Flipping the script

I've been thinking a lot lately about the scripts we follow and the scripts that are available to us. I've been thinking about when we become the character in someone else's story, versus when we decided to be that character and write ourselves into the narrative accordingly. I've been thinking about how we even know what a character is—what makes a cohesive whole, and how is that different from sloughing details until we're just a trope? How much variation can a script tolerate before it's not the same script anymore? How many edits do you need to make in order for the story to be truly yours?

Consider this Part 1/2 in the lead-up to talking about transness and athletics, because again, that topic is actually much bigger than you might think. And before we get there, we need to talk about what it means to be following a script, and what happens when you try to exist outside one.

What is a script for living? Where does a script come from?

Imagine for a moment that you lived alone. Not just, alone in your apartment in a city. But truly, actually, alone. The only living human, perhaps. What would you do? How would you behave?

Being truly alone means there's no need for social communication: you don't need to be seen, understood, or interacted with. You don't need to be legible or make sense. No loss of connection is at stake if you don't perform to expectations.

In a social system, though, the script you live by serves so many important functions. It does make you legible to others and helps you forge connection; it shortcuts a lot of work deriving meaning and appropriate courses of action from first principles every single time; it situates you in a historical lineage; it serves as a building block for a network of relationships that can scale to societies or civilizations. Just try imagining a life without some of the most canonical scripts you've grown accustomed to, ones like "mother," or "friend," or "teacher."

We're subject to cultural scripts for how we should behave since birth, perhaps even before. How you should act as a child within your family system is predetermined by every family member who came before you. Their expectations arise from the social structure you exist within. Your own expectations of yourself are a function of theirs, of what your body and physical experience allow you to imagine, and what scripts you encounter in the wider world—in art, at school, among other people.

Who's in charge of editing this script?

Yes, you say, all of this is quite obvious and I'm aware of it. Good.

So much of life is about figuring out who and how you get to edit the scripts you were given. Your parents expected you to take over the family business? Eh... but what if you want to do art instead? Or maybe you thought you'd marry your high school sweetheart because someone, somewhere, thought that was a good idea 🙄 Or your dad was a track star and you're forever living in the shadow of his glory. Or you were diagnosed with cancer and you know you're supposed to be a fierce warrior who battles and defeats it, but today you aren't feeling so warrior-like.

Any tension you experience with received scripting can be an indication of the "you" that's trying to break through, get in some sneaky edits, make the story your own. But there's another problem.

Is this script for a one-off play, or just an episode in a series?

Your script doesn't stand alone. It exists in a universe of other scripts that others are writing, some of them hewing very closely to the culturally received ones that feel easy and comfortable.

If you were a character in a TV show given ostensible control over your own script for a single episode, or even a season, it would still be difficult to pull off totally rewriting yourself. There were episodes that came before. You still interact with the entire cast of other characters. The plot line of the series isn't really under your purview. Maybe you can change some dialogue here and there, or switch out when and where you enter a scene. But you don't have control to do a total rewrite because your part has already largely been cast.

You can only really rewrite your character if you also start to change the cast. Change the show. Change the whole channel, perhaps.

Who gets to flip the script?

I say this is Part 1/2 of the series on transness and athletics (you can go back and read Part 0 here) in part because gender is just another one of these scripts, but also because it's important to highlight that it's not just an individual script we're flipping here.

You can't cleave off gender as a layer of your life and leave everything else intact (no matter who tells you otherwise). And you can't change your relationship to one of our fundamental social conventions but politely allow everyone else around you to keep playing their parts, either.

It also should be obvious that it's not only trans people who are flipping gender's scripts, or trying to. And it never has been. The rules change every few years, fully transform over decades, have always been different across cultures. It's never up to just one person who has decided that the script doesn't fit; and no one person will ever fully have the power to remove themselves from that script and start from scratch.

...so it's futile, then?

No, not really. Defining and redefining yourself is all part of the human experience—part of everyone's human experience.

Some scripts I've left on the writer's room floor

Sometimes there's no amount of editing that can build you a home in the story you didn't write. Sometimes you need to toss the whole script and start over.