A Generation in Transition, part 1 by Adam Lehrer
In this three-part essay series, Adam tries to understand how so many male artists of the '80s and '90s have transitioned into being women in their near retirement years
One can’t deny that there’s something deeply strange and difficult to trust about the notion that several male artists and writers, all from the same generation and even having some thematic overlap in their work or ideas, all spent their adult lives feeling “trapped” in their male bodies. I find it difficult to open this text, because I don’t want to sound judgmental. I can’t put myself in these artists’ minds. I can’t channel their experiences. I’d like to remain open minded to the truth of their realities… I’d so very much like to believe them….
Just kidding! I find this all to be fucking absurd – a truth so strange that not even the fiction of the likes of Lovecraft or Robert W. Chambers couldn’t compete with it. How is it that so many artists from the same decade all decided to become women a few decades later? Is transgenderism an authentic expression of a femaleness that they’ve suppressed, or is the totality of transgender ideology and its omnipotence a force from which these artists projected a more banal alienation unto? I’ve often doubted that transgenderism was real at all, to be frank, and this trend hardly assuages that skepticism. And yet, all that cynicism inside of me doesn’t feel good. Flatly denying the existence of something is too a vulgar expression of ideology, and we’d all be better off attempting to understand all the explosive social forces at play here. So, here we go…