Real Man Adventures (9 page)

L—: As a parent, our greatest wish is for C— to be happy and safe. So we worry, a lot. This is further complicated by the fact that we lost our son Christopher, who was robbed and murdered at work when he was eighteen. This is a long, sad story, but it has its consequences concerning our attitude toward safety.

We worry about the hormonal drugs, the operations. We also worry about C— finding a meaningful relationship with a partner. We worry about marriage and kids and all the possible outcomes and complications. And we fear that real stupid, very evil, and half-crazy people will do bad things for no apparent reason. My son was killed for $300 by a seventeen-year-old kid whom he befriended one night. He said he only meant to stab him and not kill him.

TC: Do you feel like C— is essentially the same person he was before transitioning?

L—: Yes, C— has never really changed much in our eyes. In our case the transition was very, very slow. I can say that I really do not completely understand what actually transpired with the Cherie to C— transition and when. As Cherie, she told me she was gay from the backseat of my car driving home from her apartment on the day Chris was killed. I don’t know why she picked that day, but she probably felt things couldn’t be much worse, so what the hell! That was almost twenty-one years ago.

While growing up I had no clue of anything gay or transgender. C— was a tomboy, sort of, had boyfriends in high school, but we did not see any more boys when college started. After college C— was still Cherie, living in Provincetown and San Francisco as Cherie—the name change came later, which at first mystified both my wife and me. I was tipped off about the transgender thing by a young woman at work who was once gay, after I had mentioned that Cherie was now calling herself C—. I never even thought about that as a possibility for C—. That was probably about ten years ago
or so. I never told my wife [but then] C— told her a few years later. C— also wrote a letter to all family members prior to the operation, which happened a few years ago.

I had a picture taken with me and C— in San Francisco in 2000 that was hanging on my wall in the office. A friend asked me how old my “son” was, and I responded, “That’s my daughter, and she would appreciate the compliment,” because C— has looked like that always. Nowadays he has a little deeper voice, a little more facial hair, a little older and more strongly built, but really he’s the same person. A little less moody and confrontational, but that also could be getting older and wiser. I had a terrible temper until I was over forty, as did my dad.

TC: When you talk about your child, do you say “daughter” or “son” most of the time?

L—: I love this question because we are so screwed up on the he/she, daughter/son thing. My wife and I actually talk about it all the time. My youngest son is great. He changed over like someone threw a switch in his brain. We do not resent saying “he” or “son.” It’s just so damn hard to get the brain acclimated to it.

TC: On that note, do you tell people you have a “daughter” or “son” straight off? At what point do you tell people the whole story, that you had a daughter, but now you have a son?

L—: We are really screwed up with this also. I’ve actually had Cherie be my daughter and C— my son in the same conversation, like
the kid cell divided or was cloned. But in the case of my son Chris, I made certain rules. In business and most social situations, people ask about your kids. Some to talk about their own, and I just let those people go and tell them I had three kids, two boys and a girl; they accept that and keep talking. It is very difficult to say your son was murdered. Then to tell the actual story, the poor soul you are talking to is just about in tears, and then what do I say? “Oh, by the way, my daughter is transgendered and is now my son.” So I really need a script to stick to, and I don’t have one as of yet. Sixty-five years old and struggling. Not that I am ashamed or anything, it’s just complicated. It’s like someone asking, “How are you?” Do you really tell them, or just say, “I’m fine, thanks.”

TC: Would you say you are at peace with C—’s transition? (Scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “cutting him out of your life completely” and 10 being “marching in tranny pride parades.”) Will you ever be completely and entirely at peace, do you think?

L—: C— has always been an activist. Really came out of the closet with a bang, with writing and artwork. Traveled thirty to forty cities with [a periodic literary road tour] doing spoken word in every major city including the Deep South. Talk about worrying! For the record, during that period C— was gay, or a least we thought so. So tranny pride parades are kid stuff to us, no problem there.

I think before anyone had a clue about transgender issues, C— appeared on
Jerry Springer
as a woman being male in a background lineup. That had to be around twelve years ago. My wife’s very strict
and conservative father saw it, and it really upset my wife because we had no idea what it was all about.

We have attended some interesting shows that C— has organized and met some very interesting people. I am one of the few parents who watched a lovely young woman transform onstage from a young girl to a young man, with music and slides, explaining the emotional journey and on to end the show by exposing his female breasts. After the show, we went out to eat, and I sat next to the talented young man with nice breasts and my head didn’t explode, but almost.…

So we are at peace. I think probably a 9.5 or so.

TC: Who was the hardest person to tell about C—’s transition?

L—: It was hard for my wife when she found out, very confusing for her. I was learning about being transgendered for at least a couple of years before C— officially told us.

We really haven’t told many people. The letter C— wrote about it went to a lot of family. I am the oldest of nine kids, and my wife has two sisters. My stepmother and her mother are still alive. No one has really mentioned it. I think it has just become accepted. My family all got together at my sister’s last summer and C—, as always, was very outgoing. Most of our friends know and it’s accepted, not really discussed.

The tough one is my wife’s mother. Not very liberal, is all I can say. It has never been discussed in front of her and never will be.

TC: What’s the worst response you’ve gotten when telling somebody that your son is transgender (or when somebody found out another way)?

L—: We have never had a negative response. But then it seldom comes up in conversation. Maybe it will more often once I get my story straight.

TC: Is there something you might’ve done differently while C— was coming up, had you known you were essentially “raising a boy”?

L—: Cherie was born when I was a senior in college. Raising children back then was a little old-fashioned; spanking was still the norm, and smart, independent, headstrong children (like C—) tended to have conflict, especially with my wife, who was raised in a very, very strict environment as opposed to my situation. I was raised in a more open, take-care-of-yourself environment, having lost my mother when I was twelve. So I am not sure life at home was a joy for C—. If I had to do it over again, I certainly would have made sure home life was quite a bit less strict, but then we were raising a daughter. I think we raised Cherie sort of gender-free, except we did treat her with the extra control parents give a daughter and not a son, which C— rebelled against consistently.

C— told my grandmother when she was about five, “I am not going to get married; I want to be somebody.” C— wore a dress to school one day in the first grade and that was that, didn’t want to do that again. C— made it to the prom and was class president
senior year, and one hell of a catcher on the girls’ softball team, and the first kid in town to shave half his hair off and get a nose ring. C— worked at the local deli [at the time], and a woman asked my wife if he had cancer.

It’s fair to say we could not be any prouder of C— and his achievements so far in life. Maybe in a few more years I’ll have my act together about this transgender thing.
²

_______________________________

1
. Names have been obscured. When I asked L— about whether he wanted to use his name, he wrote me this: “I don’t know if I want to be anonymous or not. I don’t think C— is worried about privacy, but I don’t want to end up on
The View
or
Jerry Springer
either.”

2
. A couple days after L— shared his thoughts with me, his son C— texted me: “My father sent me his responses to your questions. I have to say it is extremely moving. Our relationship has changed vastly, and the level of introspection from him is huge! There was an implicit request for healing and forgiveness in his responses and his desire to discuss them with me. Thanks for this unexpected side benefit to your project. Love, C—”

I
N MY AND MY
wife’s heads, it all ends with me getting fastened to and dragged behind a pickup truck. I suppose we stole that from James Byrd Jr. of Jasper, Texas. You remember Mr. Byrd, kidnapped in 1998 by three white supremacists, chained to the back of a truck by the ankles and dragged for two miles on pavement— apparently conscious all the while, until his body slammed into a culvert, severing his right arm and head from the rest of his body. The three guys who did it went to a barbecue after dumping what was left of Byrd’s body in a local African-American graveyard.

Then there’s college student Matthew Shepard, who was tortured, beaten, and left for dead after being strung up on a fence outside Laramie, Wyoming, that same year. The two guys who killed him at first claimed that Shepard had hit on them in a
bar that night, so they naturally flew into a gay panic and pistol-whipped him beyond recognition. The story eventually emerged that they had hatched a scheme beforehand to pretend to be gay in order to rob someone, possibly specifically Shepard, because they thought he was well-off. Either way, Shepard was targeted because he was gay.

And even though his name isn’t on the federal hate crimes prevention act like the two men above, rarely very far from my mind is Brandon Teena, a Humboldt, Nebraska, transman who was beaten, raped, and later murdered by his “buddies” in 1993 when they found out he had not been born male. They felt they had been deliberately fooled by Teena, and before raping him, forced Teena to strip naked at a party to prove to his girlfriend that he wasn’t a “real” man. Despite Teena’s filing a report during the time between the rape and murder, the local police did not find sufficient evidence to arrest the two men who eventually went on to kill Teena and two others in the house where they found him (the rape kit having mysteriously disappeared from the ER).

These three cases helped build momentum to pass hate crimes legislation in the U.S. on both state and federal levels. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act became law when President Barack Obama signed it on October 28, 2009, after being introduced in several forms several times before and
killed
each time. It is the first federal law to extend protection to transgender people, expanding the 1969 federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual identity, sexual orientation, gender identity,
or disability.
¹
It also removes the prerequisite that the victim must be engaged in federally protected activities like voting or attending public school in order for a crime to be considered aggravated by bias (in addition to earmarking funding for investigation into and record keeping of hate crimes).

Though it seems like a no-brainer to get on the books, the reason so many folks opposed the bill and oppose it still is because they feel it limits free speech. That is, you should be allowed to
say
all homosexuals should burn in hell and be sent there sooner rather than later, even if you’re not going to
do
anything violent to put them there. It’s not just Focus on the Family’s James Dobson and Westboro Baptist’s Fred Phelps who feel this way. Many of our elected representatives believe these protections are not necessary because we are all supposed to be equally protected under the law already. But more strikingly, opponents of the bill believed that it would prevent religious organizations from expressing their beliefs openly and freely—even though the bill specifically refers to violent
actions
, saying nothing about violent or hateful speech or beliefs. Even so, I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the three guys who killed James Byrd Jr. because he was black mightn’t have been inspired to carry out such a crime had they not been exposed to suggestive, violent hate speech so often and so thoroughly in the first place. Humans aren’t born haters. But of course that veers into “thought crimes” territory, and is thus off-limits.

Violent crimes against trans people are occurring at higher rates than ever. Or maybe it’s just being reported more. Or maybe more visibility creates more opportunities for confusion and frustration, which can and often does lead to rage and violence. It doesn’t really matter why, but the bottom line is, you can’t help but sometimes think about decapitation by culvert, or the tracks Matthew Shepard’s tears carved in the crusted blood-and-tissue mess his face had become during the last hours of his conscious life. Or about the stars-and-bars-loving young man who lives down the block from us, and how he looks and acts strikingly like one of the dudes who literally blew Brandon Teena’s brains out one night (and then stabbed him afterward to make sure he was really dead, because Teena had been “twitching” after being shot).