Real Man Adventures (4 page)

ME: Does it seem fair that I have to?

DOS: I can’t speak to that.

ME: You—

DOS: I’m sorry. I just need evidence of complete sexual reassignment surgery, and then I can process your application.

ME: The doctor says he considers it full sexual reassignment surgery.

DOS: It needs to say complete.

ME: Okay, so you’re telling me I need to go to Zagreb, Croatia, and spend like fifty thousand dollars on a far-from-perfect procedure that would give me essentially a limp piece of sirloin hanging between my legs for you to issue me a passport with an M on it?

DOS: Again, I didn’t make up the policy. I just need something that says you’ve had complete sexual reassignment surgery.

ME: I have completed my transition.

DOS: Not according to the guidelines.

ME: Whose guidelines?

DOS: The Department of State’s.

ME: What about my guidelines? What if I’m okay with how I am? Actually, why don’t you just tell me how many inches of penis the
government requires to decide I’m male?

DOS: [
Agitated
] I don’t know.

ME: No, seriously. How long? Because maybe I’ll just make it under the wire.

DOS: I don’t know.

ME: Okay, then. What if I don’t have either? Like, what if you can’t tell? What do those people get?

DOS: —

ME: Or… [
raised voice
] what if I don’t want to discuss with a complete stranger and put down on record with the government what I have down there, because it’s nobody’s business except mine and whomever I share it with?
²

DOS: —

ME: [
Calmer
] This is just intensely personal, and I’m uncomfortable having to talk about this with you just to be able to travel freely and comfortably in the world.

DOS: I can assure you it’s not entirely comfortable for me either.

ME: I know you’re trying to help. Can I ask you one more thing?

DOS: [
Sighing
] Yes.

ME: All those guys in Iraq getting their genitals blown off by IEDs, do you make them change their passports from M to F when they come home, because they don’t have penises anymore?

DOS: I don’t know what you want me to say. Send me a letter that says you’ve had complete gender reassignment surgery, and I’ll process your application.

…Which I took as tacit permission to forge a document with the required wording. Two weeks later in the mail was my new passport with the correct gender marker on it.

Less than a year after that, once President Obama’s appointees
had some time to review the old policy on issuing passports to transgender citizens, the State Department’s rules were loosened. Now all you need to get your gender changed is to present a letter from a physician stating that you have undergone clinical treatment for “gender transition.” Which is appropriately, graciously vague, and means you can be on hormones, not be on hormones, be on a low dose of hormones or a full dose of hormones, have had surgery, have not had surgery, have had one kind of surgery but not others, and so on.

I had a feeling the guy I talked to at the State Department knew that the new rules were coming. (Transgender legal advocacy organizations had been working to educate past administrations for years; this was the first one willing to budge.) Or maybe I was just telling myself he knew that as I repeatedly practiced forging a signature and Photoshopping letterhead—and tried desperately not to think about the fact that I was defrauding the government and would of course ultimately be caught and end up in federal prison for several years for my brazen counterfeiting scheme.

But how would they determine which prison to throw me in?

_______________________________

1
. This was shortly after Barack Obama became president and Hillary Clinton secretary of state.

2
. On that note, what the hell is up with the Transportation Safety Administration’s new full-body scanners at airports? The ones that reveal intimate contours of travelers’ bodies, i.e., take three-dimensional images of your completely NUDE body underneath your clothing, aka strip search you without probable cause, aka violate the Fourth Amendment and the Privacy Act (images are sometimes stored, and they reveal things like prosthetic breasts or testicles, colostomy bags, catheters, and other potentially embarrassing—not to mention private—details on all kinds of people’s bodies).

So essentially, any time I travel through an airport where one of the new scanners is in use, if I suck it up and go through the machine (instead of drawing extra attention to myself by requesting an invasive, time-consuming pat-down instead), I am outed. And ashamed. And standing there on the yellow footprints for a couple minutes just hoping I don’t get harassed—or worse—when stopping by the restroom prior to boarding my flight.

I
FEEL PRETTY STRONGLY
that whenever writers write about their dreams in essays or memoirs, the dreams are vastly fictionalized. For obvious reasons. That said, and with full recognition that every story is altered to some extent by the retelling, I am going to attempt to recount faithfully a dream I had two nights ago:

I was being harassed by a few policemen on a random street. When asked, I showed them my driver’s license. While I was still pretty certain the policemen were going to let me go, I remember feeling relief that my paperwork was in order. I believe, but I cannot completely recall, that I was also asked to produce my passport, in addition to other random paperwork.

At some point I was suddenly arrested and taken into custody. I don’t know the cause, but it made some sort of sense to me as I was
being loaded into an unmarked van with a bunch of other people (both males and females, all of us cuffed with hands resting in our laps) and driven to a prison that looked like a cross between San Quentin and every Midwestern prison you see on MSNBC’s
Lockup.
Outside the facility, we were joined by a few other vans full of prisoners, and as we exited the vehicles, we were all funneled into one line leading downhill toward the prison. After a dozen or so yards, a group of guards separated us into two lines—male and female—that fed into two different, side-by-side doors to the facility. I was put into the male line. I remember thinking all of it felt suspiciously like Buchenwald, but there was nobody to whom I might whisper the observation, as was my impulse.

The lines moved very slowly, and for a time, the general atmosphere and my state of mind were calm. I didn’t question where I was, or fight it. I felt like I just needed to suck it up, serve my time, and then I would be free and all this would be behind me. It wasn’t like I was certain a mistake had been made, there had been grave injustice, or that I wasn’t supposed to be there (as usually is the case in my persecution dreams). As I inched ahead in line, though, and caught a glimpse of what was happening up ahead, I started to panic (only on the inside). There was a female guard with a rifle near me, standing between the two lines of prisoners, and I tried to get her attention. I was definitely the shortest and slightest guy in line. Nobody had paid me any particular mind before, but as soon as I started entreating the guard, a few people from both lines started to take notice, the way people get when somebody cuts in front of them at the movie concession stand or at Kmart. I coughed a few times until the female guard looked in my direction, at which point I tried
to make my face really kind and open, to entice her to come over. She appeared at first impassive, but then it seemed as if she might be wavering. I assumed she would ultimately decide to ignore me, but just as I was getting to the front of the line and a male guard asked me to pull down my pants (revealing just the hair on my stomach and the beginning of the trail below that), the female guard finally came over and leaned in close to my lips. I think she had seen how panicked the look on my face was as I reluctantly started to pull my pants down.

At this point the dream became more like a scene in a film, where I was observing from a different perspective than that of myself in line. Now I was one character among a cast of many. What I saw was a small, dark-haired dude (me) talking to a guard, but at the same time I could also see people in both the men’s and women’s lines noticing that I was talking to this female guard, perhaps trying to curry special treatment. It was like I could understand it from their perspectives, too. I don’t know precisely what was said to the guard because of that perspective—even though I was the one saying it. I did have a sense of what must have been conveyed to her, which was that I couldn’t pull my pants all the way down for the strip search, because then both the other men and some women would see me and know that I was different. That if that happened, I would of course be beaten and raped when we got into the general population on the other side of the male and female admitting areas.

The guard immediately understood. Not in a nurturing, kind way, but rather in the way that suggested she and the other guards must’ve had a memo or perhaps a sensitivity training session about “these kind of people who you might see in the prison population,”
and she was just following protocol to keep me out of danger. Doing her job.

So while a few of the other prisoners looked on, again, from both lines, I was back in myself (no longer a player in the scene I was watching), and the guard led me into a separate chamber to take off all my clothes and put on an orange prison uniform while she and a few other male guards looked the other way. I was given my requisite supplies and the number of my cell. And then I was released back into the general population, among other men and women carrying their blankets and towels and soap toward their cells. I walked by rows and rows of open cells, which were divided by gender, two or four people per cell. There was the stainless-steel toilet in the middle of each room, completely on view for all to see. I was immediately terrified by the prospect of having to sit down to pee in front of everybody, but then I remembered that the female guard had acted like everything was okay, so I told myself it would indeed be okay, just keep walking and try to find the right cell. Two women inmates in orange jumpsuits approached me then, as I neared the common part of the prison (gym equipment, Ping-Pong table, TV). They spoke to me sympathetically, like they knew my “secret,” and would help me keep it from the men in the joint.

One of the women looked at my paper and pointed to a small cell that was more like a compartment that you see in Japanese airports or business commuter hotels. I had to climb the wall to enter the tiny space, but it would be all my own, no cellmates. Just a bedroll and the small adjacent cement surface to put things on. A notebook and pen and alarm clock were all I really had, besides linens. As I was slowly setting these few things up in my space,
the sympathetic women whispered something about how another person with “concerns like mine” had just been there the month before—and they pointed out the private small bathroom that he’d had access to for showering and toilets. I remember feeling immense relief at this idea, but then also equal amounts of fear that guys would see me going in and out of the bathroom enough times that one or two of them would eventually figure it out, and the information about something being different about me would spread from there. I asked one of the girls how we were supposed to know how long we were to be confined, but they said it varied.

At dinner and free time before bed, everything seemed normal. When it was lights-out and the barred door slammed me shut inside my pod, I remember feeling completely safe, but as I lay there listening to the night sounds of the prison with the ceiling alarmingly close to my nose, I was thinking to myself over and over:
that door is going to fly open first thing in the morning.
Thinking,
I’m going to have to act tough and like nothing’s out of the ordinary. Fake irritable bowel syndrome, or colitis.
I was thinking,
At least I have as many tattoos as a lot of these guys, even if I can’t bench press a lot
, and I lay there sleeplessly trying to figure the complicated algebra in my head: how many guys would see me use the bathroom and showers how many times per day, how exponentially fast that information would travel, and then how many weeks that would buy me before the worst would happen. Which I knew would happen; it was only a matter of how long I could last.