Modes of Transportation
I thought that finding the right music—black metal, ‘Loveless,’ Hole, R.E.M.—could help me to finally feel like a woman. The truth was more complicated.
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.
