Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
While the exact age varies from country to country, ‘becoming a man’ is a concept most commonly associated with one’s teenage years.
It may be defined legally, through reaching the age of majority; biologically, as a result of the onset of puberty; or it may be something attached to an age-old cultural tradition. Regardless, becoming a man is something which, if it’s going to happen, generally happens before your early twenties.
For P. Carl, it took more than 50 years.
After “living as a white, Midwestern woman for fifty years and ten months”, Carl transitioned in 2017, eight months before the #MeToo movement unfurled, a time when “white male supremacists occupy the White House” and the many horrors of modern masculinity were finally starting to be examined in the light of day.
To be expected, sadly, from a memoir on transitioning, Becoming a Man is packed with anecdotes of losing friends, strained familial relationships, and even suicide attempts.
It details the immense strain on Carl’s marriage to Lynette, his lesbian wife who has spent her life hating men (not without good reason, it must be said) now having to confront the fact she’s married to one.
Harder still is Carl’s mother’s decline, her worsening dementia adding to Carl’s challenge of trying to distance himself from who he used to be, as well as his relationship with his selfish father, whose reaction to gaining another son is, for whatever reason, simply to be more sexually inappropriate around him.
There is a flip side to the tough stuff, however.
Carl begins to experience the newfound privilege that comes with inhabiting a white man’s body. He’s a guy’s guy, striking up conversations about craft beer, absorbing “locker room talk into the pores of every inch of my skin,” and alternating between discomfort and joy at how differently he’s treated post-transition. Being served breakfast by a waiter who just moved to the US from India, Carl writes: “When I ask for more coffee, he calls me ‘boss,’ a term I will hear often from now on from men of color in service positions: valets, waiters, taxi drivers. I am stunned and embarrassed by the term, the sudden privilege and power that emanates from my white male skin.”
Similarly, on a road trip back home with his wife, he notes: “I have never been visible like this before, and Lynette and I have never been welcomed as a couple into the fold of Middle America. We can be in Ashtabula, Ohio, and not worry about whether I might get killed for looking a lot like a man but not. Our life as a straight white couple is more astounding the more we move around the country together. Being a white man married to a white woman is just so pleasant, so easy, and so terrifying.”
But maleness can be a double edged sword.
When Lynette is diagnosed with uterine cancer and has to undergo a hysterectomy, Carl sees how the couple’s friends truly view men: as bumbling, useless fools who would fail to step up in their partner’s hour of need - and, in fairness, it seems there’s a good deal of personal precedent influencing this viewpoint. “One friend tells Lynette that when she had her hysterectomy her husband went to work the next day and left her with their three dogs. She was unable to go up and down the stairs to get to the bathroom. Another friend tells her there was no one around to drive her home after her hysterectomy. This friend has been married thirty years.”
Carl is furious at the notion that he’s no different from these women’s husbands, and notes that as a trans man, while he may not have firsthand experience with what Lynette is going through, he spent his “entire life around women, in love with women, performing as a daughter, sister, and lesbian lover. How could anyone think I don’t know how to care for Lynette, especially Lynette?” It is a uniquely heartbreaking scenario to find oneself in, and like so much of the current conversation around gender, and particularly toxic masculinity, serves as a warning against making bold assumptions of gendered characteristics.
“I have fought so hard to be seen as a man,” Carl writes, “and it’s as if everyone has now forgotten I’m a trans man. I didn’t see this coming.”
In spite of the many challenges Carl faces, he argues that masculinity in and of itself doesn’t have to be a bad thing.
“I love being a man,” he writes, “I love learning from good men.” He recognizes the flaws of manhood, the unfair privilege bestowed on men— particularly white men— and acknowledges the damage wrought by a misinterpretation of what masculinity should look like. And yet, being a man is such a fundamental part of Carl’s being. It’s an important reminder that masculinity needn’t be toxic.
Becoming a Man ends on a note of optimism, largely spurred by the more progressive attitudes of a younger generation: “I want to believe the students from Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and their activism and demands for change will move us closer to a more human and civil society. I want to believe my goddaughter’s insistence on service and caring for the lives of every color and gender and ethnicity here and abroad is movement toward a future that will never allow babies to be separated from their parents at a border ever again. I want to believe my sixteen-year-old nephew, who transitioned with me from aunt to uncle without a hiccup, is what is in store for all trans people moving forward.”
We’re right there with you, Carl.
Jack Urwin is a Toronto-based British writer and activist whose work has appeared in the Guardian, VICE and the Literary Review of Canada. His first book, Man Up: Surviving Modern Masculinity, explores the wide-ranging societal harm caused by toxic masculine behaviour.
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