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Content warning: This article contains mentions of suicidal ideation. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to be connected to a Suicide & Crisis Lifeline counselor at no cost to you.
We stood in a junkyard, deep in the exurbs of Indianapolis. Tanned, muscular pyrotechnics guys and stunt riggers weaved between the skeletons of picked-over cars to do their work: final checks on the ramps, detonators, and vehicles that would be critical to the day’s mayhem. There were fire trucks, police on standby, and a small crowd of curious locals on folding chairs huddled by the junkyard office.
It was the autumn of 2017 and I was the executive producer of a show called Too Stupid to Die, a Jackass homage starring a lovable stunt crew performing high-stakes backyard pratfalls for laughs. We had A, B, and C stunt days. C-stunts were harmless rat traps, electric-shock devices, and crotch punches. B-stunts required advanced safety approval and a medic but only risked minor injury: a swim with a baby alligator in a kiddie pool, for instance. A-stunts required a full stunt team, ambulances, and medical evacuation teams, as well as on-site safety personnel. This was an A-stunt day.
We had a showrunner, director, and full crew, but the show still felt like my baby. I had found Zach Holmes, the cast’s ringleader, months earlier in a viral video and stalked him relentlessly, hoping he’d trust me to turn his self-filmed stunts into a “real” show. Being a part of Too Stupid to Die was a dumb dream, but it was a dream come true nonetheless. I’d become close to the cast in the months we’d spent preparing and filming. They affectionately called me Stunt Dad. I’d gotten to know their families. I loved them. And that day, I was scared for them.
I paced the junkyard, clawing at my beard and feeling the familiar Brillo-pad roughness beneath my fingernails. Zach would be jumping a motorcycle off a ramp, and with his heavy frame, the physics of a fall were never in his favor. Meggan, the sole woman in the cast, was going to be driving a car through an exploding RV. It was technically an easy stunt and quite safe—except for the gruesome worst case where she’d get trapped in the RV when the gas bombs were detonated and suffocate from burns inside her lungs.
Twice that day, I wandered away from set, found a private spot hidden behind piles of cars, free of oil-slicked mud and broken glass, and knelt to cross myself and pray that my friends would make it safely through the day. The first prayer was answered. Meggan launched her muscle car through the RV so fast that she overshot the crash zone and slammed into a school bus the stunt team had parked as a backstop. The car and her helmet were wrecked. She was okay.
As I walked back from my second prayer, my wife called. A documentary she directed had been accepted into the SXSW Film & TV Festival, the culmination of thousands of hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars of our money, and her relentless passion. I celebrated on the phone with her, walked back to set, and watched Zach mount a miniature motorcycle and launch it, semi-successfully, through a wall of fire before landing in a tumbling crash. (He was fine.)
I drove back to my hotel as the sun set over soy fields and billboards for Amish shops, telling my two sons over the phone about all the cool stuff their dad had been up to. The day was as close to perfection as I had experienced in a long time, yet it didn’t seem at all unfitting that the morning had started as most of my mornings started on the road: I got up an hour earlier than I needed to and exercised my arms and core until I couldn’t move. I ate a toxic mix of sausage and pineapple from the hotel buffet for breakfast, carb-free and too hard to digest to eat much of. And after I brushed my teeth, I took a long look at myself in the bathroom mirror and sent myself into the day by voicing, aloud, my standard affirmation: “You fat fuck.”
The human mind has an incredible ability to ignore obvious, screaming problems when the solutions aren’t as obvious. By the time my life had led to me standing in a junkyard watching a larger-than-life man risk his life on a tiny motorcycle, my inner monologue had become loud, angry, self-loathing in the extreme—and, increasingly, not so inner.
I could not figure out why I felt so sad. Life was good for me and my little family in Los Angeles, and while I knew this, I could not feel it. I was temperamental, score-keeping. The moments of feeling present, let alone happy, were growing rare. I felt the disconnect most with my children and worried that someday someone would be explaining me to them the way my parents had been explained to me: “He loves you, but he has a hard time showing it.”
Therapy had not helped. My near-constant sadness and anger was attributed to childhood trauma and a high-pressure work environment. Religion was the same. I had converted to Catholicism in my late 30s and felt a close connection to my faith but assumed my prayers for happiness were going unanswered because God had bigger problems to solve.
I had been overweight and felt unhealthy, so I threw myself into long-distance running and dropped 50 pounds. But being thinner didn’t make me happy either. I was worried that inescapable sadness was just the human condition, although it didn’t seem like everyone else felt this same way.
So in 2018, when my wife planned our annual Fourth of July trip to visit her parents on the East Coast, I asked to be excused. I told her I would use the time to catch up on work and enough rest to curb the burnout. Secretly, inspired by stories of life-changing revelations induced by psychedelics, my plan was to try magic mushrooms for the first time and figure myself out.
It started at a rooftop office party for the small production company I worked for, beneath tea lights and the saturated colors of a California sunset. My friend was buying mushrooms for a camping trip with her friends. I asked her to buy a bag for me.
Her guidance plus various online forums gave me the plan for an ideal trip: arriving with the right intention, finding a supportive, natural environment, and having a companion to keep me safe. But by the time the appointed Friday arrived, the plan had been abandoned. I was home...alone. I had attempted but failed to engineer a work-free day. I juiced lemons from my backyard, added some sugar, water, and double the recommended dose of mushrooms and gulped down the mixture, estimating it would be 45 minutes or so before the trip began.
My heavy workload had conditioned me to make use of every minute, so I decided to take this time to catch up on my weekend viewing. A friend who worked on the show Pose had been giving me a hard time for not having seen it. So, waiting for the shrooms to kick in and my life to change, that’s what I put on.
For the uninitiated, Pose is a fictional series set in the ’80s New York Ballroom scene, where people primarily from Black and Latine LGBTQIA+ communities came together to form houses based on chosen family. House “mothers” and “fathers” looked after their “children” by providing a safe place to live, pooling resources, and teaching them the ways of LGBTQIA+ life. House members then competed in events called balls, in categories like dance, beauty, and fashion. Winners take home trophies and prize money, turning their houses and their members into legends.
I watched as actor Dominique Jackson’s Pose character, an acid-tongued diva named Elektra Abundance Evangelista, masterminds a museum heist to steal costumes for a royal-themed ball competition. As members of her House of Abundance wander the museum, the show’s cocreator and executive producer, Ryan Murphy, frames his shots so that when the women stop to admire priceless treasures, they are actually looking into mirrors. And when they finally enter the ball in their glamorous “Prince and Princess Realness” outfits, I was stunned. I had never seen trans people given an onscreen spotlight this bright.
My mushroom trip feathered in slowly, around 20 minutes into Pose. I started feeling a deep empathy for characters like Blanca Evangelista, played by Michaela Jaé Rodriguez. I felt a connection to her I could not understand. She had grace and stoicism in the face of hardship, believed in herself even when her mother and the world questioned her worth, and fought for her children as hard as she pushed them to fulfill their potential.
I said out loud: “That’s the kind of parent I want to be.”
Of course, I was nothing like Blanca. Our lives were separated by race, class, time, location, community, and life experience. She was a mother; I was a father. And she was transgender and I wasn’t.
I tested that last idea in my mind. I wasn’t trans, was I?
I definitely wasn’t. Despite the ugliness I felt as a child, even though when I look back now I see how beautiful I was, with almost transparent blonde hair, bright eyes, and an innocent smile. Despite the isolation I felt as adolescence segregated the boys from the girls and I was left out of some of my happiest friendships. Despite the joy of sitting next to my grandmother at her makeup mirror as she “put on her face,” sampling perfumes as we got ready for our summer trips to Houston’s gem and jewelry shows. Despite my 5th grade obsession with Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
Maybe other little boys didn’t wish on birthday cakes, dandelions, and magical-looking rocks to be girls. Maybe other men didn’t feel so sorry for the women who had to love them despite how repulsive they were. Maybe other men didn’t find hanging out with guys so draining. Maybe I should have paid more attention to how I felt when a painter friend depicted me in eyeshadow and lip gloss in her series objectifying and softening men. Maybe these things and a thousand more meant something...
This is a terrible high, I thought. No one warned me that mushrooms make you feel like you’re trans!
I didn’t know what a bad trip was like, but I was sure this was one. Even if this “bad” trip felt kind of blissful, like I’d put down a heavy burden and come home. The trip deepened. I kept watching Pose.
When I went to sleep that night, I hoped that I could hold fast to some of the inspiration and empathy I’d gained that night—but that instead of waking up trans, maybe I could wake up vegan or passionately into rock climbing or some other empathetic, less disruptive change.
In 1992, when the second Lollapalooza came to Houston, a Texas hippie stranger gave me a sheet of acid, which I promptly gave to someone cooler than me. I’d been scared off by the urban legend of the Orange Man, a guy who’d taken too much acid in the ’60s and who still, in 1992, was fully convinced that he was an orange.
My mother is an Episcopalian Neiman Marcus shopper and ballet enthusiast. She favors J.K. Rowling’s intellectual transphobia over the populist conspiracy-of-perverts transphobia that has captured the imagination of the far right. She knows my story and is convinced that I am the trans version of the Orange Man. It’s been more than five years since we’ve had a meaningful conversation, but for a while, she’d surface occasionally to invite me back home to where she’d found an in-patient facility willing to rehabilitate me from this years-long bad mushroom trip. She’s told me she agrees that I was stressed and angry but that the drugs somehow inspired me to take the “easy way” out of facing my problems.
I, too, initially embraced the Orange Man theory. If psychedelics got me into being trans, I was sure that they could get me out. It was the logic of a ’60s sitcom, in which amnesia is started and stopped by a hard knock on the head. I drank my way through the week that followed those mushrooms. I had a plan to rejoin the ranks of straight men, and it included recreating the time, lighting, and mood of my previous trip.
I prepared another large batch of shrooms, waited for them to take effect, and this time watched Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 Predator. I’d always loved the fantasy masculinity of ’80s action movies: the mumbling, muscle-covered men baptizing themselves in dripping sweat, dust and mud, bright-colored stage blood, and a hurricane of bullets and pain from terrorists, communists, or monsters. I’d never fought in a war, but being big, good at pain, and hard to understand had carried me for most of my adulthood.
As the mushrooms turned the jungles of Predator into a swirling paisley nightmare, I smiled and kept my eyes on Arnold. I was grateful for the lessons of Pose, but this was a movie for a body like mine.
It was just so boring.
Watching a bodybuilder pretend to be a soldier did connect with me but not in the way I’d hoped. I thought about the actual tough guys I knew, the real soldiers, cowboys, and criminals I’d met on film sets over the years. They weren’t like this. I saw for the first time what I’d missed as a kid — and as a man. This particular form of masculinity was drag. Arnold was just a scared kid acting tough and playing soldier. Like all the tough guys making the world less fun for the people around them. He was me.
I turned off Predator, opened Netflix, and binged a season of Glow. When the night was over, I was neither a commando nor a wrestler.
When I could be alone with my revelation, it was a gift. I felt lighter. Being alive took less effort. Decades of discomfort melted away. I didn’t need to speak self-hatred into the bathroom mirror anymore.
If only there were a way to contain being trans to my private moments, to keep it secret. I loved the energy it let me carry into work, into being a parent, into every interaction, but I was afraid of what would happen to my life as soon as I told anyone about this private joy.
I had become a sponge for the stories of the trans community on Reddit and Instagram, and they didn’t make me feel optimistic. From my vantage point in the closet, it seemed that the rich (and usually white) women who came out typically transitioned into a cycle of rejection, depression, and professional and public humiliation. The poor women, disproportionately women of color, endured the same trials but with more unwelcome sex work and much more violence.
I felt dangerous, maybe a little poisonous. The potential damage my secret might cause only made it harder to carry alone. But to tell anyone was to start the predictable slow-motion tragedy: losing my marriage, being ostracized from family, making myself a spectacle in my career and daily life. And for what? Happiness? With so much on my shoulders, happiness felt like an indulgence.
Coming out felt irresponsible and greedy. Wouldn’t my kids prefer a sad dad in an unbroken family to a happy, divorced trans mom? Wasn’t it better to carry my own strangeness and spare them from bullying? What would this do to my wife? Her family? My family? I couldn’t imagine being that selfish.
There was no denying that the world had changed for me.
I saw men and felt, I am not them.
I saw women and felt, I want to be them, but I am not them either.
I saw trans people and thought, I think I am them, but what if I’m just having a crisis?
This was the early indication that I had traded generalized self-loathing for the special hell of gender dysphoria. It’s the awful catch-22 of trans existence in a world that hates trans people: As I am, I am unacceptable to myself; as I want to be, I will be unacceptable to the world.
A couple weeks later, I mumbled a confusing confession to my wife. I don’t think either of us ever fully understood what I said, but it probably sounded like I was bisexual, maybe a cross-dresser.
She was surprised and confused until a week later, when I clarified for both of us: “If I could make a wish and wake up tomorrow as a woman, I’d do it.”
The words were scary to say. Feeling how true they were when spoken to another person was even more terrifying. She cried again, harder now because now she knew what she was crying about. She would never stop being my friend and supporter. She would remain a loving and steadfast mom to our kids. But in that moment, I watched her, almost instantly, fall out of love with me.
I tried to be practical. Nonbinary identities were starting to become part of the language of the straight world. They were having a moment, and while the LGBTQIA+ and mainstream press were both treating them as the avant-garde of queerness, I didn’t view being nonbinary as a radical choice so much as a practical one. I’d been a competitive swimmer for much of my childhood and had broad shoulders, a hairline that had been receding since I turned 16, and a barrel chest. My voice was a low, gruff mumble. I was sure I’d never be perceived as female by most of straight society.
Maybe it was better to claim my own gender and find a quietly trans way of existing that would let me be happy without destroying the life I’d worked so hard to create. I submerged myself into writing by brilliant nonbinary thinkers like Alok Vaid-Menon, Jacob Tobia, and Jeffrey Marsh, hoping to absorb some of their confident iconoclasm.
And maybe, just maybe, I could harness my stubborn masculine traits. My wife’s favorite movie was the Todd Haynes glam-rock infused Velvet Goldmine. One night, I proposed a plan to her for my nonbinary identity. This wasn’t going to be like Transparent. I wouldn’t transition. I’d just know. And, sure, I’d be a little more feminine. There would be nail polish but no dresses. Kindness but not breasts. “Bracelets,” I swore to her, trying hard to get both of us to believe it. “It’s just going to be bracelets!”
This was the start of what I called my Criss Angel phase: bracelet stacks, skinny jeans, and black nail polish. If anyone suspected anything, it was that I was moonlighting as a club promoter.
A few months passed. It was an unusually hectic time for my family. My wife traveled frequently to promote her documentary. I kept working, with weeks of single parenting when my wife was on the road. My dysphoria had matured into a monster. In the noise of the workday, it would whisper in every quiet moment: You are not a man. And then, when I took a few deep breaths to process this truth, it added another: You’ll never be a woman. All you can ever be is a joke.
This loop was omnipresent and left me anxious and destabilized. I found a therapist and told her that my life would not permit me to be trans. She explained away my theories that this might be a hormonal imbalance or echoes of trauma or Munchausen syndrome. When my wife was in town, I’d cope with long runs: 8 to 10 miles before work, sometimes a half-marathon at 5 in the morning.
At night, in bed, the dysphoric voice was more dangerous: You are not a man. You’ll never be a woman. All you can ever be is a joke. And then, as the tremors of a panic attack began: Or you could leave.
“Leave” was my euphemism for the one thing I knew would bring me peace.
There were many days when I wanted it more than I didn’t. I’d read my kids extra bedtime stories, hug them a little longer, and remind myself that I owed them survival. On other days, I convinced myself that they would be better off without the burden of a parent like me.
It wasn’t long before I couldn’t outrun the fear anymore. Under the pressure of my growing inbox, my list of meetings to cancel and projects I could not focus on, I asked for a leave of absence. My wife was heading to Rome for a screening, and it would take all my energy to get the kids to school. Even then, I was dropping them off three minutes late, running down the hall to their classrooms, and depositing them with no lunch or the wrong lunch, unbrushed hair, and clothes we should have disposed of. I was a regular at the principal’s office, returning later with lunch or homework or a binder full of Pokémon cards.
Back at home, I’d dump the clean laundry from the couch onto the floor and set the alarm on my phone with enough time to pick the kids up on time. I’d lie down and let the panic and the whispers consume me. You are not a man. You’ll never be a woman. All you can ever be is a joke.
I’d cry, inconsolable. The cries would build to sobs, shivers crescendoed into full-body shakes. I counted down the days until my wife returned from her travels. I planned a suicide that I hoped would keep anyone from finding my body.
Some time near my lowest point, two of the cast members from Too Stupid to Die came over for lunch: Zach and Chad, whose tattooed face, dramatic gauge piercings, and split tongue concealed a deeply kind sweetness. They surveyed the piles: of mail, of clean and dirty comingled laundry, of dishes in the sink, of printed-out scripts, of homework and toys. “Dude,” Chad said, “this looks like the scene in the movie where the dad lost his job.” We all laughed, and I then I told them the truth.
“I’m pretty fucked up, actually. My life is kind of falling apart. I figured out that I’m trans a little while ago.”
“That’s rad,” Chad said. “What are your pronouns?”
In November, without telling my wife, I had driven to an LGBTQIA+-supportive doctor in a gleaming mall on the west side of L.A. The office was next to a dumpling place I wished I had the appetite for.
I tried as hard as I could to be invisible as I checked in and was taken to a clean exam room to wait for the doctor. He was young and kind, and I hoped that he would read my chart and lead the conversation. But he looked at me and made me say the words aloud by saying, “Tell me why you’re here.”
“I’m transgender and I want to try taking hormones…” I felt an anxiety attack hovering and tried to keep it away. “I read on Reddit that you can take a microdose and that the changes might not be…dramatic?” I talked him through what I hoped could be the medical equivalent of my Criss Angel phase.
The doctor explained what I already knew: He couldn’t promise that anything would or would not happen. I might get the “invisible” nonbinary transition I wanted — and hold onto the comfort, privilege, and familiarity of passing as a man. But I knew I could also find myself with growing breasts and a shrinking libido, shedding pounds of muscle as fat was redistributed throughout my body. It didn’t matter to me though. I didn’t think I’d be around long enough to face the outcome.
I left with an order for blood work and an informed consent form, a long document spelling out all the potential changes and risks I was signing up for. (This is the paperwork that’s often used by some non-trans people to fixate on another type of risk—that giving someone the autonomy to make a decision about their own body might come with deep regret over irreversible changes. What if it’s just a phase, after all?)
I’d already read a dozen variations of the form online but seen very few tales of regret or detransitions. What I had found were plenty of stories of mental, emotional, and physical surprises, all of which shared a similar theme: I expected one thing from transition but got an entirely different thing. Who cares? I am finally happy.
Still, I thought, Who am I to be happy?
I returned home for what I thought would be my last few days with my kids. We spent the mornings and evenings in a shaggy, laugh-filled sleepover mentality. When they were in school or sleeping, I was back on the couch riding the waves of shivering, sobbing, hyperventilating, and falling asleep in a feverish loop.
The morning my wife came home, I was in the throes of my worst attack yet, on the phone with my best friend who was talking me through breathing, one inhalation and exhalation at a time. When I heard my wife’s key in the door, I hung up and told her that I was going to medically transition — her welcome home from two weeks on the road.
I drove my signed informed consent paperwork to the doctor’s office, got my final instructions for estrogen and testosterone blockers, and was on my way to the pharmacy. I would take my first dose, take a nap, and then start the process of purchasing two 9mm Sig Sauer pistols at my local gun store. I knew that these pills weren’t going to work for me. My pain was bigger than all those happy trans women on Reddit, my fear more profound than all those brave trans women on Instagram.
This was a prescription for a clean conscience. I would know I’d tried everything before giving up.
At home, with my wife looking on, appropriately harried and overwhelmed, I took one large spironolactone pill and allowed a small, sweet teal estrogen pill to dissolve under my tongue. I crawled into bed and gave my mind over to the dysphoria, taking comfort in knowing I wouldn’t be haunted much longer. I set my alarm for school pickup and fell asleep with the bright California sun streaming through our windows.
It wasn’t my alarm that woke me up. After weeks of being bound to the bed or the couch, I just felt rested. I looked at the fat yellow lemons hanging heavy in the green leaves of the tree outside my bedroom window. The sky was a deep, cloudless blue. A hummingbird flitted through the technicolor scene, framed by the blue-and-white IKEA curtains.
I’d been embarrassed by those curtains, which had traveled from our first apartment to our second to our first home. They’d seemed cheap and dorm-room-y to me, a brightly patterned reminder of the endless list of things that needed to be updated, fixed, or replaced. But now they were cute, a reminder of the early days—the dreams of marriage, kids, our own place. I forgave the cracks in the paint in the ceiling, the cobweb wafting from the lamp, the piles of unread books on the bedside table.
And then it came to me: Is this what normal people feel like all the time? I tried to remember the last time I felt so calm, so at home in my own body, and I couldn’t think of a single moment since childhood. I went for a walk, taking in the sound of the trees, the leaf blowers, the highway. I spent so much time basking in the feeling of the sun, the warm fall air, and the reprieve from dysphoria, that I had to postpone my gun shopping plans.
That night, as we celebrated our little family being back together, I realized I had only seen my life through a filter of anger and negativity. With that filter removed, the actual beauty was overwhelming.
Dysphoria would eventually overwhelm my microdose of hormones and I would increase my dosage to defeat it, over the course of a year, creeping up to a full transitional regimen. My body began to change in all the ways I’d been afraid of, but the only uncomfortable thing about the changes was worrying about what other people might think.
All the bad things I thought could happen did. My mother, who I’d once been close to, disowned me, telling me that she couldn’t have a relationship with me as a trans woman. My wife and I continued to cohabitate and spent painful hours in couples therapy crying over my “gender journey” before saying out loud with increasing frequency and conviction the obvious truth that our marriage was over. Acquaintances and colleagues asked about my genitals and my plans for them. I started to plan extra time around errands to allow myself a mental rebound from being laughed at while returning office supplies at Staples, intentionally misgendered buying children’s Tylenol at Rite Aid, and death-stared at the Social Security office. Being unacceptable to the world sucks.
I steadily crossed off milestones: sheepishly asking a salesperson at Sephora for a concealer to cover my 5 o’clock shadow. Deciding that a Tuesday was the right day to put on the pencil skirt I’d rescued from my wife’s discards and go to work—for the first time—as myself. Attending a workout class for trans people and explaining that no, I wasn’t a very successfully transitioned trans man, I was a very larval trans woman. My first trip to the women’s bathroom, my first email with pronouns in the signature, my first Starbucks cup with my new name, my first date as me. Standing outside of transness, these things had seemed so strange, so distant. Within, they were full of joy, small and large.
Was it really all as selfish as I feared?
During quarantine, I adopted the habit of taking a long walk with each of my kids on alternating days. It was my solution to asking them to tell me about their days at the dinner table and hearing some variation of “I don’t know, it was just a normal day, I guess.” Usually after a while, whatever was weighing on them would come out and we’d spend the next hour talking about it, taking funny, poignant detours along the way.
On one of these walks, past a not-quite-quarantined L.A. neighborhood park full of pickup basketball games, family barbecues, and tent camps, my 11-year-old asked me what the hardest parts of my childhood were. I told him there was a lot to pick from: all the moves to new places with no friends, the brutal conformity of suburban Texas, my parents’ explosive divorce.
I asked him the same question.
“Well,” he said, apologetically, “It was when I was little, and I’d do something wrong, and you would get mad at me, and it felt like there was nothing I could do to make you happy.”
There it was. I had been the dad loving him the best I could, and I had still been the worst part of his childhood. The guilt was heavy.
I told him I was sorry, that I was grateful that he trusted me enough to be honest, that I loved him and his brother more than anyone on earth, and that it broke my heart to know that I’d been the hardest part of his childhood.
He shrugged. “It’s okay. That was David. It’s all okay now that Jude’s here.” He reached out, took my hand in his, squeezed it hard, and we kept walking.
A shorter version of this story appears in Cosmopolitan’s Summer 2025 print issue.
If you or someone you know is in mental health crisis, you can call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 to speak to a trained counselor at no cost to you. For an expanded list of resources specific to the trans community, click here.
