Rowan Marie Abbott
I have a complicated relationship with the beach.
On one hand, I’m obsessed with it. I have a list of addresses on my phone titled “For Your Regularly Scheduled Mental Breakdowns”—they’re all boardwalks.
There’s something comforting about that vastness. I can wade into the water and let it swallow me up. Nothing but ocean for miles and miles; and I get to be a small little dot buried within it. Within that mass, stressing over deadlines or arguments feels trivial.
And the waves? Oh my god, the waves.
I’m treading water and then, suddenly, this wall of sheer force rises up from nowhere and comes crashing down on me. I’m sent tumbling through, smashing into the sand and seaweed, and spat onto shore coughing up saltwater. If serenity isn’t enough to take me out of my own head, the beach is more than happy to try violence instead.
And it works! In that moment, I’m not a buttoned-up professional. I’m a stupid mammal covered in flesh and hair. I’m susceptible to cold and wet and salt and inertia. And I’m alive, I’m so alive. As soon as I catch my breath, I run back, returning to the ocean just as quickly as it spat me out. The ocean makes an unabashed masochist out of me.
That vulnerability isn’t perfect, though.
In December of 2024, I got my name legally changed. The year after that, I started hormone replacement therapy. But I’ve known that I’m non-binary for more than a decade; and I’ve had this feeling that something is off with my body and the way people perceive it for much longer.
In the shower or in the locker room, I’m met with a body that isn’t entirely my own. Though I may puppeteer it, the performance is stilted and awkward. Clothes—especially heavy sweaters—serve to smother that awkwardness. To give some leeway or deniability. With them, I can pantomime a male-ness cushioned with fluff. Not so at the beach.
By the water, I’m almost naked. Plenty of outfits offer options for androgyny, but the bathing suit? It’s all on display. For a body that’s rendered as a man, a top means something. It’s a giveaway for whatever form of gender strangeness an onlooker might conjure. Like when I wear a dress and weather the glares of those around me, it is a choice which marks me as an acceptable target for violence.
Even if I stick to the expected trunks and just sit in my discomfort, I’m haunted by the sense that—whatever gendered performance I opt to put on—I will be doing it wrong. That the townsfolk won’t be convinced.
I opened this piece with a shot from James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. In that scene, the monster approaches a young girl by the side of a lake. It’s a welcome reprieve from the abuse he’s been suffering thus far at the hands of his creator. The girl smiles at him, offers him a flower, and teaches him to throw the flowerheads into water to make little floating boats. It’s a tender moment. It doesn’t last.
The monster misunderstands her instruction, picks her up, and tosses her into the water. It’s harmless—or at least, it’s meant to be.
But the girl can’t swim. And neither can the monster. So she drowns; and he can do nothing but watch in horror.
This is the scene that marks him for death.
The girl’s father carries her lifeless corpse through a festival in the town of Goldstadt. As he passes by—his eyes fixed upward, in shock and confusion, as if he’s wondering why God might take his little girl—the townsfolk stop their celebration, witness the horror, and eventually congeal into an enraged mob. Who could do such a thing? Frankenstein answers: a monster of his own creation. They resolve to find the wretched thing, hunt him down, bind him, and kill him.
I see myself reflected in this scene—in the monster’s joy, in his fumbled attempts at connection, and in the dire consequences of his misstep.
Transness is often perceived as essentially violent. Whether the trans subject ever actually commits any literal form of violence isn’t the question. Trans school teachers are treated as a threat to their students, trans healthcare professionals are treated as a threat to their patients, and trans people at the beach are treated as a threat to everyone around them. There is no need for any actual altercation. The presence of a trans body is enough—it is treated as having already committed a violation.
I remember walking home from a Pride parade—dressed in makeup and a skirt. It was dark and I was alone. My apartment was only a few blocks away. And yet the walk was agonizing. I couldn’t shake the thought that, if I was approached, if someone saw me, I might be seen as an aggressor and thus, any attack would be justified as self-defense.
Beyond my personal identification with the monster’s persecution, I’m also not the first to render Frankenstein’s creation as having a sort of trans essence (Susan Stryker’s words come to mind). But the moment by the lake sticks out to me as a particularly strong argument for that connection.
The imagined violence that trans folks are so often charged with is nearly always paired with the desecration of children. Within Whale’s film (and most films, for that matter), the young girl functions as a primordial symbol of innocence. She is the crown jewel of the family unit; representative of the presumed goodness and purity of heteronormativity. Through the monster and real world trans subject alike, she is destroyed by proximity to transgression rather than intent.
In the film’s sequel, Bride of Frankenstein, there’s a scene that mirrors this one by the lake. Instead of tossing a girl to her watery grave, the creature rescues a woman from drowning in a river. The result is the same. The mob hunts him down, binds him, and crucifies him.
I think the monster knew what would happen—knew that no good deed goes unpunished. I think he knew that by his very presence, he would be persecuted.
I think he just couldn’t stay away from the water.
