American writer and university lecturer Daniel Lavery Photo: Grace Lavery
Daniel Lavery says the idea that he might enjoy living as a male was the biggest motivation for a gender transition in his early 30s.
"This is something I wanted to try because I thought it would enhance my life, not because it will remove all doubt or pain or ambiguity or uncertainty," the American writer tells Kim Hill.
In his deeply personal book Something That May Shock and Discredit You, Lavery explores the pressures of transitioning from one gender identity to another.
Photo: supplied
Other people's curiosity about why a person would transition from living as a female to living as a male is understandable, Lavery says, and he thought hard before making the choice.
After living 30 years as Mallory Ortberg - a single, financially independent person acclaimed for her feminist writing - Lavery felt prepared to risk the possibility of regret for an opportunity to make an interesting change.
He told himself that if living as a male and didn't like it he could also detransition, as others have.
"Essentially I thought [female to male transition] would be a really good, fun, interesting, compelling thing to do and so far at least I think that it has been."
Unlike many trans people who describe their previous name as a 'dead name', Lavery refers to 'Mallory Ortberg' as his "old name". These days, he has a more painful relationship with the 'Ortberg' part.
While many people suffer the deeply painful loss of family relationships during gender transition, Lavery says, his recent estrangement from his own family was due to a moral conflict.
His parents' brand of evangelical Christianity didn't have a problem with gender transition, he says, so in the early years, they were able to be understanding and supportive.
But then, three years ago, Lavery's younger brother personally confessed to him that he'd been a paedophile from a young age and often fell in love with the children he worked with, unsupervised, at the church where their father was a pastor.
The brother also said that, apart from Lavery, the rest of the family had known for years.
When Lavery found out, he filed a police report and his father was struck off - now the Ortberg family no longer speaks to him.
"To me, that last name I really associated with sickness, secrecy and a loss of the love that I once felt for this family, because I would have called us quite close before everything came out."
The Biblical edict to not call what is evil, evil and not call what is good, good, gave Lavery "solace and comfort" in standing up to his family.
As an adult, he's grateful not to be part of an evangelical community but at the same time has deep gratitude and fondness for the stories of the Bible, including the "resonant and beautiful" story of Jacob wrestling with God in the Book of Genesis.
"Of all the books to have rattling round in the back of your head you could do worse than some of the language found there."
Lavery now lives in New York with his wife Grace Lavery, a fellow writer who transitioned from male to female at the same time as his own transition.
Grace had been thinking about it for decades so it was "a real delight" for the couple to start transitioning together, Lavery says, sometimes sharing their old clothes with each other and finding their own new personal style in parallel.
No one got hurt or lost anything in the process of their individual gender transitions, he says, and the process was "fairly easy and good".
So-called trans-exclusive feminists, who invoke fear and anxiety with the message that men transitioning to women involves women losing rights, have it wrong, he says.
"Most people don't transition because they've been persuaded that men are better and there ought to be more of them or women are better and there ought to be more of them. [More often, people undergo gender transition because they think] 'I think I'd really like to be a man' or 'I think I'd really like to be a woman.'"
Lavery's choice to live as a male doesn't represent a rejection of femaleness, he says.
"I loved what I got to do before and I was ready to do something else."
Daniel M Lavery will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival in May.
