Redefining Realness (31 page)

There were moments of deep intimacy and sharing during our three-year friendship when I felt myself pulling back, withholding details that would reveal me. I remember that evening after her thirtieth birthday when we were placing her clothes (including a Minnie Mouse costume that still cracks me up), DVDs, books, and photos in cardboard boxes. She was sitting on the hardwood floor in gray sweatpants, weeping over leaving a man who was no longer good for her. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to do this on my own.”

“You’re not alone,” I said, writing “sweaters” in bold print on a cardboard box with a black Sharpie.

“I know I have you, but I don’t know if I can do this.”

“You
will
do this,” I assured her.

“How do you know?” she asked.

My heart was open, and I was ready to bare myself to her, to tell her that I knew she could do this alone because I once was a scared girl afraid of the unknown, of stepping out on her own. I pulled myself back and protectively squashed my instinct to share with her because I was too afraid that if I told her, she would think of me differently. Instead, I hugged her, grabbed another box, and filled our glasses with cabernet. A year later, we were in different places, and our friendship had grown constant, reliable, sisterly. Unlike when I was a teenager, I knew I didn’t have to do it all alone. I had someone I could rely on, to share my anguish over the grayness of my relationship with Aaron. I called Mai wracked with fear. “I need you to know that I’ve wanted to share something with you many times but was scared,” I told her over the phone.

“Janet,” Mai started in her ever assuring way, “there’s nothing you could do that would make me not love you.”

“You know how you’re always teasing me that you don’t know why Aaron wouldn’t want to be with me, that he’s idiotic and all that stuff?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Well, he doesn’t want to be with me mostly because of my past,” I said.

After I told Mai my story, she yelled at me for scaring her: “You acted as if you murdered someone!” When we met that evening for dinner, she hugged me, acted just as silly as she normally did, and reiterated that Aaron was still idiotic not to be with me. Her friendship buoyed me as I spoke the truths I’d silenced long ago.

I lived in a world that told me in big and small ways every day that who I knew myself to be was invalid. I blossomed in spite of a society that didn’t offer me a single image of a girl who happened to be born a boy, who was thriving in the world, off the streets, away from some man’s wallet, basking in the reality of her dreams. As I typed away every morning in my bedroom before going to my office cubicle, I broke down those walls of shame about being a different kind of woman. I grew more confident, stronger, realizing that I deserved love.

After eighth months of limbo, I woke up at one
A.M.
on a cold February 2010 night to a text from Aaron: “Are you up? I can’t take it anymore. Yes, I’ve been drinking but I’m not drunk. I’m just outside your apartment.”

When I buzzed him in, he looked at me with puffy red eyes. He looked as tired and weary as I felt. We had a strong bond, a deep friendship that we had built over those months since I met him on that Lower East Side dance floor, since splitting that cinnamon roll, since he told me he wanted horses someday. But I felt myself giving up on any idea of there being an us beyond friendship. I thought that my being trans was a deal breaker, and I was growing to accept that.

“You know I love you, right?” he asked straight out.

I nodded, taking it as a final answer, a rejection of all my hopes for us. I didn’t speak or expound on what we could be or rebut what I saw
as his white flag of surrender. I’d been there, done that, with him. My love was proven, and I had nothing left to prove. My love was known, I was known.

“I left my apartment hours ago in search of something. I don’t know what it was,” he said. “So I went to one bar after another and ended up on your street.”

I remained quiet, looking at him as we walked into my bedroom.

“As I stood on your street, I realized that, like that night when we met, I left my place looking for you. I’ve always wanted you, to be right here with you, Janet,” he said.

I held my tears back, stubborn. I had cried too many times over him, over not getting a text or a call, over my unanswered invitations to hang out. I remained quiet.

Lying beside me in my bed, he said, “I’m tired.”

I knew that his declaration of being tired was the moment I’d been waiting for ever since I had opened up to him. I knew this was our moment, the one that we’d remember forever, the one when we’d become that “me and you against the world” couple he once predicted we’d be.

“Make room for me,” I pleaded as his head rested on my chest.

“Okay.”

We moved in together in the spring, he met my family in November and I met his in December, and by the end of that year Aaron was beside me as I smiled from that stoop fronting Tompkins Square Park for my
Marie Claire
photo shoot, and he urged me from behind his camera to open my heart in my “It Gets Better” video. He was there with his camera, documenting my reunion with Wendi in late 2011 when she relocated to New York City for her makeup career. It was the first time she and I were in the same city since I was in college. Aaron and the friendship and love and partnership that we’ve built became my foundation, a platform that has fortified my own sense of
self, giving me the strength to step out of silence and come forward fully as my own woman. I’ve found that Audre Lorde was indeed right when she wrote, “That visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength.”

Speaking up about my experiences continues to be an incredibly vulnerable experience. I feel I am out there on my own, grappling with and sharing my truth. That vulnerability has also enabled me to connect to other women and plug into a wider network of narratives on our varying paths to womanhood. I have learned through the process of storytelling and sharing that we all come from various walks of life, and that doesn’t make any of us less valid.

My assignment at birth is only one facet of my identity, one that I am no longer invested in concealing. Acknowledging this fact and how it has shaped my understanding of self has given me the power to challenge the ways in which we judge, discriminate, and stigmatize women based on bodily differences. The media’s insatiable appetite for transsexual women’s bodies contributes to the systematic othering of trans women as modern-day freak shows, portrayals that validate and feed society’s dismissal and dehumanization of trans women. The U.S. media’s shallow lens dates back to 1952, when Christine Jorgensen became the media’s first “sex change” darling, breaking barriers and setting the tone for how our stories are told. These stories, though vital to culture change and our own sense of recognition, rarely report on the barriers that make it nearly impossible for trans women, specifically those of color and those from low-income communities, to lead thriving lives. They’re tried-and-true transition stories tailored to the cis gaze. What I want people to realize is that “transitioning” is not the end of the journey. Yes, it’s an integral part of revealing who we are to ourselves and the world, but there’s much life afterward. These stories earn us visibility but fail at reporting on what our lives are like
beyond our bodies, hormones, surgeries, birth names, and before-and-after photos.

Challenging the media tropes has been the most difficult part of sharing my story. On the one hand, there are through lines, common elements in our journeys as trans women, that are undeniable. At the same time, plugging people into the “transition” narrative (which I have been subjected to) erases the nuance of experience, the murkiness of identity, and the undeniable influence of race, class, and gender. It’s no coincidence that the genre of memoir from trans people has been dominated by those with access, mainly white trans men and women, and these types of disparities greeted me head-on when I stepped forward publicly.

Initially, I was embraced by the stakeholders of the mainstream LGBT movement. I quickly noticed that despite the unifying acronym, the people at the table often did not reflect me or my community. These spaces and the conversations were dominated by men, specifically upper-middle-class white cis gay men. Women, people of color, trans folks, and especially folks who carried multiple identities were all but absent. I was grateful for the invitation but unfilled by the company. This was my political awakening.

I was tasked with speaking out about these glaring disparities, about how those with the most access within the movement set the agenda, contribute to the skewed media portrait, and overwhelmingly fail at funneling resources to those most marginalized. My awakening pushed me to be more vocal about these issues, prompting uncomfortable but necessary conversations about the movement privileging middle- and upper-class cis gay and lesbian rights over the daily access issues plaguing low-income queer and trans youth and LGBT people of color, communities that carry interlocking identities that are not mutually exclusive, that make them all the more
vulnerable to poverty, homelessness, unemployment, HIV/AIDs, hyper-criminalization, violence, and so much more.

One of the reasons the gay rights movement has been successful is its urging that gays and lesbians everywhere, no matter their age, color, or wealth, come out of the closet. This widespread visibility has shifted culture and challenged misconceptions. People often transpose the coming-out experience on me, asking how it felt to be in the closet, to have been stealth. These questions have always puzzled me. Unlike sexuality, gender is visible. I never hid my gender. Every day that I stepped out into the sunlight, unapologetically femme, I was a visible woman. People assume that I was in the closet because I didn’t disclose that I was assigned male at birth.

What people are really asking is “Why didn’t you correct people when they perceived you as a
real
woman?” Frankly, I’m not responsible for other people’s perceptions and what they consider real or fake. We must abolish the entitlement that deludes us into believing that we have the right to make assumptions about people’s identities and project those assumptions onto their genders and bodies.

It is not a woman’s duty to disclose that she’s trans to every person she meets. This is not safe for a myriad of reasons. We must shift the burden of coming out from trans women, and accusing them of hiding or lying, and focus on why it is unsafe for women to be trans.

For a while I have had the privilege of being able to choose with whom I share my story and whether disclosure is necessary. I have based this decision on the intimacy, closeness, and longevity of the relationship. As for dating, rarely was I open with any guy the first time we met. I felt it wasn’t his right to know that I was assigned male at birth. It was often irrelevant to our interaction. Not every date or hookup was worthy of me or my story. Some of those dates were best suited to drinks or dinner and maybe even my bed.

I’ve experienced varying levels of disclosure throughout my life. At thirteen, I told Wendi I was a girl. At fifteen, I told my mother and my siblings to call me Janet. At twenty-six, I told Aaron that I was a different kind of woman. At twenty-eight, I shed my anonymity in
Marie Claire
because I wanted to disclose an aspect of my identity that I felt was widely misunderstood, and often invisible. That catalytic piece moved people to think differently, disrupting the portrait of womanhood. It was the pivot in which I decided to invite the world into my life, when I chose to acknowledge that though you may not perceive me as trans, I am trans, and being trans—as is being black, Hawaiian, young, and a woman—is an integral part of my experience, one that I have no investment in erasing.

All of these parts of myself coexist in
my
body, a representation of evolution and migration and truth. My body carries within its frame beauty and agony, certainty and murkiness, loathing and love. And I’ve learned to accept it, as is. For so much of my life, I wished into the dark to be someone else, some elusive ideal that represented possibility and contentment.

I was steadily reaching in the dark across a chasm that separated who I was and who I thought I should be. Somewhere along the way, I grew weary of grasping at possible selves, just out of reach. So I put my arms down and wrapped them around me. I began healing by embracing myself through the foreboding darkness until the sunrise shone on my face. Eventually, I emerged, and surrendered to the brilliance, discovering truth, beauty, and peace that was already mine.

T
his book would not be possible without my parents, who gave me life and shared theirs with me. I’m equally grateful to my siblings, Chad, Cheraine, Cori, and Jeff. Without your love, there would be no me.

Aaron, my compassionate first reader, urged me to tap into myself and share my journey. He also ensured that I ate, scheduled TV breaks, and had someone to yell at when I was insecure and stressed. Without his care, this book would not be here.

My best friends, Mai and Wendi, were pivotal in helping me discover myself as a girl and woman. I love you. I was also blessed to encounter Ed, who first brought me to New York City, and Zach, who selflessly ensured I stayed. The companionship of Kristina, Nary, and Charlise made my first years in New York
everything
.

Many thanks to Farrington High School for welcoming me and bringing these critical people into my life: Mrs. Jean Chun, who introduced me to Zora Neale Hurston and
Their Eyes Were Watching God
;
Alison Colby, who consistently affirmed me; and the W. R. Farrington Memorial Scholarship Committee, who invested in my undergraduate education.

I’m indebted to Ryan D. Harbage, my literary agent, who believed in me and this book from the start; Sarah Branham, my editor and advocate at Atria Books, who wholeheartedly championed my vision with such tenderness and helped me sharpen it by asking all the right questions; the entire team at Atria Books, especially Judith Curr, Peter Borland, and Daniella Wexler; and Ellis Trevor, my speaking agent, and his team at American Talent Group.