Lily Dorstewitz, Senior Photographer
While at Yale, I transitioned from being a pretty, long-haired Division I female cross country runner who wore pearl earrings to, by senior year, being a muscular man with a thick neck and robust jawline who smoked cigars at the Owl Shop and got tattoos. Being a transgender man has always felt a bit confusing to me, as I’ve never really felt at home in queer culture. “Queer” is an umbrella term that denotes any kind of identity under the LGBTQ+ flag, or any kind of subculture related to being gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, pansexual or nonbinary. People who embrace queerness as a part of their daily life usually pontificate — and rightfully so — about the various injustices we feel as a population: ranging from transphobia in the workplace, to transphobic relatives, to issues in bed and confusion about what gender we want to assign ourselves.
On the surface, I should be queer, as I did, indeed, change genders and sleep, impartially, with any gender available — be they man, woman or any of the hundreds of identities in between. What kind of person I take into my bed bears no significance to me whatsoever — as long as they are a kind, loving, consensual and respectful person.
But I believe though, with deep fervency, that there are a few things holding me back from embracing queerness.
The first is my childhood. I mostly grew up overseas, in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Russia and Jordan. Things that would terrify many Americans — like the Russian intelligence service surveilling me and my Dadon runs in Moscow, or Jordanian intelligence following me through the streets of Amman — became normal facets of daily life. It was common, walking out of the American embassy in Moscow solo at night, to find an FSB agent with his Motorola cell phone flipped open to film whoever was entering or exiting our doors. During my childhood in Russia, it was also common to make casual acquaintances with the children of oligarchs — and these oligarchs could have, for all I know, blown up oil fields or killed rivals with a Kalashnikov. This chaotic childhood left me open to risky experiences and aware of a world in which countries spy on and bomb each other. Queer culture both at Yale and beyond in America seems too sheltered of a place to accommodate my prior experiences with homicidal tycoons and intrusive foreign intelligence agencies. I find that the queer spaces I enter are filled with loving, morally righteous people who strive to make America a more LGBTQ-friendly destination, but I also feel like these people lack a general awareness of the crazy-yet-banal atrocities that happen outside of their bubble.
The second thing holding me back from being totally queer is the fact that I pass, astonishingly well, as a full-grown man. Most people clock me as a gay man, but I am very much bisexual, for whatever that’s worth. Nonetheless, my square jaw, inordinately thick eyebrows, deep voice and utterly muscular stature peg me as a man who looks like he was very much born male from birth.
I was recently at a bar in the Shenandoah Valley where a customer I told I was trans simply didn’t believe me and regarded me as suspicious to their friends. The look on their face, when they heard I was trans, was one of utmost terror; their mouth dropped, stupefied in disbelief. Other men who find out I am transgender become openly scared. The fact that I have passed so well as a man for almost 10 years now makes me live my life in a way in which I rarely think about my transgender identity at all during the day, except for the occasional primary care appointment where I have to disclose my history of taking hormones to a doctor. Aside from that, my brain space is dedicated to thinking about literature, my next love interest, playing soccer, making money and taking care of my family. It’s not dedicated to being trans. As a result, I’m starting to view my gender transition in 2015 not as something that happened as a physical change and altercation to my body, but as an event that I can merely leave beholden to the past, not something that informs my current moment. I act, for all intents and purposes, in a very cisgender way — and this is not to demean any queer person who doesn’t pass, or put them down. I want, with all of my heart, for them to be just as okay as I am.
The third thing that prevents me from being queer is my parents. I hesitate to talk about them because they are lovely and loving creatures at heart, but they are very much both straight denizens of this world and act very cisgender. And they raised my two sisters and me with tales of foreign policy at dinnertime, and stories that slowly convinced us that some wars were truly just and that shelling out money to weapons companies could be the right thing to do in certain scenarios. I would say that my dad is a foreign policy hawk — meaning that he wants to lock up whistleblowers like Edward Snowden with all of his heart, while my mother, a former ambassador, is, despite her authoritative accolade, a bit more gentle at heart.
But the kind of family environment I grew up in offered me a nuanced view of the world — a world in which Raytheon became less of an evil company and a world in which F-35 fighter jets could be seen as cool. This political ideology vastly differs from the peace-mongering that many queer people embrace — and while I believe in world peace with every inch of my skin, I can’t shake off the upbringing that my parents served to us on Russian and Saudi plates.
The fourth and last thing that prevents me from being fully queer is my disdain for political correctness, cancel culture and general labeling of people. I don’t believe in political correctness. I think people should be able to speak their minds without hesitation; I believe that people should be raunchy, act crazy and make lewd jokes. I also don’t believe in cancel culture, nebulous as that phrase is — I think canceling people at every turn does a disservice to society. I instead believe in accountability culture — where we understand that humans can make mistakes, but hold themselves accountable for them in very profound ways. I also don’t like the relentless assigning of labels to people — I don’t believe in only befriending the type of person who fits into your category of gender or sexuality. I am friends with drug dealers, Ivy League doctors, Navy intelligence analysts, tortured poets and bankers. Only beholding yourself to one community seems a bit silly.
These reasons for me not being queer do, at the end of the day, make me feel incredibly lonely and isolated. I feel like there is no other transgender man out there like me and no other queer person who shares these same reasons for not being comfortable in queer spaces.
Despite all of these things though, I still — with all of the obviousness in the world — wish the best for queer people and want to uplift them at every turn. I fight hard for trans rights, as I sit on a political board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia and advocate fiercely for LGBTQ+ rights in the Washington Blade. When I meet a queer person who is struggling, I want them to find solace, happiness and peace with their identity. My lack of queerness shouldn’t stop the fact that queer culture should continue to thrive without limits and, until, one day, all of our needs and desires are met.
But until then, I will still be smoking cigars and reminiscing on my time being surveilled by Jordanian intelligence.
ISAAC AMEND graduated in 2017 from Timothy Dwight College. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s “Gender Revolution” documentary. In his free time, he is a columnist for the Washington Blade. He also serves on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. Contact him at isaac.amend35@gmail.com.