Men's Rites

Deciding to go through a gender transition isn’t easy for anyone. But the hardest person for journalist Daniel Mallory ortberg to convince was himself

- Daniel Mallory Ortberg

before I began to transition, I tried my very best not to transition, for the following reasons:

• It might be well and good for other people, but I was uniquely unqualified.

• I could not trust either my knowledge of myself or my own desires.

• I could not trust my own happiness, such that if transition were to produce a new kind of peace or serenity within me, it would merely be further evidence of my capacity for self-deception, just another set-up before an increasingly long fall.

• I was too old, had in fact been too old since the age of 12.

• I was used to being a woman, and I liked women and couldn’t imagine my transition as anything other than an act of – at the very least – impoliteness towards women.

• I would lose my family.

• Cis men would be indifferent and cruel to me if I did.

• I would lose my sense of self and my place in the world.

• Transition wouldn’t work on me anyway.

I had worked out a sort of tortured mathematical equation in favour of never making a decision or sharing my feelings with anyone – I was just susceptible enough to the rhetoric of transition to make my continued existence as a cis woman unbearable, but