Real Man Adventures (10 page)

So
yeah
, I’m a little edgy. Afraid that I’m putting not only myself, but more importantly, three ladies who love me very much and are invested in my making it home safely every night, in some sort of jeopardy by essentially advertising something that I’m ambivalent about being in the business of selling in the first place.

I guess that’s why it’s called senseless violence. Nothing makes sense, and right about now it feels like any overarching premise I’d had is starting to sour, the narrative unraveling, this chapter falling apart, paragraphs and sentences decomposing beneath my fingertips. All as the atmosphere around us is growing even more volatile, hateful, and menacing—not less. The untethered fear makes us act in ways and think things we probably shouldn’t. Like maybe I should just discreetly live my life and keep my mouth shut so as not to attract any unwanted attention. Be happy with what I have and not act uppity. Don’t dress slutty, so you don’t look like you’re asking for it.

Imagery of these three men’s lives intrudes at inconvenient times—or more accurately, their deaths do. When my wife jokes with me before I head into a particularly red-looking bar or truck stop, “See ya, Brandon.” Or when a Tennessee state representative goes on the news and threatens to “stomp a mudhole” into any transgender woman who uses a public restroom in his state. (“Stomp a mudhole” refers to beating someone within inches of his or her life.) And federal legislation or not, I don’t feel extra protected. Or even nominally protected—forget my special rights! Some days I don’t give it a single thought; others I can’t get it out of my head. And sometimes I get so frustrated with myself for not being able to get it out of my head, for being afraid—or for not being more afraid. For feeling even a flash of fear or concern, either real or imagined.

Like just the other day, my wife was out to lunch with a newish friend. (We recently moved from a blue state up North to a decidedly conservative and religious one in the South.) The friend is very nice, open-minded, liberal, active politically. Cool. She couldn’t wait to talk to my wife about something she’d read when Googling some of my wife’s work, the way people do sometimes when they meet a new person and want to find out more about them. We’d been spending some time together as families because of the kids, and all the while, she hadn’t “known” about me. Neither had her husband. She’d had no clue! And was surprised (and delighted) to read it. It’s so great! They have trans friends at their Unitarian Universalist church (MTFs, but still). And gay friends. All kinds of friends. She LOVES
Middlesex
!
²
She’s so happy for us, and even used it as a “teachable moment” about tolerance and difference for her kids (one of whom is in school with my children).

This might seem totally fine. Maybe it is. And her intentions were nothing but good. But in our household, here’s where our brains go, pretty instantly: this friend now goes off and mentions us to someone, totally harmlessly, say to a trans church friend, or a gay one. Or just a “regular” one! In any event, she says, in this decidedly small and aggressively religious town in which we now find ourselves most of the year, where we progressive and atheist types downtown find and hang on to one another the way Holly Marshall clings to her daddy whenever dinosaurs come around on
Land of the Lost
, “Oh, you should meet the Coopers, they’re a nice new couple in town, both writers. He’s
transgender.
They have two kids. They’re great, I want to have a party and introduce you.”

Harmless, right?

We all do that kind of shit all the time, call people how we see them. The nice new Mexican family down the block. Or the lesbians who bought the pink house with the pool on the corner. Or the white couple who just brought home an adorable baby girl from China. Or the little people with the average-size son in your kid’s sixth-grade class… only what I “am” is not readily visible from the outside. It is my past, not necessarily my present, and especially not in an entirely new town with a whole bunch of people who don’t know me, didn’t know me before, and have no reason
to think I’m anything but what they see: the short dude who just moved in with his wife and two kids. A visible man.

It’s just plain nobody’s business what kind of man beyond that. Or how I grew into one. Just like it’s nobody’s business if you were molested as a child. Or had an abortion. Or you were the star running back in high school. Were adopted. Had sex with your sister. Survived cancer. Or any number of things that are in people’s past (good and bad, but let’s be honest, folks most like talking about the bad and different) and completely invisible until they make it your business by sharing.

Of course we cannot control, well, anything in the world, but when the sheer veil of our privacy is not maintained and respected, even in seemingly harmless ways, we can’t help but grow reflexively nervous. Not nervous about the people who understand that information is indeed harmless. Of course those folks are not the problem, even if I hadn’t yet decided to share with them my history myself. It’s those who feel that fact about my past is actually harmful, and even directly threatening to them and their belief systems.
Their way of life!
That, like Brandon Teena’s new friends, they’ve been deliberately hoodwinked. That I’ve been strutting around like I’m one thing when in fact I am something else entirely. I have taken something that isn’t mine for the taking. That I am at very best a liar, but most likely also a pervert and possibly a child molester. Some twisted subset of homosexual.

In some men (and especially small groups of men), this ostensible betrayal has the potential to provoke extraordinary rage
and unspeakable violence, you hear about it all the time,
³
and while I am not actively hiding anything or trying to fool anybody—I am living my life as I know how—my very existence is an abomination to some, likely including the church-attending folks who smile and wave at me from their front porches every day as I’m loading my kids into the car, or walking my dogs, or working on the house. And the folks kitty-corner from us who baked a cherry cobbler when we moved in and brought it over as a welcome. Or the ones on the other side of us who didn’t have time to bake, so brought over some locally made cupcakes instead.

When the guy who’s always smoking on his stoop down the block hears about a man who’s not “really” a man or some such, having just moved onto his street, he’ll at first think,
No fucking way, it’s got to be a different guy than the one I talk motorcycles with.
But then he’ll start looking at me differently (while still waving; this is, after all, the South), and eventually he’ll put it together. Most people are hip to the gay thing nowadays, but they don’t even have wires in their brains to connect the trans thing just yet, and certainly not in their own backyards. So he mentions it to that shifty-looking son who’s in his twenties, perpetually primed like a piston, in and out at all hours of the night, and eventually we cross paths on the street some weekend night, me coming home, him just heading out, and he’s already drunk with his buddies, or more than drunk, and when he sees me he hisses to himself, or might even say out loud, “Fucking faggot.”

And then we’re off.

Tyrone Cooper has a lot of outstanding bills. He might’ve served some time for check kiting, or for credit card fraud. He burns through cell phone companies at an alarming rate, and more than a few ladies have tried to get in touch with him about delinquent (or nonexistent) child support. Over the years, I have been the recipient of a great number of calls pertaining to these and other related matters.

But I am not Tyrone Cooper.

Upward of dozens of calls per week have come in for Tyrone Cooper, on and off for roughly ten years at my residence—until I stopped answering the phone, deactivated voice mail, and removed an answering machine from the line. When I have explained to the various callers that I am not Tyrone Cooper, and that Tyrone Cooper has never lived at this number or address, and that I do not in fact know who he is, nor am I related to him or have ever heard of him… I am rarely believed. I am instead assumed to be covering for
Tyrone, or for myself, or for us both. I have begged to be removed from whatever list my number has been added to, but the calls keep coming, an endless string of dogged, ominously threatening messages pleading for immediate full payment (or a mutually agreeable, adjusted payoff schedule).

I am the kind of person who periodically sits down with a stack of junk mail and actually takes the time to call companies and flintily demand to be removed from their mailing lists, pleading for my privacy to be respected and trees to be spared—often five or six times per company I’ll have to ask before I am successfully removed. Or sometimes I am never removed, despite years of calling on my part.
⁴
So when I get calls for Tyrone, I will swear to the people on the other end of the line, in the most sincere and desperate voice I can conjure, that there is no Tyrone Cooper associated with my address or phone number, even though the computer screen in front of them insists there is. Every other shred of evidence to the contrary. I will offer anything—a signed and notarized letter from my mortgage company, a copy of my photo ID, a fruitcake every year come holiday time—to please stop calling, to stop filling my voice mail to capacity and interrupting my telephone conversations with the click-clicks of call waiting. I promise them, You will never happen to call one day and catch me in a lie, nor will Tyrone by accident pick up the phone and suddenly send in a check to settle all of his outstanding debts.

One night several years ago, I shrieked into the phone so loudly and hostilely:

I AM NOT TYRONE FUCKING COOPER! that an upstairs neighbor knocked on my door to make sure everything was okay.

A common complaint against trans people goes something like, “Well, I could wake up one morning and decide I’m Marie Antoinette, but that doesn’t make me Marie Antoinette, now does it?” People are going to decide what they decide, think what they think, assign whatever identity to me they desire: what they see in front of them at any given time, a perspective that has as many iterations as pairs of eyes taking it in. Like seeing my telephone number on a list and calling my home repeatedly over the course of a decade, insisting I am somebody I am not.

They are among the most private spaces in the world, the periods before and after transition. Not to mention during. And yet it becomes very public very quickly. Because of the goddam social contract, which means that everything you do has the potential to affect everyone around you, everyone you care about, who cares about you. The magic of life (should you choose to engage it). Yet when you do something like this, something so far out of the lines—not to mention off the pages—of the coloring book, people from your own parents to parents of your kids’ schoolmates to people who hear about you down the block suddenly have a dog in the fight.

Which I get. If I sincerely believed pit bulls’ jaws could lock,
⁵
I wouldn’t want one running loose around my neighborhood. And
if I believed being transgender was abhorrent, indicative of sickness of the mind and body and moral weakness and poor decision making, it would follow that I wouldn’t, for instance, want my kids spending much time with a transgender person. If one of my kids’ friends’ parents was an active heroin addict—or let’s up the ante, say a registered, recovered sex offender—I indeed wouldn’t want my child spending the night or much time at all in that person’s care. It’s not that heroin addicts or crackheads are bad people (though of course child molesters are). They just seem to make some bad decisions that I wouldn’t want my children inheriting the consequences of, even for a short time.

People in New York and San Francisco, or Los Angeles for that matter, Berlin, Bangkok, Amsterdam, London
⁶
—maybe even you, wherever you reside—cannot understand
what the big deal is
, what is at stake when you live in a gender that is different from the one assigned to you at birth. That’s because only
everything
is at stake, pretty much all of the time, even if there are long periods when I don’t think about it or don’t want to think about it or don’t even particularly care much about it at all. It will almost always come up some way, internally or externally, benignly or potentially threateningly.

Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter who or what I insist I am. The proverbial, If I had a dime for every time I am asked, “What does T stand for?” I would be a rich sonofabitch. “It
has
to stand for
something
.” From police officers to sales clerks to credit card
companies to airlines, new friends, friends of friends, many of them grow viscerally angry as I repeat, “Nothing. It’s just T, no period.” They think I’m just being coy. Or a dick.

“NO. What is the NAME on your BIRTH CERTIFICATE? That your PARENTS gave you at BIRTH?” Spoken like I must be simpleminded.

Okay, okay.
I understand you think this is your business. So sometimes I will give in:
You got me, I’m lying…
it’s really Tommy.

No… Travis (usually at hardware stores and auto repair shops, for some reason). Actually, Theodore (at the public library, dry cleaners, the food co-op, out at bars). Tyler, Tyson, Terrance (food establishments). Toby, Troy, Tim, Todd (random Web sites requiring log-ins).

Tariq (at the airport, once, but never again).

TYRONE.

I swear on my children’s lives, it doesn’t stand for any of these—or anything else.
Just leave it the fuck alone and call my name when those two goddam medium mango-banana smoothies are ready for my thirsty kids. Thanks
.

_______________________________

1
. It thrills me that the law even knows how to distinguish between sexual identity (who you are attracted to sexually), and gender identity (what gender you are identified with). Now if everybody else could figure that out too.

2
. Which is not a book about a transgender character, and it drives me insane when I hear so many transpeople citing it as their all-time favorite. Or when non-trans people think they really “get” trans people because they’ve read that novel. I know it shouldn’t bother me, but it really does.