The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (14 page)

Even now, I tear up while recalling it. I feel relieved and grateful. As soon as I was feeling well enough, I bought boxes of fancy treats and handwrote thank-you notes and had them all delivered to the Emergency Department and the surgery. I also recognize that my gratitude and relief helped me in all phases of my stay there—wellness begets wellness, fear and shame do not.

I chose not to explain all this to my parents at the time, because I didn’t trust that they would really
get
it, as considerate and caring as they are. They are personable and well-off and gender-normative and heterosexual and have great health insurance, and when either of them has had to go to the hospital it has always been under the direct care of a doctor who has known them for some years and is also well-respected by that hospital and in the field. They expect their medical experiences will be safe and respectful, and they always are. They’ve never had to go into a hospital with the reasonable expectation that the staff might hate what they are, fear their bodies, and feel disgust that they exist at all. That’s not a knock on them; it is, merely, true.

The part I did not have to explain, that they knew to worry about all on their own, was how and whether someone would be able to advocate for me. They didn’t quite know how to ask the question, but my husband won a million husband-points with my family when he understood my parents’ frenzy to get in the car and drive all day to be there before I went into surgery without it being spelled out. He understood it as fear that, while I was unconscious, something might happen and no one would have legal standing to make decisions on my behalf (and earned a million husband-points from me by managing to make my parents feel understood and respected while still reassuring them that everything was, really, going just fine and so they could stay home). That one I can attribute squarely and securely to Canada. My marriage is legal here, and my husband gets all the rights that go with that without regard to his, my, or anyone’s gender or perception of it thereof.

It is wonderful to have come out the other end of a potentially terrible experience feeling shaken but relieved. But in the retelling of this story what is clear is that I had a lot of luck and a lot of privilege on my side. I really should not have gotten on two different planes with my unstable gallbladder, since air travel and pressurized cabins are not so good for organs in distress, and traveled for fourteen hours. Also, I was fortunate as a professional trainer—explaining my body and identity to strangers is a particular skill set of mine. And even when I was sleeping or out of it, I happen to be married to another professional trainer who (and, in retrospect,
this
is what would have calmed my father down) is the LGBTQ health representative for our region and is also in charge of training the entire province’s Human Rights Commission about trans issues.

I had every single possible thing on my side that a transperson could have—the money to pay for the care I needed, fluency in English, familiarity with medical language, plenty of experience and comfort advocating for myself, someone else to advocate for me on standby, a more-or-less trans-friendly country, and some credible legal threats if I needed them—and I was still afraid. I still flew and drove in excruciating pain to get to my place of most safety, and most privilege, before I let myself get any help. I was still tense and unhappy and nervous about every interaction for the entire first day, until it finally started to sink in that everyone was being really, really nice to me. I still know that the odds of a positive hospital experience were overwhelmingly against me, as a person of substantially non-normative gender. So when I sit still and let the gratitude for it all wash over me, it comes heavily flavored with how incredibly lucky I was and am.

The Rule of Two

The Rule of Two, if you ask any transperson, is a cruel joke. It refers to the difficult truth that one gender-variant person passes better than two, nearly always. One short, slightly cello-shaped dude with a wispy beard looks like just that, a minor anomaly of masculinity, but not far enough away from the standard deviation to cause comment, or even notice. Two of them, however, are a different story; ditto the two extra-tall girls with colorful scarves draped around their throats, ditto all the pairs and groups of genderfucking friends and lovers. One’s safe, two less so (unless you can pass for siblings, which makes it sort of better), and three or more is asking for trouble.

It seems like a certain kind of meanness on the part of the universe that this is so. The experience of being trans is in some ways so unique—perhaps not in its emotional content, but in its mechanics and also in its fallout—that trannies band together for advice and reassurance and warmth and protection instinctively. I don’t know the collective noun for a group of us, but whether we travel in a gaggle, a pride, a paddling, or even a murder, we do find our ways to one another, and this is where the trouble, regrettably, often starts. When we venture out with our kind, we are taking a certain maybe brave, maybe foolish, or maybe oblivious chance.

As a visibly queer, visibly genderfucking thing, I know this every time I leave my house. It informs my behavior, my dress and manner: Where am I going? Who will be there when I arrive to see me and read my gendered cues? Do I want to be read as queer or as straight? As a butch, a tranny, a cisgendered man (I can even do girl, but only for short stretches)? Who will I be with, and how attached is that person to hir gender, to being read a certain way in the world (because making the decision that I don’t care what gender or sexuality I am on an afternoon is one thing, but I cannot decide that for anyone else)? What do I need to get done, and how will my gender performance affect that; do I need some gender in particular for it?

Some people dress for the weather, you know?

Some of these activities or needs are gendered themselves, like the trip to the hardware store or the interior design showroom, and some of them are just about who I have been before. The nice people who work at my dry cleaners all think of me as a very pleasant young man, and while I am not specifically invested in them thinking I’m a guy, I am also not in a great hurry to cause a big tranny kafuffle at my local outlet. I don’t have the energy to be an activist all the time, and the dry cleaners is the sort of place I generally show up to by myself, no telltale trannies in tow to give me away.

These days, with great pleasure, I am keeping company with an outlaw like me, a sexy hybrid transman who lives in an unmodified body with great comfort and not a little style. You may chalk it up to love’s hyperbole if you like, but to me it looks like that unshakable thing that Fred Astaire and Kurt Browning and Mike Piazza all have in common; that loose-limbed, juke joint, hey-let’s-go-again ease. It’s a valuable thing in a transman; it suggests that any observer’s sense of peculiarity is clearly all about that person. I fake it differently, all bulk and woof, a general pound-for-pound insistence on the space I’m taking up as I move but with the same general effect. While I’m alone anyhow. Separated, we’re guys—he’s a little more big-city faggot and I’m a little more
Homo ursus urbanus
—but no one bothers us about it.

We wait thirty minutes for dinner on a Saturday night, crammed together with a dozen other hungry diners in a short and narrow hallway, hugging the walls to allow room for exiting customers to pass. He stands with his back to the wall and I, hand looped into his belt buckle, face the wall and turn my head toward him. It is an unambiguously intimate pose, shoulder to shoulder and facing. The other diners take notice, along with the wait staff. We hold hands all through dinner, feed each other avidly, and pour tea and sake into each other’s cups with great attention. When we leave, the host shakes both our hands and urges us, warmly, to please come back soon.

Walking together on these early-summer evenings in Toronto, his city, holding hands as the light wanes and walking as close as two people in two skins can get, we break the Rule of Two. We’re identified. We are both visibly queer, two homo boys with capricious facial hair and heavy steel earrings and an unmistakable interest in each other, and also, somehow, now visibly trans. There’s something clearly off about the picture to the casual observer. We’re a double threat or a double dose of familiarity, depending on who sees us. People watch us as we pass, gazes lingering a long time, trying to parse the sentences of our desire for one another.

Their conclusions are for the most part, obviously, about them; the eye brings what it sees to seeing. Apparently straight people try desperately to work out which of us might be a girl, sometimes assigning it to him because he’s smaller, and sometimes to me because his unmistakable tidy goatee trumps. People who read us as lesbians, in general, give us the good queer nod when they think we’re two butches but look bewildered and displeased when we’re close enough for them to see how that might not quite get it, either. It’s the fags who most usually acknowledge us as like items. By which I mean, like them. But also, we are like one another—whatever we are, we are obviously the same thing,
homo
sexual in the classic sense. Obviously, the same coordinate group, the same season, obviously the same gender, whatever the hell that might be. Two boys with breasts and beards, the kind of boys who queer a room just by entering it, and now, we’re squared, in love, touching each other just less than what would be unseemly and leaving no doubt that we’ve explored the underlying topography and found the climate and elevation most satisfying.

The coffee place around the corner is the closest espresso machine to our house-sitting gig. We haven’t been sleeping enough and, while we can’t fuck enough, we have certainly been trying our best. We stumble in unshowered, beg for iced espressos, flirt with the waitress who makes an extra trip for his soymilk and more or less invents two drinks to our specifications. She is charmed and friendly, all big grins and extra chocolate syrup at no charge. On the way out, I glance back, and she is watching us walk away, pressed together, and she is smiling.

And how do I dress myself to go out with him? In love, in a cloak of the stupid hopeful optimism of fresh love, which I imagine will protect me from both the wind and the weather like every other idiot in love has ever imagined. I hardly care what gender anyone wants or expects of me, or would like to see, or can; I hardly care what I have to get done in a day. I already know that anyone who sees us is making a mental checklist of gendered characteristics anyway, no matter what I wear or how I walk, and find in that the freedom to just brush my teeth and leave it at that. I’d rather look at him anyway, at his generous smile and long neck and faggoty glasses and really splendid ass. Anyone who needs to spend time looking at me can do it without me being complicit.

I sometimes say while teaching that gaybashing is usually about gender transgression, not sexual transgression; that people who get beat up for being queer are usually taking the heat for being visibly gender transgressive in ways that suggest queerness in the culture, that they are rarely committing acts of homosexual congress in the street. But we are. We are smooching and touching, making both our affection and our lust quite visible, and rather than drawing predators it seems to repel them, seems to create a bit of charmed space, as though somehow we’re not quite the same kind of threat when we’re wiping drops of soymilk off each other’s upper lips, quietly telling stories with our fingers twined together, immersed in each other’s voices. Has our society really come to a place of
amor vincit omnia
? Are we there yet?

I wonder. Part of me thinks the evidence speaks for itself; if two queer transmasculine things can smooch their way across Toronto and encounter perhaps the odd glance but also the regular encouragement and evident enjoyment of the people in their path, clearly something strong and fine is at work. Clearly, the tireless and honorable work of our elders and colleagues have made a kind of space for us in the world that they scarcely could have imagined and into which we spread out luxuriantly as formerly root-bound plants, repotted and revived. But part of me attributes this to a different kind of Rule of Two, this way in which this boy and I show our unapologetic queerness, our truthful inhabiting of our genders, as though there is nothing whatsoever wrong with us. It is maybe welcoming and maybe arresting, but it parts the seas for us. For me, when I’m with him.

If we’re not hiding, if we’re not fearful or ashamed, there must not be anything wrong with what we’re doing. We can walk right out with our warm and vibrant and fresh love in our hands, or on our sleeves, and if anyone disapproves they keep it to themselves in public, like people who dislike chocolate or disapprove of recycling. We kiss and laugh, and look over each other’s shoulders from time to time, but mostly right into each other’s eyes.

In the kitchen of the house where we’re staying, where all manner of people come and go at all hours, a fiftyish bike activist and peace protester named Jean is working on the homeowner’s computer when we come downstairs one late morning, looking for bagels and coffee. We sort out the breakfast division of labor, and kiss, and when we look up Jean says in a deep voice, “Wow. You guys are just totally erasing the boundaries of gender.” We grin, kiss again, and Jean makes us strong coffee to have with our bagels and fruit and love.

Like Love

I am holding the stack of forms for my immigration to Canada as my husband’s legal spouse. We meet the requirements, but now we have to prove it: on paper, with photographs, with testimonial letters and bank documents and what-have-you. I’m more than willing, you understand—I am stupid in love with this boy—but a mounting number of places where the form doesn’t have a useful option for us gives me a certain window into our relationship I don’t usually consider. Like the part about observing religious holidays together. When my parents asked, “Did he have a bar mitzvah?” I replied: “Well, at that time it would have been a bat mitzvah, since he was a girl then, but no, he didn’t, since he was Anglican then, too. He has been called to the Torah
,
of course, but when he was much older—he never got to have a bar mitzvah at thirteen with a big party like Jeffrey [my brother] did.”