> "A book's true when you can say, 'Yeah! That's just how damn people behave all the time.' Then you know it's true.” - Jillsy Sloper

This past month I found myself rereading a book I first encountered over 20 years ago, John Irving’s 1978 bestseller *The World According to Garp*. I was first introduced to the book when I was maybe 14 and my father told me that he picked my name from one of its characters. One evening I found his copy on the living room bookshelf and smuggled it back to my room. I wasn’t prepared for the subject matter I encountered - there’s a lot in there that isn’t exactly age appropriate for an 8th grader - but beyond the rape and mutilation there was a lot to take in about gender and feminism. And what exactly did it mean that my namesake fell in love with and married a transsexual?

*Garp* is a hard book to summarize. It’s about the origin, life, and legacy of a writer named T. S. Garp. Garp’s mother, Jenny Fields, works as a nurse until she publishes a book in the early 1960s titled *A Sexual Suspect* about her experiences of sexism and her desire to live in a world free from lust. Jenny’s book is an instant hit, and she uses her money from book sales and talks to aid feminist causes. Garp, a fatherless only child whose two proclivities are wrestling and writing fiction, struggles to assert his own voice beside his mother’s fame, but manages to find his place as a published author and start a family. We read pieces of Garp’s writing in the book, and watch as his family stumbles through ridiculous situations as they live out their lives.

The most prominent theme of the book is sexual intolerance. *Garp* asks: what could life look like with gender equality? What happens to the family, to culture, to politics? Irving approaches this work with the exactness of a butcher, finding the joints in the carcass of mid 20th century America and deftly cleaving through. We see characters building chosen families, relationships between men and women forming based on mutual respect and care, and growing societal acceptance of transgender people. The road to these changes is not easy, though: there are stabbings, assassinations, politically motivated self mutilations, and so many affairs. Irving ultimately promises not a perfect future, but one where gender equality can become mundane. For me, that’s more powerful because it feels like Irving gave me a way to imagine the way there.

One oddity in the book’s structure that immediately stood out to me is this: every chapter has a pivotal moment involving an erection. I think this is Irving’s coal mine canary of toxic masculinity as time passes in the book: what happens to the erection? At first they are unwanted, violent, motivated by lust. Later on, we see Garp (when they’re his) discovering restraint: nothing has to become of an erection, it’s not more important than anything in his life. As the book goes on the erections come to relax harmlessly or are directed more appropriately. But not without that one midway that gets bitten off! In reading other reviews and analyses of *Garp* I can’t say I’ve seen the regular erection mentioned before. I have to wonder if my noticing it has anything to do with my own relationship with them.

When I was a teen first reading the book, erections were a constant source of anxiety for me. What was going to trigger my next erection? How could I hide it? Why did I have to get so many of them? I wore baggy clothes and untucked shirts to anticipate any pesky erections. Garp’s seeming hyperawareness of erections reminded me of my own, and I felt doomed. That feeling stayed with me for 20 years, until I was a month in on HRT, and started waking up without morning wood. Then I was having whole days and weeks without erections. I can’t understate the degree of relief that this change brought me. Talking with other trans women about hyperawareness around erections, I get the sense that our distress caused by them was more much exaggerated than that of a cis man because we had an added layer of bodily incongruity amplifying our embarrassment.

Noticing the erection theme led me in my second reading to wonder if I was picking up on information a cis reader might miss, and with that lens in mind I ended up surprised at *Garp*’s trans literacy. The book was written between 1972 and 1977, and so the word “gender” didn’t yet have its modern meaning. The word “transgender” hadn’t been invented. No, the characters we meet are *transsexual women*, and they’re not transitioning, they’re *going through their sex reassignment*, which included hormone therapy and sex reassignment surgery. Irving doesn’t really get into the lingo of the time beyond that, but because I’m familiar with 20th century trans history I was able to spot details that reveal Irving had to have been familiar with what transfeminine transition was like back then.

The character Roberta Muldoon turns out to provide a way for Irving to touch on so many facets of transness, sexism, emotional intelligence, and family. A trans woman who comes out later in life, Roberta was the lauded former Philadelphia Eagles tight end number 90 before she read *A Sexual Suspect* and realized that she needed to transition. She starts estrogen and hides the changes until her physical strength noticeably declines, then switches careers to the sports awards show circuit. Roberta decides to come out publicly, but she’s met with sexism. and her former colleagues renege on their job offers to her.

Dejected, Roberta seeks Jenny’s help in regaining her career opportunities, but instead finds herself joining Jenny’s inner circle. She becomes Jenny’s chief strategist and head of operations at the feminist retreat Jenny has fashioned from the Massachusetts mansion that was her childhood home. Roberta recuperates from bottom surgery there, and soon meets Garp. The two become fast friends because of their shared love of athletics and for Jenny’s vision, and they pick each other up off of the floor again and again over the course of the novel.

Roberta is pitch-perfect to me: she *sounds* transfem through her tone, her relationship with her emotions, her feminine-with-a-gilded-edge-of-coarseness word choices. Here’s a bit of dialogue from a late night phone call she makes to Garp when a sex partner rudely dumps her:

> "He said I wasn't *enough* of a woman, that I confused him, sexually - that *I* was confused sexually!" Roberta cried. "Oh, God, that *prick*. All he wanted was the novelty of it. He was just showing off for his friends." 
> “I’ll bet you could have taken him, Roberta," Garp said. "Why didn't you beat the shit out of him?" 
> "You don't understand," Roberta said. "I don't feel like beating the shit out of anyone, anymore. I'm a *woman*!'" 
> "Don't women ever feel like beating the shit out of someone?" Garp asked.[…] 
> "I don't know what women feel like," Roberta wailed. "I don't know what they're *supposed* to feel like, anyway. I just know what *I* feel like." 
> "What's that?" Garp asked, knowing she wanted to tell him. 
> "I feel like beating the shit out of him *now*," Roberta confessed, "but when he was dumping all over me, I just sat there and took it. I even cried. I've been crying all day!" she cried, "and he even called me up and told me that if I was still crying I was faking myself." 
> "The hell with him," Garp said. 
> "All he wanted was a great big lay," Roberta said. "Why are men like that?" 
> "Well," Garp said.

I love how Roberta voices the difference between the societal messaging she’s received on how to be a woman vs her lived experience. Roberta does want to beat the shit out of the jerk, but she’s unsure that that’s how she’s supposed to feel and act as a woman. That uncertainty - am I doing “woman” correctly? Should I *know* how to do “woman” correctly? - plagues so many of us daily. She acknowledges her feelings once she can pause and feel them, something it’s implied she couldn’t do before her transition (and would perhaps go straight to beating the shit out of the guy).

The dialogue about being “confused sexually” is inverted later in the book, when Jenny calls Roberta “the least sexually ambiguous person I’ve ever met.” Jenny sees Roberta’s transition as a considered act of self determination around gender that few people ever approach, and I think she’s right to do so. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about cis people in trying to explain myself as a trans woman, it’s that many have a profound laziness in regarding gender, and very few cis people are willing to overcome that initial hump of self reflection in order to even approach developing empathy for transgender people.

Lastly we see Roberta ask, “Why are men like that?” and it’s not the only place in the novel where she speculates on the motives of men. Roberta acknowledges that her lived experience has not been that of a man - she sees a hole in her understanding. This is something that I constantly have to remind myself of even now, despite having written as many blogposts and [American Girl Doll plays](/posts/my-dolls) as I have about my girlhood. The reason I have to work to remember that I can’t speak about men’s experiences is because, I feel, my transition hit me so unexpectedly. I wonder if it’s any easier for trans people who knew for longer to unlearn this misplaced empathy.

Later in the phone call Roberta expresses distrust about the motives of her urologist who did her sex reassignment and urology in general, calling both “creepy.” I’ve read about what getting gender affirming surgery was like in the 1970s, and Roberta is justified in sensing creepiness beyond her urologist literally wanting to fuck her. At the time, urologists and other gender affirming surgeons in the US were starting to form professional networks and patient pipelines in order to maximize their profits. This would culminate in 1979 with the formation of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, HBIGDA, which would go on to become WPATH. Hil Malatino addresses the sordid motives of this monetization and professionalization in his essay “Beyond Burnout: On the Limits of Care and Cure,” and how detrimental it was for both potential patients and for the trans communities that organized around their need for medical transition. It’s disappointing that in the 46 years since this book was published that trans people have not much more reason to trust our doctors than we did then.

One subject that barely gets a mention in Garp is homosexuality, and when it does show up it’s hand in hand with trans gatekeeping. Lesbians fighting for gay rights are welcomed by Jenny at her retreat, but Roberta is leery of them, calling them “that damn lesbian crowd.” Roberta’s “bitchiness” towards them stems from the fact that the women she encounters seem to be practitioners of political lesbianism, a movement in the 70s that asserted that sexual desire was irrelevant in the face of patriarchy, and that true solidarity meant fucking only other women. In Roberta’s case this attitude turns trans exclusionary, and dismissive of her desire to live as her gender. This isn’t the only place that Irving takes a swipe at what he sees as misplaced efforts in second wave feminism, but it’s the least contrived example:

>"Well, they tried to confuse me," Roberta said. "When I was preparing myself for the operation, they kept trying to talk me out of it. 'Be gay,' they said. 'If you want men, have them as you are. If you become a woman, you'll just be taken advantage of,' they told me. They were all cowards," Roberta concluded, though Garp knew, sadly, that Roberta had been taken advantage of, over and over again.

After an incredibly tragic car accident (the novel’s apex of situational irony) kills the youngest Garp child and maims Garp, his wife, and his oldest son, the family moves in with Jenny to be nursed back to health and figure out where things went wrong. Since Garp and Helen are incapacitated, Roberta takes on a motherly role in the life of Duncan, Garp’s remaining son. Roberta continues to function as a third parent in the Garp children’s lives as their numbers grow, first with the birth of their daughter Jenny, and later when the mute teenager Ellen James is taken in by a sympathetic T.S.

As time passes, Duncan grows up to be an accomplished painter, but he struggles with depression. He engages in risky behavior and soon loses an arm in a motorcycle crash. While Duncan recovers in the hospital, Roberta has an unnamed young trans woman who she’s taken under her wing stay in his New York apartment. (I’m assuming she’s not given a name because the last chapter is basically Irving killing off everyone with a name, and we only just met her.) The woman begins to write letters to Duncan about his home and his artwork, and soon the two are penpals. They eventually fall in love and marry, but not before Roberta dies from what sounds like an aneurysm brought on by her irregular use of Premarin. Again this is between the lines, but based on the circumstances of her death Irving had to have known that blood clotting was a risk of the estrogen available at the time.

Roberta is laid to rest with a posthumous honor by the Eagles at one of their games in a way that I don’t think that we could expect from the present moment. The sports announcers, though awkward, are careful to use Roberta’s name and pronouns correctly, and one of them credits her for “[doing] a lot for people [with] *complicated* lives.” The Garp kids are surprised to hear her be treated with such dignity in this way, having braced for a misgendering. I even felt myself tense up when I started reading the paragraph. But to Irving, this kind of treatment follows logically from gender equality: it’s what people deserve.

The Garp siblings and Duncan’s wife later come together from time to time to reminisce about Roberta and celebrate their lives. After a few drinks things get silly:

> "There's no sex like transsex!" they would shout, when they were drunk, which occasionally embarrassed Duncan's wife-although she certainly agreed.

Finishing *The World According to Garp* was like emerging into the sunlight after a marathon spelunking expedition. I had started with a fairly basic question about the name of a character and instead found myself plumbing depths of the trans experience and feminism in the 70s. Bubbling over with enthusiasm about the book, I decided it was time to call my father to see what he remembered of the story. We had a good call, but it turned out I was a little off base.

“I got your old name from two places,” my dad said, “from that book and from some soap opera of the time. It really didn’t have anything to do with the character at all, I just liked the sound of it.” He didn’t read the book until 1984, and didn’t really remember much of the plot or that there were transsexuals in it. We talked about feminism in his upbringing, and parenting me and my siblings in the 90s. I asked him what he could remember about media depictions of trans people in the 70s, and he said while he could remember gay stereotypes nothing came to mind regarding trans people or casual transphobia.

He did tell me a fun story, though, from his high school years. When my father was 16-17, he worked part time as a janitor and stocker at a department store in Norfolk Virginia. This particular store had a periodic sale that would run called “midnight madness,” where the store would stay open for a full 24 hours. Being young and without seniority my dad would often get stuck with 10pm-5am shifts, which tended to be not particularly mad, quiet even. Multiple times when working these shifts women would come in to shop who my father said he could tell were different in some way - I think he used the term “classy” to describe how they dressed. He couldn’t say what exactly it was about them was different, and they behaved like any other customer, but something didn’t quite click. It wasn’t until much more recently that my father realized he had been assisting closeted trans women who had been emboldened by the late hours to head to the department store and do an affirming thing: shop as themselves. 

I felt sad thinking about the lonely existence of those women, this being one of their few ways to shop safely in public. I was reminded of the advice given at the time to transitioners to never move in groups, to isolate lest someone notice the combined gender incongruities of the group. To think of an author not long after writing stories about trans characters finding acceptance, family, love - was truly radical.

And what became of Duncan Garp, with his nameless wife? Later in life, the two attend a coming-out-as-trans party for a friend (because, in the world according to Garp, we celebrate our friends’ self acceptance). Duncan laughs from one of his own jokes a little too hard while drinking a martini, asphyxiates on an olive, and dies.

Deadname or not, for me that is a whole mood.

A Transsexual Suspect

Sometimes you write <a href="/posts/a-transsexual-suspect">a blogpost</a> and a beautiful whole assembles itself but there are still a few screws and washers left on the floor. Early in my research phase for the post, blog reader and poet <a href="https://www.instagram.com/poemsbymisha/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noreferrer noopener">Misha Moon</a> tipped me off that John Irving is not without trans members of his own family. If you cry easy, dear reader, have some tissue ready when watching this CBS segment from last year.
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NcinEm8bRh0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="encrypted-media; gyroscope" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Garp Errata


In 2014 I was about a year into my career as a web developer. I was doing all the good little programmer things: going to tech talks in town, reading Hacker News, following tech celebrities on Twitter who linked to interesting projects and code tutorials. I felt like I was starting to find a community that I could fit into, and I was trying really hard to consume the right nerd culture in order to get all the references and seem like hot shit. The trouble is, I’m me, and so the media that I found myself drawn to was not the nerd mainstream. No, in retrospect what caught me in its hooks was the gender.

I remember distinctly thinking, *wow, there’s a lot of trans women in tech!* and combing through every piece of media produced by every trans woman I encountered. There was something intoxicating to me about playing body horror games by [Porpentine Charity Heartscape](https://xrafstar.monster/), or reading essays on art and culture by [Liz Ryerson](https://ellaguro.blogspot.com/), and I wasn’t quite sure why. Another thought I remember having was: *I wish* I *was trans!* Did I bother to investigate what it meant to be trans, or what my feelings might be hinting at? Absolutely not! I think the intoxication and “admiration” I felt for the trans women I encountered in tech media were another [dog button](/posts/that-was-not-easy)-style conflation of emotions. What I really felt was *longing to be like them*. When eight years later I would stand looking in a mirror and say “hi Erin” for the first time, I would finally satisfy that longing with the satisfaction of knowing that *I get to be trans*.

I don’t think that feeling of “I get to be trans” is something that many other trans people start transition with or necessarily end up feeling later on. For past generations of trans people what being trans meant was that you had a lot of work to do. You needed to “complete” transition, focusing on passing as your desired gender, and usually culminating in bottom surgery. As I’ve addressed in other blogposts, the transnormative narrative is a fiction - no one ever is done with being trans, and most people ’s experiences don’t follow the imaginary path from point A to point B that cis people came up with in order to make us palatable to a society that wants to forget we exist. These days there’s much less of an emphasis on this path, but things are *bad* out there, with trans healthcare bans driving refugees to flee to safer states, and bigots feeling emboldened by these attacks on our rights to take things into their own hands with transphobic violence. It’s hard to feel like transness is a gift when so much of the world seems to hate us. It’s hard to not feel shame about being trans when so much of the world makes it out to be a shameful thing.

It puzzled me for some time that I have such a positive outlook on my transness despite it all. Just this week though I realized that I’ve faced a similar challenge before. I grew up in the southern US where evangelical Christianity is king. Every so-called secular institution there is guided by Christian leadership and attitudes, and it’s hard to participate in anything community related without visiting a church, or having a group prayer, or using religious language in conversation. It was scary when I realized at 15 that I was an atheist and that I had to put on a good face for everyone and close my eyes during prayers until I could find a way to get out. At times I felt like it wasn’t so much that I was confident in my beliefs as much as I was faithless in a world built on faith. I was ashamed that I couldn’t seem to muster that faith that seemed to come so easily to everyone around me. What changed everything for me was finding and befriending other atheists and agnostics when I went to college. Suddenly I had peers in real life who understood my circumstances and who were willing to share about their own struggles. It made being an atheist feel wonderfully unremarkable.

I suspect that isolation in transition - especially in early transition - can be detrimental, because then all you have to guide your understanding of transness is what you can find in media, which for the most part tends to be either transnormative or caricatured for virality. Seeing other trans people on social media set me on the path of understanding transness as something normal, but it was participating in trans community in person that helped me find love and acceptance for myself. “I get to be trans” means I get to be surrounded by friends who can share my joys and help dispel that feeling of otherness. Being “done” with being trans is no longer a concern, because I can live in the present. When it comes to interacting with cis people, things are still hard in a lot of ways, but I have a confidence now that I didn’t used to because I know I’m not alone. Maybe one day being trans will be a boring thing, a mundane aspect of human biodiversity that everyone recognizes as such. We have a long way to go, but until we get there I will continue to take heart in the fact that life has given me a second chance and so many wonderful people who love and accept me. *I get to be trans.*


Human Kibble

Garp Errata

A Transsexual Suspect

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