Everett Maroon, Bumbling Into Body Hair (Booktrope 2012)
Cis people have a seemingly endless fascination with transition, particularly the minutia and the deeply personal details. They want to know what it’s all like, whether someone has had the surgery, how you know you’re transsexual and/or transgender. The thirst for trans memories seems unslakeable, and many members of the trans community are willing to oblige, with books running the gamut from attempts at emotional tours de force to wry memoirs where everything is made into one giant joke.
Some members of the trans community seem equally fascinated by this recent explosion in literature, although not all of us will admit it. Inevitably, the authors of trans memoirs are viewed as spokespeople and representatives for the whole community, and their work is closely scrutinised. The assessments are often quite biting, as individual authors and memoirs are expected to carry so much weight, and inevitably there are parts of the community who feel left out.
Everett Maroon’s Bumbling Into Body Hair (Booktrope 2012) strikes a balance between humor and emotional intensity; Maroon’s unflinching emotional passages appear in crisp juxtaposition with laugh-out-loud segments, many of which are not specifically about being trans. This is a narrative that, rather than telling people what transness is and should look like, talks about one trans man’s experience, nothing more, nothing less. Bumbling Into Body Hair is also about Maroon’s life during a turbulent period that wasn’t just turbulent because of his gender, which is a sharp reminder to readers that The Trans Memoir needn’t be All About Gender.
Those looking for gory surgery descriptions or detailed voyages of self-discovery on hormones will have to look elsewhere. Maroon’s memoir is more likely to discuss the torment of a binder on a hot day in summer or what happens when your dick melts onto the radiator than how he felt after top surgery, and these segments are related in a charmingly embarrassed sort of way: Maroon is a klutz and unashamed to admit it.
But this is not a universally funny book—Maroon talks about his emotional hesitance early in transition, struggling with whether he was ‘trans enough,’ and slowly coming out to friends. This was not always a smooth and enjoyable path. Like many trans people in the modern era, he started online, where he could carve out his identity before unveiling it to his friends and family, some of whom reacted in ways he didn’t expect.
Bumbling Into Body Hair is also about Maroon’s activism in Washington, DC, where he worked with queer organisations on issues like adding gender protection to workplace anti-discrimination statements and initiatives. Along the way, he met a variety of characters who are brought to vivid life in the pages, even as the book is also about saying goodbye to many of them. As he transitioned, he grew further apart from some of his friends, for a variety of reasons, and clashed with some of the issues that continue to plague the trans community, like squabbles over who gets to identify as trans, and what transness should look like.
Maroon faces these issues head-on in the memoir, without taking a hard line, which allows readers to explore more on their own rather than being prejudiced from the start. He asks provocative questions through his characters, including his therapist, which lay the ground for more reading rather than providing readers with all the answers.
Maroon notes the varying responses to his transition, from seamless pronoun switches and friendliness to coldness, refusal, and jealousy. He manages for the most part to avoid retrospective musings, showing the people he interacted with and his reactions in real time rather than reflecting back on them and talking about what he might have done differently. Instead of offering a manual for transitioners, he tells by showing his varying interactions and lets readers judge for themselves.
As a trans reader, much of the text resonated deeply with me, particularly Maroon’s early nervousness and fear about transition; his uncertainty is a common experience, and it was a pleasure to see it confronted honestly rather than having it glossed over in the hurry to get to ‘the goods,’ so to speak. There is a stage where Maroon reaches the point where he realises he’s not very good at being Jenifer, but he’s not quite sure who Everett is either, at a party where people who know both people are present. That’s the point in the memoir when everything begins to fall into place, where the reader feels committed to the transition along with the author.
In keeping with the somewhat self-effacing tone of the book, Maroon is also very honest about some of the more harmful relationships in his life at the time of his transition. While readers are, of course, only getting one side of the story, the drawn-out relationship with his ex, Pat, is illustrative of the tensions that can develop when one or more partners transitions. Pat’s bizarre selfishness and jealousy become sort of a theme throughout the story, and it is a pleasure to reach the point where Maroon starts to stand up for himself.
There’s a point where his therapist asks if he’d rather be liked or respected, early in the book. Everett, very early in transition, is confused and conflicted, and his therapist says she hopes he reaches the point where he’d rather be respected. Those who read Bumbling Into Body Hair solely as A Trans Memoir are missing the larger point of the story, which is about Everett growing into himself, and becoming the kind of man who would rather be respected than liked, and isn’t afraid to assert himself.