"There’s this tyranny of beauty, especially among trans women.There’s this feeling that, if we’re not beautiful enough, we’re not really women."

Writes Jennifer Finney Boylan, quoted in "A 'Weary but Fabulous' Poster Girl for Trans Life Opens Up About Aging/In her fifth memoir, 'Cleavage,' Jennifer Finney Boylan writes about her 36-year marriage, her adult children and why she keeps telling her story" (NYT).

Early in her new memoir, “Cleavage,” Jennifer Finney Boylan describes a moment of reckoning in a changing room. A size 12 dress is too snug....

The problem wasn’t that she’d gained almost 50 pounds in 25 years. “The crisis was that it mattered to me now, as a woman,” Boylan, 66, writes. “When I was a man (sic), I can say most definitively that it had not.”

Is that "(sic)" in the memoir or is the NYT inserting it? I'm going to guess, because of the use of parentheses instead of brackets, that it's in the memoir.

Did not looking good enough matter to Boylan because she was a woman — and that's female psychology — or because she was transgender — and had taken on the task of influencing others to perceive her as a woman? Is it about expressing what's inside you or getting the response you want from other people?

"But the threat of a second Trump presidency means that having my birth certificate reflect present reality has turned into a matter of grave importance."

"Quite frankly, whatever is on that document may in the not so distant future determine whether one can live one’s life in peace."

Writes Jennifer Finney Boylan, in "Why I Changed My Birth Certificate 25 Years After I Transitioned" (NYT). Boylan is 66 and "transitioned nearly 25 years ago."

Despite the essay title, there's nothing more about the why — no detail about why Trump is a threat and why a revised birth certificate would work as protection against that threat. Most of the essay is about the process of getting the new birth certificate.

It reminded me of the David Rakoff essay "Love It Or Leave It" in his 2005 book "Don't Get Too Comfortable" (commission earned). It begins:

George W. Bush made me want to be an American. It was a need I had not known before.

"This term, 'biological males,' is everywhere now. And it’s not used only by right-wing politicians."

"People of good faith are... uncertain about when, and how, sex matters, and just how biological it is. Some want to draw a bright line in areas where maleness and femaleness might matter most — in sports, or locker rooms, or prisons. Others are trying to blur lines that used to be clearer...."

Writes Jennifer Finney Boylan in "To understand biological sex, look at the brain, not the body" (WaPo).

"Seeing a troubled life as a drama, a series of conflicts that, with luck, lead to resolution is one of the ways we reach a state of hard-won grace as we age. "

"Countries invent stories and myth in order to make sense of trauma, too. One reason the scars of the Civil War have never fully healed is that we’ve never, as a nation, agreed on a single narrative about what it was all for. Now we are engaged in a great debate about the lessons and meaning of the Trump era. To progressives like me, the past four years have been a period of mendacity, incompetence, racism and — in the end — insurrection. The wounds are fresh.... [T]he scars of the Trump years are likely to endure.... How can we ever get past Donald Trump, when so many people seem unwilling to let him go? What do we learn from our scars? Are they just a reminder of the traumas we’ve experienced, things that remind us how easily wounded we really are? Or are we to look upon our dents and marks with wisdom, and understand these wounds really did heal with time — that the pain that once defined our lives will not last forever?"

From "My Country Suddenly Turned on Me/Recovering from the trauma of the Trump era will depend on how its story is told" by Jennifer Finney Boylan (NYT).

This column — which also includes a story about a physical scar Boylan has from childhood — is more equivocal than I thought it would be. The title made me think that it would demand that we prioritize the way people feel by telling the story that has the most power to heal those who were traumatized. That is, forget the search for truth, we need to get together as quickly as possible embrace the story that works best to lift the spirits and relieve the suffering of the downtrodden. 

But Boylan doesn't quite say that. Not clearly. She does speak of "a single narrative" about the Civil War without which we "have never fully healed."

She doesn't quite say that if only we'd all got together on a single narrative we'd be healed by now. And she probably would concede that she's mixing up cause and effect. Once you're in the condition to agree on a single narrative, you are healed. How can you make a single narrative happen without a self-defeating sacrifice of freedom of thought and expression? And if it's just force-fed single-narrative propaganda, it is not "agreed on." 

Boylan equates the Trump years with the Civil War. She uses Lincoln's language — "Now we are engaged in a great" — and, for "Civil War," substitutes "debate about the lessons and meaning of the Trump era." I favor debate over agreeing on a single narrative, and maybe Boylan does too. She never makes the strong move I thought I saw coming and insist that we must now agree to a single narrative. I can see that her narrative would be a story of "mendacity, incompetence, racism and — in the end — insurrection." But she keeps it open-ended. That's the story she would tell, and we're in a big debate about what just happened. There is no single narrative.

And what of the wish for a single narrative and the faith in its power to heal and healing as a priority over the search for truth? (This question makes me think of "The 1619 Project."  It's not history as truth, it's history as medicine. But if you want history as medicine, you'll still have plenty of trouble getting to a single narrative. Everyone touting "The1619 Project" medicine is counterbalanced by somebody offering the restorative power of the "City on a Hill.")

"I was smugly pleased with my apparent lack of wrinkles and quite content with regard to my personal grooming."

"I did have a little trouble navigating the streets of my new home town, but, all in all, I felt pretty good about things. All that changed with my too successful cataract surgery! My first glance in a mirror disabused me of my fancies of being wrinkle free - what's more, apparently I neither pluck my eyebrows, nor am I able to apply eyeliner in an actual 'line.' Moreover, I'm an astonishingly terrible housekeeper. - I thought the dirt was part of the linoleum pattern! I do, however, now realize that Austin has street signs..."

Writes a commenter at a NYT op-ed titled "Seeing Really Is Believing/How cataract surgery changed my life" and teased on the front page with "I Wasn't Crazy. The World Really Was Getting Darker." The teaser title doesn't reveal that it's about cataracts, but I guessed that it was. The column itself, by Jennifer Finney Boylan, is a little too sentimental and arty for my taste.

ADDED: I liked the comment. It was funny, and as a cataract patient myself, I identified with the point of view. But I've got to say that the part about eyeliner is confusing. If the bad application of eyeliner was caused by bad eyesight and she didn't notice the problem before the surgery, why would there be a problem after the surgery? You go in for the procedure without makeup, and you're forbidden to wear eye makeup for 2 weeks. So by the time she could see the makeup, she would have had clear eyesight for putting it on. But it's hard to put eyeliner on straight, and it's quite possible that seeing what you're doing wouldn't solve the problem.

Is it in poor taste now to show enthusiasm about the news of whether your baby is a boy or a girl?

That's my question, reading "Why Are Gender Reveal Parties a Thing?/They say a lot more about our culture than they do about the sex of our soon-to-be children" by Jennifer Finney Boylan in a NYT op-ed.

[C]elebrating a child’s gender before it’s born... sets expectations for who that child will be. It also leaves the unfortunate impression that gender is the most important thing to celebrate about that child. And sometimes it’s just plain wrong. As a late-transitioning transgender person, I’ve experienced both sides of a lot of this world....

What does bringing a new life into the world actually mean, in the end, besides lighting a fire, passing the flame of your own life on to a new generation? But I can assure you, that fire will glow whether your child is male or female or even something in between.

There are a lot of things to celebrate about a new baby. Gender isn’t one of them. Instead, we should celebrate our child’s humanity — with all of its complex, contradictory potential — with openheartedness and with love.

Gender-reveal parties are a recent fad, and in the old days we couldn't do them and we therefore didn't do them. We did send out birth announcements that usually said "It's a boy!" or "It's a girl!" That always felt like poor taste to me. It's a specific individual, a stranger arrived from the beyond, who will gradually be revealed to us. Yes, there's one thing we can see right away, what kind of external genitalia this new person has. But instead of making a big deal about that one specific we do know, we could show awe and respect for what we do not know: Who is this? I thought all of that years ago and without the influence of the trangender-rights movement. But I'm happy to see this new basis for disapproving of parental over-enthusiasm about the genitalia of babies.

"The only dependable test for gender is the truth of a person’s life, the lives we live each day."

"Surely the best judge of a person’s gender is not a degrading, questionable examination. The best judge of a person’s gender is what lies within her, or his, heart."

When we need to categorize people by sex/gender — for the Olympics, for example — what is the right way to do it? The quote above is from an op-ed by Jennifer Finney Boylan.The quote struck me because what's in someone's heart seems to me to be a terrible test, because it demands another test — the test of what is in a person's heart — and people lie. Certainly, some athletes will lie.

But even if we could accurately see the contents of your heart the way we can see the contents of your pants and your chromosomes, would we want your subjective beliefs to determine who you get to compete against? It's one thing to leave people alone as they live their private lives, quite another to set up an athletic competition where there will be winners and losers.

How does Boylan propose to look into hearts?

A quick look at the reality of an athlete’s life ought to settle the question.

Absurd! Where is this picture of "the reality of an athlete's life" for us to take a "quick look" at? And even if there was such a picture and it could not be faked, what aspects of life are female and what are male? You can't answer the question without using sexist stereotypes that are not only offensive but have very little application to high-level athletes. Obsession with sports and competition is stereotypically male. If we took Boylan's laughable test seriously, there'd be no athlete left in the female category.

Boylan has an alternate conclusion:

Maybe ... Olympic officials have to learn to live with ambiguity, and make peace with a world in which things are not always quantifiable and clear.

That, if you ask me, would be a good thing, not just for Olympians, but for us all.

It's fine to recommend that we appreciate ambiguity, but athletic contests need rules and those who enforce them have to make decisions. It's funny how Boylan wants us to believe in her "quick look" at lifestyle test but wants us to accept that biology is endlessly ambiguous.

There may be some difficult cases at the biological level, but rules should be devised to deal with those cases fairly. As Boylan notes, the Olympic rules permit individuals who have gone through sex reassignment surgery to compete as the sex the surgery has modeled them after. Whether that rule was a good idea is another question. It seems to be accepted because the treatment degrades athletic ability, so the former man does not have the usual advantage a man would have competing with women. But there is no reason to devise a rule that allows men to compete with women because they feel like women.

***

Boylan is the author of “She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders,” described by Booklist here:

In this autobiography, she details her lifelong struggle with her burgeoning femaleness and the path she followed to become a female, both physically and mentally. For 40 years, the author lived as a man, seemingly happy and even marrying a woman and fathering two children. At a certain point, though, she realized that she couldn't suppress her desire to live as a female and so eventually went through all the steps to become female, including sexual reassignment surgery. There is something troubling about Boylan's lighthearted tone, and while she hints at it, there is no really clear depiction of the havoc this transition must have wreaked on her married life (Boylan's wife was clearly devastated) and on her children (who at times refer to her as boygirl or maddy).