The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (19 page)

It shouldn’t have. He’s highly skilled at a software system whose expert architects are perennially in demand, and his work habits would make a nun blush and scuff her toe in the dust. But when he’s set loose among all the other Dockers-clad software boys, something very particular happens: he’s very clearly not their kind. No boasting or bragging or one-upmanship (or whatever the gender-neutral term for that is, though I suspect that this may be one case where the gendered word is the most appropriate), no competitive interrupting, no jockeying for position. None of the usual behaviors seen among the males of the North American Computer Programming Geek Elite. The result of this seems to be that the hiring people don’t quite know what to make of him. I’m not even sure they understand what it is that makes them look at this guy—who aces the one-on-one phone interviews, who kills the practical test—and think, “Huh, does he really know as much as it seems like?”

I happened to be visiting him and his partner, who is one of my very dearest friends, a week or so after the last and most forehead-wrinkling occurrence of this. We’re all genderphiles, and we all came quickly to the conclusion that something about Malcolm’s innate Malcolmness was causing these HR people to rethink their decisions when he turned up in person. They could not, we theorized, map the talent, success, or skill they read and heard about onto the live-and-in-person Malcolm, who is the sort of guy you could be friends with for ten years and never have any idea that he knows how to rewire almost anything that has wires until something you owned blew a circuit. Something about his Malcolmness was killing the deal at the last minute. I had an idea.

“Next time,” I said, “you should wear a band-collared shirt instead of a straight-collared shirt-with-tie, and display a dragon adornment somewhere on you as well. Don’t get a haircut beforehand. Speak even a little more softly, and a little more slowly. Let them project whatever Orientalism they have onto you, and then they can understand you as some sort of Tao Master of the Database. Maybe you’ll make more ‘sense’ to them that way.” Malcolm is of mixed race, and was raised culturally within the Chinese side of his family, so I figured he could sell this.

We all laughed, but a little ruefully. “Can I bow?” he asked. His partner and I both nodded enthusiastically. “With your hands together,” I chimed in, and then we spent the next minute or so darkly reeling off a series of Chinese racial stereotypes and evaluating which ones he might be able to embody, or even just invoke, to get their Chinese-chicken-salad-equivalent racial stereotyping working to his advantage. We thought, I suppose, that we might as well have a little fun with it.

Counting on racism as a way to interrupt gender policing. Whee. And now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get to FedEx by five so I can put this paperwork in the mail to the Devil.

The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with Malcolm as he is. One finds, however, that in the world of gender expectations it’s much easier, and certainly more expedient, to change him to fit the cultural expectations of the back-slapping white yuppies of upper management than it is to educate them about the many and marvelous places of gender-nonconformity in the world (regardless of how very helpful that information could be for them). If Malcolm needs a job—and for the record he doesn’t, just now, but if he did—well? What would you be willing to do to make sure you could house yourself, feed your family, walk safely through the world, or manage any other of the things on Maslow’s hit parade?

Quite a bit, I bet. So would I. And this is one of the many places where all of the very careful explanations about transpeople’s gender being the expression of their true selves is simply a giant lie.

It is quite a romantic lie, of course, which is our favorite kind, especially in North America. It conjures up tender images of young people crying themselves to sleep wishing they could just have a frock to wear, or elders on their porches grieving about what could have been (if they could just have had a frock to wear), and while these things certainly happen, they are never as uncomplicated as the motion pictures make them out to be. If they were, I assure you, there would already be a Frocks for All Foundation, and well-meaning grown transpeople criss-crossing the country in a minivan, handing out gender-appropriate clothing to all comers. Particularly considering that many of us have lived some portion of our lives in queer communities and can therefore organize the hell out of a thing on zero notice, I am fairly sure this could be organized by no later than Tuesday before lunch. Even if we just collected everyone’s old drag wear and pretransition leftovers. There would probably even be enough cash remaining to supply flowers to each customer.

While I love the idea, and while there have been moments in my life where I would have done nearly anything to be allowed to wear something that made me feel right in the world, it’s also true that “making the outside match the inside” is only part of the story.

The rest of the story is about making the outside match something in the
Field Guide to Normal People
so that the folks where you live, work, or amuse yourself will recognize and accept you, allowing you to exist outside your own home without being constantly challenged. And that, it must be said, lacks some of the romance of the previous scenario. Malcolm’s story, while darkly humorous if you tilt your head a little, isn’t unique; there are many ways in which those people whose genders aren’t in the first ten entries on the first results page have spent quite a lot of time either working to ameliorate the effects or learning to cope with the results.

Many things about gender have become so ubiquitous that they’re invisible until you fall over them, like curbs (which is a fairly good metaphor, since the verb “to curb” means
to check or
restrain
). It’s only when you sit up, rubbing your sore arm, that you notice them, that
he
notices how exceptionally rude a certain bank teller was, for example, on the day he turned up in his usual Saturday-morning fitted tee and half-worn eyeliner from the night before at the club, instead of his usual Thursday afternoon suit and tie. Or how much easier it is for
her
to get through her free-weights routine at the gym (including use of the Families locker room with its reassuring individual change rooms), when she’s remembered to put earrings in and her hair in a girl-style ponytail. These are ways in which we serve, and even uphold, gender norms in order to get through the day, however much we might feel cuter or more comfortable in other clothes or makeup, however much we might enjoy a particular activity—or food.

(I can hear a dubious chorus cranking up in my mind, yelping, “Food? Give me a break. Food doesn’t have a
gender
.” No? By all means, then, see if you can get anyone you know who considers himself manly to go into a local restaurant where he is known to the other patrons, and among friends who know nothing of the experiment, and order that aforementioned Chinese chicken salad with light dressing on the side and a diet iced tea, one SPLENDA. Send me a photo of the expression of the waitperson’s face, will you?)

So you learn to be something that is a compromise, somewhere between reasonably acceptable to you and minimally acceptable to the world around you.

To be clear: I don’t mean this applies just to transfolk, but to everyone everywhere; it’s just that transpeople end up having to do it all over again, and kinda quick. That makes it seem like a bigger deal. The more usual, cisgender process of gender policing tends to be a slow grind, not just in an overt boys-don’t-cry/sit-like-a-lady way, but in an almost Darwinist way. Those of us who display behaviors that garner gendered ridicule or shame learn to erase or downplay them as a survival mechanism. To some degree this is a function of how much we natively care about what others think of us, and to some degree it is enforced by the people around us—even if a boy is perfectly happy to be the femmiest faggot that ever flamed. And even if his entire family is also perfectly delighted by this and cheerfully provides him with an endless stream of hair ribbons, the boys of the seventh grade are not always going to be on board. It doesn’t matter if Young Master Femmetudinous is the best soccer player in his class, or grade, or school; they may well only ever see him as a pansy, and never choose him for their team. They will not credit him as what he deserves because they cannot understand him that way. Like Malcolm, his talents will be obscured by his gender presentation.

Unlike Malcolm, he doesn’t (we hope) have to earn a living yet, so he’s got some room. But if it is his heart’s desire to play soccer, he is probably going to end up packing up his hair ribbons so he can play, or else dominating public-park pickup games forever, where no one can keep him from playing, ribbons streaming out behind him as he runs.

Perhaps you remember moments of this from your own childhood or young adulthood; some moment in which you ventured a thought or suggested an activity or wore a sweater and got a swift and terrible kick (metaphorical or actual) for your troubles. Maybe you noticed that being more soft-spoken made the boys like you more, or that being a bit less caring made the girls like you more (and yes, I watched the movie
Can’t Buy Me Love
at least a hundred times as a teenager and thrilled at the protagonist’s meteoric rise to popularity until he started treating the girls so unforgivably).

Whether we’re twelve and wanting to be liked, or sixteen and wanting to get laid, or thirty and wanting to be employed (and also liked and also laid), we struggle to fit in. We struggle to arrange our gendered selves in ways that can be understood and valued by the groups of people whose company or employment or business or attraction we seek. For someone who has grown up and into the gender society who is prepared to accept and perhaps enjoy, the slow grind might be somewhat easier on the body, if not on the psyche or the pocketbook. Those giant industries devoted to helping women be more womanly and men be more manly? They exist to soothe, protect, or erase the wounded places where gender has ground against us especially hard.

Now, imagine doing it all in a year. In a year and as an adult, because, while school bullies and vicious parents and whoever else will fuck you up good and proper, that is something over which you can triumph if you can just get out of there through brains or talent or marriage or pure force of will. But when there is no out of there, and when everything is entirely pass/fail with no retakes, let us just say that the whole business looks a little different. However nicely I iron my dress, however tidily I apply my lipstick, however much I manage to grow and style my hair, I am never going to look like anything other than a junior varsity football initiation ritual on parade, and this is not a good corporate look. Or, really, a good anywhere look, unless you are on the fifty-yard line with a dozen other similarly suffering adolescents.

Perhaps more than anything, I feel resentful about this process and the lie it serves, and maybe not for the reason you’d expect. Of course, yes, I resent it because it damps or drains away our true selves, because it restricts free expression, because it forces falseness and creates pain, because it reduces the number of tutu-wearing soccer stars of any sex. Those things have an immediate and often negative long-term impact on people, even when they appear to solve short-term problems (like getting pummeled on the way home from school), by conditioning all of us to move toward safety, which by and large equals conformity.

But my greater resentment is about the result, the normalizing result that makes me look like an idiot. I go about here, there, and everywhere talking (especially to cisgender people) about the many fabulous ways of gender. Insisting that gender is not binary, because I know that it is not, and that people of all genders can be successful in all things. I say this with great enthusiasm and a certain lyricism and many emphatic gestures, and people more or less almost believe me—until they go back outside and look around. At which point, they do not see the marvelous kinds of gender variance that I have described anywhere in their own lives. They conclude not only that I am full of shit, but more importantly that gender really is pretty much as simple as they had imagined. It is not.

But we cover up for safety, we become things that allow us to function when there aren’t enough of us to disrupt the normalization process. So the exuberant variety of genders gets lost, gets erased, and no matter how much I or anyone insists that gender is not binary, it nonetheless typically shows up for most people as a binary. That reinforces the gender binary further, and then I see fabulous outlaws and shapeshifters and gender-resisters squeezing ourselves into that duality in order to work or play or just get through the afternoon. And I am sure that this is not the way this was supposed to work. Right? Talking about gender variance and coming out as trans and saying Fie on Gender Normativity a lot of times was supposed to make room for
more
gender fabulosity.

One bright pansy popping through a sidewalk crack will get weeded or stepped on; it’s not until twenty fabulous flowers bust through and the pavement is ruined anyway that someone decides maybe it isn’t a sidewalk at all, but a flower garden.

So please, for the love of gender—go bloom. Or water someone else while they do. Meanwhile, I will be shopping for a bright pink shirt and a luxuriantly flowered tie for Malcolm to wear with his leather kilt to his next job interview, whenever that is.

Shame

The wonderful writer Nancy Mairs, a woman with multiple sclerosis who has written several books about her life which include her experiences with the disease, perfectly describes the differences between embarrassment, guilt, and shame in her essay “Carnal Acts.” Embarrassment, she writes, is what you feel because of what you do, acting stupidly or awkwardly, and guilt is what you feel because of what you should have done and didn’t do, or did and shouldn’t have done. But shame, Mairs writes, is the most poisonous; it is what you feel because of what you
are
.