Sometimes Evan James White's transition feels like being stuck between boyhood and manhood. Join him as he discovers the potential impact he could have from that very position.
Original music by Evan James White
("In the Ether" keyboard musical intro)
Evan: Well, hello, hello, hello. Welcome to Just Another Guy (Who Happens to Be Trans). I'm your host, Evan James White.
About a month ago, I posted on social media something like, “Sometimes I feel like this transition is a mixture of Holden Caulfield and Benjamin Button, and I had a friend who was like, “What does that mean?” And I love this friend because she holds me accountable. Like I can't just say anything and have it slide by. Like she's always going to be like, “No, explain yourself.” So I think this podcast episode is really going to explain what it is that I meant by that because I think that she's not the only person that had that thought.
Another really interesting thing about this episode is, I didn't realize it until I was putting it together, that both stories have kind of a Christmas connection to them. The book “Catcher in the Rye” is set right before Christmas and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was released on Christmas Day, and I believe it was 2008 and I went to go see it.
Anyway, I think I was a junior or a senior in high school and we had to read “Catcher in the Rye” by JD Salinger. I remember the character in that was Holden Caulfield. I don't remember all the details, honestly, about it. It was, God, that was like 20 years ago. But I read this book and I only read it one time. But what I do remember is him feeling like he was kind of on the brink of manhood. Like it was this in-between space that he was in with boyhood and manhood, and really trying to figure out his place in the world and how to navigate it.
And I'm experiencing that now. You know, a lot of guys at this age, they are married or they have a family or they have been married, they have kids (chuckles).They have a job that is, you know, decent enough that they can not just get by but kind of, you know, live OK. At least in my mind, this is how it is. This is what society wants me to see as being the norm for 37. And here I am living at home with my father, doing side gigs like (chuckles) Uber Eats and Instacart, don't really have a savings, have never been married. I don't have kids. I'm not in a relationship. I don't know that I want to get married and have kids. I don't know that I actually want that lifestyle. I'm, I'm basically a teenage boy (laughs heartily).
With being a trans man and getting on testosterone, this second puberty, if you will, oh my gosh. It's like, “Knock, knock, knock.”
“Who's there?”
“Puberty.”
“Oh my God, you again. I thought we got rid of you. I thought you were gone, you were never coming back. What are you doing showing up again at my door?”
Puberty’s like, “Well, you can have me or you can have Auntie Flow and we all know how much you loved her, so …”
And of course I'm like, “Yeah, I'll take you. It's fine. I don't … (chuckles) welcome back, you know, make yourself at home. Stay as long as you want.”
Like, I remember puberty the first time. Obviously it wasn't the right kind of puberty that I needed (laughs heartily) because a whole host of other things came with it. So with male puberty (laughs), there is acne, there is hair growth all over the body, there is a deepening of voice, changes in fat distribution, sex drive that is super high. There are guys who went through this in junior high and high school and here I am going through this almost in my 40s.
So Holden Caulfield, meet Benjamin Button. Benjamin Button was born an old man (chuckles) basically, and as he grew or as he aged he actually became younger. So he died a baby. It's basically the complete opposite of how most people go through life. As the rest of the world is growing older, he's growing younger. And that's how I feel about my experience with manhood. As the men around me are aging and getting older, I feel like I'm reaching back to my childhood to access a part of me that I never got to experience, to tap into the boy that I never got to be. I'm on the brink of manhood, but I never had a boyhood. So (chuckles) I'm really reaching back. I'm really going back, back to boyhood.
And in a lot of ways that makes sense because I stamped out my identity as a boy, as a child. I would have to reach back to access him. I would have to reach back to find him. I would have to reach back to meet him. I have to go backwards in time in order to go forward and grow as the man that I do want to be in the world. I have to first meet my little boy again. I have to ask him, “What do you like? What don't you like? What do you want to be when you grow up? What are some of your talents? What are some of your joys? What are some of the things that you're afraid of?” Like, I have to really get to know him.
I had a whole way of going through life and looking at life and understanding life, identifying as a woman. And now I'm going back and unlearning a lot of things and learning for the first time what it means to be male. So yeah it's, it's a lot and I'm learning as I go. And maybe that's the point of it all, you know, maybe the point isn't that I'm supposed to figure out how to have it all together. Maybe the point is that I'm unlearning as I'm learning (chuckles). You know, my going forward is my going back.
How do I make friends with my inner child? How do I look back to my boyhood? How do I incorporate some of that into this life as a man? How do I do that and go forward? And I think in a lot of ways too, maybe that's something that all men can do. Maybe as we grow as men, we can look back to our inner children, our inner boys, our little boys that are still very much present with us and revisit them and say, “Hey, am I giving you what you want? Hey, am I honoring you? Am I, am I doing what we set out to do in this world? Am I being who you wanted to be? Am, am I being him? Am I that guy? And I think that by doing that we’ll bring a lot of joy into our lives.
And maybe that's that. Maybe there's a lesson there for much of humanity. Maybe the experiences that I'm having being a trans guy are actually experiences that a lot of people can have in their own way. You know, this looking back, this letting go, this unlearning, this reaching backwards to go forward. Time isn't linear.
Thank you for listening. Again, this is Just Another Guy (Who Happens to Be Trans). I'm your host, Evan James White. Peace.
("In the Ether" keyboard musical outro)