The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (11 page)

I suppose I don’t know what Girl feels like, or what Woman does. I know that when I want to I can shape my voice into Woman over the phone, and I know what that feels like mostly because of the response I get. I sound educated, polished, and professional. There’s a silk I can bring to it, a way of making my words flow and ride that feels womanly to me, different from the firm-ended sentences of my more natural masculine discourse. That voice feels to me like it seems Woman ought to, as much grace as power, as much music as lyrics, and maybe that’s the result of having been raised up by high femmes, but that’s fine with me. That voice, she comes easily and feels natural in my mouth.

But nothing about Woman ever felt natural in my body. I have catalogued and discussed the ways of this and theorized about why, but at the end of the day my form is as broad and unyielding as the things I was compared to, and not kindly, as a child: a Mack truck, a bull elephant, a linebacker. I can remember with hot shame the moments in which adults of my childhood said those things to me, and I knew they weren’t compliments. I also, however, know this: in my twenties I was asked to dance as part of a performance, and repeated to the great and talented Peggy Shaw what the dance captain of my adolescence had said about me, that I had “all the natural grace of a rampaging bull elephant.” I said it as a way to get myself off the hook, but Peggy, being a tall and broad-beamed butch thing herself, looked at me seriously and asked if I had ever seen a rampaging bull elephant. I had not. She shook her head slowly and said that to see so large a thing move so determinedly and so fast was a particular kind of grace all its own, and could not be denied. Maybe, she opined, an elephant’s grace was exactly the kind I had, and there was nothing in the world wrong with that.

But I haven’t always felt like a Boy or wanted to be a Man. Maybe that’s the feminist I am, an identity and word I claim even though I sometimes find I don’t enjoy other people who also claim it. Maybe I am too suspicious of the offices of manhood. But really, beyond all the theorizing and ex post facto explanations, I don’t know what a Man feels like. I cannot see that sure, certain thing that other people I love and trust seem to see, clear and true—that thing of manhood that is a destination many people feel excited about. I have nurtured in myself a masculinity I feel comfortable in and pleased about, but sometimes my choices, in trying to live up to Man, feel just as alien as my early attempts at Girl did.

Part of me understands that these things are about culture, stereotype, and archetype; not all girls wear mascara and not all boys spit and swear. I adore all of the small children in my life, and I hope that one of the things I am able to provide for them (besides love and endless repetitions of their favorite let’s-pretend scenarios) is plenty of encouragement to ignore the forces of gender and do what they feel called to. I want them to feel encouraged and supported in their genders, and their choices about gender—in ways I do not. I want them to assume that whatever they feel like is perfectly good, and that if it feels like boy to them, then it is; likewise girl. Perhaps most of all, I want them to feel that they and only they are the absolute and unassailable experts in this regard, that no matter what anyone else thinks or says, they are right, right, right about their gender, and then right some more, a big enough and sturdy enough right to carry them past anyone’s protestations.

I catch myself even now—in an essay, for G-d’s sake, about resisting the gender binary—resorting to binary, fish-or-fowl thinking. We’re raised on it, fed it and simmered in it, and all of our language supports it and recreates it. Saying even one sentence about gender without buying into the gender binary requires so many circuitous locutions and scare quotes that I get exhausted. Even me, and I do not mean “even me” because I am so very fabulous or so unusually smart, but after daily battle with gendered language one does build up some endurance, and so when I say it I mean,
even me who hauls this particular bucket of
water every damn day
.

There are more locations than girl and boy, man and woman. Decamping from one does not have to mean climbing into another. There’s plenty of space in between, or beyond the bounds, or all along and across the plane or sphere or whatever of gender, and it is entirely okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shall be a boy.” But it must also be okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, so I shall set about changing what it means to be a girl,” and, yes, okay to say, “I do not like being a girl, and so I shan’t.” Totally okay. Not always easy, not always tidy, not always something one can briefly explain—but can you say it? Of course you can. Of course.

But would it be nice to have a destination? Well, yes.

Maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s my Virgo, Jewboy nature talking, wanting to know where we’re going, when we are expected to arrive, for how long we will be staying, what transportation we’ll be taking and what it costs and how frequently it runs. I make my husband crazy in this particular way all the time on vacations.

It’s true I have never felt like a girl, but I have felt like a Bear. I moved into that name lock, stock, and barrel the moment it was given to me, and I have used it whenever gender was demanded of me. Are you a boy or a girl? I’m a Bear. Will you be a Mama or a Papa? I’ll be a Bear. “I’m not that kind of Bear,” I have said teasingly or seriously, and more than once. When people ask me if I’m a Bear as in
grrr
or a Bear as in teddy, I smile and say, “Yes.” Bears are large and fuzzy, which I am, and can be forbidding or tender; me too. I have the Bear hug. I know what Bear feels like, and when I don’t I can decide that since I am the Bear, however I am in a moment is the right way for me to be. I can decide this without particular concern since there are so few cultural expectations for a gender of Bear, so I feel utterly free to inhabit it just as I like, to create a whiff of the experience I hope to encourage in the children of whom I am fond. I feel at home in my name. Using it as a gender, and sometimes as a sexuality, is a bonus.

I don’t always talk about myself as a Bear. I use boy words to talk about myself too, especially in terms of my size. Fat Boy and Big Fella feel friendly and familiar; they feel warm, unlike other terms, and I understand that this is because, culturally, we have a whole different relationship to fat in women than we do in men. When given a choice between being Some Guy and Some Girl, I always pick Some Guy, and I have learned to accept and enjoy Buddy, Chief, and so on as useful and appropriate nominatives in no-name-given situations. In the end I am a masculine being, an opener of doors and a wearer of boots and a relinquisher of bus seats and a person with a relationship to my tailor. In this masculine light, in moments without a lot of opportunity to explain and discuss my gendered choices built in, I am willing and cheerful to be Some Guy.

Regrettably, the results of this do not always match my choices. There is no space for “masculine-being, female-anatomy, feminist-consciousness, politically and sexually queer, transgressively gendered” to become specific and recognized in many locations of daily life, such as the public bathroom or the honorific attached to my bank account or frequent-flyer membership. To these, I take the gender-free option when there is one. I talk about gender nonspecific pronouns like I was being sponsored by them. With only slight guilt, I assign myself the honorific of Dr and use the Family or Accessible washrooms when they’re available to avoid further, external gendered confusion. When they are not available, I generally choose the expedient of using whatever name, honorific, or facility seems safest in the situation; usually the masculine, since, well, see above.

And the result can be . . . confusing. Not to me, since I am in here, making the choices (in the same way the driver doesn’t get car sick). But living in a location of gender that’s complicated may cause staring, upset, difficult conversations, hostility, and worry far more often than it causes curiosity or flirting or delight. When I discuss my choices, I am often asked why I would want to do that—and to be clear, I mean that compassionate and gender-savvy people ask this. We are not counting the votes of the hateful, for whom the polls will always be closed on this topic. I mean that time and again, people who are prepared to understand and accept and include transsexual people want to know why I could not be transsexual: change my name, take hormones, have chest surgery (at least), claim my identity as a man, and be done with it. Which seems both clearer and also easier, it’s true.

It’s a reasonable question. Being transsexual, while not exactly a walk in the park, is a destination-based mode of gender and tends to be relatively straightforward: I used to be this known, recognized, approved thing, and now I am that known, recognized, approved thing. You already know the rules for this class of person. Adjust yourself accordingly. And most people, even those who might not necessarily be delighted by it, kind of get it and can get on board and will, unless they are invested in proving some kind of bullying “I don’t believe in you” point. Certainly this is easier, as most transsexuals will tell you, with new people who don’t have to adjust to a transsexual history. People who used to know them under a former name and pronoun pose a different set of questions. But even still, even when people are being mean or stupid, at least there are answers to their questions, you know? I’m a woman now, so you can call me Cheryl and refer to me as she or you can piss off. Simpler.

In my bio, I refer to myself as a gender-jammer, a word I stole and modified from the term “culture-jammer,” which refers to those people who make their point about the cultural ills they perceive by publicly enacting an exploration of an institution or hegemony. They usually do it with humor and playfulness, which I enjoy, and let a little light and air into the kinds of things we accept without question. I can do this, be a gender-jammer, because my nontraditional kind of work as a writer and performer makes a lot of room for it. People who are lawyers or consultants or schoolteachers currently have far fewer choices about how they embody their genders, and so my self-employed status as an artist and cultural worker gives me great privilege to be a little weird, in the way we expect of our “creative types.” For which I am grateful. Being a well-employed freak with a good education means that I can use all the space not currently occupied by Boy and Girl if I want to, and see what I enjoy and where it might inspire me. Being a homesteader on the landscape of gender is, in some ways, a pretty good deal.

Am I sure I’ll always be here? No. I know far too many people who, well into their middle or later years, have finally come to terms with their own genders or have been worn down by the gender expectations of the world in which they live or some combination of that and other things, and they have changed sexes, medically or socially or both. But for now, I am clear, and I have made a choice: I am not, and have never felt like a girl, that’s true, and I’m not a woman at all. But neither was I a boy, and I may never be a man. That’s how it is over here. I’m just saying.

Passing the Word

I have started to really dislike the word
passing
. I resent it, and my resentment has blossomed fully, if you can imagine some sort of carnivorous and tentacular flower. At this point even the whiff of it makes me cranky, because it has come to represent a particular kind of backwardness in thinking about gender that, to further torment the horticultural metaphor, really frosts my pumpkin. And because I spend so much of my time talking and thinking about questions of gender, someone seems to need to talk to me about passing every day.

Passing, you know: “I pass as a man almost all the time.” “Sometimes I pass as a girl, but only until I speak.” “One hundred percent passable.” It’s how we talk about the way a transsexual or transgender person is seen in the world: are they being seen and recognized as their identified and expressed gender? They
pass.
No? Then they
do not pass
. Passing is one of the few words in the transgender lexicon that’s not a medical-legacy word. We did ever so much better with this one: it’s a racist-legacy word, a legacy of the time when Africans were kidnapped from their homeland to be enslaved in the Americas. If you’re not familiar with this, a hierarchy of race developed in which the lighter your skin was, the more attractive and intelligent you were considered, and someone quite light-skinned could sometimes
pass
for white and live in white society. Even as I write this, I snort and sigh and shake my head, thinking, okay. I know I am a word geek. But could we not do any better?

Passing is a word loaded with problems, all of which you may rest assured I will complain about before we’re done here, but by far the biggest for me is that it assigns all the responsibility for other people’s experience or understanding of a particular person’s gender to . . . the person in question. Not the people doing the observing, but the observed. It is your job, the word
passing
communicates, and, what’s more, your solemn responsibility to create a presentation of gender that conforms well enough to the prevailing standards of whatever context you find yourself in to call forth from onlookers the gender attribution you desire. Like transpeople need more work to do.

If this does not occur, you have failed; when it does you have succeeded. Not just that, but in the matrix of many transsexual treatment programs those verb forms become their nounal counterparts: if you do not
pass
, you are a failure
.
If you do, you are a success. Successes may have access to hormones, surgeries, legal remedy with regard to documents, and other such interventions as they require, as a reward for having played the game well. Failures are sent home in disgrace, and this is marketed as the natural way of things. Obviously, the thinking goes, someone who is really and truly a transsexual would be able to make a visual, corporeal case for hirself instinctively (or perhaps with a little time spent with Dr Google), but certainly there are no medical interventions to teach you how. If you cannot do it on your own, you’re a failure.