The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (13 page)

In the best moments, a brief conversation gives me a chance to close the gaps caused by ignorance a little further and make pleasant, small-talky conversation about the weather or the dog or some minor local event. Something that further underscores the idea that although some parts of my life are and will continue to be radically different from theirs—and I am not a proponent of the We’re Just Like You Except for What We Do in Bed philosophy—it is nonetheless true that in some ways our lives are not always all that dissimilar. I, too, walk my dog and worry about the consistency of his poop—even if I may share my dog with my queer femme ex-wife who maintains a separate household, which is next door to her best friend who is my former lover and owned boy and also a transsexual to boot. I, too, struggle to remain calm and good-natured while making alternate arrangements to compensate for air travel delays, even if I am flying to Milwaukee to perform my queer, transgendered, Jewish solo theater piece, which is my sole source of income, and the major source of my consternation is coordinating airport pickup for my lover from Pittsburgh, who is flying in separately and meeting me at the airport (and is also a transsexual, to boot).

I do not always reveal these conditions explicitly (though I have certainly been known to), but I tend to think that they are assumed, if not specifically then generally. Your average heterosexual, Christian mother of three is probably not looking at me and assuming that our lives are full of points of intersection. And let’s face it, we’re all wary of what we don’t know or don’t understand. So my working theory is that whatever opportunity I have to close that gap a little bit is a way of activism, as valid as the work I do standing up and lecturing about gendery things and probably, in the final analysis, with a higher success rate. I’m trying to demystify queers and transfolk, in both cases, trying to be approachable and basically regular, not afraid to laugh at myself and not afraid to answer hard questions, but also just as glad to sit and talk about the designated-hitter rule or whether
Law & Order: SVU
is better than the original
Law & Order
series. If I’m going to be someone’s introduction to LGBTQ folks in any kind of setting (and I assure you that there are people who shudder miserably at that idea), I want to use the opportunity to be someone they can like even though some things in our lives are very, very different. I want to move us from Those People to “that person I always see walking his dog who lets my daughter give it treats,” or “that person who gave me the name of that great Bosnian restaurant in Saint Louis.” I will happily settle, any day, for, “I don’t know, that transgender came and talked to our class, and he or she or whatever didn’t seem so weird.”

But the ways of gender are fickle, and on some days I become aware of the fact that I am not being read as queer or gender transgressive but as a perfectly ordinary boy, white and at least middle-class and ostensibly heterosexual in my jeans and boots. Truth be told, I’m always tempted by those opportunities. It would be so easy to slouch, scowl, mumble, “Gimme a turkey sammich on rye,” let doors bang shut behind me. I could spit and swear and jerk my chin to indicate what I want without even saying a word, certainly not please or, at any further stage, thank you. Not only would it be easy, it would probably help me to continue being read as a boy, as my reflexive politeness in those moments is in fact the most transgressive thing about me.

(I should point out here that this is true especially in the Northeast, where I live, and where a certain crankiness is the default position. In the Southeast, where some kinds of politeness, even if they are rigidly stratified by race and class, are much more common, my courtesy, when I am read as a man, isn’t transgressive at all. In fact, it serves to reinforce that gender attribution. Absolutely nothing says Man, apparently, like fingering the brim of one’s cowboy hat in a tipping gesture to a woman and her young daughter, saying first “Ma’am,” and then, with a different smile, “Miss.”)

This is especially true when that politeness crosses class and race lines. As unusual as it may be for me to address someone in a service industry position as Ma’am when I’m being seen as a transgressively gendered, female-bodied person, it seems to be even more of a shock to people when the midtwenties white boy I sometimes am does it. This may be the most gender-transgressive thing I ever get to do—perform the possibility that men can be courteous and friendly in a culture which allows, and in fact expects, its men to be rude and disconnected. So when I take the time to politely inquire how someone is feeling today, or comment sympathetically on a crying two-year-old being half-past naptime, or wait patiently for an elder to pet and admire my dog, I am having almost the reverse experience. These are things that the world expects from women (though I won’t speculate here about why) and when I perform them it calls my masculinity and my motives into question immediately. If men don’t do such things, why am I doing them? I become, quite against my will, an outlaw again.

Very occasionally, but most gratifyingly, it earns me a heady dose of approbation from a woman nearby. Part of that gratification is about being approved of, of course, but the rest comes from my sense of pleasure at having created or reinforced or expanded the possibility, in someone’s world, that men can be engaged and attentive and kind. All too often I feel as though the heterosexual women in my world are settling for only a small fraction of what they want, because they believe that they cannot have anything else. Concurrently, I often see the heterosexual men in my life being only a small fraction of what they are, because they have internalized the message that they cannot
be
anything else. It’s a great pleasure to imagine that while I’m out being the most politest tranny ever to step a booted foot in my local Dunkin’ Donuts franchise, I may also be read as a place on the landscape of masculinity where a sturdy boy in jeans and boots can also hold a baby, both expertly and with joy (and the nice smiles from girls are a lovely bonus).

I enjoy it, either way. I enjoy having the chance to transgress in ways that are welcoming rather than alienating, and I enjoy the opportunities that learning from my parents’ example has given me to maybe make some small slice of change. I enjoy knowing the names of my bank teller’s three children and keeping rough track of the oldest girl’s win/loss record (she’s a three-season athlete who’s also on a summer swim team). I like teasing my pharmacist about his taste in neckties and talking about singer-songwriters with my pharmacy tech. I like telling stories to children in airport waiting lounges and passing the time with the other poor souls consigned to waiting on a long line with me. It keeps me engaged and connected with my world and it with me, with my big fat genderfucking self, helpfully producing an extra pen and smiling kindly. Hi, I’m your friendly neighborhood outlaw. Welcome.

Getting Myself Home

I did not tell my parents the entire truth about this episode when it happened; in fact, I am pretty sure they’re reading about it just now, for the first time (uh, hi, Mom and Dad). The truth is, I fudged the timeline slightly when I explained it to them. The truth is, the pain started hours before I got on the first plane, or even in the first car to get on the first plane. The truth is, I flew all the way home from Minnesota, including changing planes and a two-hour layover in Chicago, with that last gallbladder attack. Then drove myself back over the border, talked my way into Canada using my driver’s license and a copy of my book as identification (I’d lost my passport, it eventually developed, in O’Hare while lying on some seats, writhing in pain), made it home from Buffalo, and went pretty much straight to the Emergency Room. Ishai met me there, because I was in so much pain by that point, so exhausted from twenty consecutive wakeful hours of excruciating pain, that the idea of being able to get help five minutes sooner seemed like a blessing.

Economically, this was stupid, or at least it seemed so at the time. My insurance covered nothing that happened outside the United States. I knew I would have to pay cash for whatever the Canadian doctors did to me, and by then I was pretty sure that Mister Gallbladder was having his swan song and was going to need to come out forthwith (I turned out to be right about that).

When I phoned them from the hospital, my parents expressed their worry and then immediately started asking how much it would cost, and if I thought I should come back to the US to have the surgery done. I explained to them that my surgeons, Dr Hoseini the incredibly personable resident and Dr Kim the extravagantly overworked surgeon on call, had advised against this. I repeated their worrisome comments about gangrene, necrosis, and rupture to my parents, reiterating that Dr Kim in particular, after having seen my ultrasound, seemed quite clear that it had to come out. Now.

All of this is true. I certainly didn’t make any of it up, and I had my gallbladder out the next day on an emergency basis. But what is also true is that I could have stopped sooner, and had Ishai meet me in the emergency room in Buffalo, where my insurance would have been valid and I could have stopped driving a full hour sooner (and probably waited for my passport there too and never needed to talk my way back into Canada). The other true thing is that the miraculously nice doctors and nurses of Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital in Burlington, Ontario, were ready to sort me out so that I could have made the trip: pump me full of hydration fluids and painkillers, let me check out with an actively disastrous gallbladder, make a few calls, and have Ishai drive me back over the border so I could check into a hospital there. Buffalo has hospitals. Some of them, evidently, are of very high quality.

I did not mention that part to my parents, even though I guessed they’d feel better if I were being seen in a hospital in their country, one recognized by my insurance (though paying cash in Canada still ended up being cheaper than my US insurance co-pays—by a lot). I know for sure that my father suffers from a particular kind of healthcare-induced xenophobia and believes that all good hospitals are in Manhattan or Boston, with the possible exception of the Mayo Clinic and maybe UCLA. Maybe. But a hospital in a whole other country? Where there was no one he could bully, intimidate, charm, bribe, or get a friend to call? Disastrous.

I knew all of this. I knew it, and even in my blinding world of pain I still flew and drove and got back home to Burlington where the nice people took my gallbladder out last Saturday night, because what I could not say to anyone until afterward, what I still feel tentative and shy about was this: I knew I would be safe in a Canadian hospital.

I am a masculine, mostly male-appearing person, with a female body. Even in a stylish turquoise hospital gown with none of my usual restrictive undergarments, I still look like every other big dude in a too-small hospital dress, sacrificing my dignity for medical care. And as any transperson will tell you, it rarely goes well when the medical personnel come into the room with your chart and lift up your stylish turquoise gown expecting to see one thing and find something else there instead. Most of the transpeople I know are deeply resistant to doctors and hospitals until there is no possible way to avoid them, because they know that where medicine and gender meet is not somewhere you generally want to hang around.

(And before you get saddled up going, “Well, I’m sure if you just
explained
everything it would all be
fine
,” let me remind you that there are plenty of documented cases of transpeople being left to die by paramedics because no one would touch
it
. There are transpeople dead from being refused medical care because they had internal organs like ovaries and prostates that did not match their gendered presentation, and so on. Dead now, or got a lot closer than I care to. Some people are way more freaked out about gender than anyone who would read this book, even for school or for a friend or family member, can imagine.)

It takes a lot of energy to be charming, approachable, nonjudgmental-but-also-firm enough to explain trans issues to people in a way that makes them feel somewhat okay with it. Frankly, given a choice, I’d rather not have to do that between bouts of vomiting. Which is not to say that Canada is uniformly a Promised Land of trans-acceptance. But my experience had been that, in general, most Canadians experience my Intro to Transmasculinity in much the same spirit as Dr Gupta, the ER doctor on the floor that day, did at the end of my little speech: “Well, that’s not something you see every day.”

She said this with a reassuring little smile, and then told me what was going to happen next (hello, x-rays) and afterwards proceeded to engage in a little linguistic dance where she avoided referring to me by a gendered pronoun even one more time for the next twenty hours. She arranged for me to be put into a room I would not have to share by bullying the psych people a little bit into giving up one of “their” solo rooms unless it was absolutely necessary. When she called up to the surgical floor for updates on my surgery schedule, she referred to me as a young person, a patient, and even as “the emergency gallbladder” in order to avoid having to call me a man or a woman, and I will tell you right now that as a transperson I have railed against being reduced to my body parts, and I felt a wash of incredible gratitude as I listened to her refer to me by my medical problem instead of by my name or legal sex.

I also know that some sort of off-camera briefing must have taken place, because the nurses started referring to me by pet names, instead of as Ma’am or Sir as they did with the other adult patients, calling me Chief, Sport, Buddy, and even Friend (as in, “How you feeling, Friend? You can have more painkillers if you need them”) in much the same way as I heard them address the kids on the ward. Even the surgeons, who looked at me naked for some number of hours while they peeled my miserable gallbladder off my blameless liver, just called me Bear. The last thing I remember before my surgery was the anesthetist saying, from behind my head: “Okay, Bear, we’re going to put this stuff in your I.V. now. You have a nice sleep, and we’ll take good care of you.” I probably would have started to cry from sheer relief if I had not, within seconds, been unconscious. The next thing I remember, when I woke up in the recovery room, was another nurse (a new one, to whom I had said tranny-nothing and had not given my now-standard hospital intro: “I’m Sharon Bergman, but everyone calls me Bear”) bending over me, saying, “Hey there, Bear. Do you feel sick to your stomach at all?”