The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (21 page)

It Only Takes a Minute, IV

I like going to the gym, but the locker room situation is troubling. The men’s locker room is all open spaces and gang showers, and I know better than to try strolling into a women’s locker room these days. It keeps me from going to the gym for months, until we move and change YMCA locations; the new one has a Family Locker Room with one curtained stall and one private shower. This seems like salvation until I notice that no one can parse why I am using it without kids in tow; my presence reads as creepy.

After readings of
Butch Is a Noun
, femmes often ask, quietly, if I’m on testosterone or if I’m “still a butch.” For a while I declined to answer, because it felt like a very private question from a stranger. Now I decline because I reject the premise of the question. Even if the border were really that well-defined, border crossing is rather a queer specialty, ain’t it? When I remind them that butch archetype Leslie Feinberg took testosterone, they insist, “But not anymore,” as though they know for sure and then, much more tentatively: “Right?” Honey, I wouldn’t tell you if I knew.

In the run-up to the wedding, someone asks me if I’m worried or anxious about all the facets of my life, all those names and pronouns, all in the same room at the same time. I hadn’t been, but suddenly I am. Later, I joke with my brother that we’ll make up a Pronoun Bingo card to encourage guests, by strategic mingling, to meet someone who uses each of the possible name-and-pronoun combinations for me.

When people ask me how my art is influenced by my gender, I want to say: if I had a flat chest, I would carry a bag. Or if I liked having my tits visible. A messenger style bag, maybe, or a backpack. If I carried a bag, I could stock it with my camera and sharpies and chalk and homemade stencils and some spray paint. A little dapping hammer, maybe, and some finish nails, and I’d carry little treasures I could tack to a doorway or wall. Or some flower bulbs, or seed bombs for turning median strips into tomato gardens with not-quite-volunteer tomatoes. Voluntold tomatoes. But. Since I don’t, I don’t, and that means I don’t.

The indignity of your mid-thirties is that your joints and so on don’t do what they used to, especially if you spent a good deal of your twenties lifting poorly and lugging too many boxes up the stairs in tacit competition with the other helpers. Last time I helped schlep someone’s stuff I was hurting already, and asked if I could hold doors and carry lighter items. Someone said to me in response—I decided, later, trying to be funny—“No more wife, no more moving. Was the rest of the book a lie, too?”

Sing If You’re Glad to Be Trans

Delivered on Trans Day of Remembrance, 2008, at the University of
Chicago LGBTQ Resource Center

Thanks very much for having me here today.

I guess it makes sense that if you’re going to have a really great-looking audience, it would be during a trans event at one of the most trans-friendly colleges in the country, right? I mean, we’re not even going to talk about how long I spent picking out shirt, tie, and cufflinks for this speech. Normally, I’m with the students in Abnormal Psych 101 at eight a.m. Not exactly a big challenge to out dress the audience—I’ve bathed. I win.

I’m making jokes because I’m a little nervous. I’m nervous because I feel like I am about to say something that I’m afraid some people are going to be very cranky with me about, and I don’t want to upset people. Well, I do—I just don’t want to upset people I like. You know what? Never mind. I’m ready now.

I tried to write a nice, balanced, logical speech. I sat down three mornings in a row with my espresso—actually, that makes me sound butcher than I am, what I actually had was a double iced soy mocha, because I really prefer my coffee drinks to be as gay as possible. But I sat down with my coffee and laptop and I tried to Write a Speech. And it ended up sounding exactly like that—plodding, lugubrious, like something you do on a Sunday, wearing your scratchy good clothes with your Aunt Petunia. Like the speechifying equivalent of seventeen-grain bread: good for you, but not really a pleasure.

And why am I afraid people might be angry with what I’m going to say? Because I am going to talk about all the ways it is great to be trans, and some people are not ready for that yet. There have been some gains made in some people’s lives, with a narrative of difficulty, of pity, of shame and eventual overcoming of shame into, perhaps, a grudging acceptance. Me? I’m in it for pride. I think that pride serves us better as a movement. Look at every other successful, or evolvingly successful, civil rights movement—they have all been about pride. All been about naming, claiming, and celebrating the things that make us special and different. They have all been about putting on our cutest clothes and being out in public, being counted. But I also think that pride serves us better as individuals. How healthy is it to rehearse our hard stories, our shames? How healthy is it to become part of a community best known for being raped and killed on the news and in the movies, a community with a legacy of fear, of keeping silent because the culture cannot handle us. Some people, for an infinite number of very valid reasons, need to keep silent. They have terrible, proven reasons to hide. They value their survival, and they should, and if you need to remain stealthy to survive, then do it, because we need each and every transperson alive. But I don’t have to remain quiet, and so I will not talk about transpeople in any other way but as fabulous creatures of great and many wonders who are not, in fact, just like you. And I will not stop insisting that this is a good thing. That “just like you” is a phrase we do not need; we can be fully human and fully present and real and fully able to empathize and be empathized with. We can celebrate our commonalities without being the people of the “just like you.” We can revel in our unique excellent qualities, and we can take pride in them.

And I want to offer some pride. I want to offer some pleasure. We need some, queers and trans things, in this day and age, and what’s more we need some that is made out of real queer and tranny goodness and packaged by homo hands and served up to us, not created out of Hollywood and sent via the marketing department. We need transpeople to stand up and talk about when things are good, too—when they are great. I am frankly tired of showing up for trans events and listening to people talk about nothing but how hard it is to be trans. I am tired of being invited to come and Tell My Story, when I know that what the nice, well-meaning white lady on the other end of the phone means is “come and make yourself an object of pity, reveal all your secret hurts, and let us use them to find you blameless in your condition and therefore have sympathy for you, and give you some rights. Well, maybe not rights. But help. Well, maybe not help. But we’ll stop acting like you’re the bad kind of crazy and start acting like you’re the sad kind of crazy. Is that better?”

No. No, thank you, it is not any damn better.

Julia Serano has a new book out, called
Whipping Girl,
in which she talks about the two dominant trans narratives, the pathetic transsexual and the deceptive transsexual. This is not enough for me. You don’t look pathetic. Do you feel pathetic? No. And I am not deceptive. I hardly even cheat on my taxes and, baby, that is more than a lot of straight people can say. The fact that I am not revealing a constant loop about what, exactly, is in my pants isn’t deceptive—it’s a little thing I like to call having boundaries. You with me, here? I thought so.

So I’m not going to Tell My Story in the great tradition of the pity narrative. How can that be good for us? I mean, there’s pretty solid research to show that houseplants wilt if you speak negatively to them all the time and thrive if you compliment them. Houseplants. I am not a botanist, but I am pretty sure that beings with brains and spines and, you know, feelings might also be affected by endless negativity. Might also wither, might also grow stunted, might also be prevented from the great blooming of which we are capable when all we ever get to hear are the endless repetitions of bad, shameful, wrong, and bad some more. So no more of that for me.

I want to talk about what’s great about being trans. This is not to say that nothing about it is hard. I’ve had hard times—we all have. We’ve all struggled. We’ve all second-, and third-, and eighth-guessed ourselves and then finally come at great cost to a place of feeling confident in our identities only to have other people start the interrogation all over again. We’ve all fought with our loved ones, we’ve all waded through a mountain of paperwork that never does what it’s supposed to do, we’ve all felt unsafe, we’ve all felt out of place, we’ve all felt confused and frightened, we’ve all been felt up by airport security at seven in the morning. Been there. We’ve all handled misunderstandings and mispronouns and mistakes; we’ve all been laughed at, we’ve all been asked who we think we are.

Who we think we are. People say that like an accusation, like it was a surefire way to make us cringe. It’s a middle-school bully accusation, even when the bullies are the teachers or the principal, and I think we all know how that goes—someone looks at you and says, sneeringly, “Who do you think you are?” But I’ll tell you, we know who we think we are.

That’s the first great thing about transfolk—we have thought about who we are. We’ve thought about it a lot. We have thought about our genders and our bodies, but also we have had a lot of other things to think about, haven’t we? We examine every action, attitude, gesture, choice of work or hobby. We think about what drink we order in a bar and we think about how we wrap our scarves around our necks, for sure, but we also think about how we want to be in the world. We don’t follow a path, we forge our own. We have to. And it makes us thoughtful. It makes us all recognize that we do have a choice about most things, that we can define and enact who we think we are.

This is valuable beyond measure. Most people grow up fitting more or less well into the ways their families of origin think about things and do things. There is a way to do things—set the table, dress for church, study at college, conduct relationships— that is the Right Way because it is the way that their parents and grandparents and so on have done it. There’s no need to question the rightness of it. But what transpires with transfolk, as we grow into ourselves and realize that we are not going to follow through the door into manhood or womanhood that someone is holding open for us? We also start to understand that a lot of those doors are optional. We do not have to walk through. We can go around the racism of our childhood, or the sexism. We can make different choices about education, about work, about relationships. It is the great fallacy of the family that the progression is known, that the options are limited, but we, as transfolk, do not get caught up in that. We learn early that there is no one right way. That people who try to defend their One Right Way are scared. We learn that scared people can get mean, quickly, and we also learn how not to be afraid of new pathways, even when no one is holding the door open. And the door is heavy. We have to push hard against it or find the secret knock or the hidden latch. Transfolk will open the door to who we are even when it’s difficult, because we do know who we think we are, and this is our strength.

Most of us want to be that person well: most of us want to be good people. Most of us want to perform a gender, a sexuality, that is kind and loving. Most of us think about how we speak to children and elders, people of other genders. We find our way to courtesy and kindness. We find our way to respectful disagreement. And we already know how hard it is to be told that the thing we want or need most is wrong and bad; we know better than to tell that to others (or we should, by gum).

We have thought not only about how much we want to be daughters instead of sons, but why, and what that will mean. We’ve enjoyed our fantasies and then we have grappled with our realities, and at every turn there has been a cost/benefit analysis. At every turn, we have thought about what it was worth to be who we thought we were.

And how powerful is that? However difficult it also is, we know who we think we are, and we have lived into it. We have decided who we think we are and refashioned ourselves. Let’s just say that transfolk, as a community, are not the ones to find ourselves easily thwarted by a difficult task.

And by the way, since we’re talking about it, this is a job skill. I think we approach job interviews full of dread, full of fear, hoping that someone will “see past” our trans histories or our trans identities and hire us anyway. The hell with that. “Listen,” you should say to your prospective employer. “Listen, now. I was born Louise, in Missouri, in 1971. Between then and now I undertook a substantial process of internal review, identified all the steps required to achieve my goal, including research and investigation of local, state, and federal laws and statutes. I created a budget, managed a financial plan, engaged in medical research and literature review, created a support network for myself, undertook a rigorous program of education and training, negotiated substantial reworking of existing agreements with all constituent parties, and completed all portions of the plan on schedule. My name is now Phil, and you should hire me—if not because I did all that, then because when am I ever going to say to you that something can’t be done? When am I ever going to tell you that a task is too complicated?”

We have already learned how not to invest ourselves in someone else’s No. We have already heard No a million times in our lives, and we’ve heard it from the most powerful people in our lives—parents, teachers, religious leaders, medical professionals—and yet we have not been deterred. Maybe for a minute, maybe we have retreated and regrouped and returned again, but we have not let other people’s No’s run our lives, and we have not let them overrule the Yesses in our hearts. And that is why it is
great
to be trans.

That is, of course, leaving aside the reality of how good it is, how satisfying, to occupy a body you had a hand in creating. Let’s think about this. Most people just spend a lot of time complaining about their love handles or dyeing their hair a darker red. And while that’s fine—and hey, I’m not that excited about my love handles some days either—it is not the same as taking a good long look at what you’re working with and making substantive changes. I know a fabulous transwoman who was once vigorously scolded by a religious fanatic about mutilating the temple of her body. She retorted: I didn’t mutilate it. I remodeled the kitchen, I added a breakfast nook, and I put on a little front porch.