By Christopher Hawthorne Moss, author of BELOVED PILGRIM and WHERE MY LOVE LIES DREAMING
Well, you see, it’s like this. I published a novel in 2011 titled BELOVED PILGRIM about a young noblewoman who disguises herself as a man and goes to the Crusades as a knight. I have told every Tom, Dick and Mary that I wrote it for the chance to write a female character with other concerns in her life than what particular shade of purple brocade she would wear to the ball. Even more than that I did not want to write about a woman who did, in fact, wear armor and fight but winds up giving it all up for her Knight in Shining Armor. He’s going to want that armor back, without the breastplate stretched out all funny like you did his football jersey. Since Shaw already handle Saint Joan, I came up with Elisabeth von Winterkirche. Thanks to portraying her as a lesbian, I was able to accomplish two thing, to make sure no knights in shining armor would make her trade her Crusader’s capa for an apron and to make my lesbian friends happy. Though not a lesbian myself, I was pretty pleased with the result, the first edition of BELOVED PILGRIM. I had written a female character I could.. mostly… relate to.
Chapter Two – January of 2012 found me going through a most confusing period full of anxiety and depression and even agoraphobia. I had started reading virtually nothing but gay romance, historical to be exact, which is a prescription for depression all by itself. I mean, you can’t fall in love with these characters and then daily see their most essential happiness threatened, pretty much the standard plot of all gay historical fiction. The key moment in this period was watching the film version of E. M. Forster’s MAURICE. It fell neatly into that same depressing pattern, but not more than usual. Until that one scene at the end, where Maurice waves goodbye to Clive and runs to join Alex in the boathouse, and Clive stands in the window gazing after him. In that moment I froze and didn’t come out of my funk until seven months later when I came out as transgender at a monthly PFLAG meeting. I had come to realize that what I had been experiencing was gender dysphoria, a highly painful feeling of being in the wrong sex body. When I saw Clive’s face, you see, I saw myself, a man, gazing at a life I had not realized. That though born with a female body, my heart and mind were and always had been male. No real surprise, if you had watched me grow up. I was never a tomboy, but as I once told the Peppermint Patty in our small town, I was a Thomas Gentleman.
Don’t worry, there is beginning to be all kinds of science about this. I didn’t make it up.
To make a long story short, it occurred to me now that the female character I could relate to in BELOVED PILGRIM was actually a woman who was really a man. A female bodied man, a transman, and FTM. So, I wondered, should I rewrite my novel to allow Elisabeth to be Elias? What a job! Maybe I should just drop it. But I was no more going to drop that than my own gender transition, as hard as that is.
I should say at this point that I used the expression “sex change” in the title of this article with tongue firmly planted in cheek. The expression is not used any more. The expression for taking hormones and having your bits reengineered is SRS, sexual reassignment surgery. It sounds like when I showed up in the registrar’s office they accidentally assigned me to the wrong classes or workplace. Now it was up to me to go back there and either demand my money back or for a more suitable assignment. Since both my parents are dead, it made more sense to avoid probate and just get the right sex assignment.
Changing what gender you are is a misnomer. You have come to recognize that while the bits are female, the noggin is male. The ticker too. It’s as if your brain had been implanted in someone else’s body. It’s still you, even though you look like Mrs. Somethingorother, or in a transwoman’s case, Mr. Somethignoteother. What you are doing in your new assignment is trying to make the bod and brain match. You take hormones. You might have your breasts lopped off, or in the other case, something else situated lower. You change your name and clothing and pronouns.
Speaking of pronouns, it is high time we got back to the book, you know, the one I wrote about the lesbian. How was I going to take an already quite complete and coherent, IMHO, novel. How to change Elisabeth into a dude. Could it be as easy as using my nifty little technique of “Find and Replace”?! All I needed to do was use “Find” to locate every incident of “she” and with an S-ectomy turn them into “he”? You are probably way ahead of me here. What happens if you do this without specifying “Whole Words Only”? You get a lot of words that start with “she-” losing the S even when it appears in the middle of the word: “sheet” is “heet”, “disheveled” is “disheveled”, Once you start over and make sure only the simple “she” is selected, you suddenly remember that the female character you changing into a transman was not the only female character in the book.. now suddenly they are all male. Back to the drawing board. Don’t forget “she” included in contractions, or other pronouns like “her” and “hers”. Then you start on the easy stuff, names. But wait, Elisabeth takes her brother’s name, and in the book you only know it’s the former female called Elias because of all the female pronouns used fr her, um, him, and you just changed them all.
Lest you imagine this takes care of the problem, at least eventually, there is the issue of certain terms that imply that the formerly-female Elias is somehow masquerading. You know, like “masquerade”, “disguise”, that sort of thing. I just noticed one “guise” slipped in, or rather stayed stuck in. By all rights Elias should have ripped Albrecht a new one for insinuating, by the use of that term, that she , um, he is not actually a man… Even saying “swearing like a man” would be offensive. Yes, even in the 12th century. Of course, this leads to the realization, at long last, that changing gender is no easy task. I did not start my transition with a simple “Find and Replace”.
The subtler aspects are an education unto themselves. You learn your own engrained biases when you look through a novel about a woman and change it to a man. You discover plenty of ways you interpreted what is female, even if you meant the character to be more enlightened. That is, incidentally, why, in part, that it took me 60 years to get to the understanding of myself that I did. I kept insisting to myself and anyone else who would hold still for the harangue that deep down inside there was no difference between men and women. It was all cultural. So why then did insisting I was 100% enlightened female didn’t stop me from freaking out at the dysphoria? You learn quickly how you sculpt your cultural biases into your story. C’mon, admit it, at least in other people’s books. Only with them you can call it literary criticism.
In sum, it was a real bear to make BELOVED PILGRIM into a novel about a transgender character. I’ve noticed in other novels about transmen or transwoman that it is very hard to either understand or communicate that those years of being in the wrong body mean that you can’t just change your pronouns.. and you can’t write a story about a transgender person by doing no more than writing a character who behaves like one gender but obliquely refers to the dissonance of having the wrong body. You still have that body and the world will still relate to you based on that body. And you will know that every second of the rest of your life unless you had an amazing plastic surgeon. Even then you will have a tough time. As I like to reassure people, no one seeks to live as “the other” sex on a whim. Why do we still do it? We don’t all. Just those of us who feel our gender is to large a Truth to try to hide.
Why won’t I ever perform a “sex change” on a book? You might think it’s because it was a hairy lot of labor, but that’s not it. It’s because I don’t intend to write any more books about women who really are, down deep inside, dudes. Period.
BELOVED PILGRIM
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