While being mostly unemployed the last ten months, I spent some time digging into the philosophy of religion. I don't just consider this to be the most interesting subject there is to study; it's the most essential. My interest in literature is really just a side quest of my main effort to figure out whether God exists. I gave a lot of thought to just becoming a full-time DoorDash driver so I could listen to philosophy podcasts while I work and then be free at home to read more, but I ultimately landed on considering the people in my family and trying to find something that will provide for them a little better. So I guess I really am starting law school this week and putting the study of the thing I most want to do on hold for a while longer.
In any event, one of the side issues in the philosophy of religion is that of substance dualism. Are the body and the mind two things, and is the mind really the soul? Is who we really are somehow separate from the physical trappings we come in, even though we can't point to this other, more essential thing? Traditional philosophers are mostly the only ones who cling to dualism nowadays. The vast majority of scientists and philosophers believe that all we are is our bodies, that our brains are part of our bodies, and that our experience of a separate self apart from our bodies is somewhere between a useful fiction and an illusion created by old Western philosophy and theology. I would guess most everyday people have kind of muddled beliefs, and that if you were to ask them, you might get answers suggesting dualism, and you might get answers a materialist would make, depending on how you framed the question.
It's kind of ironic that advocates for trans people end up promoting a kind of dualism. In a popular form of explaining their issues, they tend to talk as though they have a mind trapped in the wrong body. It's how Jazz Jennings explained things almost twenty years ago on 20/20, and it's been a pretty consistent trope of trans advocacy as long as I've been aware of it. The irony here is that trans advocates, who are about as far from traditional theology as you can get, are using a lot of similar language to that of traditional theologians, who are about the last people on the planet still talking about dualism and also some of the most hostile to trans platforms.
Of course, people a lot smarter than me realized this long ago, and intellectuals associated with trans rights have already produced work that attempts to deal with this seeming inconsistency. One response is something like, "Well, we have to explain this to cisgender people so they'll understand, and because of the lingering influence of dualism in Western thinking, this provides an avenue that is politically expedient, if not strictly philosophically correct." Taking a different approach, Gayle Salamon has explained, using phenomenology (here, we can say phenomenology mostly means the study of subjective experience), that even though we don't have a separate soul, our psychological experience makes it feel like there is a disconnect between body and mind. It might be a disconnect between two physical systems, but it feels like a war between two separate things.
I'm sure that dualists would seize on this "apparent but not real" contradiction and use it as evidence that the split is real, but I'm not mostly concerned with who is right in the dualism/materialism debate here. I'm just pointing out that trans narratives do tend to lead to a dualist, brain-vs.-body metaphysics.
And now we finally get to the story
"What Would I Do for You, What Would You Do for Me?," the third story in this year's Best American Short Stories collection, does some interesting things with the dualism (real or implied) of many trans narratives. Early in the story, Cody, the trans man protagonist, thinks back on past visits to Pearl Lake in rural Wisconsin where he grew up. During the time of the flashback, he would have been living as a young woman who felt out of synch with his body. At the lake with his sister Molly, though, he felt comfortable: "Out there, in the shadow of the woods with only himself or his sister, Cody had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose. He was an animal among animals. He felt the clock of light in his blood."
In this flashback, Cody is having one of his few moments of feeling whole. How did he accomplish that wholeness? Not by uniting mind to body, but by obliterating mind. In many forms of traditional dualism, it's having a mind/soul that sets humans apart from animals. But Cody is here "an animal among animals." That is to say, his mind isn't out of synch with his body, because it isn't there. That's why he "had a body and it served an uncomplicated purpose."
Cody's fleeting moments of happiness as a teen weren't a result of the union of an estranged body and mind, uniting, after much work in therapy and much medical intervention through testosterone and other treatments. His happiness isn't an improved dualism; it's an enthusiastic embrace of materialism. There is no conflict between mind and body because mind doesn't exist. As part of this instinctive, animalistic happiness, Cody felt "the clock of light" in his blood. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, clocks have served as cruel masters of humanity. We have to get up when they tell us to, go to bed when they tell us to, and plan to arrive everywhere when they tell us to. But animal, materialist Cody lived by the circadian clock of light that he felt inside of him. There was no society telling him how to be based on what it saw; he was free from a society handing him his identity.
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| This looks a lot safer than what the guys in the story were doing. |
The climax that comes and the climax that doesn't
There are two climaxes teased in "What Would I," one that happens and one that doesn't. The first one takes place all within the first five pages. Cody sees a bunch of guys ice fishing on ice they probably shouldn't be on, because the weather has been warming. But they're guys, who always think they know best and always underestimate the danger they're facing, so one of them ends up in the drink. Cody hesitates to go out to help him, and then, "without another thought"--his materialist, animalistic self reasserting itself--goes out to help him.
This first climax ends with a setup to the second one, the one that never happens. Cody, having saved Greg, the man who fell in the ice, wraps him up with his jacket, and then he forgets to get his jacket back before Greg drives off, taking his cell phone and wallet with him. This leads to Greg tracking down Cody and inviting him out to drinks.
Cody reluctantly agrees to go to the local watering hole, the kind of place where tough and burly local men hang out. The whole time Cody is there, he's worried about them "clocking" him, a twist on the internal "clock of light" Cody felt before. Cody grew up around people like this before taking off to a friendly queer community in rural Massachusetts, and he's aware that if they do clock him as trans, it might be dangerous for him. So we, the readers, are waiting for one of two climaxes. Either Cody will be clocked and have to run for his life, or he will be clocked, and we will find out that hey, surprise, the guys are cool and let Cody know he's safe with them.
Neither of these endings happen, though. Instead, Cody gets progressively more and more frightened that they will clock him, and he bolts as soon as he thinks he can do so with dignity. One of the three men at the bar follows him into the parking lot, but not to beat Cody up. Just to say thanks for saving Greg and to give Cody a hug. It's acceptance, but not the big Acceptance of what we might call an "ally" in the parlance of our times.
While fretting his way through the night at the bar, Cody tried to use his father's clothing as armor, literally. He hoped the clothes would "shield" him and allow him to be one of those people who "moved through the world unquestioned." Based on Kevin's growing inquisitiveness, the shield might have only been partly effective. Cody kept hoping in the bar for a song to come on that would "anchor him in his body," meaning return him to his unitary, animal state, but it doesn't come, and he's left with the weak devises of subterfuge to hide his split selves from others. Cody barely manages to escape with his dignity. As he leaves the bar, he feels that he has been released "from a frozen world into fresh air and life." He couldn't find his unitary and animal self in the bar, trying to blend in as a man among other men. He isn't "anchored" again until he's far from the bar.
Cody's story as a small-town, rural queer kid who grew up troubled and misunderstood, then found acceptance, identity and happiness when he left, is a pretty standard story, told in almost every queer community in America. Cody muses on how he is a different person depending on his environment. When he feels safe, he's "easy, warm, funny, and shameless." Cody wishes he could be this person in Iron River where he grew up. He senses that he needs to come to grips somehow with Iron River, even if he never goes back once his dad either dies or recovers. Maybe he will never feel like his complete and comfortable self there, but he knows he has to learn to at least be okay with having come from there.
At the end of the story, Cody has not managed to find a way to live permanently in the materialistic, animal self that brought him the only happiness he ever knew while growing up in Iron River. He is out walking on the ice. Earlier, he thought of how the ice was all connected, but here, he is thinking of the fractures in the ice, and he wishes he could be "brazen and unafraid, like any other man." At the end, not only has Cody has gone back to a kind of fractured dualism, but instead of the triumphant uniting of the soul and body that sometimes comes with the dualist view, the two seem as far apart as ever. We are denied a third climax, the psychological climax of Cody either absorbing his discordant soul into his materialist body or uniting soul and body into a unified whole.
The part where everyone hates me
I've admitted before to being a bad liberal when it comes to trans issues. Although I fully believe in supporting anyone in a quest to find fulfillment, and completely reject traditional notions of sex and gender that would critique trans goals either on religious or natural law grounds, I still don't think everything I'm being told by advocates for trans rights makes sense to me. To greatly simplify, my doubts come down to two things. First is the seeming muddling of sex and gender terminology that some advocates use, then applying that conflation to policy goals. The second is a more practical one: I don't think the care now available is advanced enough that it accomplishes its goals. If you could take a pill and magically change your male body that's out of synch with your female brain into a female body that went along perfectly with how you see yourself, great, do it. But what we have is painful, long, comes with risks, and still leaves many people worrying the whole time that they'll be "clocked." My hesitation to accept sex reassignment surgery isn't a moral objection; it's an entirely pragmatic, and it's kind of like me thinking that getting a hip replacement right when the procedure was first invented wasn't necessarily a good idea.
"What Would I" offers both the materialist and the harmonized-dualist solution to fractured trans identity, but neither is a complete solution. The animalistic, materialistic solution is only achievable in the right environment. Unsafe environments make the corporal grounding needed impossible. So it is a partial solution, but not a complete one. The harmonized dualism possibility is limited by the state of medical technology. "T" can help, but it's not going to fully prevent raised eyebrows, even from people who mean you no harm, because they are going to sense that something is different.
None of this is a reason to abandon trans political goals. But it is a reason to separate the language of advocacy from the language of real, lived experience. To advocate is to lie. You might wonder, if I feel this way, why I'm about to go to law school, when a lawyer's chief job is to advocate. It's a good question, and an even better one when I consider who much the law school's advocacy for the law as a profession annoys me. They can't stop talking about how hard law study is and how different legal work is from everything else. This isn't truth talking; it's the desire to make law sound important. It's exaggeration meant to improve the standing of the profession. I hear similar things from every profession when they try to make what they do sound more difficult than people think it is, just like advocates for political groups always try to make their plight sound as dire as possible.
I am skeptical of the truth of propositions from advocates, but I can accept a kind of social dualism, one in which we allow advocates to do their thing but where we also reserve space for ourselves to be honest about what lived experience is like. Trans advocates can say, "Here's a problem, and here's a solution that would help if we could do it." If the lived experience of trans people demonstrates sometimes that this solution isn't always as great as advocates make it sound, that's actually okay. Advocates do their thing, sometimes, to give us space to try solutions that are less than ideal.
When I read trans stories, I am trying to understand how the trans person views the problem, what solutions they look to for their problem, what they hope those solutions will do, and then whether those solutions actually do the hoped-for thing. What I like about a story like this one is its break from advocate-like narratives. You might do everything to try to find happiness as a trans person, and it still might not work. Or it might work, but only in the right environment. That actually helps me feel more connected to the needs and wants of trans people rather than less, but it means they're just like everybody else, groping in the dark for what they hope will make them happy, maybe succeeding a little bit here and there, but also meeting with failure as much as anything. Far from making me think that everything the advocate pushes is bunk, it makes me think that this is a group I can find common ground with and maybe even understand, because we are both equally lost and looking, perhaps quixotically, for light at the end.
Andrea Long-Chu wrote an op-ed years ago explaining that her upcoming sex transition surgery might not make her happier, but that it shouldn't have to in order for her to be allowed to get it. The idea behind trans rights isn't that everything they try will work. It's a big problem, one that is probably beyond our current medical capacity to fix so that everyone will feel "in their body" in every environment. But the point is to give people the freedom to try solutions and the support to maximize success and mitigate failure. This story is a useful, honest, and human portrayal of someone stumbling through as he tries to navigate a problem with the solutions available.
For Karen Carlson's take on the story, which includes an analysis of the title which I neglected to do, see here.
