may posses, that the man I am today will learn he has just been pretend, a half-life, a shadow who will one day be ‘erased’ by the light of that self turned up to 11. That is hard to admit, that a part of me has wasted my time on this earth because of fear of the unknown. Writing it here I think, “Yeah, but you will still be you and change will happen regardless. What is so frightening about being an even better, freer, more authentic you?”
I’ve also long had the habit of imagining some future course and mistaking all the bad things that could happen…catastrophizing, confusing them for a guaranteed reality. In my mind, that storyline always ends with me living penniless under a bridge alone, invisible, forgotten, and joyless. In my imagination, that is where all my potential paths usually end up. Change Jobs? Bridge. Change sex and gender role? Troll under the bridge.
I think of the ghost story Nancy told me and retell it in my head often because I relate to it and that haunts me. I still have a closet partially occupied by male clothing. I can’t tell you how many times I purged my women’s clothes, but for the last 10 years, I’ve hung them amid my other clothes. Rather than hide them at the bottom of a box in the darkest recess of my closet, I hang them out to dry where people can see them, fold them and put them neatly in drawers. I integrate them into my daily habit.
I lay in bed at night and stare at my closet, imagining a figure standing there in the dark. In my mind, she’s stronger than just a ghostly presence. She’s psychic and lives in my soul. My mix of clothes increasingly represents the impasse of transitioning for me, of a feminine spirit I imagine languishing in the dark behind them who I show a bit of light to, but nowhere near enough. I call that dark form the stuckness. It is the palpable avoidance and fear, the rationalizing of a repressed self that forms the closet I say I’ve come out of.
Before Johnny Depp’s public drama, I told people I styled myself after him. By default, that leads me to the original Keith Richards who publicly and unashamedly admits he wore Anita Pallenberg’s clothes. It became his signature style. But he isn’t trans. He’s a personality born of the stage, a rebel who has the aplomb not to care what people thought of him. His crossdressing wasn’t tied up in an identity at odds with his body that he was trained to hide. And so, in many regards, I emulate him and am read as the guitarist I am, the wannabe rockstar with additional motives.
My girl clothes aren’t overtly or overly feminine and I’ve incorporated lots of androgynous womenswear into my wardrobe. In fact, all of my pants, socks, and underthings are now women’s, but there are still the men’s clothes there, less used, other than my large selection of liberty print shirts. They are going out of style and increasingly yellowed and dusty. At this rate, I reckon that in several years, all I will own are made-for-women, ambiguously-gendered clothes… unless I go binarily dimorphic.
When the Boden, J.Jill, and Sundance catalogues arrive in the post for my wife, I flip through them with dysphoric longing imagining what it would be like to just buy what I want and be at ease publicly and completely owning and flaunting my femininity. I picture the joy of opening my wardrobe to only find Liberty wrap dresses and shifts, all sorts of skirts, cardigans, sweater dresses, cute shoes and boots, and beautiful tops, drawers full of tights and bras I could actually fill, underpants that conform to the sort of body they were made to fit — my clothes that I’d look pretty in but about which nobody would bat an eye. I suppose that is the fantasy but, in fact, I’d be more than content just to wear simple jeans, sneakers and a ‘T’, but for the form they sheath to be undeniably that of a woman and to be understood and greeted as such.
But I don’t buy what I really want. I buy what will do because I don’t really believe I ‘will do’; I do not pass.
It’s not some fetish about the clothes. I mean, I love clothes and fashion, I see dresses so beautiful that my heart slips when I see them and I think of how powerful I would feel in them, but they are still JUST cut and stitched cloth, things imbued with a particular cultural symbolism to which I and the world subscribe. But there is also the comfort I feel in them and the meaning they communicate to others and to me. Barring medical transition, they are all I have to be able to look in the mirror and feel some sort of congruence between my self-concept and body. Regrettably, they also sometimes create an incongruous tension and intensify the stuck feeling of impossibility that I will ever, or that I can ever, actually be a woman — because when I take them off, I take myself off.
The longing and attraction I have for women has almost always been a bit less about sex and more about dissociation and envy, a desire to connect deeply with that which I am not. It has often interrupted my love relationships with women because I withdraw deep into that incongruence and dysphoria and they wonder where I’ve gone. I don’t go into it too much because although supportive, they won’t understand. They can’t.
“You’re not present” they tell me. Or they ask, “Where did you go? A penny for your thoughts.”
“But I’m right here,” I retort, obfuscating and redirecting. “I’m not thinking about anything, really.”
But I know I’m obsessively peering out the crack of my closet door, as though a disembodied shadow figure, wondering what it would be like to leave the shadows. I don’t realize the door isn’t locked.
Inspired by this great article by TransGen, Abandoning my Male Wardrobe.
*YouTube: The Beatles, 2018, “Rocky Raccoon (Remastered 2009)”, June 17
