200g of Sliced Turkey

I often have to suppress my desire to be cynical. Desire is maybe too strong a word for what I mean; urge, need. I like the word desire because more than ever desire feels both fitting and just out of reach. Desire as an ideal. The desire for desire. Cynicism comes easy, maybe far too easy, and every now and then I hear my dad saying to me “when did you get so goddamn cynical” in our kitchen while we ate leftover spaghetti after I told him I thought it would be easy to make Star Wars, because whenever you needed an alien language for a wookie or whatever you just made some shit up. I loved Star Wars growing up, and I think he maybe saw me turning on the things that I loved and questioned when I had started to imagine myself better than my own desires. 

I think about these things often, even though a lot of my memories are holes and pits of half-truths and double backs. There are lines and sentences in there that linger, flashes of time that have stuck to me like a balloon to a wool sweater. 

I watched Will & Harper, the documentary road trip movie starring trans comedy writer Harper Steele and her long standing comedic partner Will Ferrell, almost by accident. I had seen the trailers, read the reactions from well meaning cis people on Instagram who saw it at TIFF and called it things like “life affirming” and “beautiful” and “teaches you about the importance of LGBTQ+ Rights” and I think all my hackles just went up at every insistence. I am often cynical about these things, because I don’t want a movie about trans people to be about LGBTQ+ Rights, I want it to be about trans people, and that’s very often a different thing. One is a thing people like to post about, and another is a reality that a lot of us aren’t allowed to ignore when no one is around to affirm a post. 

Anyway, I watched it for an episode of Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud this week, you can listen to our segment on it here

I bristle at a lot of the core ideas of a documentary like this, because it’s often very sweet, and it’s often very earnest, and there are parts of it I would challenge if I had to: I think the experience of being trans on the road is different if you’re joined by a movie star, and a camera crew, and (probably) security. But I also don’t think all of those things negate how it feels to be sitting in a steakhouse in Texas while hundreds of people take photos of you to post insulting shit on Twitter with. There is a fishbowl here traveling with them, and Harper is the only one within it, experiencing being perceived in a way that I never will, which is to say not just being trans out in the world, but being trans and standing next to Will Ferrell. 

It’s a very “I just came out as trans” thing to make a documentary about What It’s Like, and I’m no less guilty of this phenomenon than anyone else who has embarked on that road. I came out in my mid 30s, I’m in my early 40s now and I do less explaining about what this life is like now than I did in the youth of my transition. Now my experience is simply my own, and who am I to speak to the universal truth of all things? My experience being trans in the world feels different to me too, because it has been a reality for long enough that the urgency of it has started to fade. Moments fallen into the pit of lapsed memories. 

Watching Harper bristle at being misgendered in a diner, insisting that someone say “ma’am” after they say “sir” reminds me of days past, days that almost make me cringe now. I don’t get misgendered all that often anymore, even on days when I run to the deli to get 200 grams of oven roasted turkey in yesterday's sweatpants and a tank top that’s been in regular rotation. The moments of “have you been helped miss?” come easier, and when they don’t, I find it hard to care. I’ve got 200g of sliced turkey to get home, how I’m being perceived doesn’t matter as much as the task at hand. When I see Harper feeling pained at not being seen how she has dreamed of being seen for so long I remember that pain and that hurt the same as she feels it in the moment. 

I am speaking just for me, and if you are reading this and you have a trans person come into your deli to buy meat or whatever, treat them with respect and don’t misgender anyone just because I said I sometimes don’t care because I often really do, and even if I don’t it always hurts a little. I just am far too used to feeling hurt, and I often just wait for the scars to heal over so they can just be one more mark upon my body.

This is a hard thing to describe to anyone who has never been challenged by their own body. What Harper has, and what I can relate to, is decades of a life lived in contrast to their body. The pain of desire, that out of reach thing, the hurt that comes with not seeing yourself the way you need to when you look in the mirror. If, after decades have passed, you are finally able to claim and hold onto the life you wrote about in secret diaries and hushed words, how painful it is when no one else can see it. Can’t they see, don’t they know how important it is that I am here, with a name and a life that I chose and that I desired? 

When people can’t see this, it hurts. 

I see myself a lot in corners of this movie. Harper wants to feel at home in her life as a trans woman, wants to hold onto the shades of the past she holds as important truths to her. She wants to drink shit beer, go to dive bars and race tracks and mud pits. It’s only that now when she does, she would prefer to wear a dress and heels when she does this and this should all be afforded her, she deserves that same as anyone, but we know this is not always going to be true, and confronting the way that the world has shut doors to you is a hard truth in transition for a lot of us who lived with relative ease and privilege. 

Like Harper, I was older when I transitioned, I had therapists who conspired against my desires and pushed me back in the closet, I struggled with suicidal ideation, I questioned whether someone who had worked so hard to pretend to be masculine and strong could let that all go and become someone else, someone softer and more tender who still liked dirt tracks and dive bars, even though I don't drink anymore.

I took a road trip across the country a few years after I came out too, and I remember feeling the difference in how roadside food stops and coffee runs felt changed with my shifted position in this life. The unsafety in former havens, and the surprising acceptance in others. How I started to hold my keys between my fingers where I had never before. The board doesn’t change in transition, it's just that we start over on a new square with new beginnings and our path becomes something unknown with every roll of the dice. 

This is the strength of the story in Will & Harper, a spotlight on discovering how it feels to start over with so much experience and time behind you. What does it mean to desire still, the way we all deserve. To never give in to cynicism. It does, at times, veer off the path and get into teaching moments but that is the nature of this kind of film. A series of teaching moments designed to make us feel and cry and think about how fucked up it can kind of be being trans, and how beautiful it is too, and how beautiful it is when people get to see you, the real you, for the first time. It's charming, and a little trite, but maybe that's fine. I have to fight my desire to be cynical.

The movie is absolutely better than I expected it would be. It’s sweet and tender and funny when it needs to disarm the moment. Will Ferrell does his best to not be On the entire time, he seeks to find a connection to his long time friend to ensure there is still love there between the two of them. They both hope they can still be the friends they were to each other. There’s surprising tenderness here, in one moment Will Ferrell becomes overwhelmed with emotion and admonishes himself through tears for not being aware enough to do the right thing to protect his friend when the reality of their differing positions in this life became impossible to ignore. There’s pieces that I found to be a bit too drawn out, or unnecessary, but maybe they all work, and maybe this movie isn’t really for me. 

This is a movie for families who struggle with the truth that sometimes sons become daughters, or whatever direction their gender dictates, and for well meaning allies or lifelong friends who want to hold onto all they’ve had. I know how it feels to lose friends in transition and to have challenges with family, as do so many of the trans people I know. And with this audience in mind it works. All I can say at the end of it all is I wish there were more opportunities to tell stories about being trans that didn’t have to feel like teaching moments and fodder for Instagram stories.