Redefining Realness (14 page)

That same year, I had my first and only girlfriend for a couple of weeks. We met in Mr. Wong’s social studies class, where she sat behind me, wearing gray contact lenses that made her sharp eyes look catlike and a short haircut that complemented her petite frame. Like the majority of kids in Kalihi, she was Filipino. I adored her. We spoke on the phone regularly as friends, and then all of a sudden I was her “boyfriend,” something instigated and encouraged by our peers, since we hung out so much. I reluctantly went along with it, carrying the title for those two weeks because she made me appear normal. I didn’t want to stick out like Wendi, who would enter my every day during the second half of seventh grade, when we had band class together.

I played tuba, she the flute and piccolo. I was envious of her compact,
feminine instrument. We both were first chair of our sections, she swaying noticeably to her own sound. Early in the spring semester, Wendi sat near me one day as the room emptied and I wiped the saliva out of my mouthpiece. Her closeness made me nervous, just like the first time she asked whether I was
mahu
, because I worried others would think we were friends. I knew I could be called out by association, but something about that day made me not care.

“I’m going to the gym to play volleyball,” she said. “Like come?”

It was another invitation to connect; she was subtle this time. I think she knew it would take baby steps for me to be as out there as she was, and I knew that denying her would mean denying myself. I nodded discreetly, and volleyball became the foundation of our relationship. On the hot cement courts behind our school, Wendi taught me to bump, set, and spike, which was a feat, because I was about four inches shorter than she was at the time. I approached the ball with confidence and sass despite my height, and I even hit the ball with my head snapping at the exact moment my open palm hit the ball, just like Wendi. It was a flamboyant habit that my high school coach would later drill me to unlearn.

Wendi and I grew inseparable through middle school, a bond that would link us for the rest of our lives. Through association, my classmates learned that I was like Wendi—who hadn’t yet adopted any labels to describe her shifting self. I was fortunate to meet someone just like me at such a young age. It was empowering to see myself reflected in her, and I rapidly shifted in her presence. I began dressing like her, shopping at Savers, the thrift store at Dillingham Plaza, scoring soccer shorts and vintage T-shirts. Wendi shopped with a stapler and staple remover to swap price tags according to the day’s color-coded half-off specials. If blue tags were half off, we’d shop for what we wanted, then hunt for garments with blue tags, removing them with the staple remover and restapling the tags to our garments.
“Sickening, yeah?” Wendi would snap as we giddily skipped out of the thrift store, swinging our white plastic bags filled with donated clothes for just under twenty dollars.

We became a regular sight on Gulick Avenue, prancing up and down that main road in Kalihi from her two-bedroom apartment, where she lived with her grandparents, to my house on Owawa Street. What strikes me now is that no one in my family raised an eyebrow when Wendi came to our house. Mom didn’t pull me aside and have a talk with me about my friend. Cori never teased me or Wendi. Chad and Jeff were nothing but cordial, gamely sleeping in the living room so Wendi and I could have the room all to ourselves. Wendi quickly became a regular, welcomed presence in my house. A part of me believes that I brought her around at a time when I was reluctant to vocalize who I was. Her presence allowed me to show another layer of my identity to my family. Their nonchalance helped rebut my fears of rejection.

My baby brother, Jeff, who was only seven at the time, later confessed that he was “confused” by Wendi’s flamboyance and even more “confused” by my evolution. “You were always different,” he later told me, citing that when he heard he had two older brothers, he thought Mom had misspoken because he’d seen a boy and a girl with wild curly hair get off the plane.

“You were never like Chad and me,” he said. “You never wanted to do the things that we liked to do.” Jeff even recalled an incident (that I don’t remember) when I was picking him up from school. A group of boys at the recreation center asked him how he felt about his brother becoming his sister. Jeff’s memory strikes me because I think my growing confidence and self-assuredness under the light of my friendship with Wendi blocked memories of the verbal brutality thrown our way.

As I look back, what impresses me about my family is their openness.
They patiently let me lead the way and kept any confusion or worry to themselves during a fragile period in my self-discovery. I recognize this as one of the biggest gifts they gave me. On some level, I knew they were afraid for me, afraid that I would be teased and taunted. Instead of trying to change me, they gave me love, letting me know that I was accepted. I could stop pretending and drop the mask. My family fortified my self-esteem, which I counted on as I embarked on openly expressing my rapidly evolving self.

Reflecting on this pivotal time in my life, I think of the hundreds of thousands of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning) youth who are flung from intolerant homes, from families who reject them when they reveal themselves. Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless and runaway American youth, as many as 40 percent are LGBTQ, according to a 2006 report by the Task Force and the National Coalition for the Homeless. A similar study by the Williams Institute cited family rejection as the leading cause of the disproportionate number of homeless LGBT youth. These young people are kicked out of their homes or are left with no choice but to leave because they can’t be themselves. That’s something both Wendi and I fortunately never faced.

With an air of acceptance at home, it was fairly easy to approach my mother and declare my truth. Sitting at our kitchen table, I told Mom, with no extensive planning or thought, “I’m gay.” I was thirteen years old and didn’t know how to fully explain who I was, conflating gender identity and sexuality. What I remember about that brief exchange was Mom’s warmth. She smiled at me, letting me know that it was okay. I felt loved and heard and, more important, not othered. From her lack of reaction—her brows didn’t furrow, her brown irises didn’t shift from side to side—I felt as if I had announced that I had on blue today, a simple fact that we were both aware of. Mom later told me that she remembers feeling afraid for me because she sensed
that there was more I wanted to say but didn’t know how to. “My love for you never diminished, but a part of me was scared that people would hurt you, and that is what I had a hard time with,” she told me recently.

A part of me was scared, too. I couldn’t acknowledge the gender stuff because I didn’t have a full understanding of it. Saying “I think I am a girl” would have been absurd for many reasons, including my fear that it would be a lot for my mother to handle. I didn’t know that trans people existed; I had no idea that it was possible for thirteen-year-old me to become my own woman. That was a fantasy.

But no matter how incomplete my revelation to my mother was, I felt freer and began openly expressing my femininity under the grooming of my best friend. On a throw pillow in Wendi’s lap, I rested my head as she tweezed my eyebrows on her grandmother’s plastic-covered couch. I held an ice cube to my swollen eye, trying to numb the stinging pain.

“You wanna look good, right?” she asked as I flinched from her tweezers. “Now I gotta make these even.”

As she studied the curve of my brows, I felt them getting thinner with each sting. Wendi claimed she knew what she was doing, and I didn’t doubt her skills because she excelled at everything, from volleyball and flute to beauty, her latest obsession. Wendi was unwaveringly authoritative; she’d read something in a magazine or a Kevyn Aucoin book, and suddenly, she was an expert. I accepted her as nothing less. I also didn’t doubt her because I trusted her. The tweezing was my first experience of intimacy with another person, and it foreshadowed our current professional roles, with Wendi serving as my makeup artist for photo shoots and TV appearances.

Wendi’s bedroom was sponge-painted purple, black, and white, and her grandparents gave her the freedom to be who she was, despite neighbors who referred to her as
bakla
(Tagalog for “sissy,”
“gay,” or “fag”). She had a bunch of male underwear catalogs that she stacked atop her white dresser. She didn’t hide anything.

We’d stay up late talking about everything and nothing, the only way two people eager to know each other can. I have never been as open as I was in those first few months of my discovering friendship with Wendi. I had butterflies about having found someone like me with whom I didn’t have to explain anything. I was fearless about sharing myself with her. Wendi was the first person I told about Dad’s crack addiction, about the disappointment of my mother’s absence and her preference for men over me, about the times Derek had made me blow him. She in turn told me things she had never told anyone.

Wendi (I’ve known her only as Wendi; given names and “before” photos are irrelevant in our friendship) grew up in Kaneohe with her mother, who, like her father, struggled with meth addiction. I remember her giggling at her younger self when she told me she lost her virginity at eleven to a playmate a few years older than she was. “Girl, I was such an itchy queen!” she told me in reflection, adding that she’d been attracted to boys for as long as she could remember. There was never a point in her life when she pretended to be anything other than who she was. “That’s a waste of time,” she said. “And, girl, you were not fooling anybody, trying to be butch. I clocked you right away.”

For as long as I’ve known Wendi, she’s been unapologetic about who she is. I can see her clearly at six years old, snatching her cousin’s pink one-piece bathing suit and proclaiming, “I’m a girl! I’m ovah!” Wendi told me she remembers older
mahu
who frequented her family’s flower shop. “They were tall, with long hair, and wore
pareo 
s,” she said. “But, girl, you could clock them right away. I didn’t want to look like that!” When she learned that her mother was having an affair with a neighbor, cheating on her stepfather, whom she adored, Wendi said it was easy for her—at only eleven—to make the decision to run
away, taking the bus across town to her paternal grandparents’ home in Kalihi, where she sought refuge and stability. “I knew that I wanted to transform without interruptions,” she laughed. “And grandparents are always easy.” Her Filipino grandparents took her in with no complaints about her femininity or the girls’ world that she had created for herself.

It was in Wendi’s room that I heard about hormones. She mentioned them as if discussing milk, something you had to drink in order to grow. She told me the older girls she knew (“These fierce, unclockable bitches!”) went to a doctor in Waikiki who prescribed hormones for girls as young as sixteen. “I’m going to get my shots down when I turn sixteen,” Wendi, who was fourteen at the time, said with excitement. “Trust.”

I knew about hormones and puberty and safe sex from the handouts Coach Richardson gave us in health and physical education class. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he’d lecture us about how we were raging with hormones, changing the shape and feel of our bodies. I felt nothing, barely five-two and a little chunky in the face and thighs; puberty hadn’t really touched me. But I noticed the suppleness of the girls in class, the ones who seemed to be towering over many of us in height and shape. They began to separate from the pack swimming way behind in the puberty kiddie pool.

“Your grandparents are going to let you do that?” I asked Wendi, stunned.

“They don’t know what
that
is and can barely speak English,” she said matter-of-factly. “My aunt’s gonna take me.”

I trusted that she would do exactly as she said she would, and I admired her unstoppable determination. Wendi’s friendship gave me the audacity to be noticed. One morning after one of our beauty experiments, I walked into student council homeroom with arched brows that framed my almond-shaped eyes, which were sparkling
with a brush of silver eye shadow that Wendi said no one would really notice because it was “natural-looking.” The girls in class, the ones who wore the white SODA platform wedge sneakers I so coveted, said, “I like your makeup.” I remember tucking my short curls behind my ears, beaming under the gaze my new look warranted.

One early evening after playing volleyball, Wendi and I visited a group of her friends in a reserved room at the recreation center. They were rehearsing for a show they did at Fusions, a gay club on Kuhio Avenue in Waikiki. Most of them were drag queens, but a select few were trans women who performed as showgirls. Society often blurs the lines between drag queens and trans women. This is highly problematic, because many people believe that, like drag queens, trans women go home, take off their wigs and chest plates, and walk around as men. Trans womanhood is not a performance or costume. As Wendi likes to joke, “A drag queen is part-time for showtime, and a trans woman is all the time!”

The lines continue to be blurred due to the umbrella term
transgender
, which bundles together diverse people (transsexual, intersex, genderqueer, drag performers, crossdressers, and gender-nonconforming folks) living with gender variance. Unfortunately, the data on the transgender population is scarce. The U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t ask about gender identity, how trans people self-identify varies, and many (if asked) may not disclose that they’re trans. The National Center for Transgender Equality has estimated that nearly 1 percent of the U.S. population is transgender, while the Williams Institute has stated that 0.3 percent of adults in the United States (nearly seven hundred thousand) identify as transgender, with the majority having taken steps to medically transition. This number does not take into account the number of transgender children or individuals who have expressed an incongruity between their assigned sex and gender identity or gender expression.