Self-Made Man (33 page)

I was coming close to the end of a year and a half spent masquerading as a man. The men's retreat was the culmination of that masquerade, and in certain ways the hardest part to pull off. I had gone to the woods with these guys not knowing what the retreat leaders were going to ask us to do. I had envisioned all sorts of things, none of which, thankfully, came to pass. Yet somehow this didn't relieve the pressure in my mind, and I continued to imagine scenarios in which I would elicit some violent reaction from Paul or someone else.

Once the retreat was over I knew that I had accomplished the last big task. Some part of me knew I didn't have to hold Ned together anymore, or the girded mind-set that made him possible. And once I knew that, all the guilt about being an impostor, the anxiety of getting caught at it and the by then extreme discomfort of contravening my own gender identity came rushing in. I didn't have the resources or the reasons anymore to stop it.

 

I could use the term “crack-up” to characterize what happened next, but it doesn't really describe what it felt like. “Nervous breakdown” is another handy term of art, but it too does little more than brand the experience as some filmable catastrophe that makes for good TV. The reality was not nearly so dramatic. There was no earthquake. The floor of my house didn't open and swallow the furniture.

It was all very quiet, as if I had gone out one day to do errands and come home to a summer house where all the chairs and tables had been covered with sheets.

I did not become paranoid or hysterical or make a scene in public. I didn't feel overwrought or afraid. I felt nothing, and that was scarier. There was no break with reality. None whatsoever. I heard no voices. I saw nothing that wasn't there. If anything, the opposite was true. The everyday unremarkable scenery became so heavy, so imaginationless, that I felt as if I were wearing my surroundings like a cement suit.

I simply quit, or some part of me did, and then left the rest of me to work out the particulars, which in my case meant checking myself into a hospital.

The event itself had been so subtle, or perhaps my notion of what mental collapse is really like had been so overblown, that I wasn't even aware that it had happened. I knew something had happened. I knew that I had taken steps to prevent or mitigate some impending disaster, but once in the hospital I found myself bewildered by my fellow patients and my presence among them. Absurdly so at times.

Over institutional pancakes one morning I asked one of them what he was “in for,” and he told me he'd had a nervous breakdown after his wife left him for another man.

“Oh, really,” I said. “What is a nervous breakdown like anyway? I've always wanted to know.”

It seemed at the time as though I had checked myself into a locked psychiatric ward for no particular reason at all. I didn't associate my condition with anything that had happened over the previous year and a half. I thought my antidepressant medication had simply stopped working, and accordingly I had tripped into the nearest hole. That was my official line: “I'm having my medication adjusted.” A euphemism at last. As if checking yourself into the bin was no different or more involved a procedure than irrigating your ears.

The truth was I had been what the experts called “passively suicidal.” I was walking around in a trance looking for Pauls in everyone I met, Pauls, that is, who happened to be carrying real knives on their persons and were practiced at using them. Given that such people are all too easy to find in New York City, my therapist thought it wise to suggest that I take myself off the streets, and the waking part of me agreed.

It wasn't until I sat in the day room of the mental ward talking to various social workers and med students and distracted psychiatrists that I connected this episode in any meaningful way with Paul or Ned, or even came to realize that Ned was over.

Sure, Paul was someone associated with Ned, he was the focus of my guilt, that much I knew going in, but he was not the only or even the most prevalent cause of Ned's demise.

The deeper cause was in Ned, inherent to him, and had been there from the start. First of all, Ned was an impostor and impostors who aren't sociopaths eventually implode. Assuming another identity is no simple affair, even when it doesn't involve a sex change. It takes constant effort, vigilance and energy. A lot of energy. It's exhausting at the best of times. You are always afraid that someone knows you are not who you say you are, or will know immediately if you make even the slightest false step. You are outside yourself in two senses. First because you are always watching yourself from beside or above, trying to get the performance right and see the pitfalls coming, but also because you are always trying to inhabit the persona of someone who doesn't exist, even on paper. You don't have the benefit of a script or character treatment that can tell you how this person thinks, or what his childhood was like, or what he likes to do. He has no history and no substance, and being him is like being an adult thrown back into the worst of someone else's awkward adolescence.

But there was more to it than that. Ned was also a man, albeit a Potemkin man, all facade and no substance, but I was still very much a woman peering through his windows, and the cognitive dissonance this set up was simply untenable in the long term, like holding two mutually exclusive ideas in my mind while trying to juggle and ride a bicycle at the same time.

Being him was a bit like being a zebra who is trying to pass himself off as a giraffe. Trying to be a man when you are a woman is not just being a horse of a different color, or a person who has traded in her old trappings for new ones: new clothes, new makeup and new hair. Through Ned I learned the hard way that my gender has roots in my brain, possibly biochemical ones, living very close to the core of my self-image. Inseparably close. Far, far closer than my race or class or religion or nationality, so close in fact as to be incomparable with these categories, though it is so often grouped with them in theory.

When I plucked out, one by one, my set of gendered characteristics, and slotted in Ned's, unknowingly I drove the slim end of a wedge into my sense of self, and as I lived as Ned, growing into his life and conjured place in the world, a fault line opened in my mind, precipitating small and then increasingly larger seismic events in my subconscious until the stratum finally gave.

I left the hospital after only four days, not because I was cured, far from it, but because listening to my roommate talk all night about the Swedish troll people, or about how DJs on the radio were calling her a whore, wasn't helping me to get better.

It took me a solid two months of meticulous care and home rest to get myself out of that state. Several times during that period I reached for Paul's number but didn't use it. I could never quite trust my motivations for wanting to see him and tell him about me, so I put off any meeting and concentrated instead on purging myself of Ned.

Ned had built up in my system over time. This allowed me to convey him more convincingly as the project went on, but it was also what made me buckle eventually under his weight. It was to be expected. As one rare (rare because insightful) psychiatrist would later put it to me when I declared that my breakdown would surely impeach me as a narrator, and hence impugn the whole project: “On the contrary, having done what you did, I would have thought you were crazy if you hadn't had a breakdown.”

In an odd way I think that what happened to me as Ned is what happened in some form or another to most of the guys in the men's group, though I experienced the alienation more intensely because I was a woman. Square peg, round hole and all that. My effort was disastrous of necessity. But for these men, living in their man's box wasn't a particularly good fit either, and learning this in spades may have been Ned's best lesson in the toxicity of gender roles. Those roles had proved to be ungainly, suffocating, torpor-inducing or even nearly fatal to a lot more people than I'd thought, and for the simple reason that, man or woman, they didn't let you be yourself. Sooner or later that conflict would show, even if you weren't trying to cross the boundaries of sex.

 

Manhood is a leaden mythology riding on the shoulders of every man.

True enough. But what to do about it? I can hardly write those words and defend them. Men's liberation isn't a platform you can run on, even if it is the last frontier of new age rehabilitation: the oppressor as oppressed. In our age we feel no political sympathy for “man,” because he has been the conqueror, the rapist, the warmonger, the plutocrat, the collective nightmare sitting on our chest. Right? Right. “Boo hoo,” we say in the face of his complaint. “The tyrant weeps.” When the bellowing image of the Great Oz turns out to be the befuddled homunculus pulling levers behind a curtain, we are understandably lacking in sympathy.

Yet as Paul, who has spent years in the men's movement trying to defend it to angry feminists, once put it to me, “It is women who are paying the highest price for men's dysfunction. We are not in opposition to them at all.” And he's right. Men's healing is in women's interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are—here is the dreaded word—victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role. From the feminist point of view this sounds at best like an abdication of responsibility, an easy out for the inventor, and at worst an infuriating instance of blaming the true victim. But from Paul's point of view it means that men and women are finally agreeing on something: the system sucks.

All of this is why the men's movement has remained a largely clandestine affair, relegated to retreats in the woods. Being a victim is far less practicable politically when the victimizer is also you, and the rending yoke is self-imposed. Can anybody really march the streets crying
j'accuse
and mea culpa in the same breath? Can you be “The Man” and the rebel at the same time?

Not in our revolution, pal.

It's hard to position a movement when the territory is so intimate. Men, after all, can't exactly gather on the White House lawn and demonstrate for their right to cry in public or claim their lost fathers' love. These, it would seem, are matters for the therapist's couch. Private matters.

But, of course, men's private lives are ours as well. Paul was right about that. Whether or not you're a feminist has little bearing on the matter. If men are really still in power, then it benefits us all considerably to heal the dyspeptic at the wheel. And if they're not, they're still members of our families and they still make up half the breeding population of the planet. We can hardly exist, much less live or change without them. And as the feminists might say, it doesn't get much more personal or political than that.

I don't really know what it's like to be a man. I never could. But I know approximately. I know some of what it is like to be treated as one. And that, in the end, was what this experiment was all about. Not being but being received.

I know that a lot of my discomfort came precisely from being a woman all along, remaining one even in my disguise. But I also know that another respectable portion of my distress came, as it did to the men I met in group and elsewhere, from the way the world greeted me in that disguise, a disguise that was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man's world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball. Only in my men's group did I see these masks removed and scrutinized. Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room.

 

In the end I decided not to tell Paul about me. I wasn't afraid of him anymore, but I worried that the embarrassment he would probably feel for not having sussed me out somewhere along the line might put him on the spot in a way that by now seemed unfair and unnecessary. This was an aspect of my previous disclosures that I hadn't fully appreciated at the time but now saw all too clearly. I had expected people to be shocked or bewildered, even angry, but not embarrassed. Yet embarrassment was I think at bottom what most people felt when I told them that Ned was really Norah. I had learned a lot about the chemistry of male/female interactions by talking through the transition with people, but I had done so somewhat at their expense. I had done it unknowingly then, but now I knew enough to know better. I wasn't going to make Paul squirm, and that, I feared, was most of what telling him would have done.

I never said good-bye to the guys for the same reason. I just stopped going to the meetings. I was tempted, however, to go back as myself. I wanted to tell them that I had heard what they had to say, that what they said had helped to buttress my own discoveries about manhood and helped me to see my own life as a man in sharper relief. Their honesty had made that possible and I was grateful to them for it. Most of all I wanted to wish them well, to tell them that I thought they were doing important work and that maybe, before long, a few more people would know it.

It was hard
being a guy. Really hard. And there were a lot of reasons for this, most of which, when I recount them, make me sound like a tired and prototypical angry young man.

It's not exactly a pose I relish. I used to hate that character, the guy in the play or the novel who drones on and on about his rotten deal in life and everyone else's responsibility for it. I always found him tedious and unsympathetic. But after living as a guy for even just a small slice of a lifetime, I can really relate to that screed and give you one of my own. In fact, that's the only way I can truthfully characterize my life as a guy. I didn't like it.

I didn't like how wooden I felt and had to make myself in order to pass as a believable guy. I had to do a lot of crossing out when I crossed from woman to man. I hadn't anticipated this when I'd started as Ned. I had thought that by being a guy I would get to do all the things I didn't get to do as a woman, things I'd always envied about boyhood when I was a child: the perceived freedoms of being unafraid in the world, stamping around loudly with my legs apart. But when it actually came to the business of being Ned I rarely felt free at all. Far from busting loose, I found myself clamping down instead.

I curtailed everything: my laugh, my word choice, my gestures, my expressions. Spontaneity went out the window, replaced by terseness, dissimulation and control. I hardened and denied to the point almost of ossification.

I couldn't be myself, and after a while, this really got me down. I spent so much time worrying about being found out, even after I knew that nobody would question the drag, that I began to feel as stiff and scripted as a sandwich board. And it wasn't being found out as a woman that I was really worried about. It was being found out as less than a real man, and I suspect that this is something a lot of men endure their whole lives, this constant scrutiny and self-scrutiny.

Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it's other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it's some kind of plague they're terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching. If you don't make the right move, put your eyes in the right place at any given moment, in the eyes of the culture at large that threatens the whole structure. Consequently, somebody has always got to be there kicking you under the table, redirecting, making or keeping you a real man.

And that, I learned very quickly, is the straitjacket of the male role, and one that is no less constrictive than its feminine counterpart. You're not allowed to be a complete human being. Instead you get to be a coached jumble of stoic poses. You get to be what's expected of you.

The worst of this scrutiny came from being perceived as an effeminate guy. Other guys, it turned out, were hypervigilant about the rules of manhood, and they were disconcerted, sometimes deeply so, by my failure to observe those rules. They could be obtuse as hell about all kinds of other signals, especially emotional ones, but boy were they attuned to the masculinity quotient. So much so that it really does justify the term homophobia—and I've certainly never been a fan of that word. But it felt to me as if most men were genuinely afraid, almost desperately afraid sometimes of the spectral fag in their midst. It's hard to explain it otherwise. Only fear could make them spy that much on another man's signals, especially when so much else in masculine interaction goes unremarked.

Of course, being seen as an effeminate man taught me a lot about the relativity of gender. I'd been considered a masculine woman all my life. That's part of what made this project possible. But I figured that when I went out as a guy some imbalance would correct itself and I'd be just a regular Joe, well within the acceptable gender spectrum. But suddenly, as a man, people were seeing my femininity bursting out all over the place, and they did not receive it well. Not even the women really. They, too, wanted me to be more manly and buff, and sometimes they made their fag assumptions, too, even while they were dating me. Hence the phrase “my gay boyfriend.”

Women were hard to please in this respect. They wanted me to be in control, baroquely big and strong both in spirit and in body, but also tender and vulnerable at the same time, subservient to their whims and bunny soft. They wanted someone to lean on and hold on to, to look up to and collapse beside, but someone who knew his reduced place in the postfeminist world nonetheless. They held their presumed moral and sexual superiority over me and at times tried to manipulate me with it.

But standing in the pit of the male psyche was no better. There I saw men at their worst, too. I saw how degraded and awful a relentless, humiliating sex drive could make you and how inhuman it could make your incessant thoughts about women become. I'll never truly know what that drive feels like on the brain when testosterone is fueling it, but I saw how by turns brutish and powerless a man can feel in the company of women and how bitter and often puerile he can be in the company of men. I know how much baser that drive could become in the circle jerk, where the expectations of manhood again exert their noxious influence, egging you on to cover the need and insecurity with crudity or pretend potency.

My buddies encouraged me to talk shit and I encouraged them to do the same. We let out all the hateful air in our balloons like mad monologists with a cogent form of Tourette's. We said all the things we didn't mean and did mean and couldn't say in mixed company, and a kind of catharsis happened then much like it did in the men's group meetings, but without the therapeutic self-consciousness. The company of your brothers can make you worse and better. Better because it lets you drain away some of the rage, but worse because it keeps you from talking about the pain underneath, because this ritual of male bonding itself is just another part of the manhood that's kicking you.

That's how it was when I was being manly with men. The dialogue was ugly and as a woman in the middle of it I felt soiled and frightened just hearing it. I was shocked because at its worst it was so much worse than I thought it would be, so foreign and relentless were the obsessions with fucking and competing and hazing the weak guy. It was all there almost all the time and it made me think that many men are far worse than most women know, but then also far better, because I knew where so much of it was coming from and how hard it was to overcome. I knew they were tied in a thousand knots and tapping out their distress in stilted code.

That is probably the part I hated the most. As a guy you get about a three-note emotional range. That's it, at least as far as the outside world is concerned. Women get octaves, chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance, and now after black bra feminism, we even get vitriol, too. We get to be bitches, at least some of the time, and people write proud books about it. But guys get little more than bravado and rage. Forget doubt. Forget hurt. They take punches. They take care of business. And their intestines liquefy under the stress.

I know mine did.

Yes, it's true guys get good stuff, too. Sometimes they still get a special respect and deference and a license to brag. I found this in the workplace. I got the power to exaggerate, to believe in my “nine-inch dick” and my “180 IQ,” illusory or not. It didn't matter. I had the spit to say “Try me” even when I didn't have any idea what I was doing. I had at times the billy club confidence of pure stupid unwarranted self-belief that I have seen in more guys than I can count. I always used to wonder how they did it. Now I know. They did it because a tough front is all you have when there's nothing behind it but the weakness that you're not allowed to show. It's the biggest gift you get, compensation for all the rest, as if the culture were telling you, “We're going to cut out your heart, but we'll give you legs and a VIP pass to make up for it.”

Even when Ned was at his best, getting the full benefits of manhood, wearing a jacket and tie, strutting down office hallways, full of a sense of his own importance, even then I disliked his life. Even then the swagger was false, and not because I was a woman, but because the good feeling was coming from outside me. Even positive feedback was still feedback, still a cultural expectation purporting to make me who I was, to make me acceptable as a real man in a way that I had not been in the monastery.

And that hurt personally. There was still someone telling me how to be, saying “Attaboy. Now you've got it.” There was still someone hanging over my shoulder taking notes, and even though hearing encouragement was always better than being demeaned as a fag, or a brute, or a failure, it was still insulting all the same, because it told me that just being me wasn't enough.

This was not just my complaint, not just a woman's mismatch with a man's part in the world, though that certainly heightened the contrast. It was the complaint of every guy in my men's group, and a problem if not always a complaint for almost every guy I met, though some of them were too shut down to express, much less see, how much damage “manhood” was doing to them.

In that sense my experience wasn't unique. Being a guy was just like that much of the time, a series of unrealistic, limiting, infuriating and depressing expectations constantly coming over the wire, and you just a dummy trying to act on the instructions. White manhood in America isn't the standard anymore by which women and all other minorities are being measured and found wanting, or at least it doesn't feel that way from the inside. It's just another set of marching orders, another stereotype to inhabit.

Learning this surprised me. At the beginning of the project I remember thinking that living as a man and having access to a man's world would be like gaining admission to the big auditorium for the main event after having spent my life watching the proceedings from a video monitor on the lawn outside. I expected everything to be big and out in the open, the real deal live and three feet from my face, instead of seen through a glass darkly. To be sure, there was a time in America when this would have been so, when boardrooms and a thousand other places were for men only, and worming my way into them would have gotten me the royal treatment and given me the very feeling of exclusivity and enlargement that I was anticipating.

But for me getting into the so called boys' club in the early years of the new millennium felt much more like joining a subculture than a country club. Walking around in the world as a man and interacting with other men as one of them seemed in certain ways a lot like how it feels to interact with other gay people in the straight world. When certain men shook Ned's hand and called him buddy it felt as if they were recognizing him as one of their own in much the same way that gay people, when we meet each other, often give each other some sign of inclusion that says: “You're one of my people.”

Being with the guys on bowling night as Ned was in a way like going to a gay bar as myself to be with my own kind. That is a lot of the reason why walking into that bowling alley for the first time on men's league night was as jarring to me as walking into a gay bar would be to any one of my bowling buddies. I was in the wrong secret club, that is, until Jim, taking me for an insider, a regular guy, shook my hand for the first time and let me know without needing to say it that I was among friends, that there would be no judgments here, that—if I had a mind to—I could swear and fart and drink my beer and talk about strippers with as much impunity as I can be a raging queer in my local lesbian bar.

Making this removed comforting contact with men and feeling the relief it gave me as my life as a man went on was not a sign of having joined the overclass, for whom superiority is assumed and bucking up unnecessary. It was more like joining a union. It was the counterpart to and the refuge from my excruciating dates, which were often alienating and grating enough to make me wonder whether getting men and women together amicably on a permanent basis wasn't at times like brokering Middle East peace.

I believe we
are
that different in agenda, in expression, in outlook, in nature, so much so that I can't help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects.

 

In the end, the biggest surprise in Ned was how powerfully psychological he turned out to be. The key to his success was not in his clothing or his beard or anything else physical that I did to make him seem real. It was in my mental projection of him, a projection that became over time undetectable even to me. People didn't see him with their eyes. They saw him in their mind's eye. They saw what I wanted them to see, at least at first, while I still had control over the image. Then later they saw what they expected to see and what I had become without knowing it: the mind-set of Ned.

I know this to be true because in several situations late in the bowling season, for example, or late in my stay at the monastery, I stopped wearing my beard, my glasses, and even at times my binding, yet no one questioned my disguise. No one stopped seeing Ned. They were just as surprised as everyone else when I finally told them the truth.

Even in the thick of the project when I went out into the world as myself, during the off periods when I was writing or taking a break from full-time Ned, people almost invariably mistook me for a man even when I was wearing a tight white T-shirt without a bra. Yet after I had finished the project, detoxed from Ned for several months and reclaimed my mental femininity, people everywhere addressed me as “ma'am” even in the dead of winter when I was wearing a black watch cap and a man's navy peacoat.