I have a doppelgänger who’s also a ghost. Once, I went where she went, did what she did, but she and I have since parted ways. Now she’s a diaphanous specter. I’m flesh and blood.
Rebekah Frumkin was an exposed nerve — vulnerable and insecure, anxiety-ridden, predictably ill at ease in her body. She tended to flit from worry to worry with little pause for peace. She was lucky enough to go to college and then to grad school, where she began working on a novel about two big, dysfunctional families whose fates become intertwined by a drug deal gone bad. At twenty-eight, she published that novel. It’s called The Comedown, and it was met with praise and found its way onto a handful of bookshelves. Rebekah was glad that people seemed to like the book, and was torn apart by its unimpressive sales. In her characteristic worry-fueled fashion, she called up friends and family and panicked to them about being a failed writer. She envied people whose books sold well and was so embarrassed by how envy caused her to drift from friendships. It was not because she no longer cared for those friends, but because she feared that the envy radiated off her like a stink, and that she would be “found out” and resented.
Every morning, she inspected herself in the mirror and made a list of the things that were wrong with her: her stomach, her skin, her hair. She cycled through periods of restricted eating, hoping that shrinking herself would solve the spiritual crisis that was ravaging her, the ongoing apprehension that she was unworthy of the things she wanted so badly. She got sucked into relationships with people who didn’t much care about her or themselves. One of them walked into the bathroom and dumped her unceremoniously, while she was naked in the bath. Another dumped her over the phone and was engaged to someone else two weeks later.
Rebekah was fascinated by drugs, in love with altered states and chemical phenomena. She spent some late nights experimenting with pills and powders, met some memorable people and had some wild experiences, but her experimentation morphed into dependency and she found herself constantly seeking relief from substances. She spoke with a friend who was in recovery and that friend told her that of all the people the friend had met in twelve-step groups, Rebekah harbored the most resentment about her situation. This shocked her: there were people in those rooms who had been to prison, who had lost their families and livelihoods, and here she was, fuming over a commercially unsuccessful book and an alien body. At first she felt hurt by what the friend had said, and then her diaphragm tensed as though she’d been punched. It dawned on her how intensely she’d hurt herself. The seeds of change had been planted in her brain, but she didn’t realize it yet.
I so wish I could sit down with Rebekah and tell her what I like about her. I think the reality of the future would overwhelm her: she’d be scared, on top of everything, to learn that her entire form was going to change, that she was about to undergo a transformation so total that her ways of relating to herself and the world would be completely overhauled. It would be easier for her to hear compliments, like the fact that she’d poured herself into her novel with an enviable starry-eyed confidence and not a single care for whether anyone would pay any mind to what she’d written. It was her love note to herself — a worthy project for anyone who’s felt so trod-upon, so face-down in the mud of her own emotions. She loved her friends and family fiercely, had a surreal and spontaneous sense of humor, and had a soul bond with her dog. I would delight in telling her these things, because they’re also true of me, and if she could wrap her head around the fact that I was visiting from the future, she might realize that a lot of the hard, hurtful stuff was going to melt away: she had been frozen in an icy block of self-hatred that was about to thaw, leaving her the opportunity to articulate her atrophied limbs, to crawl unsteadily out of her self-imposed captivity into a new kind of light.
There’s so much I want to say to her, but she’s gone. And while I’m not necessarily grieving her — she’s better off where she is, floating in the blue ether at the back of my brain — I’m grieving what could have been for her.
My cross-dressing began at an early age. For Halloween, after being a puppy several years in a row, I started dressing up as a man every year: Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, Indiana Jones, and, perhaps most strangely, Louis Degas from Papillon. Then I started reading men – men like Philip Roth and John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov, men whom I was supposed to take very seriously. I never connected with any of these canonical white men — what is there for a teenaged closeted queer in Portnoy’s Complaint? — until I came across James Joyce.
There’s nothing queer or trans about Joyce’s writing. Leopold Bloom is painfully straight (definitely to his detriment), and so are Gabriel Conroy and Stephen Dedalus. Joyce himself was a fan of the gender binary and gender roles, driving his daughter Lucia to insanity by privileging his son’s doomed singing career over her trailblazing dancing. As was the case for many a white male literary giant of his era, Joyce’s wife Nora was his primary reader, his housekeeper, and his confidante. She was also the object of his many kinks: in one of his letters to her, he describes wanting to “crawl up into her womb” — one of the tamer, non-scatological things he wanted to do to her. But I found myself falling in love with his writing: the agglutinated words, the carefully planned symbols and colors, the detailed homages to the development of the English language. Then there were the characters themselves, many of them searching for something rangier and more exciting than their current circumstances — hungry, like I was, for some color in a monochrome world. I was in high school when I first read Dubliners, and it was as if the feeling part of myself had overtaken the thinking part of myself; everything was elegant and heart-rending and true. Dubliners made me feel as if the top of my head had been taken off.
I didn’t know about Leslie Feinberg or bell hooks or Audre Lorde or Jeanette Winterson, but that was because I wasn’t ready for them. I was ready for Joyce. I was not ready to imitate him (a really hard thing to do); I was ready to be him. Not in the sense that I thought I was some polyglot-genius enfant terrible, ready to burst onto the literary scene with a giant tome that would remake the zeitgeist. More in the sense that I saw myself as someone who wanted to traverse the boundaries that had been set for me, to escape normalcy. For Joyce, normalcy was Ireland and the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. For me, normalcy was my gender.
I fell in love with the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses and decided I wanted to write a book like that, from many different perspectives. I began working on The Comedown in college, writing from the points of view of teenaged boys and men. When I got to grad school, I submitted a few chapters for workshopping and someone complained that it was “a white male imitation,” asking where the women were. It was as if I was waking up from a dream: I hadn’t realized I was neglecting women’s perspectives. Where was I, a woman, in this novel? Embarrassed by my workshop submission, I went back and wrote several chapters narrated by women. What had I been thinking? Was I some kind of conservative? Some kind of sellout?
Tumblr was big back then, and there were countless people in queer fandoms who had been assigned female at birth and were wondering if they wanted to kiss an effete male character they saw in fiction, or be him, or both. Now we can look back at those posts and recognize all the trans eggs trying to hatch, but back then many of us millennials were sitting uneasily with these desires, feeling doomed to bodies and experiences that didn’t fit us. I felt doomed, too: my escape was in what I read and wrote.
At the time I submitted those white man chapters to be workshopped, I was trying so hard to be a girl: makeup, inexpertly and unenthusiastically applied; tiny dresses with Peter Pan collars; heavily-conditioned hair in pigtails. What I didn’t understand was that these things were my Ireland, and that I was trying my best to write my way out of lip gloss and ballet flats. I thought I was writing across experience because I’d been brainwashed into believing that the only voices worth hearing were those belonging to men. I resolved to be better: I was an intersectional feminist, after all.
I originally wanted to publish The Comedown under the name R.A. Frumkin. Other women were doing it, and it allowed for a gender ambiguity that felt pleasing to me. But as I drew closer to publication, a sense of duty took hold. I was a woman, and it was important that I show up in the world as a woman. It wasn’t as if white women were fighting for representation in literary fiction, but it still felt meaningful, like a jacket that didn’t fit me but that I would nevertheless wear with pride because it had been made by someone who cared about me. I had been “made” a woman by the doctor who’d assigned me female at birth, by the parents who’d raised me as a girl, by the kids at school who’d insisted I play house with them, by the teachers who cast me as mothers or old women in school plays. I’d also been made a woman by the men who’d teased and groped me, by the bosses who paid me less on the dollar than my male colleagues, and by a media landscape that wanted me to tone my arms, shrink my waist, and augment my chest. I’d been underestimated and condescended to, determined too emotional or weak to undertake tasks that would have been easy for me. It was important that I show the world what I could accomplish: maybe then I’d never be underestimated again. So underneath the rainbowed title on the cover of The Comedown appeared the name Rebekah Frumkin, bold and colorful and defiant. Look who she is, I thought. Look at all she can do. But I still fantasized about having a different name. If I were R.A. Frumkin, people who hadn’t yet flipped to my dewy author photo might have thought I was Rowan Frumkin or Riley Frumkin. That would be such a funny mix-up! Maybe they’d read the sections from Lee, Leland Jr., and Leland Sr.’s perspectives and think that Rowan or Riley Frumkin was writing from personal experience in his neurotic family. What a great mistake that would be!
When the book came out, I did a small, largely midwestern circuit of sparsely-attended readings at independent bookstores. The empty seats were, I was told, nothing new for a debut author, but I still took it personally. At one reading I appeared onstage with two other authors. The event was intended to be unconventional: the hosts instructed us to chat up the audience instead of reading from our books, and I did, making nervous jokes that didn’t land. The other two authors read from their books.
After the event, one of the hosts took me to a mobile home that had been converted into a diner. I ordered fries and a chicken sandwich and ate them greedily, my stomach empty from my effort to produce the adrenaline it takes to be onstage. I figured the host had brought me to the diner out of pity, which should have hurt, but I just wanted to feel special, and her attention did the trick. She asked me about my inspiration for the book and then peppered me with questions about individual characters. She was a dream reader, and I responded to her questions loquaciously, pretending she was interviewing me for a profile in a glossy magazine. When we were finished, she called a Lyft to get me back to my hotel, offering me a hug when the driver pulled up.
“You were great, girl,” she said. “And you’re going to be great.”
“Thank you,” I said, attempting a smile. I was used to being cajoled into smiling, so much that I automatically smiled even when I didn’t want to. “Thanks for the opportunity.”
In the Lyft, I looked out the window as the little grey downtown gave way to a neighborhood of modest bungalows and A-frames. There was a hot prickling at the back of my neck, some combination of anger and shame, a why-me protestation whose provenance could have been anything.
You were great, I reminded myself. And you’re going to be great.
Maybe, I countered. But I still have to be a girl.
“I couldn’t find myself in history,” Leslie Feinberg writes in Transgender Warriors. “No one like me seemed to have ever existed.” While it’s true that there’s been no one quite like hir, I know that’s not what zie means. Zie was searching for trans representation in the history books and finding none. This should come as no surprise: anyone who’s received a formal education in the US knows that there’s virtually no mention of trans people in history, not even headline-makers like Marsha P. Johnson or Chelsea Manning. Trans people have made history, time and time again, and then been promptly scrubbed from the human narrative. This is curious, given that the narrative has always been one of “progress,” and human beings harnessing the ability and courage to transition is, I think, one of the greatest signs of social progress.
Because trans people are either hidden or reduced to flashpoint conversations about bathrooms and genitalia, the first stirrings of transness in me were alarming. I had witnessed a handful of my college friends come out — unsurprising, given that I went to a small liberal arts school full of neurodivergent nerds — and I was impressed by them: they knew what they needed and had gone for it without apology. I, on the other hand, had no idea what it was I needed, and had resigned myself to the idea that I would never feel good. I took psychotropic pills and handfuls of vitamins, tried to eat well and exercise. None of it seemed to be working. Perhaps nothing ever would.
The Comedown is full of straight people: out of thirteen POV characters, only Lee and Tweety are queer (though it’s barely canonical for Lee), and only one of those two is trans. Tweety, a transfeminine person, is a loner in high school, a drug dealer in college, and a lover of the Zelda games. She was like me in some ways — I was, by the time the book was published, flexible enough to admit that I was gay — but not in others. I was fascinated by the idea of knowing oneself so well at such an early age. How did people put it together that they were queer when they were only sixteen? How could someone figure out that they were trans by the time they arrived at college? Self-knowledge was so interesting to me, a person who neither knew nor loved themself. In a review of my book, a writer I greatly admire wrote that he would be the first in line to buy a Tweety spinoff novel if there ever was one. I was flattered, but this was 2018: it would take me a few more years to understand what had made me write Tweety with such conviction — a quasi-desperation. She was the lone openly queer character in the novel’s cishet world: a dandelion plucked from a crack in the sidewalk. What she had, I wanted, but I didn’t know that yet.
When the pandemic hit, I was still aching from self-hatred, and my world was still monochrome. I holed up in my little house in rural America, less than a mile from where I teach at a small public university. A friend stayed with me: she needed to escape the city, and I needed the company. She would inject her hormones subcutaneously in the bathroom, leaving the door open so we could talk. I noticed the ease with which the needle punctured her skin, her lack of a reaction to what I assumed must have been a distracting pain.
“It doesn’t hurt at all,” she told me, affixing a band-aid to her stomach after another shot of estrogen.
“How?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I’ve just been doing it long enough that it doesn’t bother me anymore.”
My friend and I are both millennials who came of age at the dawn of the internet. We were exposed to neon-colored websites made with crude HTML, to Pokémon and Sailor Moon, to Xanga and LiveJournal and Myspace. But most of the conversations about queerness and transness were consigned to chat rooms and porn. Chasers would log onto AOL to chat with young trans women about their measurements, and artless videos in which “transsexuals” or “transvestites” performed sexual favors for cishet people abounded. These sexualizations of trans people would only serve to foment transphobic violence, on- and offline.
Later, sites like Tumblr and Scarleteen would become a haven for young queers asking questions about gender and sexuality, but before then all we had was the sex-and-death paradigm: trans people exist to fuck and then die prematurely, whether by another’s hand or their own. There is no joy to be had in transness — in fact, there is only the opposite of joy: fear, anxiety, self-loathing. To be trans is to suffer. All of this had been drilled into my head from a very early age, absorbed through the air I breathed and the amniotic fluid I swam in. So imagine my dismay when, watching my friend inject her estrogen, it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, might be trans.
Things unspooled rapidly from there. With the thought lodged in my brain, I was scrolling Instagram and saw a picture of someone from college flaunting his top surgery scars and referring to himself as an “alien.” Funny — I, too, had always felt like an alien. Then: lying shirtless on my bed in the midst of a thick and balmy summer heat, my breasts melting to either side of me like the clocks in that Dalí painting. Then: my breasts’ heft. Their sagginess. The fact that having such a large chest made me look a way I didn’t want to look, made me move through the world more achy and trepidatious than I would have otherwise. I visited the profile of the guy from college with some frequency, dwelling on photos of his smile. Here he was as photographed by his best friend at some beach’s edge, shirtfront flat. Here was a selfie in which he showed off his gnarly scars and nipple-less chest. An open-hearted smile in each. How? What elixir had he drunk?
Eventually, I would figure out the answer: trans joy.
I realized I wanted top surgery in June of 2020, and I got top surgery in July of 2021. I’m aware of how fortunate I am. I know of people who’ve waited over half their lives for the same surgery — who spent years, even decades, crushing their ribs with too-tight binders or Ace wraps or, in some seriously misguided cases, duct tape. I even got access to testosterone during my recovery from surgery, though it would be five months before I’d begin weekly injections. Maybe the ease of my transition could have gone to my head — I could have been cheerfully vacuumed up into the patriarchy — had I not officially identified as a transmasc genderqueer Birdcage fag.
I hold a paradox in my head: although Rebekah is separate from me, our pasts are still the same. It’s difficult to square, sharing a lifetime of experiences with your doppelgänger. There were times during my transition when I felt more like her, and times when I felt more like me. For instance, two weeks after surgery, Rebekah was not yet Rafael. She was ashamed and doubtful and vocally criticized her body, anxiously asking for friends’ reassurance. Will this help me? This doesn’t feel like it’s helping me. Her scars were bloody, the plastic bulbs at either side of her abdomen draining the blood from her chest were uncomfortable, and the nipple bolsters had not yet fallen off. Sitting was hard, standing was hard, walking was hard. She had been warned about post-op depression but hadn’t been ready for how heavily it hit her, how painful it felt. She feared she’d spent thousands of dollars to undergo a procedure that would get her no closer to happiness. Until it did.
At the two-week mark, I began being able to move around more easily, and took short walks outside in my rubber slides. I wore button-downs and kept them open, just briefly, to feel the sunshine on my chest. I felt relieved, as if I’d just emerged intact from a Braveheart kind of melee — indeed, I looked like it. My friends took photos of me: in one, I’m standing with my hands in my pockets, my shirtfront open to reveal my scars, grinning to the sky. Now it was my turn to take the flat-chested photos, to look at my profile and notice no weary-making bulge, no frustrating uniboob. I practiced lifting my shoulders and puffing out my chest like some bird of prey defending its territory. So much of the day was spent feeling giddy and light, even in the midst of the strange and painful sensation that my ribs were falling into my stomach. For the first time in my life, I actually believed that I looked good. I began wearing clothes that made me feel more like me, button-downs that fit easily over my flat chest, colorful blazers and jeans from the men’s section. I can see now that I was coming to life after years of dwelling in the nebulous and painful gray territory of the gender dysphoric. This was gender euphoria. This was trans joy.
After that, my brain underwent a creative renaissance. I designed and taught a class called Queering the Narrative in which we read everything from Giovanni’s Room to Zami to Porpentine’s surreal fiction. I wrote a short story collection, rich loam that fostered the shoots and tendrils of queer themes: a story about a queer porn collective, another about an e-girl who discovers she’s lesbian. I wrote a novel, the queerest thing I’ve written to date: a story about two con men, one a nebbish gay and the other a charismatic pansexual, who set up a billion-dollar cult-cum-Ponzi-scheme called NuLife. The two men have an on-again off-again relationship, the nebbish deeply in love with the pansexual, and, like any novel, all goes well until everything goes wrong. I was shocked and thrilled when the novel and short story collection sold to a fantastic editor days after my agent took them out onto the market.
I was becoming Rafael. I had graduated from Wandering Rocks; now was the time for The Price of Salt and Notes of a Crocodile and Written on the Body. Queer books had been waiting for me all along, and I devoured them hungrily, surprised at how ashamed I’d been of reading them before. I knew from experience that queer love was possible, and now I knew that possibility from literature, too. At first I was embarrassed to have such gaps in my reading, but then I remembered I’d grown up in an era when kids said “that’s so gay” of something they didn’t like, and I had been watching Republican lawmakers try to legislate LGBTQIA+ people out of existence for decades. No wonder I was scared and ashamed. For once, I blamed the bigots instead of myself for something that made me feel small. But there was no such thing as unburdened conviction: I couldn’t be completely certain who I was in my queerness, or who I was going to be.
I still carry a certain degree of uncertainty, but it’s not the kind that haunts me. It’s the kind that we all carry with us, of our ever-evolving nature, of the impossibility of assuming a “final form.” Still, I keep thinking of what it would be like to give Rebekah a glimpse of her future. Rebekah thought that she should work herself into the ground, that her work would be the only thing to distinguish her. How surprised would she be to learn that Rafael sees himself as worthy of love regardless of the work he produces? How strange would it be for her to witness this cozy Sunday routine: Rafael and his partner taking their T-shots and then making tea and eating breakfast, stealing kisses between bites of oatmeal? How would she feel knowing that Rafael has found peace in his body, that it could take on any size or shape and he’d love it, look at it admiringly in the mirror? I think about sitting down with Rebekah, her body knotted with stress and shot through with misery, her brain gone gray from all the hours spent criticizing herself. She suffered so much despite everything she had, and she didn’t deserve to. I want to promise her that she will crawl out of her cave and see the light. I want to promise her a better life.
