The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (10 page)

In Wisconsin, at a hotel happy hour for business travelers, I accept a glass of a nice white and sit on a low couch. I’m facing a good-looking, sturdy blonde woman with her briefcase and binder set on the seat beside her. “Nothing wrong with free wine,” I remark casually. “I tried to get my husband to come down, but he’s watching the game,” she replies. I grin, and say, “I don’t think my husband’s ever watched a game in his life,” even though we’re not married yet. Suddenly she likes me a lot better, and we talk and drink wine for an hour. I remain unsure if I was redeemed as a straight woman or a gay man.

At my wedding, Zev and Turner are taking one of my grandmothers, in her wheelchair, from the place where we were taking photos to the tent under which the wedding will be held. Making conversation, Zev asks my grandmother which side she’s on, meaning: my mother’s mother, or my father’s mother? Grandma puffs up and announces, “The bride’s.” Turner and Zev make sure not to dissolve into giggles until they are safely out of earshot.

My nearest-by Starbucks, purveyors of the iced grandé caramel double espresso that writes books, employs a cadre of young stylish white girls and one teensy gay boy. My low-level flirting has apparently caused some conversation: one of the girls murmurs quietly to me as she hands over the magic potion that the tallest girl and the little boy were
both
wondering if I was single. I grin and say I’m married, which I think answers the question. She looks vexed.

When I see queer-lookin’ people out and about, especially while traveling, I like to at least smile and nod. In Nashville, at the supermarket, I see two short-haired tattooed women standing close together, and grin at them, friendly-like. One glares and the other sneers at me, and I make a quick escape down the frozen foods aisle. Either I have misread them, or they’ve misread me. Anyone have suggestions for how to tell which it is?

The Field Guide to Transmasculine Creatures

Gender is complicated. I’m here to tell you. I have worked on nearly every other essay here before this one, because although gender is complicated, writing it into understandability is part of why they let me publish books. The issue is, there is no part of the genderverse quite so complicated for me to write about as the questions and arguments around who is a butch and who is a transguy and how I came to this conclusion (full points are not awarded unless I show my work, like on math exams). Evidently, I have to be a grownup and write about the most tender and dreaded topic of my identity universe, having already far outstripped the once-deadly taboo of butches getting fucked, which hardly anyone thinks is even news anymore (although it’s taken the entirety of some people’s active sexual lives to come to this realization).

The bigger problem is that I just don’t know what to tell you. I know it’s important. I talk about it all the time, get email about it every day, hear from people existing in a state of anguish because they don’t know what to do. Should they transition? Have they transitioned already and they just haven’t named it that? Or how do they get people to recognize that they
have
transitioned, and stop inviting them to women’s events? How big is the difference between Butch and Transsexual Man. Are there middle grounds? Where are
those
defined? Could I please send a map, or failing that, a chart or a graph?

I just don’t think it’s that easy.

There are a few things I find myself trying to remember to point out rather often. Most of them have to do with assumptions about what words mean, what experiences mean, and what kinds of things either of those permit or preclude, which is often decided as though they are absolute. Perhaps the first topic related to the Border Wars I want to take up is: please stop treating gender as though it were a set menu.

Gender is an à la carte arrangement, even though the macroculture rarely realizes this and doesn’t usually act accordingly. We are all, I firmly believe, in charge of our own genders. We can choose to have the final say about what they do or do not include, and we can make changes to those things if we want to and decide we can afford them (afford, that is, in terms of cash, or relationships, or values, or the approval of those in our lives). But because the cultural message we’re all steeped in is that gender is a fixed arrangement, even the most politically progressive among us—and I include myself in this—can forget or overlook how very variable gender can be when we want it to be.

Further, genders that are unusual, nonstandard, mix-n-match, or new to us are just as valid as the ones we’re more accustomed to. My conversations with people who are just beginning to understand and include transsexual and transgender people in their plans or programs lean heavily on this. For them, the very fact of a transsexual who is a real student at their school or client of their agency can be new and surprising. But for queers and transfolk, who have institutionalized an additional set of queerly normative genders, it can sometimes be difficult to hear that we, too, must expand. If butch daddies want to crochet, if twinkly ladyboys are sometimes tops in bed, if burly bears can do BDSM play as little girls, if femme fatales build bookcases in their spare time, these things, too, are not just good but great. They bring us, I believe, wonderful news: news that gendered options can continue to explode, that the chefs in the kitchen of gender are creating new and imaginative specials every day. That we, all of us, are the chefs. Hi. Have a whisk.

Unfortunately, it seems that we are more likely to decide that these people, and their genders, are secretly fraudulent. That after all this gender mixing, all this firm and sweet belief that a female-bodied person can be called Rocky and be ferocious as a hurricane, we cannot quite make the next step and let Rocky also like to needlepoint. So many of us will go so far as to accept a nontypical gender-and-sex pairing—but only if the gender is uncomplicated.

Maybe yours is relatively straightforward, no pun intended. And that’s fine. There is plenty of room for
everyone’s
gender in the New Gendered Order. Mine, which is as messy as chocolate-chip cookies made by a pack of eight-year-olds, and yours, which may be a perfect soufflé, all ingredients combined in elegant harmony. Also fine: everyone else’s gender. Not to extend the cookery metaphor forever, but fusion cookery is popular for a reason. Macaroni and cheese is delicious with truffle oil and a little blue cheese mixed into the sauce.

And so, when we start to look for the line of demarcation between the butch and the transman, the complex parts can be hard to sort. Certainly there are people who are perfectly easy to categorize—they’ll tell you right away who and what they are. They’ve chosen, invested in their choices, and that is the end of that. I am thinking, as I write, of transmen I know who feel as though they have always been male but whose bodies were a little slower catching up, is all. They are men of male experience, not butches. Many were never butch identified. Many are rather tired of having it implied that they were. Some transguys have nothing whatsoever to do with butch flight. It turns out that masculinity in female-bodied people is even more complex than we have been assuming all along.

Which, I suppose, is why everyone is so desperate for the Field Guide; the magical series of taxonomic determinations that will tell you what exactly you are, or are dealing with. Then, I hear in people’s requests, then I will know what I am dealing with. Then I will know what pronoun to use. Then I will know who I am permitted to be attracted to. Then I will not have to have my shirts re-monogrammed.

(It’s worth noting that while I was swanning around the house trying to remember the name for the chart-thingum you use to figure out what kind of bug you found, Ishai commented that it rather suggested a little boxful of butches with pins through them. This, of course, is not at all what I want, neither the fixedness nor, you know, the deadness. This is the biggest problem with classifying things; a classifier often cannot know exactly what they’ve got until the subject is dead.)

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic to the desire for security, for understanding, for tidy boxes. It’s just that I’m not your guy. I’m against categorization for a hundred reasons, not the least of which is: as soon as you make a list of the possibilities, you’re guaranteed to have left someone
off
the list, which will either piss them off or make them feel invisible, or both. By declining to make a list, by refusing to weigh in on who is really or isn’t really a what, now, I am not just protecting my own ass but also trying to protect other people’s hearts. Who wants to hear that they’re not on the Comprehensive List? Who wants to be told that they cannot imagine their way into a new gender, that they have to choose one out of the book?

When we live in a world that leaves only the tiniest sliver of room for the least complicated among us, it’s difficult to find a place for all our complexities. I am afraid that it pushes us to leave our genders unexplored, and I am pretty sure that it does not allow us to express them in all the ways we would prefer. As it goes with many things, it’s easy to be afraid of genders that seem dangerous, unusual, or even merely new.

I find it easier to talk about this topic when I can remember that we are all mostly afraid, because I have great compassion for even myself in that. And for femmes who have loved butches since forever, cut the hair of tender warriors in their kitchens because it wasn’t always safe to go to the barbershop since forever, treasured the toughness of outlaws who have made lives beyond the bounds of acceptance forever, and are now watching their worlds get smaller. For butches who first worked hard to figure out how to become acceptable to greater society, and then when that was a dismal failure recreated themselves into genders that gave them access to a life, friends, and love, and then could no longer stay there. For masculinely gendered people who are still, however old they are, not sure how to make sense of what they want and need, how to navigate the world, how to stay safe and feel warmed and get enough of what they need to survive, and then work toward thriving. For transmen who slap the hands of people trying to span the distance between butch and transman within their arms’ length, not out of dislike of butches, but because their identities depend in some part on making that distance much more than a body’s length, much more than a short hop.

This seems like a digression, but isn’t: My parents used to be very upset about my masculine gender expression. They tried a lot of things to get me to be girlier, some of them not very nice. Now, they do not appear to care one way or another about my level of girliness. It has been suggested that they’ve gotten more accustomed to my masculinity, but I don’t think that’s quite it. Instead, I think, they were so diligent at first because they were afraid. They didn’t know anyone who looked and acted like me. No one in their universe, no one with a partner and kids and friends and a profession was like me. And so they tried to police me into being more like someone they could imagine a good future for. As it began to develop that I could have all those things and be just as faggoty a butch/dandy/queer as I am, they seemed to care a lot less. Now we don’t even talk about it. It’s just, for the most part, how I am.

I think we’re all guilty of letting our fears drive our actions. I realize now, dug deep into the question of butch or FTM or transmasculine and who’s a what, that we get activated in the exact same way my nice, straight parents do: out of fear. We’re worried that we’ll make a mistake, or that we already have, and that the consequences will be more than we can manage. That we’ll take the wrong path, say the wrong thing, get a crush on the wrong person, be identified wrongly, have the wrong expectations, make the wrong move—all of it. And at the risk of answering the same question the same way over and over: it’s not a fucking binary. It would be easier for a lot of people if it were, but it just bloody well ain’t, and nothing any of us does can make it that way. Please take a deep breath.

Or, better yet, how about this: be glad. Be glad that there’s so much play, so much slip and slide, in queer genders. Be glad to have an opportunity to learn more and do better. Be glad that there are so very many variations of the transmasculine body to enjoy—your own or someone else’s. Be glad that we, the butches and boys and bois and transguys and transsexual men and FTMs and MTMs and trannyfags and Studs and Aggressives and all of us now have the agency to speak about our own lives, use our own words, and give our own experiences our own names. Instead of wishing for the Field Guide, be glad to live in the beautiful chaos of each of us finding our way into our own gendered menu, our own identity, and our own name for it, which—if you will just love us while we do this complex and fragile part—we will kiss into your mouth with such gratitude when we’re through.

I’m Just Saying

I’m just saying:
I have never really felt like a girl
is not the same as
I
have always felt like a boy
. I mention this because when I have these tortuous inner conversations about how I may yet need to change my body and whether (and in what way) I am prepared to invest myself in the destination model of transition, I have to keep reminding myself of this important thing. It’s disheartening, in a way, because you’d think that someone who makes a living kicking at the gender binary would do a little better with this, frankly. But no. The ways of the gender binary are often dark and never pleasant; it can and will suck you right back in to its uncompromising orbit without remorse.

When I look at myself in the mirror, I am looking for handsome, never pretty. I don’t think I was ever pretty, even once, as hard as I tried to fake it, and I did. For the benefit of my family, for my own safety, for camouflage or comfort or whatever reasons at whatever moments, I worked at it. More than just the odd once. I still have the long, wild earrings I wore to make earrings feel like an all-right choice, and I am pretty sure that somewhere in a bucket in the old bathroom at my folks’ house are the green mascara and copper lipstick I tried too. It always felt wrong, in the way that people talk about the ineffable wrongness of their early lives. I was never good at it. I never felt right; never felt like a girl.