“Adults, too, will be caught up in this fantasy: many of them will join this pan American masquerade and don store-bought accoutrements to become temporarily someone else. Suppose that at the end of the night, made weary by parties and pranks and cross-dressing, this whole costumed crew comes home, takes off their disguises, and finds that underneath is not the Self they expected to find, but another costume draping the body. And suppose that under this alien identity is another, perhaps stranger one; and under the next, another. Years of costumes may have built up underneath, and as each one is peeled off like onion skin, the suspicion arises that there’s nothing at the center, or that the center will never be reached.”[1]
-The Armour of An Alienating Identity, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen.
What is the werewolf? The creature hiding in plain sight. It is the monster without bodily autonomy. It is a shapeshifter beholden to the moon. Maybe it’s just a hairy guy? It’s the subject of old wives tales, and folklore, and trashy teen romances, and oral histories. It’s the man in the moon. The werewolf is the howling you hear at night, whether it’s a full moon or not. It’s a feral creature who loses its humanity not due to a choice of evil or a slow descent into madness but because of a turning into something inhuman, often against the person’s (or creature’s) will.
The werewolf, among its many meanings and allegories, is a trans man.
THERE ARE A LOT OF STORIES ABOUT WEREWOLVES, to put it lightly. The myth of the werewolf, in our modern perception of it, can be pinpointed to witches. What I mean by this is that witchcraft and lycanthropy went hand in hand, with “people who believed that they could change into wolves by using an ungent obtained from the devil – the same means use to affect witches’ flight – [being] guilty of delusions produced by the devil. Belief in such delusions was in it- self sinful.”[2] Lycanthropy, the medical condition, was a sin– the act of being animalistic and believing oneself to be something Other was a sin. The belief is the thing that piques me: why make note of the difference between believing in delusions and having those delusions at all? Does it not require one to believe in the delusions you have to make note of them at all, to confess to another person? Or can you look at yourself and see a dissonance in body and mind and go on to believe yourself to be what you’ve always been told you are? Or does the difference lie in acceptance and acting upon impulse?
In any case, what I’d like to focus on in the connection between witches and wolves is this: there is a belief that the witch cursed the werewolf into existence, among their many storied fraternizations and explanations for the existence of these two creatures. This idea was popular at the height of witch hunts in Europe, and enchantment of men into were/wolves, or indeed any mention of wolves, was an indictment of the suspect as witch. I find this significant for a number of reasons– the commingling of feminine and masculine monstrosities, the autonomous monster vs the created monster, the quiet violence of a nonfatal intrusion into a body vs the loud and obvious violence engaged in by the werewolf of destroying a fellow man. The werewolf, after all, is a creature that wounds and maims and kills, and after all that violence is enacted upon the body, it is a creature that eats. So the witch and the werewolf are interesting in what they represent: the witch, a female monster, enchants the innocent man into a thing that is both man and animal. She does this without wounding the physical body, but it is an intrusion upon the mind, a violence enacted upon the mind that causes the body, later on, to shift and morph into something unfamiliar and beastly. From there, the beast-once-man engages in a violence upon others that was not enacted upon him, or at least, not in the same way. Now what if the witch and the wolf were one person?
Before I get to that, I’d like to reflect on the idea of the wolf itself. The wolf is an interesting creature, canine enough to feel more familiar to us than a bear or shark, and just as deadly as other apex predators. This mix of familiarity and fear is something I will not hesitate to say is modern– the wolf was a creature wholly feared and reviled in history. After all, in colonial America, “from the time they landed in New England, the colonists were in direct conflict with wolves for their meat supply.”[3] Nonetheless, I think that there is something to be said about familiarity and fear- and transness.
Okay, so why relate to the werewolf, and the plight of the man trapped inside the wolf? The trans man is one that, from my experience, is plagued by transformation (of course, all trans people are plagued by this, but as a trans man, I will not speak for others in my community and their experiences, only my own). Puberty is that first transformation. This is an internal strife, one that is unseen by others as anything abnormal– the once ‘genderless’ girl shifting into something with gendered aspects is, of course, normal. This is the witch’s enchantment– here is the wolfman, still man, not yet wolf. But violence has been enacted upon him. A quiet violence, a violence of femininity. The feminine monster rears its head, looking for a victim to enact upon it not only the violence of a nonconsensual change but the violence of the vision of society. The trans man sees himself through the eyes of those around him, and that is the vision of society. With the witch’s curse comes the promise of violence-to-come, hurts and wounds that can only exist by virtue of this shift into something that you were once not and did not ask to be. Here I am, the New Woman, a title I did not ask for, and with it comes the baggage of centuries, and no way to scream, because, after all, this is a change that is unseen. All that can be done is to change into something that matches the hurt inside of you.
The werewolf’s revenge, then, is that of disobedience. We shift from the perspective of the man to the world around him. After all, the werewolf enacts his violence upon the world around him. The werewolf turns into the wolf, something unexpected, and that is violence, because the werewolf was once just a man and now he is something man-like, something man-but-not. And then the werewolf acts as a wolf does, and that is violence. Physical violence, to be sure, but violence nonetheless. The world must, as part of the werewolf’s revenge, make its dues with a creature created by the world around it who will not silence itself or leave the world unmarked. The world must, as part of the trans man’s revenge, accept him for what he is, and not what they think he is. To the world, this is a violence enacted upon himself, and not upon them. Finally, a violence that is seen.
To go back to belief: is it not enough to believe yourself to be a wolf, to be condemned? Is it not enough to believe yourself to be a man, so as to become one? The werewolf and the trans man are one and the same, from two different perspectives. For the trans man, the werewolf’s revenge is the promise given from the witch’s curse of violence finally come to fruition. The trans man is the witch and the werewolf– or, if not the witch and the werewolf themselves, then the results of their existence and commingling.
For me, the story of the werewolf is something that is deeply relatable, and as a result, deeply humiliating. And I don’t think it is just my transness that makes it easy to relate to the monstrous, nor to be humiliated by it, though the queer and the monstrous is not something unfamiliar to the LGBT community.
The werewolf not only enacts violence, but it looks monstrous as it does so. It grows fur and a long snout, its limbs become something inhuman. To put it plainly, it looks different. And what an understatement that is, both for me and the wolf. Growing up, the two points that always Othered me from my white peers were my big nose, so different and obtrusive as opposed to the button noses I saw, and my hair. I am hairy. Very hairy. And this was not something that went unacknowledged in my life. Snide comments that ranged from subtle to direct followed me about my hair. Gym class was a pain not just for my lack of athleticism but for the moments before and after gym class, when I’d fidget uncomfortably as I changed. This was another beast of the witch’s curse. Whereas I found most of my white peers with hairless skin or, if not hairless, then their hair was light enough it was unseen against their skin, I had dark hair everywhere. I can remember my first crush and thinking nonsensically that he’d never like me if he saw the hair on my hand. I can still remember cutting my knuckle on the razor and watching the wound bleed quietly in the shower. The person without hair- that was a selkie, something beautiful and yet unmasked, at the will of someone that wasn’t her. I was the wolf.
What I mean to say is that the werewolf resonated to me not just on a trans level, an internal strife no one else saw, but on a physical level of I Am Brown And I Am Not Like You. The witch cursed me to be seen as Other. All my peers appeared to have it easier because, for the white ones, they did. They didn’t have to deal with comments about hair like I did, and they didn’t have to experience all the racialized microaggressions I grew up fielding and, of course, internalizing. Of course I stumbled through puberty and growing up– when those around me seemed to be running laps around me, I had weights on my ankles.
To be seen is to view yourself through another person’s eyes, and the story of the werewolf is me, seen through the eyes of the world at large. What a horror that is. Here is the best approximation of yourself and the unseen hurts inside of you, and look at what it becomes– a mindless beast, enacting on the outside world the pain enacted upon itself. The fear of the werewolf, after all, is that of a beast in the letterman jacket. The werewolf is not a horror movie monster just for its existence, but also for its nature as something that can be hidden. That’s the fear: the beast among us, and being unable to tell. That’s the wolf itself: the strange combination of fear and familiarity. Nonetheless, there is a strange validation in seeing yourself as depicted by outsiders. It is almost a “yes, someone else is seeing it,” kind of moment. You can live all your young life without seeing gender nonconformity or deviation from the norm, and watch everyone around you turn, with the witch’s curse, into something that appears effortless and welcomed, while you fight against it with all your might. Here’s the werewolf’s revenge, it seems to say, here is the creature you’ve become, and it is something real.
Quotes used come from:
[1] The Armour of an Alienating Identity by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
[2] Wolves, Witches, and Werewolves: Lycanthropy and Witchcraft from 1423 to 1700 by Jane P. Davidson and Bob Canino
[3] American Attitudes Towards Wolves: A History of Misperception by Valerie M. Fogleman
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