Real Man Adventures (6 page)

Closer friends naturally transitioned into calling me “he,” which felt best, but when other people messed it up, I was always like, “Whatever! You can even call me ‘Asshole’ if you’d like—I’m sure it’s gotta be really hard for you!” As for my parents, I remember saying to them one time early on, “You don’t have to call me ‘he’ if you can’t bring yourself to, but please try not to use ‘she.’”

But now I wished I hadn’t said any of that. That I’d never spent so much time at that stage. And if I were to draw that pyramid now—again, with easiest on the bottom and hardest at the top—this is what it would look like (most days):

Once I overtly switched to “he” and let people in my life know about it (still in a self-mocking way that let everybody off the hook),
that’s when I got off the apologetic train. After fielding scores of “It’s so hard, because I’ve always known you as ‘she,’” and “I know it’s no big deal for you, but it’s really hard for me,” I stopped being so goddam accommodating and started gently correcting people, even if it made them mildly uncomfortable in the moment. Because you know what’s mildly uncomfortable? Not being seen for who you are, especially by people who are supposed to know and love you. You know what else? People insisting you are something you are not, and likely never have been.

I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what’s so fucking hard about calling me what I am, what I prefer. If you are introduced to somebody as John, it’s not cool to decide to call him Sally, or even David, instead (simply because you choose to, or worse, because you woefully—for John—happen to have knowledge about his past using a different name). Or say you have a good friend you’ve known for years. You used to go out to bars with this guy, snort drugs, hook up with strippers, and then wake up and do it all over again the next night. If this guy is now five years sober and happily married with two-point-five perfect children, you probably wouldn’t call him up every day and ask him to score some coke and go whoring with you. (Especially not if his wife answers the phone.) It’s not the world he lives in, even if you think or wish it still is. Maybe it never was him, it never quite fit, and he had to wade through all that crap in order to reach the happy puppies-and-rainbows-filled place he is today.

Or say you always played basketball with a different buddy, that’s all you guys did together—played on your high school team, at the
Y, down on the corner, at Chelsea Piers in one of those oppressive adult leagues where everybody has to buy the uniform and celebrate at the sponsoring Irish pub after all the games. But then your buddy is in a gruesome Staten Island Ferry accident, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down, exiled permanently to a wheelchair. Would you forevermore go up to him, see him sitting in that wheelchair, and then be like, “Yo, you wanna go down to the corner and play some pickup? Ooops! I didn’t mean to say that! Sorry, it’s just so
hard
to get used to!”

No, it’s fucking not. You know who it’s hard for? The dude who never gets to walk again, never gets to play pickup hoops with his buddies again, never gets to use his dick again for anything outside of involuntarily urinating into a bag. That’s who it’s hard for.

All these not-quite-right analogies are just a fairly shrill way of saying that it always makes me feel like shit inside when people refer to me as “she.” It doesn’t happen much anymore (outside family and a few old friends—or the random schmohawk who is introduced to me and naturally takes me for what I look like and what I am,
a guy, but then hears from somebody that I’m trans, or does some Googling and figures it out on her own). And it doesn’t matter if it’s with the best of intentions, or whether it’s obvious to those in earshot that I am male and nothing’s technically been lost, that there’s obviously been a mistake. Or even if they are talking about the past.

So as usual, I’ll leave it to my unbelievably intuitive and intelligent wife to say it better (and more generously) than I ever could, better than I’ve personally ever heard anybody—trans or not—put it:

       I think about this sometimes. How I would feel if I were called “sir” while I was on a date, wearing a dress and heels and cherry lipstick. How abnegating it would be to have the world look at you and decide, no matter how many signals you give, that you are something you are not.
   There is this misbegotten notion that transmen and women are about playing dress-up and fooling people. But to be trans is to feel the truth so acutely you can’t fake it. It is to be so consumed with the truth of who you are that you are willing to risk everything to inhabit it. To refuse to be what other people have decided you are—this is an act of courage few individuals dare try. I know I didn’t.
²

_______________________________

1
. Coincidentally a question I used to hear, often out of the mouths of children, and only in women’s public restrooms. This was many years ago, though, when I didn’t pass as obviously as male and thus was using about 60% men’s and 40% women’s restrooms, depending on the seeming safety of the situation.

2
. This is a tiny excerpt from a much larger essay she was asked to write for
O: The Oprah Magazine
, about falling in love with me. I was not identified by name in the piece, though there were a couple photos of us accompanying the essay (wherein we, ironically, look nothing like ourselves).

1.
 
The physical pain involved in menstruation

2.
 
The emotional pain involved in menstruation

3.
 
How to comment properly on an outfit, hair, shoes, makeup, dress, etc.

4.
 
How much sex is enough sex

5.
 
How completely natural it is to feel one way but then also feel the complete opposite way simultaneously

6.
 
How it feels to be dismissed

7.
 
How stubble feels against softer skin

8.
 
What people think of you if you dare to argue for what you believe

9.
 
How certain tasks, by default (or perhaps through the fault of history) tend to fall on women

10.
 
The tyranny of hormones

_______________________________

1
. As my wife has said to me, in the heat of some stupid argument in which I was likely being a dick: “It’s astonishing how little you know about women.”

ME: W
HEN YOU FIRST
saw that photo of me—before we ever met or you knew who I was, or I knew who you were—what did you think of me? When I tell the story, I always say you just thought I was “some writer guy.” Is this close to accurate?

MY WIFE: It is and it isn’t. I did think you were a guy. But there was always something else there. Something that made you magnetic in a way I’d never felt before. I don’t think this has to do with your being trans (more to do with falling in love), but I suppose, now that you
are asking me to consider it, it could, if only in that something about you radiated infinite possibility.

ME: Do you think everybody who came to our wedding “knew” about me?

MY WIFE: Yes. First, because they were our closest, dearest friends. Second, because information like this travels. It is such a core issue, and it brings up so much inside folks, that I can’t imagine it being tamped down. Lastly, it was likely a great comfort to our parents to have a chance to talk about all this complicated (for them) stuff in a safe, understanding place, during one of the most traditional rituals on offer.

ME: Do you believe there’s something different about my biology? Like, do you think I may not have the typical XX chromosome setup that those designated as females at birth have?

MY WIFE: That is a good question. I know you are resistant to the biology-is-destiny argument. As am I. But that is probably just stubbornness and ego. Fuck you, genes! I don’t care what you say I’m meant to be. An addict, a depressive, slope-chinned, acne-prone, a cheat, a girl. Then you read the medical journals.

ME: How many minutes do I have to be in a public men’s restroom before you start picturing me being raped and killed?

MY WIFE: On average, three. Five if I can see the line. Two if we are at a dodgy truck stop.

ME: How many times a day do you worry about something violent happening to me? Is this number compounded by my being trans, or would you worry anyway?

MY WIFE: I worry with every breath. The only time I am not worrying is when my brain is being distracted by other, lesser attentions, like reality TV or my work or what to make for dinner. But the hum of fear is always there, as it is for the children. Sometimes it is manageable. And other times, say after reading the newspaper or another study about girls and rape, or watching something hateful happen on the street, it washes over me how thin the line is between our happy, sweet lives and the moment that could end all of it forever. Because of my experiences and natural inclinations, it isn’t challenging for me to imagine the worst. Sure, I would do this no matter what, but the undeniable fact that trans men and women are statistically more likely to suffer myriad abuses doesn’t exactly help. Just as having been the victim of violent crime myself doesn’t make me inclined to be comfortable releasing my girls into the world. And yet what choice is there? So we truck along, hoping, praying, studying the truth from the corner of our eye. There aren’t enough fingers to cross.

ME: List five ways that I am “typically male.”

MY WIFE:

1.
 
You are self-involved.

2.
 
You watch TV with your hand down your pants.

3.
 
You never worry about how much you’re eating.

4.
 
You get territorial and jealous.

5.
 
You don’t apologize for yourself.

Bonus: You spit on the sidewalk.

ME: Are you secretly waiting for a man who’s taller, bigger, smarter, richer, tougher, more handsome, more talented, and—most importantly—was born male to come along so you can leave me and run off with him?

MY WIFE: No.

ME: Do you think your mother thinks I’m good for you?

MY WIFE: Yes.

ME: What if one of our kids turned out to be transgender? (For the record, I don’t want that to happen.)

MY WIFE: I’ll blame you.

ME: How happy are you that this is the last question?

MY WIFE: As if.

_______________________________

1
. Containing far fewer questions than I probably should ask her; there are a lot of questions I’m just not sure I want the answers to yet. Starting with: “Do you sometimes wish I were a ‘real’ man?”