I get gendered correctly basically every day now. This is really affirming and I think each time it relieves some of the “do I look like a girl, will I ever look like a girl” anxiety that I’ve had weighing on me for the last three and a half years. But not completely. The image of me as a boy is still plastered on the inside of my eyelids, and I feel like if I close my eyes and think for too long, then I’ll be there again — my consciousness transplanted into any number of the “boy me” memories that are scattered across the floor of my brain. Today in particular I remember I’m with Caroline. I’m wearing something like cargo shorts and a T-shirt or something, walking around with her at 9pm on our college campus. I have short black hair still, and she still has her orange hair in bangs, and she’s wearing a pair of jeans (that she will eventually give me, five years later). Underneath the streetlights I ask her, impromptu, in the way college freshman excitedly ask faux-intellectual questions: Do you think we really own our bodies, or are they just a consequence of existence? She blurted out Definitely just a consequence.
This is around the time when Caroline’s long-distance girlfriend began thinking about transitioning. I was sitting on the couch in Caroline’s dorm room when she brought it up. So, well… Olive [who used a different name back then] has been having these thoughts lately, about wanting to be a girl. I remember holding up a hand and saying Oh, uhhm… is it okay if I say ‘me too’? And we went from there. Even though I said ‘me too’ (and, of course, I said it in the deep masculine voice I hadn’t yet changed) I don’t think I really interrogated what I meant by it, nor did I understand the weight of this thought, its prophecy, the obligation that it would impress upon me. I backpedaled from anything too committal, too confessional about that desire: Oh, but you know, I’ve always been a guy who’s just comfortable with femininity, so I don’t put too much stock into gender roles at all. Or, Maybe I would transition but I’m going to medical school, and I don’t want to make it too difficult on myself. Et cetera. Implicit in this was my desire to fall for a girl, date a woman, have a wife, etc, which would be easier if I were to be a man, then a boyfriend, then a husband. I didn’t tell Caroline this part about dating because (a) I didn’t think twice about gender back then, and (b) I wanted to date Caroline.
I don’t remember being particularly surprised by the conversation topic. Caroline already exclusively referred to her partner as “my wife” (as a joke, of course) and mentioned how Olive would wear her clothes. At the time I was quite aware of envy towards Olive. Of course I had a crush on Caroline, so the general shape of the envy was familiar, of wanting to date and love Caroline, and having her date and love me too. Every evening Caroline would have dinner with me and call Viv on the phone; I remember the look on her face as she’d turn away from me, say “see you tomorrow!” and walk back to her room. I wanted it to be me, of course. I wanted to be her boyfriend—a thought that was salient enough for me to listen to sad music about it, and write about it vaguely in the margins of Chem 151 notes.
But as Caroline talked more and more about Olive, who was becoming Viv, and how she was actively supporting and enabling and loving her transition, I saw a glimpse of a different sort of envy. In Caroline I saw a different life that was possible; her existence was proof that hey, maybe there are girls who could still love me even if I’m more of a “feminine” guy. A small part of me began to believe that I could become more feminine (or be feminized by Caroline), but still loved. I felt this pang of longing when Caroline would talk about all the clothes she was lending her long-distance girlfriend; and a vague yet persistent discomfort seeing my ill-fitting jeans and blue sneakers.
So, this is also around the time when Caroline and I got really physically close. She was on this swing dance team and needed to practice, so we’d dance in her dorm, just the two of us, her as the lead, and me as the follow. We’d get drunk and I’d joke about how weak I was and she’d show off how easily she could beat me at arm wrestling. She would come to my chemistry lectures and steal the breakfast out of my backpack, eating it when I wasn’t looking. I’d nap in her bed if I was tired, I’d tell her about my chemistry classes because she liked it when I explained stuff.
Once she was so depressed she could barely leave her room to go to class or get any food from the cafeteria. I brought her soup that day in a little plastic container, carefully walking across campus to her dorm in Dauten Hall so it wouldn’t spill. She opened the door for me, lights out and bangs unkempt. She mumbled thank you, closed the door behind her. I heard her sobbing on the other side of the door. I stood there for at least a couple minutes in the hallway, trying to work up the courage to knock and comfort her.
I never knocked, never went in. I never told her or asked her about it, even five years later when we became roommates in Astoria. Things were different between both of us. I was unemployed and working odd jobs, going through the he/they phase (lol), had this situationship thing with my ex, Sylvia. She had broken up with Vivienne long ago at this point and was seeing men. We’d trip acid, smoke weed, ride the train. We’d go to lesbian bars together, where she’d wax nostalgic about Vivenne’s transition: “It made so much sense, in hindsight. Our roles clicked into place,” Caroline said. “I thought to myself, oh, okay, I’m supposed to be fucking you.”
So. Anyway, nothing happened. We were really just roommates, and neither of us said anything, and the tension (if there even was any on the other side) just dissipated. So why am I writing about this again? It’s embarrassing. I’m not really sure but the whole point of a journal is to be confessional, anyway, so here is my confession: I want to ask her whether, even though she’s been dating a guy for two years and I’ve been dating Sylvia for six, Did you ever think it could’ve been the two of us? I don’t know. I guess I just want to hear her response. It could be said that I’m searching for closure. (Though I wonder whether closure is even a thing that needs to be sought if we’re still friends, and nothing happened.) But maybe closure has already happened, and I didn’t realize it. Maybe closure came from the door swinging shut behind me as I moved out of our Astoria apartment; maybe closure was that closed door behind which Caroline sobbed freshman year. Or maybe, through some coincidence, she is wondering too and just waiting for me to ask her about it. And I think eventually the day will come where I ask her what it was really like on her end. But we’d have to get really drunk first… and that day won’t be today.
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