The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (9 page)

Those questions are complicated because it seems to suggest that further interrogation of trans bodies is appropriate, which is a difficult concept. A lot of my work is about saying, hey—here’s my gender. Deal with me on the face. If there’s some possibility that you might encounter my genitals, we’ll deal with that when we get there. And also, it’s about creating a space in the world for others to say the same. Asking a transperson about hir sex will always carry a whiff of, “But what are you,
really
?”

It is a lot like asking someone what name they were given at birth; it’s a way of trying to peel someone apart in a way that is intimate or invasive (based, largely, on the relationship between asker and askee). I do not use my first name anymore; no one calls me that except my parents and older relatives. When strangers ask, “What does the S. stand for?” I say, “My first name.” When people ask me about my genitals, I invite them to tell me about their own first. Being a display-model transmasculine person is a full-time job, but it does not pay well enough to offer all comers a look into my underpants, metaphorical or otherwise. It’s an intimacy, and I reserve the right to reveal it only to my intimates.

So—do genitals matter? Of course. The question for me then becomes—to whom, and why? I talk about my genitals with those people who I may reasonably imagine, through word or deed, have a legitimate interest (a group pretty well limited to my doctor, my therapist, and anyone with whom I have sex). The fact that my genitals are nonstandard for my gender matters to my mechanic or bank teller not at all—they are not interacting with them. Does someone learn more about me if I talk about my parts? Well, maybe. But why do they want to know? How many times in a day do I have to drop my pants for the educational good of others?

Am I defensive about this? Yes, certainly. As a transmasculine person, I experience a lot of poking and prodding at that emotional spot—what are you, really?—and it has become tender in response. So tender that sometimes really perfectly okay questions (like, “will your friend be babymaking with this new guy?”)
feel
like the same kind of accusation (Aha! Imposter!) that I more regularly experience.

That’s where the “gender crime” part comes in, the sense that I am somehow committing a fraud. Did you follow the Susan Stanton case in Florida? The manager of a small city down there announced her intention to transition from male to female and was fired. Why? Because despite fourteen years service and a sterling record, she was suddenly viewed as “dishonest.” They felt they could no longer trust her. She had not been “forthcoming,” at which no one should have been surprised, considering what happened, but whatever. Her gender crime made her unfit for service to the city, and they sacked her without delay.

So, it’s all charged. And again, I’m sorry—I could have responded better and more thoughtfully to you, and should have. I welcome your questions; I find them thoughtful and interesting. But that’s why that’s such a tender location of inquiry—people keep hitting it with big sticks.

His reply was a few weeks in coming. By the middle of March, just when I was starting to fear that my response had been alienating, I got this:

You have nothing to apologize for—the world could use more compassionate indignation. I merely noticed your response, which got me thinking, and I thank you for that. And I take all of your points, except one, and maybe half of another one.

The lesser point: Is it possible to interrogate the body without questioning the authenticity of the gender? I think so, because I think that’s what I was doing. Of course, I also realize that could easily be taken for a rhetorical dodge—many a respectable bigot sidesteps his own bigotry with a stated desire to “discuss/face things openly” or “see all sides of a question.” Righteous pseudorationality is very convenient when one is trying to ratify some noxious norm or convention. I don’t think this is what I was doing, and of course the bigot never does, so some self-directed skepticism is certainly in order. (For all of us. All the time.)

The larger point. Re: “The fact that my genitals are nonstandard for my gender matters to my mechanic or bank teller not at all—they are not interacting with them.” Not so! And I realize I consign myself to some neo-Freudian hell the minute I say this, but we are all in some way interacting with each other’s genitals all the time, just as we are interacting with all the other aspects of each other that we cannot see but know are there—heart, “heart,” brain, mind, digestive organs, soul, etc. Any feeling of kinship or enmity or attraction or caution, however significant or trivial, rests on a platform of knowledge that includes the physical. (“Do I not bleed?”) For all of us, all the time. Does that give the bank teller license to inquire about my genitals? Socially, ordinarily, no. But the inquiry is there, and there naturally and necessarily, because we are the same species, whether it’s voiced or unvoiced. (And I see that word “naturally” in the preceding sentence, and it’s screaming “Delete! Delete! Uncool!” at me, but I’m going to resist deleting it because
I will not
be cowed by a potential connotation, and I do precisely mean “naturally” and not “normally” as the connotation might go. Also because I’m hoping that having triggered your indignation once, your red flags might sit this one out. I hope I’ve earned that, but if I haven’t, if I’m entitling some heteronormative box—I trust you’ll kick me out of it.)

And
I see that this has big social implications for gender-genital configurations you have termed nonstandard. Okay, they’re a complication to the “standard” social platform, but so what? We have to deal with them, hopefully with wisdom and humanity, which is where your life’s work tends, may G-d hold you in the palm of hir hand as long as you are willing and able to do it. There’s obviously a long way to go, and yes I know the Stanton case, and it’s a really bad deal. But our organs can’t be taken off the table. They’re part of the table, even in the grocery checkout line.

It’s lovely to have smart friends. They make you smarter, especially when you’ve known them for more than half your lifetime, even with time off for good behavior. So I replied:

Right, okay. And for you, who is about a foot smarter and probably a yard more willing to saddle up for variances in the human experience than most people, that’ll all probably work in a way that also allows me to have my life. You see? This is a balancing act—how much information do I give, or can I give, and still get though my day? Can the bank teller get a sense of me, in context, enough to do the banking, without knowing about my genitals? Yes. Are they nonetheless at work in some way? Probably also yes, I’ll give you that. Maybe especially for me. But where is my responsibility to the bank teller, and where is my responsibility to my own banking chores getting done? Where, for that matter, is my responsibility to my own sense of safety and well-being?

So, theoretically, I am more than willing to take your point, and sign up for the idea that we are all, constantly, interacting with one another’s bodies in all their messy, furry, damp, ungainly, brilliant, delicious ways. But also I am not theoretically banking.

In the practical realm, people (about whom I generalize in this Standard American Television Culture) do not react well to things—any things—which are nonstandard. We have a big love affair with normal and abnormal, with normal getting rewarded and abnormal being punished. So then it becomes this intense thing of assessing: how much educating am I willing to do? What’s my risk here? How much energy do I have to be a transthing right now? For a while, right before
Butch Is a Noun
came out, I was responding to queries from strangers about my work by saying I had written a book about the history of bananas, because I got overwhelmed with the sheer number of times a day I was being called upon to stop everything and explain what a book titled
Butch Is a Noun
could be about, and stand while I did it under a newly very measuring gendered eye.

And sometimes, like with Susan Stanton, people do not respond well. Especially if they liked me when they thought I was a regular ol’ dude, if perhaps a little better spoken than usual—now their own discernment, maybe their own identities, have been called into question. They liked a tranny? A queer tranny? That cannot be—therefore, I must have tricked them (and G-d forbid if they were in any way attracted to me). The quiet “I think you’d better go now” is not a pleasure, no matter when I hear it. So, the larger point is all very well and good—and I can agree, if we keep it theoretical. But on the micro level, where I actually go with my actual genitals to the actual bank? It’s one angstrom of progress at a time, and most of it is getting paid for by transfolk, who can least afford it and have the most at stake. Which is why such interrogations of the body, when undertaken by you (or anyone for whom it is a place of privilege—that is, anyone whose gender/genital arrangement is standard) should be approached with the understanding that it is a tender spot, that even for those of us who walk around in our bodies more or less just fine there are still a lot of issues about legitimacy at stake, and if you don’t want to trigger them you’ll want to show your willingness to protect that tender spot in the conversation before you open it (about which, for the record, we’re clear here).

After this email, a lot of time passed. That’s not terribly unusual between John and me; sometimes there are gaps. But then, in May, I received the following:

Ach. Okay. You’re right, of course: we don’t live in theory. Which is why I don’t have much patience for what people tell me they believe—increasingly I feel like beliefs and actions relate 1:1, which is depressing when you see what people really do most of the time, though not, thank G-d, all the time.

And I wish to heck I didn’t have to go where I feel I must go with this, because I care about you so much; your work, yes, to be sure, but also your tender spots, some of which I’ve known about since you were still, to most of us, a girl.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, a modicum of decency, intelligence, and mutual respect exists between you and me, or between you and anyone for that matter. We engage in discourse. On my side there is appalling privilege and a certain amount of ignorance, in addition to curiosity and the aforementioned decency, etc. There is not, however, much ambiguity about some aspects of my identity. On your side, in addition to great generosity and the aforementioned decency, etc., there are widely shared professions of identity prostitution, stories about creating and enjoying warps in the social continuum of gender-normal, and more clinically, the details of your essay “Tranny Bladder” over against references a few chapters earlier to your cock. And even if I hadn’t read your book, you met me in a major airport, in all your gender-jamming glory, in a sweatshirt emblazoned “Transmasculine.”

I’m trying to see why I shouldn’t try to figure out what those things mean, in the most respectful way possible, which is by asking the person who is saying them. By asking you. And here’s the hard part—what if “I” isn’t me, but someone else. Are the rights and responsibilities of interrogation contingent on the circumstances? At what point—and it seems to me there must be a point—must the choices you have made (above) constrain the choices you can make re: protection of tender spots?

I feel very ungenerous and not a little queasy as I write this, because whatever you might be guilty of, I doubt you are guilty of hypocrisy. And I am constrained by my own humanity, at the very least, from treading heedlessly on anyone’s tender spot. But haven’t I, along with thousands of others, been warmly and openly invited to consider your tender spots—indeed, to make ourselves better by the vicarious habitation of your life on the micro level, both physical and meta-physical?

I never replied to his email. Mostly I didn’t reply because I didn’t know the answer, and I continue not to reply because I still don’t (though it hasn’t stopped me publishing the correspondence in a book, has it?). How much am I inviting these kinds of questions because I talk about gender and sexuality issues? If I am willing to take some questions, do I have to take all of them? If I wear a shirt that reads TRANSMASCULINE, what responsibility am I accepting? If we’re likening me to a whore, does the price of my hire entitle the purchaser to whatever ze wants of me? Or am I entitled to keep some things private—or, perhaps, to negotiate a separate price for each? If people have questions, am I responsible to each and every one of them? If I answer them, am I setting the example that people can go ahead and ask transfolk whatever they want, measuring again and again rather than taking us at our word? Or am I slaking their thirst to understand in such a way that will keep them from asking anyone else?

I don’t know. I also don’t know how much these questions are built on our experience, and how much on our personalities. But I must uncomfortably confess that I leave the conversation in much the same place that I began it. I have great respect for John, and great belief in his empathy, but I can still feel my hackles rising uncomfortably when someone starts their interrogation, however friendly, always understanding that in some way the underlying question is, “Are you real or not?” On the other hand, I already know that sometimes—as woo-woo as I know this sounds— sometimes if I lean into other people a little bit and offer them my trust before I expect theirs, things can go better than I expect. Which, for a worn-out tranny warrior who spends way more time in airports than with old friends, is kind of a nice thing to be able to hold on to.

It Only Takes a Minute, II

There is, in fact, nothing wrong with me. Or with my husband or with any of my friends, and though I know the Gender Identity Disorder diagnosis-and-treatment model has served some people well over time, I find it harder and harder to get on board. So I apologize for not reacting more warmly to your explanation of how you got your workplace to cover your surgery and medical leave. I know it’s a huge relief for you, but I’m conflicted. Glad you got what you need, worried that it’s not a good precedent.