Heed the Dolphin Queen

“I’M GONNA NEED you to to search ‘sexy beasts’ on Netflix and watch the first 2 minutes,” I texted my friend Chris a couple of weeks ago, “just where they explain the premise.”

I’ll save you the trouble and just tell you that the premise is, people go on blind dates wearing bonkers amounts of non-human prosthetics.

If I were creating a time capsule for the post-apocalyptic A.I. beings in Love Me, a 2024 film about bots pretending to be us—the pre-apocalyptic humans who pretended to be whatever played best on social media—I would include the above screenshot. Maybe I’d include the whole show.

I watch a lot of reality television: cooking competitions, because I like watching chefs have a hard time doing their own job (🤷🏻‍♂️); singing and dancing shows, because I like watching people sing and dance; most Netflix dating shows, the Love Is Blinds and Too Hot to Handles of the world, because I apparently like watching straight people make terrible decisions.

I tell Chris about all of these, but he would never watch them. He hates reality TV. So you can imagine how proud I was to hear that I’d finally found one that, after he checked out the first two minutes as asked, he could not turn off.

It is…jaw-droppingly mesmerizing to see two strangers make first-date (and, for those who aren’t eliminated, second-date) conversation wearing the face of a beaver and a leopard. Or a panda and an alien. Or a rhino and, in the case of the woman who chooses him after he beats out a dinosaur and a scarecrow for her affections, a dolphin. (Sorry. Spoiler.) Some of the participants mention that they feel looser, freer, more empowered dressed as these characters. Lots of drag queens say the same, and indeed the subjects of Love Is Blind, where strangers meet only on opposite sides of a wall before getting full-blown engaged, constantly tell their invisible betrotheds they’ve never been so vulnerable, so open, so safe.

Last week, I was seized with the incessant, agonizing self-judgment that I should be someone else. Before I transitioned—when I was wearing “lady” prosthetics, as it were—I don’t ever remember thinking that. Since I started transitioning, I’m not sure there’s been a single day, in the last eight years, that I haven’t thought it at least once. Last Monday, I was paralyzed by all-over, physio-emotional, post-traumatic pain. On Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I was sucked into ever-deepening anxiety spirals. In an average week, I spend at least one or two days seized by suffering, but last week it was almost all of them. Like it was before I started my meds.

We’ve all got our reasons for feeling more comfortable behind walls and masks. I’ve got my mine, not least of which are sex abuse and the systematic oppression of trans kind. Both were, and are, torturous conditions I can’t control. For most of my life, I tried to change myself when I couldn’t change those situations, then blamed myself for failing. When I’m in pain, I often still do.

When the makeup comes off on Sexy Beasts, the contestants are thrilled with the looks of the person they chose based on personality—every person the producers cast could be, or actually is, some sort of model. We don’t see any of their journeys after that. But on Love Is Blind (which also includes a very narrow range of physical types), when the newly engaged couples finally meet in person, many of them fight like dogs within weeks, or even days. Occasionally when they each other for the first time, suddenly exposed, they bicker within minutes.

Saturday evening, after chastising myself all week for being the me that must be the cause of all my suffering, I texted Chris that the life I’m working for and that I want—a great life—feels impossible. As in, not possible for me. “Like instead of trying I should just lie here watching tv until I run out of food and starve to death,” I texted.

But eventually, I ordered Indian food, and got on my bike to go find ice cream.

Standing in the freezer section of a gas station liquor store, beat down by brainwashing that a person “ruined” by incest and unacceptable identities, honest and authentic to what capitalism considers a fault—a person like me—can’t build a life that’s better than barely survivable, I was suddenly smacked with the desire to at least try.

It freaks me out to say this, but I am more firmly rooted in a life rife with beauty and integrity (freaked-out squeal!) than I have ever been. Already more than I could have imagined. It’s possible this rootedness created more space for those long-held feelings of helplessness and hopelessness to emerge. As my former therapist Monty used to say, feelings are like dogs. If you keep them caged for a long time, they tend to come out snarling.

I’ve made progress with these particular emotions before. And as with most (all?) parts of healing, I’ve had setbacks with them as well. So while I have certainly not fallen into a pit of self-condemning despair for the last time—I tripped into one like four hours after I finished the first draft of this—right now I’m feeling resourced by faith, in exactly who I am.

And that it doesn’t limit my possibilities. But creates more of them.

Anyway, even the superpowerful A.I. in Love Me run themselves ragged trying to be someone else. I think about the amount of time and effort that went into the sexy beasts’ disguises, the ones that freed them to act more like themselves, which took two stylists three hours to put on and another two hours to remove every day. And I remind myself how much energy I can free up, with self-acceptance, to pursue the previously unimaginable.