Real Man Adventures (19 page)

She (we?) went with purpleish.

_______________________________

1.
The kind you’ve read about in
GQ, Esquire
, and
Details
magazines ad nauseam— your best-buddy female friend you can itch your balls around, say “cunt” in front of, and go to hockey games with and (supposedly) don’t want to fuck.

TC: W
HY ARE TRANNIES
, across the board, so unbelievably self-involved?

KATE BORNSTEIN: Unlike more respectable “trans people,” trannies don’t have the sanctioned identities that anchor us to the
culture, so we’re tossed about until we discover what the fuck it is within ourselves that can get us seen the way we’ve always wanted to be seen. That means a whole lot of what-the-fuck-am-I-doing, and even more how-are-they-reacting-to-freaky-me. I’d call that self-involvement. Nu?

TC: Yeah, I guess I would. Do you identify with the phrase “born in the wrong body”?

KB: Not in the least. I like what you say about it.

TC: Oh, yeah, being born in the “right” body? I think I feel that way, and then something demeaning will inevitably happen, and I question everything.

KB: Yup, trannydom is both a blessing and a curse.

TC: If there was as much visibility when you were a kid as there is now about transitioning and transgender people (like, if they had
Dancing with the Stars
on TV, or shit, if they even had TV back then)… No, seriously, do you think you would’ve transitioned earlier than you did, had there been more information and tools readily available?

KB: Y’know what, I’d like to think I would’ve transitioned earlier. But it was more than television back then, it was the whole postwar hetero-macho-misogynist-homophobic-racist-anti-Semitic glue that held everything in place. We’ve only been seriously prying ourselves loose from that for a couple of decades now, at most.

But as a fantasy? Wow, sure, I wish I’d been as brave as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn and Tula and International Crysis. They were so beautiful.

TC: Speaking of those ladies, who was your tranny role model? (You were mine, by the way.)

KB: I often consult the ghosts of Doris Fish and ‘Tippi’. I got a lot of strength-of-girl from reading books by Caroline Cossey, aka Tula. Sandy Stone put me head over heels in awe and gave me hope that I could be a mad, eccentric artist and survive while doing just that. Marsha Botzer taught me I could still be a lady, but I don’t think she calls herself a tranny.

TC: Why do trannies get their panties in such a bunch over the word “tranny”?

KB: Trannies don’t. Trans women do. Because they think that people will associate them with those horrible sex workers, and that would cost them their jobs and the respect of their communities. Because they’ve worked so hard to scrape all the sex and desire off the identity of trans. Because they don’t want to be treated with disdain by the masters of theocratic capitalism. Because they’ve been called that name with terrible anger, been shamed by it too many times, and it really hurts them to hear it.

TC: Haven’t we all been up and down the “reappropriate the words of the oppressor” road?

KB: Yup. Still haven’t figured out the meta solution to the paradox of hate speech being the same as love speech.

TC: I’m going to bring
transie
back. What do you say?

KB: Nah. You say “transie,” I say “tranny,” so both our books are then filled with hate speech. We are the most transphobic people on the planet. And maybe we’ll change some hearts. Won’t that be lovely?

TC: Who’s the lady who always used the term
transie?

KB: Sandy Stone. I’ve asked her if she invented it. She said, no, that’s just what trannies of her generation called each other. Why is it you like that better than
tranny?
Just curious.

TC: I don’t really like it better, I just cotton to
transie
because it seems old-fashioned, like what ladies used to call themselves before they even knew what they were. There’s something sweet about it, although I’m sure even thinking that makes me a misogynist. Which of course I am.

KB: You think you’re a misogynist? I’ve seen you write misogyny into some of your characters, but I haven’t seen you do misogyny. Not that I watch you 24/7. Nah—at best you’re a miso-nearly-wanna-be.

TC: I’ll take that as a compliment, coming from you.

KB: Everything I can think of about you is a compliment, mister man. Well, most everything.

TC: Back to transition. I think if I had transitioned earlier in life, I’d be more interested in living as stealth as possible. Mostly because it would help me avoid some really uncomfortable moments that have the potential to make me feel really shitty. Do you ever fantasize about living stealthily?

KB: Never with any joy. I did fantasize it, never thought I’d be able to pull it off. I dreaded the constant fear I’d have to face if I tried to do it. But I do live stealth as I walk through the world. AND my father-in-law has known me for fifteen years and doesn’t know I’m a tranny. Conversation with him is so boring.

TC: Is he among the twenty million
Dancing with the Stars
viewers? You could talk about that.

KB: He watches the news and Lawrence Welk reruns. If you asked him what
Dancing with the Stars
was, he’d probably tell you it’s what angels do. He would never call Chaz Bono an angel.

TC: Is Chaz Bono “good for the trannies”?

KB: At this point in his career, the Chaz Bono phenomenon may be good for some trans people. He’s a freak like us, and he’s holding his course. He’s a freak because he’s fat, and that makes him embarrassingly unattractive—no one a respectable person would want to be,
no one a respectable person would want to fuck, no one a respectable person would want to be seen with in public. He’s a freak because he’s a celebrity, and respectable people resent how drawn they are to him. And he’s a freak because he’s an artist, and that makes him laughable and socially undesirable.

Chaz is a
baby
trans thing. He’s swung way over to the boy side of the world, including the icky parts of that gender (no offense, there are icky girl parts too). It’s going to take Chaz another five years in the public eye, poor fucker, until he gets the internal head and heart room to figure out for himself who and what he is. That’s when he’ll be amazingly good for trannies and other trans folk.

TC: Do you really think Chaz Bono is an artist? I can’t see really anything he’s done that could be considered artistic (besides, perhaps, transitioning, which definitely is an “art”)—I feel like he’s always just been a child of famous people, coming out, penning memoirs, trying to get reality shows, talk shows, record deals, popping up in the news here and there. I also remember his being a vocal lezzie and spokesperson for this or that (the Human Rights Campaign, when they were blatantly anti-trans, as in: let’s get all this more palpable gay and lesbian legislation passed first, and then maybe we’ll worry about the freaky trannies later). I’m curious what you mean by “he’s an artist.”

KB: Okay, this gets down to elitism. I admit I hesitated after I said that he was an artist. I almost changed it to “entertainer.” Then I reasoned that entertainers are artists and—as you pointed out—we trannies are gender artists. And there are hunger artists, do you
know about them? When I’m deep into my anorexia, I’m a fucking artist—I pull forth bones, I disappear. But it’s not entertaining. I wish Kahlil Gibran had tackled art and entertainment in
The Prophet
. You and I need to write a dark version of
The Prophet
together.

TC: Okay, but let me get this dark version of me out first. What is, in the end, going to be “good for the trannies”? Every time I read an article about a transperson in mainstream media, I resist reading the comments, I really try, but then someone will e-mail me a link about how Chaz Bono told
Rolling Stone
magazine that he is “saving up money to buy a penis,” and so I’ll just glance down at the comments—99.5 percent of which are virulently intolerant and hateful and religious and say things like, “Psychological help would be better than mutilating herself over and over.” Part of me is like, “Shut up, dude, keep it to yourself.” And the other part is like, “Well, I guess folks need to hear about it, but I’m sure glad it’s you and not me.”

KB: It is you and me. Life just isn’t the same for us, holding identities as trannies. Maybe Chaz is a tranny trying to be a trans person—a lot of trannies do try.

TC: I kind of want to be a trans person.

KB: Well, in my advanced years, I’ve come to see that it’s only when we give up and give in to our inner tricksters that we find ourselves a life worth living. The virulent intolerance and hateful religious condemnation is an inescapable part of living out in front of any
cultural curve. Whoops—there I go, being elite again. I get that way with you.

TC: It’s not that you’re being elite. It’s just that you’re better than everybody else.

KB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

TC: Truth is, in light of the often grotesque nature of the online world these days, I’m slightly terrified of publishing this book, and I was for a time considering publishing it under a different name, even though it would’ve been obvious it’s me. Then I hated myself for considering using a different name, felt like a pussy. I know you would never consider doing something like that, but I’ve never put myself out there—it’s of course so different from fiction. Anyway, since I am a self-involved tranny, tell me something to make me feel better about all this.

KB: Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

TC: You texted something to the effect that we are fractured people trying to use our art to put ourselves back together again. In some ways we are all doing that, us writer types. It made me think of Joan Didion, who says she doesn’t know what she’s thinking about anything until she writes it down. That might be what I’m doing.

So, this is your, what, fourth memoir-ish book? Have you figured yourself out yet/put yourself together? Was there elucidation with each publication?

KB: There’s that old saw: we teach what we most need to learn. What the fuck does that say about writing memoir?
²
As trannies and trans people, we put a whole lot of stock into what other people think of us, how they see us, how they treat us, what gender box they put us in. When we write, we get to call all those shots. It’s heady.

Have I figured myself out yet? Put myself together? More or less, yeah. I have. I’ve got the components down, and they’re all in the right place in the Rube Goldberg device of who and what I am. But putting ourselves together doesn’t take into account the never-ending morphing we do as we move from the gaze of one person to the next—and the never-ending morphing we do as we travel through the nature of our desires. I’m always reassembling myself into something that’s easy for people to relate to—and I always do my best to become the object of desire to the people I’m mad for. No, no. I don’t always do those things—not when I’m cranky. Or scared. Then I don’t give a fuck about what people think they see when they see me. And I get all prickly and resentful of the easy time a lot of people seem to have of it just by being normal, and I think mean thoughts. That rule I wrote in [my last book]
Hello, Cruel World
—“Don’t be mean”—yeah, well… we teach what we most need to learn.

_______________________________

1.
This conversation took place over the course of a few days while Kate was in the throes of final edits on her sixth book,
A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today
(Beacon Press, 2012). Now sixty-four, Kate started her transition in the early eighties and is a widely known and revered gender theorist, author, playwright, and performance artist. We first met shortly after I moved to New York City in 1996, and despite my being a bumbling pipsqueak, we became friends and have been ever since.

2.
Kind of like how I just wrote a whole book about something I hate talking about?

A Six-Word Memoir

Thank God for Astor Place barbershop.