The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (6 page)

I always take care to correct them, cheerfully. “No, I’m the granddaughter. It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs Birnbaum. Can I carry that for you?”

When Will You Be Having the Surgery?

It’s true. I am trapped in the wrong body. And the truth is that if I could have surgery to fix it, I would in a hot second.

My problem is that none of the bodies into which I would like to live are available to me. Mine and everyone else’s problem, maybe, I dunno, but my want of a different topography—however strong it may be and, oh, some days it sure is—isn’t ever going to be but a patch on the problem.

If I could have surgery to be a slim, slight gentleman dandy of the 1920s, wearing high-button pants over no ass whatsoever and a fresh collar every Saturday night—that I would do. I would trade all this bulk and fur in a second to be the kind of boy that would have owned a selection of hatbands and changed them when he went courting according to season and occasion and whim. I imagine him pale as the beginning of time, blue veins ghosting through his skin and a dusting of blond hairs on his chest and legs, a slightly more robust swirl at his armpits and cock, but hardly enough to really sell Man. Tiny clothes, small enough to fit into the tiny suitcases of the era, the straw box with leather handle, out of which I could unfold a clean shirt every morning. Pull it on over my long limbs, snap my sleeve garters, cock my hat rakishly over my eye, give a grin, and take you out for a soda.

I would also cheerfully, delightedly have surgery to turn me into a zaftig redheaded girl, all tits and freckles, someone who could wear a corset and have it do for her what a corset is supposed to do: nip me in further at the waist and present my rack to the world on a velvet platter. The surgery would also have to give me her purring smoke-and-honey alto, her confidence with people of all genders, and her steady hand; the kind of girl who makes clerks and cops and passers-by fall in love for thirty seconds at a time all day long, who could linger over coffee or a short glass of good scotch all by herself and just watch the world go by, with not even a moment of thought that anyone would imagine she was by herself for lack of a willing companion. Always well-upholstered in pure cotton and silk, velvet and fine, fine wool, and I would slide her soft clothes on with no jewelry but my smile and think about what sort of company I wanted to call.

In fact, I would absolutely have the surgery to turn me into Mark-from-high-school, the blueprint of every boy I have ever been hot for since: short and stocky and fuzzy with a big ass and a ready smile and a kind, kind heart; Mark, who let me wear his denim jacket, which smelled like boy funk, for three days when I was a spectacularly awkward fourteen-year-old girl. I could certainly get my high school alumni office to tell me where he is now, what he’s doing, but I don’t even dare to Google his name, because, in my mind, he’s well settled with a boyfriend who’s sweet on him, and spends all his time designing beautiful houses that make people feel lucky as hell to live in. But to be him, yes, I would change everything in a heartbeat, wear only corduroy and shave twice a day, to live in his compact and handsome form.

It’s true that I would probably have surgery to be more boys than girls, but frankly, I would also have it if I could have wings. Whenever I watch
X-Men: The Last Stand
, the X-Men movie with the heartbreaking winged boy, I catch my breath with a sob and no lie every time the tender teenaged protagonist spreads his wings for the first time. They look so beautiful, so absolutely right on him, pitching backward to steady him. They could lay me open at the spine and knit each nerve ending into me, make me wait longer and worse than any brand-new-girl with a new pussy ever had to wait with her dilating set, and I would still be cheerful. Even if I could never fly high at all, even if all I could ever get out of them was a little assist on a jump or a few powerful beats-worth of a soft landing, it would still be worth it. Totally worth it—and this is the place where, perhaps, I understand intense body dysphoria the most—to be able to look in the mirror and see them folded up behind me, to power or protect me.

I would probably have surgery for a tail, especially a prehensile one, but I wouldn’t pay as much or endure as much: somehow, a tail seems more like an endlessly amusing sex toy than a thing one
needs
, and also I kind of have a hard time finding pants that fit me as it is. I might have chest surgery, but I don’t usually want it because my big issue with my tits is how they
look
, and how they make my clothes fit—I really like the way they feel, is the thing, especially when my husband reaches for them. It turns out that through the magic of the Lycra undershirt (of which I now own several), I can eat my cake and have it too on that one. And now I’m a little bit through the looking glass there: ten years ago I was sure I would get a medically necessary double mastectomy in a heartbeat if I needed one, and now I feel less excited about that. I would definitely have surgery that would fix my weight permanently at about 245, which seems to be the right weight for my frame and leaves me big and bulky like I prefer, but not
quite
so doorway-filling as I am now and would be so much kinder to my knees I cannot even describe it. I seem to be permanently set on 275, though, in various configurations of muscle and fat, which is fine but not quite what I would prefer, so if I could set that dial I totally would.

I would have surgery to make my reaction to the bitter Canadian cold less severe, even though I now have two full sets of performance-weight under-layers (one wool, one polypro) to keep me warm, and I would have surgery to end, once and for all, my miserable cystic acne. I would have surgery to improve my knees, my balance, my eyesight (even though I might still choose to wear glasses, because I think they really suit me), my terrible temper, or my sense of direction. I might even, if it all worked the way I would want and I for
sure
wasn’t gambling with my ability to come ever again, have surgery to have a penis attached (especially if I could have it attached, I don’t know, maybe a little higher than usual so I could keep the other good stuff I like as well).

But if I can’t go from the body I have to a body that I am certain would feel very right—right like having wings would be or even right like wearing spats would be—then I think, maybe not for me. Which isn’t to say not for you, of course. You should move toward whatever changes, whatever surgeries, whatever renovations or alterations or restorations will create you in the glory you deserve, oh yes you should. And you should do it with your usual style, and you should do it without shame, and when you’re healed up and ready we can go shopping for something fabulous to showcase the many wonders of you.

But me? I might actually be waiting less for advances in surgery and more for advances in time travel. We’ll see. Meanwhile, there are a lot of reasons people don’t have surgeries. Okay?

What’s in a Name?

About once a week, I have the following exchange when I introduce myself:

“Hi, I’m Bear Bergman,” I say, reaching out to shake hands.

The person to whom I am introducing myself, instead of volunteering hir own name (which is the traditional form), replies instead, “What’s your real name?”

Granted, I live in the world with what some people would consider a somewhat unusual name. And when I say “some people,” I mean mostly white, anglophone North Americans, usually those from the northeast and sometimes the Midwest of the United States. Southerners, upon introduction, often think I must be named Paul (after legendary football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant), and think nothing of calling me Bear, but do tend to follow up asking what position I played. On the West Coast, people named Zephyr or Trash or Puppy are so common as to be entirely unremarkable. People might guess that I was born in a commune or decide that I chose my own name, but either they don’t care or they want to Honor My Process. Everywhere else in the world, well, it’s not their language. They just smile nicely.

In some ways I am grateful for having had ten years of this experience already, even before I started to grow into my gender and look more like a man to the casual observer, more of the time. Because while naming is a fascinating thing worthy of much conversation, it also turns out that some people enjoy a particular parlor game of learning the birth names of transpeople.

There are many traditions, most of them religious or spiritual, that seem to have contributed some power to this current of interest in learning someone’s birth name (which many believe to be the True Name). Some Pagan traditions believe that knowing the True Name is a powerful kind of knowledge about someone’s character or nature, and that it is with the power of the True Name that someone can be located or called spiritually. Jews, especially Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, will never name a newborn after a living relative, because they believe that the Angel of Death is looking for elders whose times are up by name, and might take a baby by accident if the child had the same name as the adult. This belief among Jews is so strong that sometimes, if an infant or toddler becomes gravely ill, hir parents will change hir name in an attempt to confound the Angel of Death into going away empty-handed. Catholics give young adults the name of a saint upon the occasion of their confirmation, adding the holy name to their birth names to cement the relationship between that person and their patron saint (and, I was interested to learn, children of any gender can take on the name of any saint—the choice is about that saint’s qualities, not hir gender). Many First Nations who have kept their naming traditions will give a child a temporary name at birth, a name that serves to welcome and honor them, and only at a further stage of development, when a young adult has become someone with personality traits and interests, does a group of people within the community (sometimes including the person to be named) choose a permanent name for that child. Among the Chinese, the modern custom is for people in business to have an English name, to the degree that human resources forms have a space for it. This both conveys the fact or appearance of having attended an anglophone university (considered a boon) and removes the difficulties of more traditional, relational forms of address used in social contexts, where you might be known as Third Son or Tall Wu. And so on—there is a reason that the study of names and naming crosses psychology, anthropology, sociology, and linguistics, and even has a subspecialty, phonosemantics, which suggests there may be an intrinsic relationship between sound (the spoken name of a thing) and the nature of the thing referred to. I mention all this because I want the weight of years and research and authority behind me when I say Names are a really, really big deal.

I introduce myself as Bear Bergman. I am greeted at the bank, pharmacy, and dry cleaners as Bear. I work as Bear, and my friends and lovers all call me Bear (unless they have a private, fond nickname for me), and I sign checks as Bear. The people who still call me by my original, given first name have known me since before I made my bat mitzvah. To these dozen or so mostly octogenarian people, I have given explicit license to go on calling me Sharon. I will also answer to Sharon for people who are employed by the air travel industry, for whom even Jay-Z must appear as Shawn Corey Carter, passport (and custom lavender Timberlands) in hand. Other than that, I am Bear, and I consider this to be my real name because it is how I think of myself, what I’m called, and what I answer to.

(Department of irony: in order to find out how Jay-Z was named on his birth certificate, I turned to Google. And what search string did I type? “Jay-Z real name.”)

I was named Sharon after my great-grandfather Samuel, my mother’s grandfather on her mother’s side, deceased shortly before I was born. It’s common enough among Jews to give a named-for child just the first letter of their antecedent’s name, sometimes along with that person’s Hebrew name, and I remain eternally grateful to my parents for not choosing to name me Samantha. As sometimes happens, though, my birth name stopped fitting me well around the time of my adolescence, and I was renamed Bear twice in pretty short order by two different groups of people who had no point of overlap. Not being an idiot, I took it on, and allowed the name Bear to become more and more present in my life. Earlier I was hesitant, in large part because of questions like, “What’s your
real
name,” but as I became the person of my name, I learned to defend it as I would anything else I liked.

People are often curious—sometimes unkindly so—that I don’t insist that the last remaining holdouts (my parents, grandmothers, and a couple of old family friends) call me Bear instead of Sharon. For me, my change of name was not and continues not to be related to my change of gender. So my struggles with my relatives (and people I have known so long they might as well be) on the subject of my name is more in the realm of the practical: Please try not to use my first name when introducing me to new people, lest I have to make them
un
learn it. Please try to remember not to make out my birthday cards addressed to Ms Sharon Bergman, and especially not the birthday checks, because checks made out to that person will not be cashable at the bank by Dr S. Bear Bergman, which is how the nice people at my bank know me (having conferred the title Dr on myself to avoid gendered honorifics). Etcetera. It is also worth noting that one of the few things in my world about which I am secretive—except, I suppose, not anymore—is that I do not insist my parents use the name Bear. I especially hide this from parents of newly out transpeople I know. I do not want them getting the idea that there’s a parallel to be drawn: if it’s okay for my folks and with me, it must therefore be okay for them to continue using their child’s birth name. It’s not a parallel because I have never asked my parents to call me Bear, while many transpeople have asked or demanded or begged their parents to call them by their new names, but in the dim corners of denial many subtleties are lost. So I keep my mouth shut about it.