Most Searched: “Gabe Dunn Before”

It was my drunken party trick.

“Wanna see me before?” I’d ask. People would either oblige because I was standing in front of them and they didn’t want to be rude or they were genuinely curious and had been waiting for me to offer.

Not many trans people would, right? You’re not even supposed to ask our old names, but I’m cooler than the others. You can pass my digital past around at the club.

It made it clear to people that I didn’t transition because I was a “failed woman.”

I was a great woman! The best! Big hair. Big make-up. Heels and dresses. Lingerie. Great tits. I followed the script to perfection. I went out of the game on top. I retired at the height of my female career. They hung my gender jersey in the Staples Center.

I lived for reactions to my “before” photos. Rather than wanting to hide my pre-transition self, I laughed her off. I wanted people to know exactly what I’d given up to “live my truth.” Look at the “body tea” that I’d lost just to be happier.

Sometimes I’d ask if they wanted to see something even crazier. I’d warn that it was nudity so they could consent. Then, I’d show my topless modeling pics.

The other people, also drunk or high, would lean over my phone in awe. How could me and that girl be the same person?

As I started to go stealthier, the refrain changed to how unfair it was that I was so hot as either gender. (I did not believe them, but I guess now I do.)

I don’t show people my old photos anymore. To be fair, I’m also not as high on party drugs as often as I once was.

I remember another trans man, a long time ago, telling me about how he would go around his college campus in the 1990s flashing people his boobs on the quad. He didn’t hunch in a hoodie to keep them tucked away. He showed his breasts to everyone because he felt no bodily connection to them. What did he care who saw them?

They weren’t his anyway.

Not many trans men have as much public evidence of their prior self as I do. (Maybe Elliot Page. More on that later.)

I’ve made online videos for the last dozen or so years. Even if I wanted to remove them, it would negatively affect my income. It would also erase a good chunk of the work I’m proud of. I have four books published with my dead name on them. Although lovely friends have redone their own covers for me with Sharpies, it doesn’t change the author on the bookstore shelf.

Last week, looking for an idea for this newsletter, I searched my own name to see what other people were Googling about me.

Gabe Dunn controversy. (Could be anything at this point.)

Gabe Dunn Allison Raskin. (Duh.)

Gabe Dunn ex-boyfriend. (Could be anyone.)

Gabe Dunn and *celebrities I’ve dated.* (Finally, something interesting.)

And then, of course…

Gabe Dunn before.

This is why, after four years on testosterone, I still don’t post side-by-sides on Instagram. To me, a “before & after” post implies that the “before” is something to work away from. The “after” — which is ongoing and never finished anyway — is not inherently better.

It is not aspirational. It does not equally exist in every trans man’s future. It is not an expectation of ‘transness completed.’ I don’t feel proud to have “accomplished” it. When I was first transitioning, the “befores” that other people posted made me so sad. I still looked like the “before.” What if I never reached the “after?”

Why did that guy have a beard already? Why did that guy have big pecs? Was I somehow dreadfully behind?

But if people think I look better “after,” then did I look ugly before? If people think I look “happy” now, then was any happiness I felt “before” not real? Do I have to perform happiness in my “after?” For how long?

Worse: What if people felt I actually did look better “before?” I would be handing transphobes the ammo to call me “mutilated” or “ruined.”

Some people find these posts inspirational. I get why a trans man might want to celebrate himself in such a dark world for trans people. I completely understand a community showing support for a person’s transition.

Congratulations on taking that step.

Congratulations on getting to this point, which is brave as fuck.

Congratulations for opening your eyes to see another day. So many of us don’t.

Yet something always keeps me from posting my own. I think about the trans people who don’t want to or can’t medically transition. The ones who don’t want to or can’t socially transition. I wonder if they find trans “before & after” posts upsetting. The implication is that they are a “before” and will remain a “before” forever.

What does a “before” even mean if there is no hope of an “after?”

I’ve been holed up at home like a hermit so I’ve been watching a lot of movies. First it was illness and now it’s something closer to nihilistic depression. There’s death all around, so it’s fitting that I randomly chose Flatliners the other night.

Flatliners, an Elliot Page joint from 2017, is a remake of a 1990 film of the same name. Page plays a medical student who is desperate to find out what happens after we die because they killed their sister in a car accident. This interesting premise is decimated when midway through the film Page’s character dies. Everyone else starts getting killed off Freddy Krueger-style by guilt ghosts. Page later wrote in his memoir Pageboy that the set of Flatliners was dangerous and toxic for a number of very valid reasons.

It’s also not a good movie, but Page is definitely presented in it as the hot “next big thing” alongside these other hot “next big things.” Flatliners was released about ten years into Page’s it-girl reign post-Juno in 2007. It wouldn’t be until 2020 that Page would come out as trans. That same year, I had just begun to consciously examine my own gender.

I decide to do with Elliot’s SEO what I did with my own.

“Elliot Page young” says Google search’s automatic fill-in.

Of course it does.

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