Redefining Realness (15 page)

Despite the misconceptions, I understood the distinction between a drag queen and a trans woman because I came of age in the mid-nineties, and drag queens were in vogue. There was the 1995 release of
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
I hated that movie because Wendi would tease that Noxeema Jackson—Wesley Snipes’s drag character—was my “Queen Mother.” Drag queens were on Cori’s favorite talk shows,
Sally
and
Jerry Springer
, and then there was RuPaul, “Supermodel of the World.” It was a time when a brown, blond, and glamorous drag queen was a household name, beaming on MAC Cosmetics billboards at the mall in shiny red latex.

Like RuPaul, the queens at the rec center staked their claim on a smaller scale in Hawaii, part of the fabric of Oahu’s diverse trans community. Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak My Heart” was blasting from a boom box, and they were huddled together, about ten of them, discussing their choreography. I watched, seated on the cold tile floor with my backpack and volleyball at my side. They soon reconfigured, gathering in a circle of arms as one woman knelt at the center, hidden by the fort of mostly rotund queens. With the tape rewound, each queen walked clockwise, slowly descending into a kneeling position as the lady in the center rose, lip-synching Toni’s lyrics.

The lady had long, full wavy hair that served as a backdrop to her curvy body. She gracefully moved her head to the lyrics, basking in the glow from the yellow-tinted lightbulb directly above her. Her deep-set brown eyes, magnified by a pair of full false lashes, looked straight ahead, stoic, almost numb, mirroring the turmoil of an unbearable heartbreak. She was a diva among a moving mass of chorus queens who appeared blurred; only she was in focus.

“Tracy’s ovah, yeah,” Wendi whispered at me, snapping her finger. “You can’t even clock her!”

I want to be her
, I thought, half nodding to Wendi, speechless and captivated. I was excited and afraid of my silent revelations. Though
she didn’t look it, I knew Tracy had been born like us. I knew she had wondered at night about how she was going to change. I knew she had climbed the insurmountable summit of trans womanhood. Unlike the queens she was performing with, Tracy was a woman of her own creation, and I was moved and on the verge of so many emotions that I was fragile when they stopped the tape and Wendi approached the group.

Lani, who wore a pair of knee-length denim shorts and a stretched white tank top with black bra straps visible on her shoulders, kissed Wendi on the cheek. I stood behind Wendi, looking at Lani’s winged black eyeliner, which she had whipped all the way to a sharp point where it nearly intersected with her penciled-in brows. The other girls gathered around her when Wendi turned around to introduce me. They were the first trans women I had met outside of Wendi.

I extended my hand to Lani, and she pulled me to her fleshy chest and gave me a kiss on the cheek, which left a red lip print on my face. My heart was racing because they were staring at me. Tracy was standing off to the side, uninterested, brushing her hair. I could hear her raking through her mane, strands snapping with each stroke of her brush.

“Mary, she’s fish, yeah,” Lani said with a chuckle, holding me at arm’s length by the biceps. The girls around her nodded. Then, looking directly into my eyes, she added, “You’re going to be pretty, girl. Trust!”

I tried my best to smile, aware that she was giving me a compliment—blessing me, even. To Lani, my fishiness was something to boast about. To be called fish by these women meant that I was embodying the kind of femininity that could allow me access, safety, opportunity, and maybe happiness. To be fish meant I could “pass” as any other girl, specifically a cis woman, mirroring the concept of “realness,” which was a major theme in
Paris Is Burning
, the 1990 documentary
about New York City’s ballroom community, comprising gay men, drag queens, and trans women of color. Ball legend Dorian Corey, who serves as the sage of the film, offering some of the most astute social commentary on the lived experiences of low-income LGBT people of color, describes “realness” for trans women (known in ball culture as femme queens) as being “undetectable” to the “untrained” or “trained.” Simply, “realness” is the ability to be seen as heteronormative, to assimilate, to not be read as other or deviate from the norm. “Realness” means you are extraordinary in your embodiment of what society deems normative.

“When they can walk out of that ballroom into the sunlight and onto the subway and get home and still have all their clothes and no blood running off their bodies,” Corey says in the film, “those are the femme
realness
queens.”

Corey defines “realness” for trans women not just in the context of the ballroom but outside of the ballroom. Unlike Pepper LaBeija, a drag legend who said undergoing genital reconstruction surgery (GRS) was “taking it a little too far” in the film, a trans woman or femme queen embodies “realness” and femininity beyond performance by existing in the daylight, where she’s juxtaposed with society’s norms, expectations, and ideals of cis womanhood.

To embody “realness,” rather than performing and competing “realness,” enables trans women to enter spaces with a lower risk of being rebutted or questioned, policed or attacked. “Realness” is a pathway to survival, and the heaviness of these truths were a lot for a thirteen-year-old to carry, especially one still trying to figure out who she was. I was also unable to accept that I was perceived as beautiful because, to me, I was not. No matter how many people told me I was fish, I didn’t see myself that way. My eyes stung, betraying me, and immediately I felt embarrassed by my visible vulnerability.

“Oh, hon, no worry,” Tracy said, her brows furrowed in concern. “She never mean nothing by it.”

“Sorry, babes,” Lani said, pursing her lips emphatically. “I meant it as a compliment.”

As Wendi and I walked out of the room, I could hear Toni Braxton singing, and I imagined Tracy rising from the sea of queens.

“How come you cried, Mary?” Wendi said, confused by my emotion. It was the first time I had cried in front of her. I’d learn with time that expressing vulnerability or sentiment made Wendi defensive, uncomfortable. In all the years of our friendship, I’ve never seen her break down or her eyes well up with emotion.

“They were all staring at me, like they expected something from me, you know?” I said. “It just made me uncomfortable.”

“Mary! Life is uncomfortable,” Wendi said, rolling her eyes as she remained focused on the dark streets ahead of us. “You have to get used to it or you’re going to live your life trying to make people comfortable. I don’t care what people say about me because they don’t have to live as me. You gotta own who you are and keep it moving.”

I pushed myself to stay in step with Wendi’s long-legged stride. She didn’t have a stroll in her. I reluctantly let her words soak into my skin, like the tears that watered the conversation. We remained in silence for the rest of our walk home. When we reached Gulick Avenue, she leaned in and her cheek met mine. Then she spread her arms around me and squeezed. She turned around swiftly and crossed the street at King and Gulick. I stood on that corner for about thirty seconds, watching her backpack bounce on her behind as she headed home.

With Wendi at my side, I felt I could be bold, unapologetic, free. To be so young and aiming to discover and assert myself alongside a best friend who mirrored me in her own identity instilled possibility
in me. I could be me because I was not alone. The friendship I had with Wendi, though, is not the typical experience for most trans youth. Many are often the only trans person in a school or community, and most likely, when seeking support, they are the only trans person in LGBTQ spaces. To make matters worse, these support spaces often only address sexual orientation rather than a young person’s gender identity, despite the all-encompassing acronym. Though trans youth seek community with cis gay, lesbian, bisexual, or queer teens, they may have to educate their cis peers about what it means to be trans.

When support and education for trans youth are absent, feelings of isolation and hopelessness can worsen. Coupled with families who might be intolerant and ill equipped to support a child, young trans people must deal with identity and body issues alone and in secret. The rise of social media and online resources has lessened the deafening isolation for trans people. If they have online access, trans people can find support and resources on YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, and various other platforms where trans folks of all ages are broadcasting their lives, journeys, and even social and medical transitions. Still, the fact remains that local trans-inclusive support and positive media reflections of trans people are rare outside of major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Recently, the media (from the
New Yorker
and the
New York Times
to ABC’s
20/20
and
Nightline
) has focused its lens on trans youth. The typical portrait involves young people grappling with social transition at relatively young ages, as early as four, declaring that they’re transgender and aiming to be welcomed in their communities and schools as their affirmed gender. As they reach puberty, these youth—with the support and resources of their welcoming families—undergo medical intervention under the expertise of an endocrinologist who may prescribe hormone-blocking medications that suppress puberty
before graduating to cross-sex hormones and planning to undergo other gender affirmation surgeries.

To be frank, these stories are best-case scenarios, situations I hope become the norm for every young trans person in our society. But race and class are not usually discussed in these positive media portraits, which go as far as erasing the presence of trans youth from low-income communities and/or communities of color. Not all trans people come of age in supportive middle- and upper-middle-class homes, where parents have resources and access to knowledgeable and affordable health care that can cover expensive hormone-blocking medications and necessary surgeries. These best-case scenarios are not the reality for most trans people, regardless of age.

Certainly, this was not the reality for Wendi and me or the girls and women we would soon cross paths with in Honolulu.

C
hin down, Mary. Hide that Adam’s,” Wendi said from behind her Kodak disposable camera. She wasn’t reading; she was aiming to capture me at my best.

I smiled into the little round plastic lens, trying to keep my balance in her black platform heels. They were chunky and heavy and a size too small. I had grown a few inches over the summer, topping off at five-six at age fourteen, the same height as Wendi, with a size-ten foot, or, as Wendi would call it, “supermodel, supercanoe size.”

Wearing her black wig, which she had cut into a sharp, angular Vidal Sassoon bob, and her black-and-white chevron-print halter pantsuit, I was
feeling
myself, and Wendi was cheering me on. She painted my face in bronzes and browns and tweezed the ends of my brows so she could have a wider shadow palette to work with. She didn’t ask, she just did it. To this day, my brows are struggling to grow back in full.

“Arch your back and stick your butt out,” Wendi said. I did as she instructed. “Yaaaasss, bitch! Stay just like that.”

I glowed under her focus and creative direction. She consistently made me feel good about myself; it was the kind of relationship I now know to be rare, in which the other person wants to see you at your best. Wendi has always wanted me to shine beside her, not behind her.

Wendi was more comfortable behind the lens, behind the brush, behind the curling iron, even though she was one of the prettiest girls I knew. Wendi’s black eyes were held in wide-set slanted lids that flanked her flat, wide nose. She called it “too Filipino for my taste” because she didn’t have what she called an “elegant bridge,” something she would later attain with the help of a plastic surgeon. She often wore her jet-black bra-strap-length hair in a ponytail to stay cool in the humidity, and she effortlessly maintained a yellowish-brown glow that most people can achieve only with a spray tan.

After using every click available, we booked it to Long’s Drugs at Kam Shopping Center and dropped off the camera at the one-hour photo. We grabbed gravy fries at Kenny’s and browsed Everblue Casuals to kill time. When we picked up the double prints, Wendi praised, “Oooh, bitch! You’re serving it.”

I sat, incredulous, with the photos. I loved my makeup, my hair, and my smile. But other features I hadn’t taken note of before came into focus: shapely arms and shoulders that had developed from volleyball; a bubble butt that looked like Auntie Linda Gail’s; a small, sharp Adam’s apple playing peekaboo under my chin. There was no denying that my body was changing. Seeing the things I disliked made it hard to see the good. The photos became an image-shattering moment that birthed insecurity in me about my growing body. Most teenagers grapple with body image, but to be a pubescent trans girl with few resources to change what you don’t like only magnifies the features that begin negating a mental self-image. It probably didn’t help that the beauty standards I held myself to were rigid and impractical. Like most teen girls (whether they’re
trans or cis), I had a vision board of my ideal, pulled mostly from the pop-culture images that MTV fed me. I wanted Halle Berry’s or Tyra Banks’s breasts, Britney Spears’s midsection, Beyoncé’s curvy silhouette and long hair, and I prayed that I wouldn’t grow any taller so I didn’t tower over the petite Asian girls who were the barometer of beauty in the islands.

Holding myself to this impossible beauty standard led me to pick myself apart critically. The incessant comparing and measuring of my body and physical attributes against this ideal occupied my mind, and the chasm between my physical reality and the elusive ideal led to personal discontent. I was chasing an ideal that was separate from my personal appearance, and my preoccupation with this pursuit amplified the tick-tock of a clock alerting me daily that it would take only a couple of years for me to become a man, something I wanted to avoid at all costs. Though Wendi always said hormones were “not a miracle drug,” I knew that starting them would mean the beginning of my
real
life.