Real Man Adventures (5 page)

A Six-Word Memoir

Had a good personality, I’m told.

N
OT TOO LONG AGO
I was interviewed in person by a reporter for the
LA Weekly
, the main alternative paper in my native Los Angeles. The story was to appear in a front-of-the-book column, just six or seven hundred words (of the style—if not the quality—of the
New Yorker’s
“The Talk of the Town” department). My book
¹
at that time had just appeared on the
Los Angeles Times
bestseller list for a couple weeks, and I had been in town for events at local bookstores a few weeks prior to that.

When the reporter showed up at my folks’ house (where I was staying), she seemed nice enough. It was my last day in town, and
I didn’t necessarily want to spend that time doing an interview. But I did, for three hours. I don’t need to go into all of the details, but suffice to say that I made an amiable connection with the reporter, she seemed sympathetic and easygoing, and she laughed at my jokes pretty consistently throughout the interview. She also seemed to enjoy herself, as was confirmed by a follow-up e-mail she sent me: “It was great talking with you. A lot of people I interview get caught up in their own hype. But you say what’s on your mind. It’s refreshing.”

About a quarter of the way through the interview, the reporter mentioned that she was surprised to learn from my publisher’s publicist that I had not been born male. She then asked me, “When did you have the surgery?” at which point I calmly, non-defensively, launched into the requisite spiel about how there is no “one surgery”: you don’t just show up for an appointment at the hospital one day, then leave the next morning as another gender. She seemed to get it.
Yes
, I explained frankly, this was a fact about me that I am not necessarily secretive about, but at the same time, it wasn’t what my book was about, and I thus wasn’t going to be comfortable if it was to be the main focus of our interview and the story. I brought up, by way of example, a few other publications (even a gay one), that had mentioned that I was transgender merely one time, and then proceeded with their review or interview. Again, the reporter seemed to feel me when I explained this, in no uncertain terms stating that all the trans-related stuff we were discussing was off the record, not intended for her story. Perhaps things would’ve been different, I told her, had it been an in-depth profile, where there’s a lot more time and space to at least attempt to approximate a life; but
in the space of six hundred words, I believe it is virtually impossible to convey the nuances and complexities of gender identity in any adequate way. And even more so if you don’t bring a tape recorder to the interview. Which she did not.

When the piece appeared, I was not super-psyched to see that it began, “So there’s this man who used to be a woman, who wrote a novel about a polar bear who comes to Hollywood and becomes best friends with Leonardo DiCaprio.” Not great, but if that was to be the reference to my gender identity, then so be it. I kept reading. To spare you the torment of an 85 percent inaccurate and 100 percent snarky fluff piece, I’ll just say: in the space of 650 words, this reporter managed to mention my gender identity nine (9) more times.

The most grievous of these: when she described me as having been “a little surfer girl” in my youth. I know this probably doesn’t sound like much, but I would never in my life use that term to describe myself. When asked if I surfed and did other ocean-related things when I was a kid, I indeed answered in the affirmative, but I never once used the word
girl
over the course of the interview—not when talking about surfing, not when talking about my youth, never. I don’t even say it in real life, outside of a formal interview context. Because it’s simply not accurate, doesn’t begin to tell the whole story. And it’s not a term that feels particularly good, either, like any time I hear the words
she
or
her
in reference to myself. It’s all more complicated than that, and I took a lot of time explaining this to the lady, because it seemed like the right thing to do if she was going to be asking about it.

But to call me a “little surfer girl” was not kosher. I just don’t think you do an interview with a newly skinny person and constantly
bring up how they were obese in their youth, and how everything they do now must relate to that transformation. You don’t keep banging that same fat note over and over. Especially when asked not to. You also wouldn’t mention ten times in six hundred words if I were physically challenged in some visible way, or had epilepsy. You wouldn’t go ten rounds about my race if it was a difficult or fraught aspect of my past; you wouldn’t even do it with a gay person anymore—the one punch line over and over to make sure everybody knows: freak! In addition to my gender status, I also happen to be Jewish—and I didn’t see the reporter referencing my being Jewish ten times either (she didn’t even mention it once).

I am certainly not the first person “of difference” who does not want to be known only for that difference. I am reminded of a time in early 2007 when I did a reading in Los Angeles with the author and poet Chris Abani.
²
We went to coffee after the event, and this subject came up. Chris remembered reading that review of my (then) new novel in the
NYTBR
, wherein the reviewer took time out to tell the reader that I, the author of the book in question, was female. Chris recalled thinking that as odd when he originally came across the review. He told me he was likewise getting tired of reviewers or interviewers insisting upon “reviewing my body” instead of the work. In fact, he was surprised when his physical body
wasn’t
the subject of reviews and interviews concerning his body of work.

At a certain point I’m just a man who writes books, advocates for pit bulls, likes both early-twentieth-century jazz and hip-hop, digs old airplanes, has a lovely wife and two kids—and not a transman who is all these things.
Transgender
is a term that implies an identity forever in transition. But I cannot think of a living person who is not in transition to some extent, regardless of gender. That’s what we do as humans: we evolve, constantly. Or, as Foucault has suggested, “I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”

Dr. Marci Bowers, the rock star of the transgender surgery world whom you see on all the TV shows about the subject, seemed to suggest as much to me when I spent a few days in Trinidad, Colorado, interviewing her for a profile I was writing about her. I didn’t completely understand it at the time a few years ago, but I think I’m starting to now. She insisted she was just a woman. Not a transwoman any longer. Not even really transgender. It’s just one aspect of your history, being trans, like you were born in California, were orphaned at age eight, or were adopted, had some all-consuming illness, went to Harvard, went vegan, lived abroad, accidentally killed a girl with your father’s Oldsmobile. Just one of the many things on the way to becoming the person you are today, man or woman—or anywhere in between. Because every day is filled with transitions, from the tiniest and most insignificant to the largest metamorphosis you can possibly imagine.

I don’t want to perpetuate any secrets, and I don’t want to straight lie to anybody, but I do sometimes wonder if and when I’ll ever just be a man in this world.

_______________________________

1
. A graphic novel about a polar bear who attempts to escape extinction by going to Hollywood. There is nothing in the book explicitly transgender at all.

2
. Who is black and was born in Nigeria. A fact I never would’ve mentioned here if it weren’t actually relevant to the story. Now I’m going to attempt to resist mentioning it nine more times in the space of this short paragraph.

W
HAT
’
S THE FIRST THING
people ask when a woman is going to have a baby?

Is it a boy or a girl?
¹

Sure, the halfhearted
Is it healthy?
question is usually soon to follow for good measure and/or manners, but mostly folks want to know what the sex of the baby is. Or they don’t want to know what the sex of the baby is. All about the sex:
We told the doctor not to tell us! We wanted to be surprised!
Well, I’m here to tell you that gender
surprises can happen any time. Just ask my parents.

A few years back, if I had to draw a pyramid to represent who has it “hardest” with respect to the subject of me and pronouns (with “most difficult” on top and “not really difficult at all” on the bottom), it would look something like this:

Notice that I am nowhere on the pyramid. This is because for many years, I was generally apologetic about my situation. I didn’t want to make anybody feel uncomfortable, ever, so I readily shelved my own discomfort over being referred to by the wrong pronoun. In my early twenties, I had been in a boy band (so being a guy was all just in the name of satirical performance!). And for years after that, I minced around my preference about gender pronouns in real life, splitting the
difference, perhaps to make it less jarring for people, asking for no gender pronoun to be used in reference to myself. But that got tricky: “T said T wanted to stop by T’s house before we go to bingo.”