On a not so straight and narrow path
Robert Hamblin’s frank memoir puts readers inside another body by using the magic of words. By
Photographer, painter and writer Robert Hamblin doesn’t want me to ask him whether he has a penis. “My body is off limits. If you want to know what happens to trans people’s bodies, then go and open the internet. Unless you buy me dinner and a drink. Isn’t that how it’s always preceded?”
We have only just met and it occurs to me then that I am, perhaps peculiarly, uninterested in his genitals. I have read his book
Robert: A Queer and Crooked Memoir for the Not So Straight and Narrow in which he demonstrates – generously, amusingly, poignantly – all the things that could be called “interesting” about him, and they are so many and so varied, that I’ve forgotten to wonder how he pees.
This is unusual, it seems. Although people don’t generally ask one another what their genitals look like, non-trans people – that is, cisgender people, or people whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds with the sex they were assigned at birth – seem to think that being transgender means you’ll willingly discuss how you urinate or climax with anyone who asks.
It seems fitting that he introduces “the problem of the penis” into the interview before we begin. Introducing the absurdity of cis prurience into a conversation is a way of asserting some control over one’s own story.
Curiosity is human, of course. Hamblin later says: “We are all curious about other people’s bodies.” And his book certainly addresses curiosities I didn’t even know I had.
For instance, I was interested to learn that since being trans is inherently about “not belonging” in the gender you’ve been assigned, undergoing transition does not deliver one wholly and happily into belonging to the social group of the gender you’ve supposedly joined. Unlearning the socialisation that’s been ground into us is not relief granted anyone through medication or surgery.
Reading Robert has given me an embodied sense of what “gender is a social construct” means. How are people with vaginas women, or those with penises men? What does it mean to be a man? Or a woman?
Hamblin makes the body personal, direct, vivid, inescapable, infuriating, delightful, terrifying, flexible and funny. And if you don’t understand how complex and ridiculous the idea of the male/female binary is when you’ve finished reading the book, then you probably never will.
Robert did make me curious, but not about what’s in the author’s pants; rather about whether he was as quick, warm, funny, vulnerable and f**k-you in real life as he is on the page? And, yes. Yes, he is.
We’re in the heart of his Muizenberg, Cape Town, house, where his painting studio is. There’s another studio, outside, that is dedicated to photography.
Robert, Hamblin’s compelling memoir, is full of life drama. Real, horrible, achy stuff – not least of which is the story of his connection with his 1980s Dynasty-soap-opera-loving gay father, who triumphed over dangerous verkrampte last-century attitudes towards homosexuality by his wits, but who was felled by Aids.
The book is also peopled with all kinds of amusing drama llamas, from religious straight cis men to jealous lesbians.
But the most poignant drama, in the context of a trans man’s life story, is the one when Hamblin’s girl version camps up an impromptu stage act of being a seductive woman, to the delighted amusement of the children watching.
The hyperfeminine performance steals the show, and fleeting access is gained to a group that usually moves around the gender-confusing spectre of his child-self like he is a boulder in a river: on one side the girls who see someone too much like a boy; on the other, boys who see a girl.
Hamblin is 52 now, and he has lived as a man since his thirties. He has grappled with what gender means since he was very young.
I wonder out loud about the extent to which all body dysmorphia and less devastating body-related dysphorias may be related to ideas constructed by society about how bodies should behave in the world.
“A theme that often comes up in sci-fi is technology and organic things becoming combined and I think often that bodiliness and the systems within which we live are like that. We think that nature and nurture are two separate things, but the systems we live in, and the experiences we have, become ingrained, and they twist [the way we perceive] our bodies. “I cannot speak for all people or all trans people, but I do think that fashion, even when it transgresses gender, still dictates how our bodies should or shouldn’t be. And if you don’t have that body, or when things acquire meaning – like big breasts mean this, short legs mean that, a big ass means another thing – the body gets assigned all these meanings and if you don’t feel it, obviously you’re going to have a disconnect.
“So, yes, I think maybe we do all have some of it, but we don’t all diagnose ourselves. We just put on our Woolies clothes and bear it.”
Does he still have dysmorphia? The answer is not immediate.
“Um. Er. No.”
Does that have to do with being 50?
“It’s got to do with being older, yes, but it’s also got to do with this examined life.
“I had to face dysmorphia and if I could not supposedly ‘heal’ myself of it, I wouldn’t have had access to the medical stuff. In order to transition, you firstly have to understand what is supposedly wrong with you, be diagnosed, to access treatment.
“Then you are expected to show you have a grip on gender. Then, even though you know you’re not going to get your shit together before you are treated, which is what will let you get your shit together, you learn how to perform that gender, and that was a good rehearsal towards understanding the difficulty of gender. That understanding brought the healing.”
I ask Hamblin about language. People who do not actively engage with the gender debate often feel lost in the language of gender and sexuality and get irritated by the issue of pronouns. Robert is a book that avoids academic language, and the reader experiences the speaker learning to express himself, not just physically, but also in appropriate language.
Hamblin shares how he fumbled towards his identity in the only language that was available to him at the time, giving permission for readers to be brave about adjusting their own language.
“We are all petrified,” he exclaims, when I say people are afraid of getting the lan
1. According to the Mayo clinic, body dysmorphia is a mental health disorder in which you can’t stop thinking about flaws in your appearance — a flaw that appears minor or can’t be seen by others.
2. Gender dysphoria is the feeling of distress or discomfort because of the difference between a person’s gender (assigned at birth) and their gender identity. guage of a revolution wrong. Hamblin is uncompromising in his insistence on a clear political stance and is merciless of people who refuse to be sensitive or dismiss the gender shake-up.
“Look,” he says, “I lived through the time when I had to teach people to use masculine pronouns for me before I’d had any physical changes and it was a really difficult, really painful time for all of us – and this was before it was all over the internet.
“I really understand the pain of it. And just as we all started getting used to it, the non-binary movement came along. And they came up with the pronoun ‘they’.
“I’d learnt from my academic friends that language is everything, that it’s the departure point for changing the world. But then I had to start calling people ‘they’ and, yoh, that was hard.
“It’s hard in the first place because you’re pulling apart something fundamental.”
He says gender – pronouns – “are the fundamental survival strategy you are taught in the colonised world. Fundamentally grasping that gender is a survival strategy is what keeps you safe. You can get killed for getting it wrong. And here we are now unpicking it and someone — someone vulnerable — is asking you to f**k with a basic survival strategy by asking you to use a pronoun for them you aren’t used to.”
If you understand gender, he says, you will understand that pronouns are a way of giving someone humanity. And when you misgender someone, you take away their humanity.
“To learn is not a comfortable thing. It’s painful, because you’re redirecting your neural pathways. It’s all about working towards kindness.”
If someone tells you you’ve misgendered them, or you’ve used an inappropriate word, the kind way to respond it not to tell them to stop being sensitive, he adds.
“If someone has asked you to use a different pronoun to the one that comes naturally to you, they are probably having more of a crisis than you are, so go process your shit at home.
“Another thing is to look at impact and not intent. If you have hurt or offended someone accidentally, the only thing to do in that moment is to say sorry and to move on.”
Hamblin says he wants to talk about trans children: “Your own child’s body is a sublime thing, and you are responsible for it every day and you have to help it survive to the next day. Our understandings of what it means to be trans [are] a threat to that and your first response, as a parent of a trans child, is obviously going to be to be overprotective.
“What you forget if you are an adult in the life of a trans person– and now I’m going to preach – is that the whole world is going to tell your child they’re wrong. So, you have to find a different role to play in your child’s life.
“Know that there is a path in front of them and you have to walk that path with them, every f**king step, with love.”
Experts will tell you that children who have the most information about sex are the least likely to get pregnant, he says.
“It’s an absolute fact that children who have more information have fewer rash responses to difficulty. So you have to be there with your child, helping them make their choices without them having to navigate your resistance as well.”
What does he say to people who say being queer is a fashion right now?
“I say: so what?”
But they would say if it’s going to go out of fashion, you shouldn’t mess around with hormones for a trend.
Hamblin laughs. It’s the quietest laugh of the morning. Actually, it’s not really a laugh at all.
“If they only knew how hard it was to get to that first hormone injection. And that’s another thing I’d like to say to people: do not be your child’s gatekeeper, because there are a hundred other people who are going to do the gatekeeping.
“There is all this first-class care out there: well-researched, scientific support to help your child medically. You just need to seek out that help for your child. No one is in a better position to help them get the best care possible than you are.”
I tell Hamblin that his frank engagement with his identity in the book seems to come from a place of steady ego, that shame does not play as big a role for him as it does with so many children who come from far more conservative homes or communities than he did. He disabuses me firmly.
“I didn’t want to talk about my body shame anymore, because you know how people internalise racism? Well, people internalise transphobia too. The chapters in the book where I write about shame are so short.
“The stuff about cutting myself and where I spoke about having too much weight: those were long years, but I skirted over them. I spent time on sex. On youth. On my father’s vulnerability. But the stuff where my shame was, yoh, I wrote over that very quickly.
“I mean it’s still powerful, but it is part of my narrative to pretend that there is no shame, while here in my personal life, my wife has had to navigate that with me.
“I can’t languish in shame,” he says. “It sometimes means that I don’t have enough empathy for myself. Or I don’t process things, because I’m too ashamed to have shame.” And yet.
Here Robert Hamblin is, apparently confidently, happily inhabiting his male body in a sweet little suburban house, with his wife working in the next room and his daughter at crèche. He’s had an exceedingly successful life as a photographer and now as a painter.
He has written a book that will, I have no doubt, change the way that many readers understand what it means to be transgender by putting them right inside another body, using the magic of words.
Shame is part of the story, but it hasn’t stopped him from living out loud.
How did he get to be such a straight shooter? Is it because the Joburg gay scene of the 1980s was often rough and cruel, a response to the environment of oppression and fear? Is it because he was a newspaper photographer, and newsrooms were notoriously hardcore about no bullshit?
“Look, I am an artist. It is my duty to make a book or a painting. Having pain and showing it is part of my job.”
But writing Robert was not a walk in the park. Hamblin was part of the Life Righting Collective, run by the prolific writer Dawn Garisch. Whenever Hamblin’s writing wandered towards the cerebral, towards “cleverness”, she yanked him back and told him to “just tell us what happened”.
“The book traumatised me … to revisit all those things. Because I was in it all over again. I wasn’t an adult looking back. I wrote from inside the child, the teenager. I had to go there, be that person again. So, no, it wasn’t healing while I was doing it.”
We are all storytellers, Hamblin says. “And part of mental health is to be able to tell your own story. Because to tell your own story is to take back power.”
Pronouns are a way of giving someone humanity. And when you misgender someone, you take away their humanity
Robert: A Queer and Crooked Memoir for the Not So Straight or Narrow