Movie Review: Are you There God? It’s me Margaret.

From the <a href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/Are-You-There-God-Margaret/dp/148140993X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=28ZIJ713CVHG&keywords=are+you+there+god+it%2527s+me+margaret+book&qid=1703606807&sprefix=are+you+there+god+%252Caps%252C205&sr=8-1&_encoding=UTF8&tag=beyondnonbina-20&linkCode=ur2&linkId=eba4371ef25675dd04921910196cefe9&camp=1789&creative=9325">Are you There God Its me Margaret Judy BlumeJudy Blume novel Are You There God? It’s me Margaret.

Can you be nostalgic for things that never happened? Can you be nostalgic for a feeling that might arise in the future? To me, this ineffable feeling of having something which isn’t quite there, will never be there, but is still somehow a part of lived experience is central to what it feels like to be transgender. I “lived” the emotional female experience growing up as a boy through its lack, and acute observation and absorption of lessons directed towards girls during that time…imagining my way into feelings so strongly that they become real. There are times when this feeling is triggered, and nostalgia really is the best word, conjuring a sensation of regret, love, warmth, desire, comfort, pain, all at once…this movie did it to me.

This isn’t really a movie review.  It is a review of my feelings from watching a movie.  And isn’t that how we judge art?  That it makes us feel.  Perhaps for most people this is a popcorn movie.  But considering that I was sobbing all the way through the second half, for me it was not.  It was pure pathos.

The last time I cried like this on an airplane was when my therapist had suggested I the Tao of Pooh and watch “Goodbye Christopher Robbins”.  That movie was about the loss of innocence, something that always hits me very hard.

This was very different.  Do you remember what it was like to come of age?  To go through puberty?  I do.  I think that there won’t be many American women, perhaps others, who didn’t read Judy Bloom books when they were growing up.  I did.  I can’t say I read them all, but I sure did love them.  I loved how the books seemed to get inside my head, showing my own feelings and thoughts through the stories.

Are you There God?  It’s Me Margaret is a movie about a girl who is coming of age.  It deals with subjects such as boys, kissing, practicing kissing, getting your first period, such critical parts of our development as humans.  Even more, it wrestles with God and religion.  And finally, it explores values and the finding of the self, perhaps the deepest lesson of all.  In a way, all these other things are just a backdrop for this most essential step in life, learning who you are, what you are, your values, your how.

Margaret’s mother has my affliction, she’s a doormat, and struggles to assert her boundaries.  Like me, she is a people-pleaser.  Although the plot-leap at the end of the movie where she finally says ‘no’ to Margaret’s friend Nancy’s mother is not fully developed, this is the message.  Finding the self and asserting boundaries, but yet, the mother’s strength and coming of age has only been made possible because of the journey of her daughter.

Margaret’s friend Nancy is the unofficial leader of a tight-knit group of girls who explore these themes of boys and kissing, growing breasts, and menstruating.  Nancy is also mean.  And this meanness affects Margaret and leads Margaret to also be mean.  But in the particular instance where this comes out, Margaret realises that she is not mean, that she doesn’t want to be mean, that it isn’t the way she wishes to exist on this earth and decides that she will befriend the person she was mean to even if it costs her relationship with Nancy.

In the movie and in the book, this is played out simply through action and interaction, as no explanation is needed.

Sitting on the plane I had some 100+ movies to choose from.  I don’t usually watch movies on the plane.  I usually just sleep.  I do usually look to see if there is something good, and I thought I might watch Oppenheimer as I don’t see myself going to a theatre to see it—I have a thing about personal productivity which makes it hard for me to participate in “entertainment”…unless it is about being with someone…and somehow the passivity of movies and TV undermine the “being” part of the “with someone” experience.  But there was this film.

As a trans woman, I will never menstruate.  I will never know the feelings that the girls and women in this movie have grappled with, or that form so much of the core of the narrative structure not just of the movie, but of coming of age.  After Margaret gets her period for the first time, her mother hugs her and says “you’re a woman now,” and Margaret raises her arms in an elated shout and echoes, “I’m a woman now!”

Do I have something similar?  Does a boy have a similar feeling?  I can’t think of one.  My first orgasm?  Nothing at all like this.  It is the mystery life in a body.

I stayed with a woman not long ago who was renting a room on AirBnb.  This is one of my new favourite things, to stay with people in their homes rather than going to a hotel.  I choose roughly based on location, but mostly based on the profile and how quirky they seem.  All but one of them has become a repeat host, and one has become a friend.  This particular woman confessed to the pain of being infertile, of not being able to conceive.  She cried as she related her ‘failure’ as a woman.  She asked me to understand how devastating it was to be a woman, in a woman’s body, and to not be able to do that most natural and fundamental thing.  I so understood her.

As the youngest sibling with a big age gap to my next eldest, growing up was dominated by not being able to do things because I was too young.  So, they had fun and I watched.  I felt so capable, but I was treated like a baby.  Yes, the irony is very real.  I don’t mean to equate the devastation of this AirBnB host with not being able to drive a Go Kart, but to describe a bit the feeling of being a trans girl in a boy body, fully aware, but being forced to look at girlhood, the rites of passage, and then womanhood as if through a window.

I can remember thinking it was okay when we were just girls and boys and they were mostly better at everything: sport, academia, poise, everything.  And to be pretty!  Oh.  Like my mother, had I been a girl, I would have been an ugly duckling.  Those years from about 6^th grade through high school were hella awkward.  Before puberty, we were all just people, kind of thrown together, and our sex didn’t matter much.

But when puberty struck, and girls began to be private, to disappear, it felt a bit like being unmoored.  The hardest thing for me was to have to let go of friendships and what was like being a sister, not because I had changed, but because our bodies were changing.  I hated it.  I remember lying in bed at night dressed as a ballerina asking God to reshape my body, and I willed this feeling on my shape to give me a snatch waist and to make me as girlish as possible.  And hoping always hoping that I would wake up female.

It was always there.

In a way, it was a mercy to be in an all-boy’s school.  Being around girls in those days, especially the pretty, privileged ones that were at our sister school, was intensely dysphoria inducing.  And yet, I still wanted to be around them…and I didn’t the feeling of being excluded from “girl” things or being told I wouldn’t understand…because they couldn’t see inside me, and I couldn’t dare utter my truth.

I dated.  I was hopeless at it.  I had crushes.  Whoever was prettiest.  But I wouldn’t do anything about it, but just long from a distance, hope she would notice me.  This changed when my two best friends (boy classmates) said how attractive they thought a girl in our same year was and that each of them had plans to ask her out.  Funnily enough, one of them eventually married her.  But first, spurred on by not wanting to be outdone by my friends, I somehow ended up with her.  It was the threat of competition that made me approach, a fundamental belief in me.  

The first time we made out was the first time I really made out, and we kissed so much and so hard that I thought my jaw was broken.  And that was kind of how did it.  Looking back it was kind of funny, but it was blissful.  Tongue, mouth, being glued together.  It felt wild and magical.

What I wonder about, is the degree to which being sexual helped me to forget my dysphoria for a while.  Sex and sexuality are that powerful.  Did I really forget?  Maybe not.  Being sexual with a woman for me was also about merging.  Connecting.  That there was something about closing my eyes literally, metaphorically, and just becoming an all-feeling being.  And in those moments I am neither female nor male.  I am just a magical creature kissing and cuddling and fondling another magical creature.

Overall, however, going through puberty was as traumatic for me as it is for any baby to be born.  To enter a world, screaming, seeing this harsh, glaring light, and taking your first breath with a scream.  To hate what is happening in the body, to hate how your voice changes, to hate how you smell, to hate how you grow, to hate the emergence of the Adam’s Apple.  It is to feel as if you are torn from your own self-image.  You cannot pretend anymore.  As a trans-woman who knows, going through male puberty is the worst thing I have ever experienced.  It is a desperate, horrific experience, one that left me numb, so sad, just so sad.  

And no, so I won’t have a period.  I won’t have had those experiences.  But I will have had the sorrow and have felt it with intensity.  To know that you can never be the ‘you’ that you wanted to be.  When my bestie cut me verbally by saying that I had only been a woman for a year, but she had been for a lifetime, what she couldn’t know is that a trans woman, whether she is still hidden or is out, lives life with a different experience, but one that is no less painful.  To be always on the outside looking in.

I am so grateful for the handful of women in my life who have adopted me as a little sister.  And I don’t refer to their age or mine, but more that I have so much to learn and experience and that they might teach me.  And I good part of it has nothing to do with actual lessons or even explicit feelings.  It is more just about living a bond.  A bond that holds through life experiences, that is there in a particular way when things happen.  

Female friendship is very different from male friendship.  It is easier.  That isn’t what we think of it, now is it?  I think we think of male friendship is easy because it is bloke-ish and doesn’t cover the same emotional landscape.  It is quieter.  Female friendship is not quiet.  It can be quite complex and raucous and at times even painful, but somehow it is easier because it fits better.  It’s like dancing salsa, when you and your partner are tethered at the groin.  You can just move so much more effortlessly if there is a solid core anchor.  Male friendship is more like two people dancing without touching.  Superficially easy, but actually much harder to make deep or to make sustainable.

This movie made me think about growing up, and about never experiencing menstruation.  When women tell me about what a pain in the ass it is, that it is gross, and that having a vagina is hard, and sometimes gross, and that the ups and downs of the body are hard to deal with…or others who try to say I shouldn’t have sexual reassignment surgery, it is hard for me to hear any of that.  The pain and everything else is nothing to me compared to what it means to be closer to what I wished I was born as.  I can’t play catch up.  There is no such thing.  I can’t pretend to be something I am not, or pretend to experience something I will never be able to do.  And in that sense, although dysphoria is only seeming to get better, I don’t think it will ever go away completely.

In the end, the women who dissuade me leave me feeling as if they are testing me, seeing if my commitment is real, whether I am willing to sacrifice enough.  To me, the increased vulnerability is part of the prize.  How can you begin to approximate the female experience without experiencing it, without understanding it?

Vulnerability is strength.

Female anthems sung by such artists as Morgan Saint Jean address this, how women are strong because of their vulnerability, how they have to put up with so much more than men, and how they get no credit for what they do or have to fight for things that men take for granted.  It is so true.  As a man, I always hired women or worked with women as professional advisors because I figured they had to be better at what they did to reach a certain level, to have an equivalent reputation.  My life experience has not shown me that I was wrong.

In other words, the challenges life is throwing at me for being trans: my first experiences with aggression from random strangers forcing me to think about whether it is safe to walk in certain places, at certain times.  Having a job offer rescinded because I am trans is just so similar to what women at work face every day.  Even the idea that I would want to sleep with men because I am a trans woman.  I have to fight all the time.  Even just the way people look at me.

I met a woman the other day who I hope get to like more and more over time, but she was echoing my feelings about men, and life as a woman.  It just makes you want to beat men.  I mean, literally.  And I have begun to realise that I can tolerate a man’s company if he is on his knees.  I can tolerate a man’s company if he is submissive to me.  I can tolerate a man’s company is he is respectful and subservient to the point of negating his own needs to fulfil mine.  And I still don’t understand why a man should feel that way, that so many men do, but it sure feels right.  And yes, I do believe that the true alpha man, the true men who are worth admiration, are the ones who are on their knees, literally, figuratively, not to get something, but in genuine service.

“Getting a woman” for such a man is not owning her, possessing her, it is that he lays himself naked in every way before her, and that she chooses him, that she accepts to receive from him, that she honours him.  Men that rail against women’s power to choose or who mistake conquest as something to aspire to, fail utterly to understand that to capture a wild thing is to kill its beauty.  And you know what?  All women are wild.  And the strong man, the self-possessed man, is the one who serves her wildness, who even encourages it, but is always there because she wants him there, because she has chosen him.  The alpha man is the one who not only has the strength to let go, but who never tries to grasp or hold in the first place.

I haven’t read Judy Bloom books since I was a teenager.  They helped me cope with dysphoria, because her writing style really gets into the heads and hearts of her characters, most of whom are girls coming of age in one way or another.  I feel compelled to read them now, maybe in part because what I am going through is a kind of second puberty, at least on a physical level.  The other reason is that they make me think and feel, but most of all, they make me cry.