Site Presented By
Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
I kept hoping love would transform me. But, secretly, I longed to be female
Salon
Jul 2, 2009 |
With Maeve it ended with a big fight. This was back when I was still a man. "I never know what you're thinking," she said. We were at a bar in Baltimore, eating potato skins. "I mean, what the fuck. Who are you, anyway, when you're out of my sight?"
Maeve was in my fiction workshop at Johns Hopkins. It was becoming clear to me that she was a realist, not only in her writing, which was fine, but in her life as well, which was where the trouble came in.
I finished my pint. "Why can't the truth be about this, instead?"
"About what?"
"About making each other laugh. Telling stories. Singing songs. The blarney. That's so wrong?"
She was looking around the bar, as if she'd already decided it wasn't too soon to start shopping around for another boyfriend. "You know," she said. "Sometimes you're a real asshole."
Afterward, I went back to my apartment on the corner of Maryland and 29th Street, locked the door, pulled down the shades. I got out the cardboard box that contained all my stuff, put on the bra and hose, the blue sweater, the black skirt. Did the makeup, too, although I didn't like makeup. I thought it made me look fake.
The wig was last. It made me look kind of like a run-down Joni Mitchell. Then I walked back out to the living room and sat down on my black leather chair with a copy of an anthology entitled "The Major Poets," edited by Coffin and Roelofs. I was reading a lot of Keats back then. It was our man's theory that truth was beauty; beauty, truth. It was nice to think this might be true.
I looked at myself in the mirror above the parlor fireplace. I didn't look so terrible. Most of the time, when I went out en femme in Baltimore, you wouldn't know I was reprehensible unless you looked real close.
I always passed well, maybe because of the slender bones. I could go from the world of men to the world of women at the drop of a hat, and no one was any the wiser, or for that matter, dumber. It was terrifying and amazing, having a secret identity. It was like I was Clark Kent and Lois Lane, all my own damned self, both the experiment and the control.
I thought about Maeve and the fight we'd had in the bar. I felt bad for her. She wasn't wrong about me, either. Sometimes it was hard to know what I was thinking.
When it came to the women I dated before I transitioned, there were all sorts of ways of ending things. There might be a big fight, one of those calls where I would slam down the phone, and then it rings again three minutes later and you keep on like that all night long. Or I could write a letter, saying I just wasn't ready. I was too immature. Make it sound like I was doing her a favor. Which, of course I was, but not because I wasn't ready. It was because she and I were, you know, same same, not that I could possibly ever explain that.
It was tempting, of course, to try to put it all into words. Usually people assume that the reason you want to change genders is because you are, deep down, kind of an asshole, or that you hate yourself, or that you are actually gay and just don't know it, or that you can't figure out a way of being feminine in the culture while still being a man. None of that had anything to do with it, though. Even now, I occasionally meet trans people who say: Oh I'm a woman too! I love to make cookies and play with dolls! To which I want to wearily respond: Jesus fuck, if you want to play with dolls, play with dolls. You don't need a vagina for that.
But most of the time I've had to resign myself to the fact that people who are not trans will never get it. Why should they? They've never had to think about what gender they are. If you're not trans, you're free from thinking about what gender you are in the same way that white people in America are generally free from having to think about what race they are.
The women I knew, for their part, liked the fact that I had a feminine streak, that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn't know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto. A lot of straight women love a female sensibility in a man, an enthusiasm that goes right up to, but unfortunately does not quite include, his being an actual woman.
The romances didn't last, of course. Because, let's face it: I was keeping the basic fact of myself camouflaged. How are you supposed to fall in love when you're so frequently lying?
But I still believed, on some fundamental level, that love would cure me. That if I were only loved deeply enough by someone else I could be content enough to stay a man. It wouldn't be my authentic life, but it would be all right. Anyhow, my authentic life meant coming out as transsexual and taking hormones and having some repulsive operation and please. My authentic life wasn't very appealing. And so I allowed myself to be lifted off the ground by the levitating properties of romantic love. It was a nice effect. Of course, nobody really gets cured by love, but then transsexuals are hardly the only people who believe that romance will lead them outside their selves. We all believe this, at times, even if this belief turns out, in the long run, not to be true. You can't fault a person for hoping that love will make her into someone else, someone better. The world is full of false hopes, most of them dumber than the hope of being transformed by love.
