On T Cooper’s Early Meditations On Being A Trans Man, Real Man Adventures

The pop culture of five years ago is barely gone, still too recent for assessment, let alone retrospective; the pop culture of twenty years ago is history, distant enough from the present day that we can contextualize it within the era in which it existed. But the pop culture of twelve years ago is baffling, uncanny, affronting. If the past is a foreign country then the recent-ish past is a protectorate that you don’t need a passport to visit but nevertheless insists on its sovereignty.

Real Man Adventures is a memoir written by T Cooper and published by McSweeney’s in 2013. The intervening thirteen years have seen the US rocket past the “transgender tipping point” directly into a far-right-driven cultural backlash against a nationwide tolerance of trans people that, unless I missed it, never really materialized.

It’s unlikely I missed it. By 2013 I was already a card-carrying trans man myself. It feels important to add that context here, that I was a Member of the Community at the time T Cooper was writing about his experience as a trans man.* This is the kind of personal information that Cooper himself expresses ambivalence about sharing throughout his book.

That tension within Cooper, that he resents feeling compelled to write about being a trans man but he is, nevertheless, writing an entire book about it, is the crux of the project. It’s the source of some of the most interesting insights Cooper has—into himself and into society with respect to trans people more broadly—while, in other sections, that same reticence to actually be writing this specific book produces less satisfactory results.

Trans people hadn’t yet accumulated enough basic rights or cultural saturation to stoke different, grander anxieties for Cooper to opine on.

For examples of the latter, see the multiple six-word chapters about his early life (the entire chapter on his college years: “Guys dug me. I mostly declined.”) or “The Sex Chapter,” which contains no primary text and only one footnote, a conversation with his wife where he announces he will not be talking about sex in the book except to declare that he’s “far and away the best sex [she’s] ever had, ever.” Obviously he’s being facetious, but here we run into that twelve year gap between publication and the present again. Would that kind of thing have seemed funny at the time, or maybe a clever way to avoid a topic either too personal or too fraught for out-group consumption? Or would the choice to avoid a topic as pertinent as sex in a book all about what it means to be a “real man” have appeared as inexplicable then as it does now?

At other points, that same ambivalence Cooper returns to in writing a book about transness at all, and his transness in particular, is by turns compelling and prescient. Real Man Adventures isn’t broken up into chapter-length sections of narrative, but rather brief, discursive essays. I’m tempted to call Cooper’s voice throughout “bloggy,” but that may be more reflective of the time in which the book was released, when there were simply more online publications featuring writers working in a similarly punchy tone.

A few of these essays touch on the double-edged sword of visibility, how more people knowing what a trans person actually is can result in both greater understanding—in the macro, society-wide sense and in the micro, “your aunt knows what the hell you’re talking about” sense—and also a greater threat. The savage rape and murder of Brandon Teena is still fresh in Cooper’s mind, and the story of Teena’s death and the impact it has on how Cooper moves through the world is the topic of one of the book’s more somber chapters.

That this kind of interpersonal violence is the looming fear woven throughout the book is striking. Cooper can’t be blamed for not predicting the political backlash against trans rights, because many of the rights currently under attack by conservatives weren’t yet in place when he was writing the book.** Trans people hadn’t yet accumulated enough basic rights or cultural saturation to stoke different, grander anxieties for Cooper to opine on. Another reason the thirteen  year gap between this book’s publication and today makes it difficult to review; I want to engage with it as a work of nonfiction rather than a time capsule.

Here’s a guy writing about wanting to, more than anything, move through the world as a guy: as a husband, a father, a pit bull owner, a writer. Who doesn’t quite know where to rank “trans man” in that list of identities, or who sometimes wishes he could rank it lower on the list. He’s writing at the last possible moment before—even for a guy who evinces a desire to be an unremarkable suburban dad—American politics will make it impossible to exist without an acute awareness of one’s transness.

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*Stylized as “transman” throughout his book, likewise “transwoman” and “transperson”; the house style on these things is ever-evolving. There was once a brief time where trans*, with the asterisk, was in vogue. Fortunately we’re not subjected to that particular artifact in Real Man Adventures.

**For one significant example, by 2013 the Affordable Care Act had been passed, but the effects of its mandate that insurers cover transgender healthcare were only beginning to be felt.