What does my MA in Writing thesis have to do with transness?

This week, I graduated with an MA in Writing, Nonfiction concentration.

Three years ago, when a fellow transgender writer learned I started my Writing program and intended to write memoir, she asked me facetiously, “Will you write your transition story?”

“Well,” I said, “I have so much more to write about.” She smiled and nodded.

Our transition stories are important. Major turning points in our lives. They lend themselves well to the “traditional” narrative arc: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. The protagonist has a goal (living as my true self, a man), but encounters barriers to achieving it (I risk my marriage, my natal family, my life in Tanzania, societal scorn), and my story tells how I overcome obstacles, choose myself, divorce, move continents, and reach my goal of transition.

Telling our transition stories is a key part of processing and healing.

But they are not our only stories. I think a lot of us feel that society reduces us to only our transness, only our transitions. We become a trope. One dimensional. I resist that pigeonholed narrative. I’m confident trans/nonbinary people are not the only minority that sometimes feels this way.

But we, like everyone, are multifaceted, complex, full human beings.

My thesis is both about me as a trans person, and not about my transness. I don’t tell my coming out and transition stories at all; I leapt right over them. I also leapt over my break from Mormonism, my 20-year marriage, divorce, the decade+ living in Tanzania, my career in global health, giving birth and parenting, the painful adjustment as my kid grew into his adulthood, how I discovered my neurodivergence, or how I met and immediately fell in love with my new husband.

Why? I don’t know. I guess I’m not ready to write those stories, at least not to a standard of craft I feel good about.

But the stories in my thesis are, nevertheless, infused with my boy-ness, gender dysphoria, and the embodied consequences of suppressing my Self in order to survive.

I could not begin to heal, to become whole again, until I felt safe enough to live as my Self. And I could not begin to find that Self until after I transitioned. That’s when the real growth began. And though most people are not trans, we each have our own version of authenticity and wholeness that is worth striving toward. My stories, then, are both foreign and familiar.

Share

The program honored me with the David Everett Award for Outstanding Thesis.

After a girlhood in a large Mormon family marked by all-consuming religious devotion and marriage at nineteen, now in middle-age, I navigate masculinity, family, and dating as a queer, transgender man. A Light in Outer Darkness, a memoir-in-essays, reckons with layered identity, the embodied cost of self-erasure, and the long arc of queer self-discovery.

The seven essays are in chronological order. The first highlights my toddlerhood, written in a voice that captures both the innocence of kid logic and the wisdom of hindsight. It recounts my earliest childhood memories, when I knew I was a boy. Because no one believed me, I donned my “girl disguise” for the next thirty-five years. The ruse proved effective; even I failed to understand my constant discomfort and the underlying sense of wrongness that continues through the subsequent essays.

The second and third essays take place days before my first marriage at age nineteen. Here, I slow time down to bring the reader into my memory of those confusing, life-altering minutes as I was initiated into the “sacred, not secret” Mormon temple rituals. Echoes of the coerced choices I made that day haunt me for decades before I begin to comprehend their embodied impact.

In the fourth essay, time leapfrogs through decades, capturing discrete memories of queer experience and denial. The essay arcs like a rainbow between the youthful me of the first three essays and the forty-something me in the final three. In those, I am myself, a man named Will. As my identity resurfaced and I negotiate old and new relationships as a man, I face the enduring cost of silence, the ache of delayed grief, and the hard-earned path to self.

This video excerpted from my third essay, “I Love to See the Temple, Part 2: Anointing.”

Content warning: ritualized, non-consensual touching. Transcript below.

I created this artwork to help process this experience. Though it was 27 years ago, I can still feel its embodied impact.

Yep, that’s me in the photos, age nineteen. I kept the middle picture whole because I like how I looked there, and because through it all, I am me. My Self is constant and whole.

I chose this piece for my thesis reading because it’s a major moment of psychological rupture and fragmentation. I wanted the audience to feel, to get close to what I felt. It showcases my abilities as a writer to convey that visceral response.

After I chose, edited, and rehearsed it, I then freaked out about my choice. My past Mormon programming came rearing up. The first rule of the temple is that you do not talk about the temple.

I found every excuse to doubt my choice. It’s too intense. It’s too private. It needs a content warning (which we don’t give in the writing program). Most of my family hasn’t talked to me since they learned I criticize their church, including this essay. When I worked my way through one excuse, I found another. I talked through them all in two therapy sessions.

“Why shouldn’t you be able to share your experience?” my therapist asked.

“Because the Devil declared he’d have all power over me if I do,” I told her. Not that I believe that. I don’t believe in a devil, or an afterlife. Or any gods. But the fear, mapped onto my body, into my brain, is real nevertheless.

Ultimately, I emailed my thesis advisor, Susan Muaddi-Darraj, an amazing fiction writer and acclaimed author. She also writes about her cultural heritage in ways that I’m sure she’s gotten flak for. I told her my hesitation and asked for a gut check. She wrote back, ”It’s so filled with tension that it crackles. Nice choice.”

I stuck with my choice. I stand by it. Even though it was terrifying. Even now, I hesitate to publish this post.

I’m Will Cole. This is from my memoir entitled, A Light in Outer Darkness. I’m a trans man, and at the time of these events, I was living as a woman, age 19, and being initiated into the Mormon temple, days before my wedding ceremony. I had been told nothing about what to expect. We enter the action right after I have followed instructions to remove all my clothes and cover myself with a large, white cloth, similar to a poncho.

Mom knuckle-taps twice on my stall door, “You okay, honey?”

A familiar discomfort radiates out from my torso. I stand barefoot, covered but exposed. This is what Heavenly Father wants. I open the door.

Mom’s lower jaw is askew and her dark eyes dart around my face. [whisper] “You don’t ever have to be naked,” she says. “Didn’t your dad tell you?”

My left hand clenches the poncho’s edges into my stomach like I’m staunching the seeping blood of a stab wound. Mom envelops me in a hug, saying, “It’ll be okay.”

I command my legs to move, left, right, left, toward a row of curtained cubicles. A gray-haired guide gestures me through with a saccharine smile. I am alone in a four-by-four-foot stall. A wrinkled hand appears around a second curtain and pulls it aside. My brain is a TV stuck between channels. This is what Heavenly Father wants. I step forward.

A new woman in white taps my left fist to release my vice grip, and the cloth falls open. Something in my head is pulling me backward, far, far away.

“Sister,” she says, “say your full name.”

[mumble]

“Say your name again.”

After I repeat, she dips her hand in a burbling fountain and wipes water across my forehead, praying in a lilting rhythm, I wash your head, that your brain and your intellect may be clear and active. I long to bathe in this moment of power, the sole liturgical authority that belongs to women, but I register little. I remember less.

With a wet finger, she blesses my eyes that I may discern between truth and error, ears, and nose, then I feel her stroke the bare skin between my shoulder blades. A roaring white noise fills my ears. Under the cloth, the finger strokes my chest, my belly. A single word penetrates the fog—loins—as a cold finger grazes my inner, upper thigh. My body recoils. Her hot breath hisses as she blesses my feet, that I might run and not be weary, and walk and not faint, but I am a statue.

The blessing of the body parts repeats, now with oil. In and out under the cloth, a hand slithers. I retreat further into the Silent Place.

In the next cubicles, new women’s voices seal the anointing, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. One phrase pierces through: preparatory to becoming a queen and a priestess unto your husband.

Unto my husband?

My guide holds up a translucent white, knee-length jumpsuit. She holds it open and gestures for me to step into the Garment of the Holy Priesthood. It’s baggy. As she pulls it up under the cloth and onto my shoulders, she drops her hands and gropes for the zipper. My hips jerk backward. From between my legs to my collarbones, she zips the garment up, chanting.

My body is their puppet.