GenderBendy

A tale of two roofers

I wanted to find a good local roofer to fix the damage to my roof from the storm last month, and I had seen that other houses in my neighborhood had been damaged and fixed, so, a couple of weeks ago when I was out walking and saw the owner of one of those houses getting out of his car I called out a "good morning" and he came to talk with me.

He was a young fellow, solidly built, a touch pugnacious but polite.  When I explained what I was looking for he told me that his guy was good but was going to be out of town for the next couple of weeks (odd thing to know about a roofer, I thought...maybe they're friends), but that he had the card of the guy who did the house next door.  I copied down the name and number from the card, thanked him, and continued on.  Then, as I passed his house again a little later, he came back out and gave me a slip of paper with the name and number of his guy after all.  I thanked him once more, shook his hand, and came home to Google the names. 

I checked the name from the card first and found a business listing for a contractor at a local address.  I checked the other (an unusual name, so it was unlikely there were two of them) and found no business listings.  Instead, I found the that second roofer was affiliated with the KKK and had, in my local area, been convicted and had served time for threatening to kill a black man.

So.  I have a neighbor who might be friends with a guy who traffics in hate.  This does not mean, I keep reminding myself, that my neighbor shares his possible friend's views.  Still, I keep feeling anxious about how femme I might have seemed to the man.  I was dressed entirely in man-clothes, but there was still my long dyed hair, plucked eyebrows, and jeweled ear studs.  If he drew a conclusion it was probably that I'm gay, rather than trans...but if he is a basher I know this distinction will not matter to him at all. 

I have not seen or heard anything from my neighbor since our conversation.  It was the first time in three years living in the neighborhood I had talked with him.  He doesn't seem to be around much.  There have been no words, no actions, no threats.  But I am afraid. 

I didn't truly understand when I was a man - I don't suppose most white men do - that the absence of fear is a privilege.  The possibility of violence will always be with me now, because I am trans, and because I will be a woman.  My friend Deb gave me a good word...she said I need to become wary.  I hate that, but I see that it is true, and I am learning. 

One thing though:  I refuse to be ruled by, or silenced by, my fear.  I will be prudent and watchful...I am going to start locking my house, for instance...but I am determined neither to flee nor to live in terror.  I decline to cower.

Easy to say that...hard to do.

Needless to say, with regards to getting my roof fixed, I called the first guy.

The end of a whirlwind week

I've had a couple of kind inquiries about how I'm doing since coming out at work on Wednesday, and I'm doing fine, thanks.  A lot has happened in a short time, all of it good.

Thursday:  I had many more e-mails waiting for me when I got to work, expressing congrats and support.  No stink bombs.  Several people said they thought what I had done took real balls, which is funny when you think about it.  There was one e-mail from a volunteer friend who read my blog from top to bottom with real attention and said some really nice things about it.  I am totally susceptible to compliments of my writing (take note if you ever want to try to get something out of me), and enjoyed a warm buzz for the rest of the day.  Otherwise, a more or less ordinary busy day at work. 

Friday:  e-mails trickling off...some people saving saying something nice for a face-to-face encounter.  Still no stink bombs.  Sharing news this personal invites return confidences...I've had more than one conversation which was mostly listening on my part.  And, otherwise, another regular busy day.  Then home to prepare for a trip to western MA for the second laser treatment on my beard.

The Weekend:  The second treatment was not nearly as traumatic as the first.  (See Zap! for an account of that.)  I knew what to expect this time, and also I'm extremely pleased with how well the first one worked.  Afterward Ardis and I started talking clothes (she's an old family friend...we played together as toddlers) and next thing I know, we're at her house and she's hauling outfits out of multiple closets for me to try, and it turns out we wear the same size shoe, and an hour and a half later I'm driving on to Sue's house (Sue is Ardis's mother and a kind of surrogate mom to me too) with two big bags in the back ...some really nice stuff.  Thanks Ardis!  Total pink fog orgy!  :-)

Sue had invited me to a night of comedy improv at a local VFW hall, and I had asked if she minded if I went in femme mode, and she said she was expecting it, so I got dressed, wolfed some stew, and out we went, stopping back at Ardis's house to pick her up too.  This was pretty much my first time out as a woman in a completely ordinary everyday social setting...non-shopping (where they have to be polite), non-LGBT friendly.  Nobody looked at me twice.  Sue and Ardis were great...just treating me like their old girlfriend in town for the weekend.  I got to experience what life will be like when I'm transitioned... and it was a bit of a letdown.  I was tired and feeling a little shook up, and the fact that I was dressed the way I wanted didn't make that go away.  I know this is a lesson I need to learn, that even if my transition goes perfectly I'm still going to have plenty of sucky times, and that was perhaps the beginning of learning it.  I still savored every moment, though.

Before I left Sue's house this morning I had added a third big bag of clothes to the back of my car...thanks Sue...clothes-swapping like this may happen all the time in girl world, but not in boy world, so it feels special, and it's a thrill to have so many more wardrobe options...  :-)

One last event of note:  I stopped for the weekly grocery shop on my way home, and an employee of the store who pointedly declined to serve me several months back was once again behind the seafood counter. (Original account here.)  He saw me coming and moved into a little alcove with his face hidden, pretending to be busy.  I felt the adrenaline begin to bubble up, and without giving myself a chance to really think about it I stepped up to the counter and waited a moment to see if he would acknowledge my presence.  He did not, so I said clearly and loudly, "Could I buy some fish please?" 

Reluctantly, with hostile eyes, he served me.  When he handed me the bag of salmon fillet, I met his eye for just a second and said warmly "Thank you kindly," and then stayed a moment more to cross things off my list before rolling out of sight.  It was a sweet ending to a fine weekend.

I've made an enormous amount of progress in a very short time.  My children are due to arrive any time now for their week with me, and I think I need to slow down now, breathe, rest...show myself I can still take a step back, bide my time...work, write, parent.

Comeback accomplished...now what?

Last week I went through with my plan to put on a deeper femme look than I had ever taken out into public before, and attend a drag show in Portland.  Oh, and I did want to go out so badly...when I was finishing my makeup at Deb's house, my hand was shaking so much I had to steady it with the other one. 

I had a nice time.  I met people I knew and surprised them, and received some nice compliments.  I also derived deep pleasure from sashaying back and forth between two huge mirrors on opposite walls of the hotel ballroom, working on my walk. 

The evening was a little odd because several times I found myself explaining, actually this is not drag...I'm trans.  One friend asked me my drag name and when I supplied the pedestrian "Lisa," he looked blank.  (The star performer that evening was Mimi Imfirst.)  I now grasp from first-hand experience the sharp divide between these two ways of being...drag is guys at play; what I do is practice for a new self.

Here is a pic Alex took for me:

The evening was supposed to be my triumphant comeback after having a slur yelled at me the last time I went out.  I spent eight weeks figuring out what my stance and armor would be in the face of inevitable future prejudice.  I thickened my skin, sought and found again my core of self-love, rekindled my sense of play...and accomplished my comeback. 

My sense of victory, though, was more muted than I expected.  

I've been pondering about why, and I think it has to do with where I am now in my transition.  It was right around this time last year when, feeling confused and desperate, I wrote in my journal "I just want to be a girl."  I have been consciously trans for a year.  And where do I stand?  Still on the first steps of a long road.  The soonest I can conceive of living as a woman is a couple of years from now, and the soonest I can imagine being where I ultimately want to be years after that.  I have my adolescent children to consider, and money is a problem.  And I don't want to rush.  I want this metamorphosis to happen at an organic pace.  I want to open into womanhood with no more trauma than a flower unfolding to the sun.

In the meantime, sometimes I squirm, sometimes I ache, and most of the time I keep my head down and pull hard against the harness-straps of life, keeping busy, keeping myself together...keeping myself distracted from fear and worry...from loneliness...

I've waited so long...it seems a terrible injustice to have to wait still more.  But I feel I must.  So, patience...and, while I am being patient, I'm musing about when is the next time I can go out and play.  I need the practice, and it really is fun, even if it also makes me feel underneath how far I still have to go.

Girding my loins, such as they are

I have a date to meet my friend Deb for coffee at 2pm this afternoon.  It is 1030am now...plenty of time to shave, do makeup, select an outfit, change my mind a couple of times about which wig to wear, and go...and I am on the verge of calling to say, I'll be there, but I won't be dressed today.  Despite that being the plan.  Despite it being six weeks since I've gone out dressed.  Despite aching with all my being for a little time in full femme mode.

It was six weeks ago that that man in the Goodwill parking lot looked in through my car window and yelled "faggot" after me, and I still cower inside when I think of it.  I have always been terribly sensitive to what other people think of me.  I can't seem to shield myself from their emotions, especially the negative ones...anger, hostility.  And I feel most vulnerable when I'm dressed.  My confidence drains away.  I feel exposed and tentative and weak.  I feel afraid.

One possible reason it took me 46 years to become conscious of my transness:  I'm just that shy.  So pathetically, absurdly shy that I came within a hair's breadth of standing on the sidelines of an entire life.

I have to go.  I have to return to the public eye.  I have to show the world who I am, and continue to learn to make my way.  If I don't, I deny myself.  If I don't, I step voluntarily back into the cell.  I can't do that.  I can't go back in there.  I have to go.  Out.  Out.  Out.

Didn't somebody once say, true courage is not fearlessness, but being full of fear and doing it anyway?  If so, I guess I am about to be courageous.

Here I go.

Gulp.

Bigotry as Motivation

Last Sunday I went shopping dressed as a woman.  In the parking lot of the Goodwill store in Biddeford there was an awkward driving moment:  a grey-haired, bearded man in denim overalls was standing looking over is shoulder, waiting for a companion to join him, and he glanced once at me and then away, so I thought he was waiting for me to drive by and sped up a little, and then he stepped forward so that I had to veer slightly to go around him.  As I passed he peered into the car, did a double-take, and then shouted after me, "faggot!"

This calls to mind another incident recently when, once again, I was driving in femme mode and entered a tricky intersection I had never been in before and accidentally passed a couple of other drivers who were waiting to merge...they looked parked...and one of them, a dark-bearded guy in a jacked-up pickup, accelerated up next to me and gave me a baleful glare and the finger.  At the time I put it down to random rage, but now it seems that the extra level of hostility might have been based on another quick read.

I haven't been called "faggot" since junior high and high school, when (for reasons unknown to me at the time), I wore my hair very long and was often mistaken for a girl.  Perhaps the difference between adolescent boys and grown men in the US today is that grown men stay polite in person, but still feel free to express their bigotry when there's the buffer of glass and motion between.

Anyway, I was dismayed for a while (partly about being read so fast), but I administered chocolate and wine and felt better.

The next day, in the evening, I went to the No On 1 office in Ogunquit to help with a volunteer-recruiting phone bank.  (For any out-of-state readers, we're attempting to defeat a people's veto which will be on the ballot in November of our new law allowing same-sex marriages in Maine.)  At the beginning of every volunteer gathering we go around the room and say our name, where we're from, how we self-identify, and what motivates us to volunteer.  It was a big group, so we were held to one word each on the motivation question, and I just used one of the standard ones...but sitting there waiting my turn I realized I had a whole new reason.  If I could have had a paragraph instead of one word I would have said: 

I'm here tonight to radicalize bigotry.  I want there to be so many gay and lesbian couples just out being themselves in all the everyday places of our country, and for that matter, so many crossdressed and otherwise gender-variant people just out being themselves in all the everyday places of our country, that the great majority of Americans will come to accept us as completely normal.  Then the few genuine haters left, the committed bigots, will start to seem more and more reactionary...and I guess they can go huddle in their basements and regurgitate and re-swallow their bile if they want, there's no stopping that, it should still be a free country...but I want to work for a time when shouting "faggot" in a parking lot will be as acceptable in our society as going into a restaurant and taking a crap on some stranger's dinner plate.  I want the great majority to see using such a word as as ugly as it feels to be on the receiving end of such a word.  That's what brings me here tonight.

I made sixty calls, signed up three volunteers, and got six supporters to pledge to donate.  I guess maybe they could hear my zeal...  :-)

Engaging Senator Nass

I was out this morning (in male mode) as a volunteer for the No On 1 campaign, asking folks at the Cornish Apple Festival to sign cards pledging to help preserve Maine's new law allowing same sex couples to marry by voting against the people's veto of that law which will be on the November ballot.  I approached a distinguished-looking gentleman of late middle age who was standing watching the crowd.  He had a conservative haircut, intelligent eyes, and a superior expression.  He agreed to give me a minute, so I went into my spiel.

"Hi, I'm Dave, I live in Wells, and I'm a volunteer with the No On 1 campaign..."  I got no farther.  He interrupted and told me that he was Richard Nass, my state Senator, that he had voted against the law, and that he would be voting for the "repeal," as he put it.

We're trained to move on if someone says they're a "yes" vote, but this guy was my elected official, so I stayed and engaged him.  I asked him what his objection was.  He had the practiced politician's slipperiness.  He lectured me on the theory of people's vetos, as though the existence of a provision in our state's constitution allowing them meant that all such measures should pass.  He told me he had taken an active role in extending civil rights to non-married couples, as though the playing field has been completely leveled (far from it.)  And he talked about the burden to the state of taking care of "all these children." 

The unspoken prejudice behind this last point seemed clear:  that gay and lesbian couples can't be good parents.  As a trans-parent I found that personally offensive and called him on it, or tried to.  I tried a couple of times.  He wouldn't answer, dodging neatly into tangents about policy.

I found myself really wanting to reach this guy.  I asked him if, as his constituent, I could tell him where I was coming from on the issue.  He said I could, so I told him that I had been married for 16 years as a man to a woman.  That post divorce I'm living in Wells and that my children live with me half time.  That I'm trans and may someday become a woman.  That I'm still attracted to women and may someday want to marry a woman again.  And I asked him, if that happened, if he thought I would no longer be a fit parent, to my own children, to her children, to children we might have together.

He did not answer the question.  Once again he evaded.  By this point I wanted to get away, so I shook Mr. Nass's hand, thanked him for his time, and walked off shaking.  He was standing with another man and I heard one of them say to the other as I passed out of earshot, "Yeah, there's a lot of them here today," and the word them had that unmistakable tinge of smug dismissal it can so easily be given.

I was feeling upset so I called Levi, the campaign coordinator who was leading our little group of canvassers, on his cell phone and asked him to come talk me down.  He came and sat with me on a porch.  He listened to me vent.  He was supportive and helpful...but he also couldn't help smiling a little, watching me struggle to come to terms for the first time at a personal level with the complacent bigotry of the privileged straight white male elite.  What was hardest for me to stomach was how impervious the man was:  ensconced in his comfortable world view, secure in his power, and behind his courteous front clearly contemptuous of me, having in an instant decided who I was. 

I continue to learn what it is to be "other."  It is not pleasant learning, but definitely valuable. 

Besides being given a useful lesson about people and politics, I gathered 21 signatures, identified a new volunteer, changed (apparently) at least one person from a "yes" to a "no", and munched my way through a huge Rome apple so fresh off the tree the dusty bloom was still on it.  All in all, a fruitful morning...ba-ba-boom.  :-)

The seafood man

I had an instructive encounter last night.

There was a new man behind the seafood counter at the grocery store.  As I approached he was just starting to fish seven female lobsters out of the holding tank for two very particular French-speaking Canadian men.  (They liked the eggs, one explained to a shopper who asked).  I noted that my favorite salmon was on sale, and while I stood waiting for my turn, pleasantly anticipating a treat for dinner, I watched the seafood man work. 

He was a large man, thick and solid-looking through the chest and shoulders especially, with heavy arms.  His hair was grey and conservatively cut.  His face was stony, and that and his forceful way of moving and the jerky fast rhythm as he chomped his gum gave him an air of masculine aggressiveness.  As I often do I started making up details about his life:  ex-marine, immune to tenderness, sometimes threatens his girlfriend with physical harm.  His customer service, as he pulled lobsters from the tank and sexed them, was perfunctory at best, verging on rude, but the Canadians were manly men too, muscular and frank, and I sensed respect between the seafood man and them...that vibe of men being men among men which so often in my life I've had to bluff my through.