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me or my testosterone?
Saturday, August 31 2002
This morning Gretchen and I biked to the South Slope (southern Park Slope) to attend a brunch hosted by Griffin, one of Gretchen's friends whom she met in the world of poetry. Griffin also got Gretchen her first brief dotcom job (January-February 2001). He's a "tranny," a female-to-male transexual. Once during the height of Gretchen's so-called "ho phase" she and Griffin fooled around in the back of a gypsy cab. Today's brunch was in celebration of the airing of an interview Griffin had with the producers of This American Life as part of a three-act show on the subject of testosterone supplementation and loss.
Griffin's apartment was in a dismal building in a somewhat seedy neighborhood near 6th Avenue and 13th Street. As we were climbing the stairs, Gretchen drew my attention to the unpleasant smell infusing the place. It was a combination of the cooking smells of all the kitchens in all the various apartments. One can tell a lot about the socio-economic level of an apartment by the average smell of their cooking food. In this case it smelled like cheap, fatty meat. Gretchen calls this "the smell of poverty," and she associates it with her labor organizing gig in Milwaukee back in the 1990s, when she'd visit minimum wage hospital workers and find them frying up pans full of chicken necks.
Griffin's apartment, however, was a pleasant enough residence up on the top floor of the building. Many of the grimiest, most horrendously-painted buildings in the the most bombed-out neighborhoods in Brooklyn are actually sound 19th Century structures that clean up amazingly well. Their high ceilings, robust construction, and ornate detailing provide a fundamental capacity for gentrification that no modern upscale suburb will ever have.
Griffin makes for a rather short little guy. If you didn't know he used to be a chick, it would be easy to overlook the small girlish hands, fine skull details, and wide child bearing hips. Griffin shares his apartment with his girlfriend and perhaps other people (it seemed a little big for just a single couple). Griffin's girlfriend's mother was also in attendance at this brunch. When you're living an alternative lifestyle, it's a rare and beautiful blessing to have such supportive "inlaws."
Gretchen had raised my expectations that the brunch would be crawling with trannies, but the only other one there was a tall male-to-female redhead named Carrie.
The brunch featured a good vegetarian spread, including a variety of bagels and the makings for mimosas. For some mysterious reason the coffee was dreadful.
When This American Life came on, everyone quit talking and someone turned up the radio. Since it was only a small boombox, the sound was a bit distorted at this volume.
As with nearly every This American Life I've ever heard, this show was unexpectedly fascinating. It started with an interview with a guy who, for some mysterious medical reason, temporarily stopped making his own testosterone. I was amazed by the extent to which testosterone had supported his sense of self, for without it, he was an entirely different person. In its absence, he said, he lived in a life absolutely devoid of desire and motivation. Everything he saw was "beautiful," but only in the most casual, superficial way. He even admitted that his testosterone-free existence was actually rather pleasant.
Unfortunately, though, throughout this segment of the show, some of the people at the brunch who had gathered to hear Griffin's segment made clear that they had no interest in the subject being discussed whatsoever. They kept giggling at one another and making rude comments about what the first guy was saying, oblivious to the point he was making and completely unsympathetic to his experience. The only reason they were listening at all was to hear Griffin's segment. And when it wasn't Griffin's segment, it behooved them, so they thought, to diss whomever was talking, as if Griffin was somehow in competition with the other people with whom he shared the show. It was a cattiness that was completely unnecessary and non-entertaining, particularly when the subject matter was this interesting. But, as I said, it was clear that these people didn't give two shits about the subject matter. Gretchen, by the way, was in complete agreement with me on this matter.
Then came the segment in which Griffin related his experience, which started with his life as a butch dyke. One day he decided that what he really wanted to be was a heterosexual man, and he signed himself up for a regime of testosterone injections. To partially compensate for the lost years of his girlish youth, he was placed on a powerful dosage, equivalent (as the interviewer joked) to the combined testosterone level of two football linebackers.
I was fascinated by the profound psychological changes Griffin experienced under the influence of all this testosterone. Back in the old days when he was a dyke, he'd see a woman on the subway and think about maybe getting to know her. His romantic interests would have a "narrative quality." But once injected with testosterone, he'd see some mildly erotic part of an otherwise unattractive woman and his mind would immediately be flooded with pornographic images. He'd come up behind a woman and see her nice ass, and then, on passing her, fight with himself to keep from turning around to ogle her breasts. He'd had all the usual liberal feminist classes, and he knew that he shouldn't turn around to look, but still he couldn't stop himself. Indeed, he was so oversexed that even such inanimate objects as shuddering Xerox machines and red convertibles would arouse him. In the old days when he was a dyke, his poetry about seducing women was "edgy and cool." But as a man "I was just a jerk."
To an extent, I related to things he was saying. It was as if his journey into maleness gave him the perspective to admit things that men are not usually given to admitting. I don't think I have abnormal levels of testosterone, and yet the extent of my mental preoccupation with sex is something I often find frightening. I might not find anything sexy about a Xerox machine, but I share Griffin's inability to keep from staring at sexually-provocative sights, despite my intellectual awareness that to do so is probably not to my advantage.
Intriguingly, Griffin admitted that under the influence of testosterone, he suddenly had new interests that he had never had before. The most remarkable of these was science. Suddenly he liked science and understood physics, "throwing 100 years of progress out the window."
Another interesting, and somewhat unrelated, aspect of Griffin's transformation related to the kind of man he became. For one thing, he is only five foot four inches tall, and he found that, as a man, this made him into something of a target on the sidewalk. Anonymous men on the street would veer into his path and even "body check" him as they passed. Since this sort of thing has never happened to me, I can only assume that this is a common problem for short men. Most short men became men only gradually, not in the course of a few weeks. This gives Griffin an interesting perspective on being a short man; he can recall when he wasn't a victim of hierarchical battles on the sidewalk, and having a literary mind, he has the tools to tell us about it.
Another unexpected aspect of the transformation is the way it changed the way people perceive his place in the social strata. As a woman he was "cool" and "popular," but as a man he found himself regarded as "nerdy."
After Griffin's segment was over, the radio was turned down and we didn't bother listening to the third segment. Everyone agreed that Griffin had given an outstanding interview, and some of us who were actually interested in the subject matter even admitted that This American Life is an excellent show, transcending the usual soundbite with the real meat of its stories. There were of course those at the brunch who felt the need to further diss that first guy (the one who had lost his testosterone for a time), but Gretchen and I did what we could to put them on the defensive where they needed to be, particularly this one lesbian chick with a me-too bleached dyke haircut who had the superficially-didactic conversational style of an Oberlin Sophomore.
Griffin regaled us with a few additional tales related to his testosterone regime, and then the conversation fragmented into small subconversations as people compared tattoos, talked about tattoos they might get, and expressed relief about not getting the tattoos they once thought about getting. Eventually Gretchen and I said our goodbyes and headed back home. Someone had propped open the door at the bottom of the stairway and the smell of poverty had dissipated.
In the evening we were visited by Gretchen's friend Joselyn, whom Gretchen met at the summer artists' retreat in Vermont. We three went to Second Street Café for dinner, where I had a glass of red wine as an appetizer and a seafood pasta dish as a main course. I could understand why Gretchen likes Joselyn so much; I've never before seen a guest who could make as much of a fuss about our pets as we do.
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