Transmaculinity has a few cornerstones.
There are a few key things you can do to navigate the waters of what it means to be a man. You can beg your GP to give you access to hormone therapy, you can opt to have your breasts removed in an intense surgery with a 4-6 week recovery. You can take supplements to inspire your chin to bloom with hair, attend the gym as if it’s a church, change your name, change your pronouns, change your gender-marker on your passport. That all sounds like a lot of work, though.
You could choose a much easier route—make like me and just get really into 70’s jazz-rock band Steely Dan.
I’ve always liked music the way that a boy typically likes music. Snobbishly, unabashedly, with little interest for sophistication but plenty of interest in historical context, fun facts, and musicality. Buzz word, buzz word, I don’t do long concert queues. I have an anti-static record cleaning brush. When I tell people about the bands and music I like, they often respond with ‘never heard of them.’ The pride I feel, the groundswell of ‘I am better than you’ that fills my rotten heart. It’s unlike anything else on the planet.
Steely Dan are the final frontier of ‘dad’ bands. A 70’s outfit made up primarily of Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, and a host of belaboured studio musicians—Steely Dan hasn’t released an album since the early 2000’s (but still regularly tour, even after the loss of Becker in 2017), but their status as an intricate, obsessive, and fascinating band has only grown over the last few years. I could feel it swarming around me, from listening parties of their albums back to back in my native UK, to walking into a cinema foyer and finding myself complimenting the teenager working the counter who was playing all of Can’t Buy a Thrill (1972) from top to bottom, I knew a resurgence was upon us, and I’d never really heard of a girl listening to them, so I was all in.
I do also happen to like whimsical, bubbly things. I dressed in pastels and wore pretty skirts for a very long time. I fundmentally understood why I was not registered as a boy but I desperately wanted to be perceived outside of the feminine signifiers I was clothed in. I did this by feigning an interest in video games, wearing trousers with my school uniform as a teenager, and talking about sex in a comically embarrassing, Superbad type of way. I knew nothing about what it meant to be a boy, except when it came to being a boy in the toxic masculine sense, a sense that gave me pause and shame.
I didn’t have a cool dad. I had a nice dad, a hardworking dad, but he was never cool. I barely saw him as a child. He came home with plaster caked to his head after a long day of construction work. He was a man but he wasn’t a tastemaker. I didn’t really have any male influences who matched up to the dreamy masculinity I revered so much, just my fellow music-snob of a mother who’s friend group consisted of men. Bald men. Tired, overworked, British men. I was set up from the beginning for an acerbic approach to the world, to culture. As a kid, I listened to Kate Bush and Madness and showed an interest in guitar music from a young age. Boys liked guitars, and boys liked music that upsets their mum’s ears, and boys could play instruments. I wanted to do all of those things, to consume anything that would lift my cultural status up.
The internet was my teacher. It’s where my enlightened sense of self developed, and where I allowed myself to find comfort within a masculinity I didn’t realise was growing stronger and stronger, enveloping my identity and coming to a head when I ended up a spliff-smoking-bald-headed-dyke with an itching for testosterone and counter-culture.
The culture of online music snobbery came to a beautiful peak in 2016, a year in which Radiohead had just released their first new album in 5 years, and Anthony ‘theneedledrop’ Fantano was scooting further and further out of obscurity and directly towards a higher plane of cultural significance. I’d been interested in folk and indie music for the better half of a decade, but the internet taught me about how fun it was to claim superiority just by being able to correctly identify some progressive shoegaze band and their 16th album. Although the culture was growing, the culture was mostly occupied by cisgender men who hid inside Reddit forums, who only really listened to music made by men. It wasn’t really a welcoming space, because it wasn’t interested in including women. I kept to myself, or I took my obsessively researched knowledge to the real world.
It is gauche, really—to be a man and to claim a higher understanding of music than women, it’s outplayed and outdated, and it’s misogynistic. These are facts that I am stating, and yet…I made it to 2022 and would still find myself slating the girls I would date for their uninteresting and derivative interest in Taylor Swift, in Lorde. I was better, apparently. I wasn’t sure why, but my festering toxic masculinity told me that not only was I better, but I was smarter.
An interest in complex music does not maketh a man, but it can maketh an asshole.
Steely Dan are a band that are primarily understood as complex, as pioneers of studio perfection. They spent most of the 70’s engineering the most beautifully sequenced jazz rock of their time, employing session musician after session musician to enable their vision. They met at art school in the 1960’s, smashed out 7 records (not without extensive studio conflict) before the 80’s began, and took a hiatus due to addiction and exhaustion. In the 2000’s, they were reluctantly inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That’s just under 40 years of effort. That’s 40 years of notoriety. That’s 40 years of wielding a sex toy as their name, and 40 years of trauma for drummer after bassist after guitarist.
Famously, Becker and Fagen were also eternal curmudgeons with very little patience or interest in pleasing the masses with niceties. I’ve never met either man, so I can’t tell you of their true identities, but I can tell you that every interview clip or award show acceptance video I’ve seen of them has been either unsettlingly cold or sneering.
I like the way their music sounds. It’s funny and satirical (I like 1976’s The Fez, which is either about the life of a Shriner, or insisting on wearing a condom), and they can get mean (1973’s Show Biz Kids, for example). I think that I’ve always been drawn to the concept of the aloof artist, and I found that in the core members of The Dan. As aloof in their words as they seemed to be in one to one and press interactions, it was tantalising. Being socialised as a woman often meant that there is a benefit to hiding in politeness. It’s what you’re meant to do. Girls are meant to be nice, aren’t they?
Would I have to be an asshole to be my truest, most masculine self?
There’s a coolness to smoking a cigarette and washing it down with a double shot of dark liquor. That’s the Steely Dan sound. It’s cool and it’s mean, and I can completely disconnect from my own reality when I’m wrapped up in stories of unattainable women and down on their luck men. Escapism can come in many forms, and I don’t feel as eaten alive by my own uncertainty when there’s a sick guitar solo from a dude named Skunk occupying my headphones.
It seemed to be universal that the men I admired, or the men I was scared of, liked this band as much as I did. I was as much of a man as them. I liked the same music they did. I held the same values about art, creativity.
But I’m not a man.
I’m not a man like Becker was, or like Fagen is. I’m not a curmudgeon, I’m nice. I’m masculine, I’m a boy, and I’m trans—but can’t hide inside of my toxicity, however hidden it is or isn’t. I’m not a man if to be a man means to switch off from the reality of my actions.
Do we need to cling onto unkindness to truly engage in our authentic selves? Do we need to sneer and snark at the popular, easy things? Before I knew it, I had taught myself pride via a high and mighty sense of self, and I was letting a dead man and his shitty friend do so.
I wish the UK health service would push me to the top of the gender affirming care waiting list so that I could simply just enjoy the moody sounds of Aja without subjecting myself to my own ridiculous psychoanalysis. Maybe when I get my first dose of testosterone, I’ll understand Chappell Roan from the outside. For now, I’ll keep fighting the good fight. I’ll interpret the music and my fandom in whatever way I want. I’ll liberate it from boring, angry, grumpy old men. 1977’s Josie is about a kick-ass trans woman, and the band name is a reference to testosterone bottom growth. It’s true because I said it, and that’s what interpretation is all about.