After a decade-long relationship with a dominatrix he called Daddy, Emerson Whitney began to crave something besides submission. It came as a full surprise: submission had been so central to his early adulthood. Now what? Dizzied by new questions of transness and aging, living...

Emerson Whitney writes, 'Really, I can't explain myself without making a mess.' What follows is that mess - electrifying, gorgeous, defiant. At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences....