The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (12 page)

To be a success on the transmasculine spectrum, one must begin by gaining some measure of expertise in, if not mastery over, enough psychology, anthropology, gender studies, and improvisational theater to create and constantly modify a gender presentation that seems male enough. Merely being masculine, and even knowing yourself to be absolutely and utterly a man, will not be enough if you cannot also deepen your voice, comport yourself in a stereotypically masculine fashion, and create the right appearance. If your authentic masculinity is a little faggoty, you probably cannot express it until you’ve had chest surgery and grown a beard or at least a good crop of stubble. And though this racist-legacy word is not, technically, a medical-legacy word, it is nonetheless frequently adopted by doctors, for if you can do all of these things, if you can pass—then, yes, they will let you be a man. Because, of course, what you think or feel or need has much less to do with it than the opinion of someone with medical training. Clearly.

Carrying on with what has now certainly become a rant, I would also like to discuss the connotations of deception or trickery that come with the word
pass
; the whiff of sneakiness it carries. I can join other brilliant thinkers and write about the myth of the deceptive transsexual until my fingers fall off from hitting the keys too hard, but not nearly as many people will eventually read this essay as will hear from or about a transperson
passing
. As what, may I ask? Does no one else hear the echoes of
passing
herself off
or
passing a bad check
? (Ironically, this was the very crime that led to the eventual execution of Brandon Teena.) This construction of
passing
is the tertiary definition of the word, but nevertheless, transpeople have been saddled with it. The addition of the word “as” makes inherent in the phrase the comparison between the then and the now, between the “natural” and the “constructed.” When we talk about passing, however much we may mean it in a neutral or even positive way, I wonder and worry about how many of these lexical hangers-on are also making the trip. The loss of that certain personal veracity that transpeople face may have something to do with the fact that every time we talk about how we are in the world—how we legitimately and (mostly) authentically are—we use a word that comes embedded with a question of legitimacy.

And, while we’re at it, legitimately what, exactly? While we are busy sticking transpeople with the burden of proof in every single arraignment in the court of public opinion, we simultaneously fail to examine the nature of that court. It is all very well indeed, as North Americans, to imagine that we immutably and everlastingly know things about gender, but any anthropologist worth a pencil can tell that you we don’t know a damn thing. That gendered cues change radically according to cultural context, particularly in terms of race, economic class, religious background, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and ability status. No one likes to mention this, because it threatens to interfere with our sense that gender is knowable, definable, and absolute, but, in fact, gender cues are not read in the same way everywhere. Leaving aside even some of the more fabulous examples (because I fear they exoticize cultures that are less well understood by westerners), consider the legion of heterosexual and gender-normative German boys strolling the
strasse
in pink or purple socks and Birkenstocks (yes, at the same time). Or the masculine men of Montreal, who greet everyone, including one another, manfully, with a kiss on each cheek, or the farm women of northern Maine who wear blue jeans and flannel shirts from L.L. Bean and are considered perfectly and precisely gender-normative for their time and place. If you moved either of the above groups into Manhattan or Chicago you would almost certainly conclude that you were in a gay bar (because North Americans reflexively map non-normative gender expression onto queer sexual orientation) and would quite likely begin to speculate on the genders of some of the patrons.

Why is this a problem? It’s not, as long as the socks stay in Germany and the farmers in Maine and the kisses in Montreal. But when those people—entirely Normal within their cultural contexts, absolutely cisgendered in their personal identities— arrive in Chicago or Boston, their genders may well be read as suspect, as Other. And the same is true of transpeople. Can you imagine a transwoman from that farming community in northern Maine meeting a physician from South Carolina? Each has hir own idea of what a woman looks like or does or needs to be; each has a clear mental map of how femininity is achieved and maintained. Each idea is, again, entirely culturally correct and totally valid within a context. But they conflict.

So who do we declare the winner? The transwoman, because she has authenticity on her side? The doctor, for having a medical degree? Do we hew to the demands of the American ethos and privilege the privileged, awarding the passing points to the person of higher economic-class status? How would this transwoman
pass
? Perhaps more importantly, and more to the point of my everlasting problem with this word: for whom or by whom would she pass?

(And no fair mumbling about most-people-and-most-places, either. If nothing less than my life, my wellness, to say nothing of my ability to get medical or legal intervention, should I want it, are at stake, and the entire burden of making myself acceptable falls to me alone, then I think I can expect a little consistency, can I not?)

It seems clear to me that this
passing
concept is not really viable at all, certainly not for actual people. It may have worked in a limited way for a minute, as long as all such medical and social transactions took place among people whose cultural contexts and demographic locations were all pretty tidily lined up (or so vastly disparate that those with privilege were free to exoticize and disenfranchise freely). And even with that, the word
passing
always carried with it the strong aroma of exactly what some people think about transfolk. It suggests that they are passing themselves off as something they are not, that there is something undeniably deceptive about them; that there is something superficial or merely cosmetic about our identified and/or expressed genders. But now what do we do? Perhaps even more importantly: now what do we
say
?

My suggestion is that we put the burden where it belongs: on the observer. Imagine a construction of language that, rather than reinforcing an idea of transgender or transsexual people as creating a falsehood, supported the notion that our genders are perfectly natural and inherently truthful. For that to be the case, however, some blame needs to be assigned in cases of disagreement (and no one will allow me to just blame the media culture and its great love affair with the binary, regrettably). I say we assign it to the cisgendered. Rather than talking about who
passes
, let us instead talk about who
reads
.

“They read me as a man.” See how this works? That sentence assigns responsibility to the person or people doing the seeing, the reading, rather than further objectifying the object of the gaze. Not just that, but in the sentence it is not clear what the speaker’s identified gender or sex assigned at birth is. It could be, in that person’s eyes, either a successful or a failed attempt by someone else at correctly parsing their gender, but the onus is on someone other than the speaker. The actions of bystanders, rightly and reasonably, do not reflect on the transperson in question (though, of course, they may affect hir). The idea that someone is attempting to pull some sort of gendered fast one does not make the transition from a sentence constructed with
passing
to a sentence constructed with
reading
; nor is there any sense of endeavor. In no way does the language indict the efforts of the person being read; they are more or less what they are in somewhat the same way a book is what it is—engaging or boring, quick or slow—and these things are understood to be in the eye of the beholder. This is why we have Amazon rankings and reviews on
librarything.com
as opposed to, say, a governmental assessment and eternal branding with the result. Ahem.

I am always in favor of better language: more compassionate, more precise, more lyrical, more aspirational. When we continue to use the word
pass
, we continue to hamper ourselves by endlessly repeating a narrative of deception, not to mention the legacy of racism, the cultural arrogance, and the spectacular level of objectification it brings with it. I do not believe we need this, and what’s more I do not believe it’s good for us. I would rather move the burden back where it belongs, to the observer, the person whose cultural lens and personal locations on so many axes are in so many ways the day-to-day deciders of how a person is read. To be read is something that happens to all people and carries none of the stigmas attached to its new or old meaning; it is also done by all people, and is not a special test applied only to hapless trannies with the temerity to leave our houses. What is more, maybe most important: passing is fleeting, tricksy, and temporary. But what it takes or means to read depends, rightly and righteously, entirely on who’s doing it.

Not Getting Killed, with Kindness

This morning, as I was getting a cup of coffee around the corner, someone asked me whether I was raised in this country. I am sometimes asked what planet I’m from, or even whether I was born in a barn, but this question hasn’t come up much. I replied that I was, and wondered why she’d asked. My English is unaccented, my general comportment doesn’t seem to suggest foreignness; I wasn’t listening to French-language hip-hop on my iPod. She said, with some surprise, that she’d wondered because I was so polite, which she does not associate with Americans. Nodding and grinning, I shrugged, thanked her for the compliment, and said what I usually say in such situations: “I was raised right.”

That’s true, but it’s a half-truth. It is true that I was raised by parents who, whatever their strengths or faults may have been, placed a very high premium on being courteous and friendly. They taught me to say, “May I please,” as though it were a single word, and to say, “Thank you,” early and often. I learned by example that taking the time to say, “Good morning,” to inquire how someone’s day is progressing and to actually listen to the answer, go a long way in making one’s world a nicer place in which to live. And I internalized a basic understanding of the concept that one gives respect in order to get respect; that it is the height of self-centeredness to assume that anyone will treat me respectfully if I don’t treat them in the same way, and that this is true for anyone I encounter in my life, no matter what social status that person’s job might seem to confer upon hir. That, in fact, those distinctions are themselves at the heart of American-style rudeness—the idea that the person who makes me a cup of coffee does not deserve to be called Sir and thanked politely absolutely as much as the university president who is about to decide if I get a gig or not.

I wish I could say that I have continued practicing politeness as it was taught to me solely out of a deep sense of respect for all other people until they prove themselves otherwise. I would like to be a person who, for no other reason than coming from a whole-hearted place of honoring the divinity in all beings, treats everyone around me exactly as I believe we all deserve. I’d like to say that, but it isn’t quite true. I have to confess to an ulterior motive. If I’m being honest, the truth is that I am courteous and friendly to everyone I meet, or at least I try to be, because I want them to like me
before
they notice what a freak I am and try to punish me for it.

I recognize that, on the page, this sounds like hyperbole, and in some ways it is. I do not, in general, feel myself to be in any immediate danger of being sucker-punched by the receptionist at my doctor’s office or roughed up by an associate professor of modern literature (though the receptionist at my shrink’s office, Trish, is a no-nonsense Southern girl who could clearly lay a smackdown if she cared to). But I never trust myself to make such judgments, and so I make the decision to exercise my particular brand of Nice Boy courtesy in all situations.

Also, there are other considerations, gradations between completely accepting and hiding a baseball bat behind hir back. The ways of punishment can be so subtle I never know about them, never know what I could have had or done if I hadn’t been so threatening to look at. What visible outlaw has never been sweetly told that the job was filled, the apartment was rented, the manager was out for the day, that no substitutions were allowed, that all bags must be checked, that the thirty-four-dollar fee still applied even for a seventeen-cent overdraft? I don’t know any. We all pay a price for looking different in any way, from my thirteen-year-old niece, the goth princess whose typing teacher sent her to the principal’s office to be disciplined the day she appeared at school with pink hair, to my former students, elite-level athletes in the basketball program whose great size and black skin were so anomalous in our smallish New England town that bank clerks played a passive-aggressive game of Not It in order to avoid having to help them. It was in talking with them about their experiences in the public eye that I started to recognize how much my reflexive politeness and gregarious ability to make a few minutes of social chat with nearly anyone had smoothed my way: I eventually escorted my students to my local branch of the bank and introduced them to the three tellers with whom I was acquainted from my own visits there, and they had no problems after that. They, too, had moved from Those People to someone individual and knowable.

As someone who moves through the world being visibly queer, visibly beyond the bounds of the traditional gender binary, being someone individual and knowable is one of the most powerful tools I have. I am aware that I am always—whether I want to be or not—an ambassador for my people. At the very least, I am aware that this is always a possibility. And it is a possibility I take seriously. If someone is encountering a queer person, or a readably transgendered person, for the first or even the tenth time, I would like that person to remember me as being, really, perfectly all right. Not freakish or lecherous or miserable or rude, not anything but moving easily in my world, giving respect and hoping to receive it in return.