“I wondered if I wasn’t missing something, I don’t know. Like I was supposed to say “Be Here Now?” That’s the magic phrase, right?
—Darryl
Sometimes I feel like I’m over it all now. What, I don’t know exactly, and regardless, I usually find I’m not that over it at all, though it certainly rears its head a little less often.
This one is about presence, and it might not make a whole lot of sense unless you’ve read Readings 4 and 8, which are about how dysphoria can create a psychic disconnect- an absence of self that removes one from life and sends you wandering around empty rooms, blind to yourself.
This is also my 1 year on hormones post. I started estrogen on the 23rd of October 2022: it was a rainy Sunday morning, and I sat on the sofa with my flatmate Sarah.
The usual narratives of trans experience often present the experience of starting on hormones as a kind of revelatory break: a sudden irrevocable shift that sends your life onto a- much happier- tangent.
Much of this narrative is true and applies to me. So much so was I expecting a kind of psychotropic shift that, when I first popped a pill of estradiol, I sat looking around at the corners of the ceiling in the kitchen. As if, out the corner of my eye, I’d see tracers or something.
I sat with a copy of PIKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved), next to my black coffee. The psychonaut concept wasn’t lost on me even then.
But I’ve generally tended to envision that morning in a weirdly organic way. As if on that wet morning my life didn’t shift but instead enfolded within itself. In fact, when I think back to sitting on the sofa in that flat, rain on the windows, I imagine the blue walls of the kitchen folding in on themselves in a continuous motion, like a flower after dark.
Sarah helped me to feel so ready and comfortable, and I’m so grateful to have had such a lovely friend with me on that day. After we’d sat around for a while we both picked up our umbrellas and walked up to Morrison’s on the Walworth Road to get supplies for the week.
The morning was so bizarrely ordinary, but it was also probably one of the most significant of my life— the morning I started my journey to being here now.
(Thanks Sarah! ♡)
Recently I was reading Darryl by Jackie Ess, which is ostensibly a novel about being a cuck. The book’s narrator, Darryl Cook, introduces himself as a pretty typical married cishet guy in his forties:
You live vicariously through celebrities, I live vicariously through the guys who fuck my wife.
The novel opens with this excellent, excellent line. But what starts out as a weird, seedy depiction of one man’s love of his own cuckoldry actually becomes a really fascinating story about transness and the early stages in discovering one’s trans identity.
Jackie Ess, the book’s author, litters the book with whispers of trans experience. As we read more about Darryl’s life we begin to notice that it’s not really the cuckoldry that he actually enjoys. If anything, it begins to seem that his attraction to his wife being fucked by other guys is more a bizarre performance of his own sense of absence, along with his attraction to men, and his desire to have a female body.
The novel, from my perspective, is about what it’s like to feel totally blind to yourself, to never be able to feel present in your life and to slowly begin to discover your own identity.
I want to be clear, while some aspects of Darryl are totally fascinating, and some are definitely relatable, the whole cuck thing was what initially put me off reading this book. There’s a sort of yuckiness to the whole thing, from the misogyny underlying many aspects of the cuckolding culture that Darryl becomes engulfed in, to the seediness of his sexuality. It’s all sorta a bit gross- but at least part of this owes to its earliness in the stages of Darryl’s self discovery— in a way that reminded me of James’s presentation of himself as an ‘autogynephile’ in Imogen Binnie’s Nevada.
Reading it, there were a few times when I felt utterly repelled. But, if anything, this only enhanced my interest in Darryl’s predicament.
I think the distasteful awkwardness of Darryl’s life, like James’s in Nevada, comes from their lack of self knowledge, and their clinging to their male identities, as well as their behaviour’s proximity to the transphobic concept of autogynephilia, a word which, when used in reference to trans women, is capacious enough to include any sense of gendered embodiment (apologies for the recycled naughties era autogynephilia discourse, I just didn’t get to do it the first time!).
It is so large a concept, in fact, that if you’re a woman and cannot be said to be autogynephile, you’re probably trans. Why not start on T? And the same goes for men: autoandrophiles the lot of them. It makes me sick!
Jokes aside, the thing that made me want to bring up Darryl was a section where he goes on an acid trip and sits sorta awkwardly, not knowing what to say to the other people he is tripping with:
“I wondered if I wasn’t missing something, I don’t know. Like I was supposed to say “Be Here Now?” That’s the magic phrase, right?
This line took me back to another period in my life: a time where I, like Darryl, was blind to my own trans identity and spent much of my life trying to live vicariously through women.
It was during Autumn of 2018 that I first read Ram Dass’s book, Be Here Now– a guide to Eastern Spirituality written for a white, western audience that had been a huge sensation when it was first released back in the 1970s.
It had been recommended to me by Bailey, the trans woman who I was obsessed with at the time, and spent much of my free time thinking about or speaking to. I was in my first term of university and I was totally consumed by the mix of Eastern spiritualism and transsexuality discourse that went on in Bailey and I’s messages.
Be Here Now, as the title suggests, is a book about finding presence. I’d always known I’d not felt present in my body or in my life. As I neared the end of my teenage years I’d become increasingly interested in psychedelic drugs and spiritual philosophies as a way of accessing presence.
I read Be Here Now in earnest, loving it all the more because Bailey recommended it- it was she who increasingly seemed to have all the answers to my life. At that time it felt like there was this big secret just beyond the horizon.
But, even then, I knew it wasn’t going to be a few spiritual books alone that would take me to the self-presence and corporeality I craved. As I wrote in Sunset Sex With Bailey Jay at the time:
If I breathe out too much I wheeze
And go into a coughing fit:
The sky pale purple, strained like an iris,
Above us, the moon huge and short-sighted.
What is the female presence that delights,
Has always been there? Stomach ache.
Fear of dying.
Whatever it was, in my state of confusion, I knew that my absence from myself, my life and all the male things I was just supposed to accept, were not just going to go away.
Since its popularity in the 1970s, the idea of ‘Being Here Now’ has become a cliche. When it appears in Darryl, it’s used as a vacuous commonplace, a stand in for a white, western, hippy drug culture. But, at the same time, it seems to me that the whole novel is about Darryl’s desire for presence, his ability to be here now.
For what it’s worth, I’ve always sort of loved the phrase, even if it’s all too easily used in extremely cringe contexts. I love its simplicity: the fact that it seems to be the simplest way to describe presence as a declarative utterance.
I also love the fact that, despite its total simplicity, it is also one of the hardest things one can ever do: be present.
In the same way, I love how despite the fact that Darryl’s transness seems so obvious to me, as a transsexual reader of his life, at the same time, I know just how easy it can be to not able to draw a line between the dots.
It can be so easy to develop a kind of a priori, ‘yeah, but I’m not trans’ into the logic of your thoughts, especially when, growing up, you didn’t fit into neatly into one of the two categories of transsexual who were allowed to exist in the media of the naughties: totally self-assured, passing transsexual who came out in their early childhood, or, deviant crossdressing man.
So, I really connected to Darryl, and found that is was my own slight disgust at its depiction of the confusing days of early trans identity that continued to draw me to it. It made me think: was I, as a trans woman almost a year on hormones, feeling disgust to performatively distance myself from my own past experiences in the very early stages of my own transition? Was I merely feeling disgusted to stress my own difference from Darryl’s seedy male sexuality and my desire to be rid of that shadow of my former existence?
I’m not sure, but there is probably a grain of truth to that. At the same time, though, there were a huge number of things about Darryl’s experience that seemed utterly alien to me. For one, he seemed to sexually enjoy a lot of the early experiences of cross dressing and feminised male embodiment that I personally found quite upsetting and disheartening rather than sexual.
On the contrary, my early introduction to transsexuality and being here now was intensely interpersonal and spiritual, or, at least it felt like that at the time. It felt like I was getting closer to a revelation. The physical stuff, the crossdressing, generally made me feel worse, more male, more distant from the life I was vaguely beginning to envision (I describe this stuff at length, especially the way my early experiences of presenting myself in a feminine way heightened my dysphoria, in Reading 7).
Where am I going with this? I think I’m trying to say that the main effect of my first year on hormones is that it has made me feel present for the first time since I was a kid. I’m trying to say that that rainy sunday morning was the beginning of my being here now.
There are times nowadays when I feel alive in my body. Often, when it’s around 11pm and I’m ready for bed I get this burst of energy and look in the mirror up close while I’m doing my teeth. I see my face and the skin looks like my skin, like I always wanted it to look. And I dance because I feel alive.
It was also my birthday this month. I got a new coat. I tried it on in the TK Maxx with Molly in Clapham Junction and she said it looked like a little red riding hood coat. I bought it and it’s definitely one of the best things I’ve ever bought.
I love how it’s both kiddish and, at the same time, makes me feel very adult. Like, in some vague way it appeases my anxiety about my lost girlhood, (see reading 6), but also makes me feel like an adult woman. Its shape is very non-dysphoria inducing as well (baggy but not boxy), which is great. It’s actually probably the least dysphoric garment I own, which is to say that it is the piece of clothing I own with the greatest capacity to not knock me out of presence.
There are still things I want to do. When I was buying a can of coke in a Camberwell off-licence with Molly the other weekend the guy behind the till asked us whether we were sisters (woooo! what a massive compliment!)… but I barely spoke because I thought speaking too much would make me not pass anymore in the situation.
That’s an example of me being knocked out of presence, of dysphoria creeping in.
I was on the tube home from some event at the South Bank centre the other week. It was the Victoria line, semi busy at around 9pm, and I was sat next to the disabled section where there are glass partitions between the seats.
Some really nice guy in his early thirties wearing a suit, clearly on his way home from work, sat down next to me on the other side of the glass. I looked up at him and looked away before he caught my glance. I looked straight ahead for a while. Then I leant my head against the glass, as if on his shoulder, and closed my eyes as the train screeched home. Like I was safe with him, and he was taking me home. Was that presence? Was that being there then? God I’m pathetic.
One year on estrogen, I feel wayyy less dysphoric than I used to. I’m not over it, of course I’m not over it. But as time goes on I feel less and less the horror of the confusion, the self disgust, the crawling presence of an unwanted male body. I feel those things almost never, actually, now I come to think of it.
There’s still a long way to go but I’m so much happier. I feel like my first year was my ‘self acceptance’ year, while this is my ‘pride’ year, if that makes any sense at all.
It’s like when Darryl is first speaking to Oothoon, the trans woman character he meets early on in the book, and he says: “I feel like I’ve been finding my way to a different kind of confidence…”
It’s definitely been one of the best years of my life so far. Probably the best. It’s in the top two, anyway. It’s hard to tell with this kind of proximity. I like my ear with my helix piercing and my hair tucked behind it. I worked so hard for this.
28/10/23
Freya-Onions-report 
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