Modes of Transportation

I think it’s good critical practice to occasionally confess your biases and blind spots, so here’s one of mine: Until the summer of 2023, I didn’t care about R.E.M. When I was a boy, and measured music’s value by weight, their lack of heaviness was disqualifying. “Everybody hurts,” Michael Stipe sang, and I knew that. I also knew that pain wasn’t for pondering with a weepy ballad but crushing with a Big Muff distortion pedal. The R.E.M. singles that split radio air with “Big Empty” and “Black Hole Sun” were so at ease with their own sadness, I could only understand them as maudlin affect. Not that I had any of these words or thoughts in 1996, when I was a 12-year-old devotee of alt-rock radio and Spin magazine who understood musical taste as a garment like a football jersey—one you wore to signify your allegiances, and thus who you believed yourself to be. I had a gut reaction about R.E.M. that hardened into certainty. Not my thing. Not me.

That’s how I would’ve explained why I wasn’t into R.E.M. if you’d asked me before last summer. It would’ve been true. Here’s another, much longer explanation.

In the summer of 2023, I started hormone replacement therapy. I began asking people to call me Sadie. I stopped writing under my old name. I changed my email addresses and social media handles. I understood myself as transgender in February of that year, something that 12 months prior would’ve been inconceivable to me. By June I was a bewildered evacuee of the only self I’d ever known, heading down a vast and empty stretch of freeway, on my way to who knows where. 

For many years, the common narrative around being trans went something like, I always knew I was born in the wrong body. This may be an accurate way of describing the experience for some people, though not for everyone; I am one of the latter. For a number of reasons, people tend not to use this framework anymore. No matter how dramatically your appearance might change, you never leave your body behind for a new one; everything it stores remains in storage; your memories continue to play, even if at a different speed. But I understand the appeal of thinking about it this way. It’s easier to explain to someone else, and it’s easier for them to imagine the phenomenon, even if they’ve never experienced it themselves. And more than that, the idea of being trapped in the wrong body is irrefutable. If your inner being is intractably pulled toward a finish line with the word “WOMAN” printed on the tape, your path is clear, if still incredibly challenging and hard to accept.

Very rarely in my life have I understood where I was trying to go while I was heading there. So it’s not surprising to me that I brought the same solution to my gender crisis that I’ve always brought to my relationship with music. Like a roaming herbivore, I wander around, munching on whatever interests me until it stops interesting me. Then I wander some more. For decades, I quietly hoped that every stop would be my last. I could be an outlaw country person, or a New Orleans rap person. Finally, I would say to myself, this is the place for me.

What does it mean to be oneself? The imperative to be true is perhaps the last remaining universal value in this country. Use your gift, follow your heart—I’ve received this kind of advice in evangelical churches and gender-therapy sessions and Sprite commercials. I have attempted to obey my thirst. But when I’ve looked within, I haven’t found much of anything. Authenticity, as it’s typically formulated, is a conservative value: It demands that you only be what you have already been. But trying on new selves is one way to inhabit the richness of humanity, and thus enrich our understanding of who we might be and become. As the art critic Dan Fox writes, “To fear being accused of pretension is to police oneself out of curiosity about the world.”

My attempt to understand my gender went this way, more or less. I had a series of curiosities, and I followed them. What would I look like in eyeshadow? What would I look like in a dress? What would I look like without a beard? The answer, every time, turned out to be “better.” So I moved on. Like all peregrinations, the path seems obvious in retrospect. I wonder, sometimes, whether this is the same thing people are talking about when they say they’re living in the wrong body, whether what I perceived as the autonomy of my drift made it hard for me to understand that I, too, was being pulled forward by something mysterious. I wonder whether my language and theirs are both failing to adequately label something that is essentially indescribable.

When I want to become different, which I do from time to time, I listen to records. And when I find myself becoming different without warning, I listen to records. In late 2022 and early 2023, I heard the crackle and pop of my unconscious certainties as they disintegrated. Every day, it felt as though a removal laser was burning off everything written on my mind that had once seemed to be permanent, and I was screaming in pain. Something new was being constructed in its place, bright pixel by bright pixel, its light sharper than anything I’d seen before. I listened to so much music.

I crawled the 90-minute commute between my home in Long Beach and my office in Los Angeles three times per week, impatient and claustrophobic. At 7:45 a.m., I would play the vicious sludge-metal band Body Void as loud as I could handle. I felt like something shot from space and burning through the atmosphere, everything within and around me rattling. I’d play the doom duo Vile Creature and the Appalachian black metal band Feminazgul and the disgusting blackened punk of New York’s Melissa. Anything that was so loud and ugly that it became transcendent. 

Metal—particularly black metal, and especially black metal made by trans people—began to feel vitally important to me for the conviction with which it negated convention and good taste, insisting upon its own self-definition no matter how repellent it might seem to the rest of the world. If someone in the band was fucking with their gender, perhaps the vibrations of their noise might shake something out of me that I could study more clearly. I saw the legendary New Orleans sludge band Eyehategod at a tiny bar in Hollywood and later told my therapist that there’d been a trans woman there in corpse paint. (I probably also told him that corpse paint was a black metal thing, which made me think she didn’t know what she was doing at a sludge show, but then again, I didn’t know what I was doing anywhere.) “Maybe a year from now, that’ll be you,” he suggested, as if the path were clear enough to have an endpoint. I think I rolled my eyes in response.

At night, exhausted, I would lie on the couch listening to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless at a volume loud enough to see the individual dust particles in the production. For reasons I couldn’t explain to myself or anyone else, I believed shoegaze, and Loveless in particular, to be deeply transgender music. There are probably musicological reasons for this. Both Kevin Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s voices are high, airy, and de-sexed. The album’s beauty is inseparable from its noise. Every boundary between typically discrete sounds is blurred to illegibility. But my conviction, at the time, had more to do with the immediate experience of the music. Any cute analogues between gender theory and glide guitar came later. 

In my ears, Loveless is the sound of attempting to articulate to oneself something deep, personal, and true that can’t be simply defined. Like an image drawn from memory, it expresses as much about what’s forgotten as what’s retained, tracing the mind’s straining gestures as it attempts to bring back something lost. You can see through the grains of “To Here Knows When” as it struggles to stay together while pulling itself apart. What’s back there on the other side can only be experienced in its relationship to the foreground, just as the foreground can only be understood through its decay and revelation of distant beauty. 

In my phone, I kept a running list of albums I’d tagged as “gender.” In retrospect, it seems obvious to me that I was trying to put together a composite sketch of the girl and woman I hadn’t been—a fantasy, ultimately, though in the moment it felt more like an excavation. Some of the artists in that folder are obvious choices for someone who grew up on alt- and indie rock in the 1990s and 2000s: Liz Phair, Lush, That Dog., Velocity Girl, the Sundays, Tiger Trap, the Raincoats, the Vaselines, the Breeders, Elastica, Bratmobile. 

More than anything else, I listened to Hole’s Live Through This. I walked around my office with “Miss World” stuck in my head, pushing and pulling and soothing in the rush of the band’s forward lean when Courtney Love sings “I made my bed, I’ll lie in it.” They’re playing in italics, willing themselves to go farther than the song’s roots will allow, both accepting and escaping the sadness of fate. “Go on, take everything,” she insists, sarcastic and pleading at once, in “Violet,” a song I have loved for as long as I have loved songs.

I wasn’t sure that any of this was touching me in the way I was hoping to be touched. I wanted something to reach inside of me and ring a bell I hadn’t yet found and wasn’t totally sure existed: to save me from the struggle of putting definite language to something that felt beyond my ability to articulate; to declare to me, without ambiguity, that I was a woman, that I always had been, that everything else had been a dream. As the year dragged on, I could no longer abide the illusion of stasis that came with being in transit from one place to another, but I could not find within myself any quicker way to the other side. I felt gridlocked. The only thing I knew, with a certainty that would have felt superstitious if it hadn’t also felt so important, was that the way across would be smoother with the right music, and that once I figured out what that music was, I shouldn’t listen to anything else. 

For a week, as I circled around something I both did and did not want to think about, I listened to Alkaline Trio’s song “Sadie,” about Charles Manson’s follower Susan “Sexy Sadie” Atkins, which I’d loved for about three months when I was 18. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything, really, but Matt Skiba singing “You’re on your own, my little nightmare” and, later, “Sadie G., she’s crazy, see?” in his autumnal, admiring way made something twitch. 

That same week, I tried listening to Joanna Newsom’s “Sadie” but couldn’t make it past the way she sings the name in the song’s first few seconds: “Say! dee,” like she’s calling a dog she loves who’s been out to play for a while. That is, in fact, what the song is about: a dog who has buried her pinecone and bone, and who Joanna loves. “Bless this house and its heart so savage,” she sings. She tells Sadie to go ahead and dig up that bone, pull out the little thing you buried so long ago, let yourself enjoy it. I finally listened to it, and I listened again, and I listened again, and tried not to let my crying disrupt my vision behind the wheel or smear the makeup I was learning how to wear.

Something shifted within me late in the summer. I began compulsively listening to R.E.M. I started with Document and moved forward and backward in time, slowly wearing each record out and moving on to whichever remaining one drew me in. I could listen to nothing else. I had no idea why. I wondered what kind of person listened to R.E.M. The almost-literal truth is: nearly everyone born between the years of 1970 and 1985, at least for a little while. 

So why had it always felt to me like listening to R.E.M. meant belonging to some kind of club to which I couldn’t imagine myself belonging? What was the thing that turned me off in 1996, and that suddenly turned me on in 2023? This is a question I have not been able to stop asking myself, even as I’ve moved on to other bands. What did I hear in the music?

I heard the sound of Michael Stipe’s voice. For someone who is literally, if not spiritually, a rockstar, he is remarkably coy. Even when his lyrics are clear, his melodies are rich with shadows. It’s dangerous to believe that artists are ever singing directly to you, and that’s not quite what it felt like to me, though it was similar. He made anyone listening feel as if they were in on the same secret as him. He took his audience into his confidence. If it were funny, you’d call it camp. But it was earnest, so it felt queer. (There was a reason why journalists started asking Stipe about his sexuality in the early ’90s.) The truth of R.E.M.’s immense popularity makes my reading of their meaning impossible: Surely listening to one of the best-selling artists of their era doesn’t make you queer; they remain so popular, it can’t really say anything about you at all. But I can’t stop hearing it otherwise.

In September, as that year’s turbulence began to resolve into a new normalcy, with the air beginning to cool, I had dinner with a couple of music-critic friends in a loud, low-lit restaurant. We were talking about the evolution of taste: If one artist stuck with you from teenhood to middle age, did it mean you hadn’t changed, or had something timeless in the music managed to speak to every version of you? I mentioned that since beginning my transition, my values and priorities as a listener and critic had drastically shifted. One of my friends asked me whether this was a conscious choice, if I was purposefully reshaping how I understood music in order to conform to more typically feminine standards, or if I found that with hormonal changes and socialization what I desired had naturally drifted in a new direction. I told him that it felt to me as if I were growing a woman inside of myself. She was rooted in me, had arisen from me, and required nutrients that could only have come from her relationship with the entirety of my past. I was providing her with the nourishment of music that I thought would help her—and her specifically—to grow until her branches became my skeleton and her vines replaced my nervous system. 

After dinner we wound our way to a bar in East Hollywood, where I had DJed regularly years earlier. I had just left a full-time job at a magazine that required me to hitch my interests to the hype cycle. When I finally quit and could again listen to whatever I wanted, I felt a kind of wonder I’d never known as a music fan. I would drag bags and bags of records into this bar on Monday nights, playing ’70s Afrobeat and highlife, Malian funk, gaseous spiritual jazz, loads of Jorge Ben and Gilberto Gil, mod reggae, regional P-Funk knockoffs, everything from Herbie Hancock’s disco period. I thought I’d never listen to a rock record again. Usually, there was nobody there besides the bartender to witness any of this. Sipping fernet that night in September, idly tracing the hem of my dress, conversing like a normal human and not someone desperate to be recognized, I’d never felt more remote from the person I’d been in the DJ booth. He was trying so hard, I saw; he thought he was breaking into daylight; he felt so free.

I believed what I told my friend that night at the restaurant for a long time. It was the best-possible explanation of what I felt like I’d gone through. Now I’m less certain that my conscious choices had anything to do with it. Maybe I wasn’t watering anything; maybe it was simply raining. Recently, my friend Erin, who plays black metal under the name Genital Shame, was telling me how transition had changed her guitar tone: not in how she set up her gear, but as a result of the playing itself. As she became more at ease with herself, her touch lightened, and her playing lost some of its rigidity. I can hear that now, in her records, that her tremolo picking has a microtonal flutter in it that I hadn’t really noticed before. Maybe some tiny corpse-painted girl buried deep in my subconscious could hear this kind of thing in the months when the only music I wanted to hear was black metal made by trans women. Or maybe it’s just the power of suggestion.

The things that attract me to music haven’t really changed. I’m a sucker for extra-thick guitars and cooed vocals. I like when a punk song has an organ or an acoustic guitar in it. I like when a figure is repeated so many times its emotional valence threatens to loosen and transform. I like when a rap song features Juvenile. I like when a singer delivers a beautiful melody with pinching urgency that turns it acidic, like the way Michael Stipe sings the chorus of “Pretty Persuasion.” I like when a new song reminds me of something I liked in high school and makes me think about the old song in a new way. I like polyrhythms. I like when the spirit that lives in a song grows imperceptibly, until it’s so big the song becomes overwhelmed, loses legibility, goes ecstatic, and spends the rest of its time trying to reconstitute itself.

For a long time, I believed my perspective was endangered. With every new iteration, I thought I was obliterating the previous one, leaving no trace of any outmoded version of myself. The music I liked in 2019 was radically different from what I liked in 2014, just as 2014 was radically different from 2009. I had been so many types of guy: ska-punk guy, twee hipster guy, jazz guy, cosmic death metal guy. It never occurred to me that they were all authentic expressions of the same spirit. Not until I lightened up and stopped trying to be any type of guy at all.