Real Man Adventures (11 page)

3
. I forgot to mention Angie Zapata, the 18-year-old transwoman in Colorado who began dating and eventually had sex with a man whom she’d met through a mobile social network. After he spotted old photographs of Angie in her apartment, the guy confronted Zapata, who maintained that she was “all woman.” At which point, the man grabbed her genitals and then proceeded to beat her to death with a fire extinguisher, until he “killed it,” (his words). He was eventually convicted of first degree murder and a bias-motivated crime, after the jury heard taped jailhouse conversations in which the murderer told his new girlfriend that “gay things must die” (see, nobody knows the difference between sexual identity and gender identity, even when sleeping with “one”).

It was the first time a state hate crime statute resulted in a conviction in a case involving violence against a transgender victim. And the only sliver of an upside by my thinking is that the murderer will be in prison for the rest of his natural life, with the only sexual contact available to him provided by men (or possibly even other transwomen like Angie, trapped in the purgatory of men’s prison due to their genital status).

4
. Dell computers and Kiehl’s being the worst offenders by far.

5
. This misconception being almost as absurd as the one about transwomen’s seeking to secure unfettered access to women’s bathrooms so they can molest little girls in there.

6
. Hell yeah, I’m generalizing wildly.

Part One

S
HORTLY AFTER MY WIFE
and I got together, a female cousin of hers told my wife that her brother (my wife’s other cousin) referred to me as “it” when he heard that my wife was seeing me. He threatened, “If
it
comes anywhere near me, I’ll kick
its
ass.”

By way of an example of some of the challenges that people of gender difference sometimes encounter in the course of their lives, my wife included these words—without attribution—in the story she was asked to write about our relationship for
O, The Oprah Magazine.
But when the cousin who shared her brother’s threat with my wife found out, she grew instantly incensed, even though no identifying descriptions (not to mention names, theirs or ours) were to be included. First she claimed that her brother hadn’t meant what he’d said. Then she insisted he’d never said it in the first place, that
my wife was remembering incorrectly. Or perhaps even making it up entirely.

“Which was it: did he not mean it, or not say it?” was the only question I wanted to pose to her as I watched the heated exchange between my wife and this female cousin going down over dinner at a burrito joint in New York City one night a few years ago. But I couldn’t get a word in, she was that loud and raging, pointing and screaming in my wife’s face like you see people doing on
Jersey Shore
, before storming out of the restaurant with her fiancé in tow (and within full view of our perplexed children, who were sitting at a nearby table). I have never, before or since, seen my wife in an altercation like that with another person. It was so volatile and over-the-top that in the moment I assumed the cousin was joking—or that they’d had fights like this all the time (neither was the case; Trannygate 2009 was the first time they’d come to blows about anything).

The one thing I did manage to say to the cousin—after the initial explosion, but before it ratcheted up into the red zone—is that it seemed like she was trying to protect the spewer of those shitty words, rather than standing firm on the fact that she’d thought those words shitty enough to report to my wife in an incredulous, disappointed way in the first place. This cousin prides herself on being an NYC hipster with tons of queer friends, and yet when it was time to come to Jesus, she couldn’t do the right thing. I love my own brother and feel a deep and abiding sense of loyalty to him, but I don’t necessarily agree with (nor am I proud of) some of the shit that has come out of his mouth over the years. He probably feels the same way about me.

Trannygate took place well before publication of the story, during the editing process, so out of respect for her cousin’s apparent second thoughts about having shared her brother’s threat, and to minimize any further discomfort on anybody’s part, my wife removed any mention of either cousin from the story (even though, again, in the original draft, the guy never could have been identified, as my wife did not use his or his sister’s name, nor even her own full name for the piece). Nobody would’ve known that he was transphobic, that he had threatened to bash me. And nobody else in the family had to be publicly associated with a tranny—or a tranny lover (which was initially a concern for some of them).

Ever since a couple weeks after Trannygate, my wife and her cousin have not been in contact; my wife had to stop returning phone calls and e-mails when the drama became too heightened. Her cousin just didn’t seem like she wanted to work it out, even to agree to disagree, to take some space. The two had been extremely tight before the incident—that cousin was one of my wife’s closest relatives in the family. She and her fiancé had been guests of ours on a recent weekend; we’d all spent the previous Thanksgiving holiday together at our house.

I feel as though the split is my fault, that
what I am
caused an unprecedented wedge among family. That what I am caused my kids to be exposed to a family member they loved acting so terribly, and worse, treating their mother so abominably—after having shared a perfectly fun day ice-skating at Rockefeller Center, and coming home toting a souvenir snow globe with their photo inside.

I also feel sad for my wife, that after so many years of affinity and trust, she was reminded of how little it takes for someone to turn
against you and drop out of your life entirely, to revoke support and even a modicum of kindness or loyalty in favor of somebody clearly in the wrong. Protecting the one with the power instead of the one without it.

Part Two

A
T ABOUT
9:30
P.M.
on April 15, 2010, a twenty-seven-year-old transgender man named Colle Carpenter was allegedly attacked in a men’s restroom on the campus of California State University Long Beach, where Carpenter is a graduate student. In the attack, Carpenter reported that his assailant accosted him in the bathroom, referring to him by his first name, and proceeded to push him into a stall, pull his T-shirt over his head and shoulders, and then cut him with some sort of a blade on the chest—perhaps an X-Acto knife—carving the word IT into his skin before fleeing. Carpenter returned to class after the incident, and a professor later took him to the hospital. The assailant has never been found, despite seemingly cooperative efforts of campus security and Long Beach Police Department.

What do you say about this?

Being attacked in a public restroom is one of my most prominent fears. It’s sort of like I just assume it’s going to happen to me at some point, just something I have to go through, and then it’ll be over and I can move on. Not a matter of
if
it’s going to happen, but rather
when
—you know, after an agro guy inadvertently spots me through the crack between stalls in a movie theater restroom, or accidentally pushes through a door with a broken lock at a truck stop, and there I am, vulnerable and wiping.

When I heard about the attack over a year after it happened, I wanted to interview Carpenter, so I wrote him a short note through a social networking site, and he wrote me back. He was (understandably) wary of talking about the incident, said he hadn’t spoken to anybody about it, though he had received quite a few requests from the media. But he did eventually talk to me, once, for about half an hour on the phone one evening. He spoke throughout most of the conversation, and was fairly candid about his life, his physical challenges (not even related to the attack), and other interpersonal stuff involving his role as a coparent of a young boy, a lecturer who gives “Transgender 101” presentations at various organizations and educational institutions across the state (which is how he believes his attacker knew his name), and as a graduate student in rhetorical theory, focusing on gender performance and the construction of masculinity. I wanted to, but did not, ask specifically about the attack, which he referred to at various times throughout the conversation in roundabout ways.

Before we hung up, I asked Carpenter whether I might send him a few questions to get a dialogue started, and he responded in
the affirmative. He said he’d read them over, think about it, and get back to me, either answering my questions or letting me know that he wouldn’t be interested in being interviewed.

Here are the questions I sent him right after our phone conversation:

       1.  How much can you tell me of what happened that night? I haven’t read much beyond a few newspaper stories— even though I’ve imagined it a lot—and anybody who reads this will likely be unfamiliar with what happened, so I was wondering if we could just start off there, with what you’re able to say about it…

       2.  Has there been a day since that you don’t think about it? Are there physical reminders of it that you have to process daily (scars, etc.), and if so, do you have any plans to do anything further about them?

       3.  What did you say to your son? How do you explain something like that to a kid?

       4.  Have people mostly been supportive of you? Are there any folks who haven’t been? I’ve read and heard about people doubting the attack actually happened, that you made it up. Where do you think that might be coming from?

       5.  Has what happened ever made you wish you hadn’t decided to transition? I know that sounds crazy, or maybe it doesn’t, but sometimes, like when I’ve had to have medical
procedures or have been sick and don’t know what’s going on with my body and have been at the mercy of somebody who has never come across somebody like me but who in that moment is infinitely more powerful than I, there’s this really tiny (high) voice in the back of my head going,
You brought this on yourself
… Or when I feel like I’m making life harder on my wife and kids…

But he never responded to them. I sent a couple follow-up emails asking whether he’d had a chance to check out the questions, and he wrote back that he had, and was working on answers. He’d just had some difficult life circumstances to deal with, medical issues, social drama, hospitalizations, etc. At one point he asked me to resend the questions (which I did), and told me I could e-mail or call him anytime. But at a certain point it dawned on me I should probably just leave the guy alone. So I did.

The truth is, I realized, he probably couldn’t tell me what I really wanted to know. Nor would I have been able to ask.

A
RECENT STUDY FOUND
that about 40% of adult Japanese men sit down on the toilet to urinate (outside of when they are going number two). Larry David makes a strong case for sitting to pee on one of my favorite episodes of the TV show
Curb Your Enthusiasm
, and Muslim men are supposed to sit or squat to pee all the time (something about avoiding impure urine splatter, as Islam strictly prohibits direct contact with urine or feces). Since the subject of sitting down to urinate is something I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about, I decided to conduct a study of my own, in which I surveyed 31 of my male-born-male
(adult) friends about their STP (sitting-to-pee vs. standing-to-pee) habits.