I'm writing—repeatedly crying—at 36,000 ft. After 13 years on testosterone, I treasure the tears that flow freely.
There was snow on the ground when I woke up in Brooklyn this morning; more snow than I've seen accumulate on our street in years. I woke to my kid pulling back the curtain to show me the flurries. The snow-reflected sunlight filled my bedroom. Could have been a slow, cozy morning at home with coffee, cartoons, and the paper. But she's now at her mom's making snow creatures, and after two hours on the tarmac, I'm finally a third of the way to San Francisco to visit my girlfriend for the week.
So, old friend
Fill me in slow, old friend
Start with hello, old friend
I want the when, where, and how.
— Charley, Merrily We Roll Along
I've been listening to the new Broadway cast recording of Merrily We Roll Along on repeat for hours. (OK, months.) I pressed play on the overture while boarding this morning's plane. (IYKYK, that opener is a VIBE.) Flight already 30 minutes delayed, functioning on too-little sleep, I thought a drumroll and some horns might put some pep in my step. The airport coffee failed its job, and I had a newsletter to write. Plus, I like the drama of a full orchestra underscoring something otherwise banal.
I brought Casey Parks' 2021 memoir for the flight. It's the treat that awaits me at the end of this writing session. (Will I finish in time?)1 It is a big, beautiful hardback full of earnest adolescent inquiry, Southern grace, familial complexity, and the kind of queerness that subverts right on the surface.
Casey had a big week, she published an substantive article in the Washington Post giving face and context to the crushing wave of anti-trans legislation. On the same day, ACLU lawyer and tireless trans advocate Chase Strangio’s opinion essay published in The New York Times. Both important, urgent reads.
I reread these stories while Merrily continued to play on my headphones. I started to daydream about the nearly three decades that have flown by since my first plane ride to San Francisco. Oh, how many lives I’ve lived since then.
Every few years I seem to fall in sync with a different Sondheim show. Company’s meditations on marriage got me through a divorce. Into the Woods' interrogation of fairy tale morality and giants in the sky helped me survive existential pandemic angst. I'm in my Merrily era now: rolling back through time to figure out how I got here, how we all got here.
For the Sondheim newbies and/or musical theater-avoidant, here's the Merrily TL;DR:
The show bombed when it originally opened in 1981; now it feels nearly-perfect and well-timed. It is introspective, deeply moving, and, just like the newly released book The Other Significant Others, positions friendship as the center of one's life. All accompanied by a brassy, thrilling score.
Merrily We Roll Along tracks the friendship between composer-turned-producer Franklin Shepard, lyricist Charley Kringas, and writer Mary Flynn—told in reverse. You meet the trio at their lowest moments later in life and then rewind time to reveal how they got there. Every few songs, a modern greek-style chorus helps the audience keep time by announcing the years while singing the show’s central, and oft-repeated question:
"How did you get to be here, what was the moment?"
Lately, I've had this recurring anxious fantasy that one day I'll be forced to stand trial to defend why I transitioned from female to male—"How does it happen? Where is the moment? How did you ever get there from here?"—and that I wouldn't have an answer. Or not one sufficient enough to keep the M on my ID and my testosterone prescription. I don't ascribe the ‘born in the wrong body’ explanation to myself, my cultural anthropology degree keeps me from being that essentialist. (I don’t criticize those that do, to each their own story.) But, I can tell you with complete confidence that there were countless moments, over many years, I chose to ignore my body and heart. And know that, with absolute certainty, I'm much happier now. That should be enough.
Part of what is fueling the recent anti-trans attacks is the promotion of a social contagion theory, labeled ‘rapid-onset gender dysphoria’. The theory/panic argues that a terrifying, contagious "craze" of questioning one's gender emerges suddenly and spreads largely amongst adolescent girls. (Never mind adolescence is typically characterized by questioning everything.)
I suppose I was one of those teenagers moms lose sleep about. Except, I was in high school in the 1990s, almost twenty years before the DSM-5 introduced "gender dysphoria" as a concept. What was a well-intentioned diagnostic effort to move away from “gender identity disorder” (a condition) to a form of “dysphoria” (a feeling) had the unforeseen side effect of giving rise to a hysteria over a rapid-onset variant.
My high school in suburban Northern Virginia was fine, but by no means a welcoming environment to come out as gay or lesbian. I was the only out student in my school. They pointedly denied my petition to organize a Gay-Straight Alliance. Transitioning was definitely far beyond of the realm of imagination.
But, I was one of the lucky teens. Through my gay dad I had exposure to LGBT culture, news, and community outside our town. I learned there was an organization in Washington, D.C. for kids like me: The Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League. Before I could drive myself, one of my parents would drop me Saturday mornings at the nearest Metro station so that I could attend a support group.
At SMYAL, I finally made queer friends my own age. We did normal teenage things. We talked about our crushes, traded music, and eventually started skipping the actual organized youth group to just hang at the nearby McDonald’s. I met my first girlfriend.
We also did things atypical of our suburban classmates. We were ambitious, righteous activists. One of us joined SMYAL’s youth board. I sat on the steering committee of COLAGE, the national org for kids with gay families. We attended LGBT conferences. A few of us spoke at the first DC first Youth Pride Day rally. We regularly socialized with the leaders of all the national LGBT organizations. We were naive teenagers, perhaps, but we also optimistic and knew we were at the epicenter of a huge historical moment for queer activism.
Of my core group of a dozen-plus friends from those years, all but one transitioned. We we were aware that something extraordinary was happening, but it wasn’t a fear of a gender-changing virus. It was the euphoric sense that we lived at a time when some of us could make choices to align our bodies with our spirits.
Unfortunately, despite all of the people around me who were transitioning, I didn’t believe I could make that choice for myself. I worried constantly that listening to my heart meant rejecting the feminist teachings that I held dear. That even just wanting my body to change would be an affront to the entire lesbian community. I didn’t invent this concern, I heard women around me bemoaning the loss of butches, and shunning these new men ruining their women-only spaces.
There was nothing rapid about my transition. It took me the longest in our group; more than fifteen years rolled by from the time I made my first transgender friend to when I started taking hormones. Because the world was, still is, hostile to trans people.
What particularly irks me about the social contagion fear-mongering is that it is rooted in the belief that being trans is a new phenomenon. My friends and I are the same age as the author, Abigail Shrier, who did the most to spread this harmful hypothesis. She literally wrote a book about it. We were in high school at the same time. The difference is that TikTok wasn’t around to document my friends gathered at the American Boyz or True Spirit gatherings. So she, you, didn’t know we existed then. And too many believe that we don’t exist now. Or don’t deserve to.
Twenty five years later, my old SMYAL friends are scattered across the country. I wish I had stayed in better touch. Looking back, there isn’t one moment to point to, no dramatic falling outs, but rather a series of life transitions that led us all down diverging roads, to different cities, to jobs of all stripes, to children, to chosen families.
I hadn't realized until today that Sondheim named Merrily's greek chorus moments "transitions." Like a symphony full of movements, he enumerated them, starting with the show's fourth song, "First Transition," and counting all the way through, until the penultimate number, "Seventh Transition," which sets up the gut-wrenching finale, "Our Time,” where the trio meets on a rooftop under the stars.
It was reliving this last scene that has me sobbing in the sky.
Feel the flow
Hear what's happening:
We're what's happening
Don't you know?
We're the movers and we're the shapers
We're the names in tomorrow's papers
Up to us, man, to show 'em
We were so young. We were energetic. We really believed that we were on the brink, that the ground was shifting. And it was. It did. The DSM was updated, marriage equality passed, so many things we fought for changed for the better. Many things truly did get easier for LGBT people.
And now, the right-wing is trying to roll back the clock on us. They are trying to reassert binary, black-and-white thinking, to restrict choice, and legislate away nuance.
What Sondheim knew, that the legislators of Florida, Tennessee, Utah, Iowa and Abigail Shrier do not, is that life is nothing but transitions. Life is nothing without transitions.
At key emotional moments throughout Merrily, the central trio leans into each other to say:
Here's to us.
Who's Like us.
Damn few.
Here's to us,
xx Kyle
This is just a draft.
(Right.)
Probably stinks.
(Right.)
Haven't had the time to do a polish.
(Will you sing!)Right.
Who wants to live in New York?
Who wants to worry, the dirt, the noise, the heat?
Who wants the garbage cans clanging in the street?
Suddenly I do....
—Charley (and Frank), Merrily We Roll Along
When the laptops had to go away I got a few chapters in. Reading Casey is a complete pleasure: “…I longed to tell my mom that I’d signed up for OkCupid and had spent the last few weeks emailing a girl in San Francisco something like love notes.”
Hi Kyle. Found you here through the GUT. Beautiful writing! I'm a musician and have been a Sondheim fan since high school (early 2000s) when I bought Company on CD and listened to it over and over on my discman. I only discovered Merrily about ten years later in my late twenties and it hit me over the head with its truth and beauty. My husband and I watched a filmed theatre production from London (circa 2012?) and not knowing the story, I sat there after Our Time and bawled. (Also i assume youve seen the film doc about its creation? So good!) Didn't know there was a new recording so I'm off to listen to it! I love your story of coming out and transitioning, thank you for sharing this.🧡 I'm in Canada and I feel somewhat protected from all of the anti-trans rhetoric and policies in the US, but there are politicians here with similar views and I know that protection is super-fragile and I need to pay attention.
“...life is nothing but transitions. Life is nothing without transitions.” Thank you for marking this truth and beauty.