Trans

Another confession: designating myself “a complete Yin and Yang combination of gender, nature, and spirit” is really a workaround, a way of reconciling myself to not being “trans.” It’s possible I do fit somewhere in the trans array—Transgender. Genderqueer. Genderfluid. Genderdormant. Gender-on-the-low-down, the-down-low, the-quarter-note-on-the-half-beat—but I can’t keep up with all the gendermanding nomenclature!

I am a dual being, a gay male stuffed into a female body since my start. Ergo I have, from my start, felt a smattering of girl sensibilities vying against boy dominance. I hope that clears everything up.

But of course it never did.

Scene: 1971, college biology class, oral-report day. Mostly male. Coulda been all male. Doesn’t matter. One of my classmates gave a report on something. Another muttered their way through… whatever. Fascinating stuff all, I’m sure. Stuck with me like a leaf dancing in the California wind.

When it was my turn, I took my place at the lab table, faced the roomful of bored faces, and pointed to someone in the front row.

“How do you know you’re a guy?” I asked him.

I loved the laugh! No one didn’t chortle and having everyone’s undivided attention certainly felt good. But I’d spent months… days… hours in the CSFU library researching the all-but-unknown whys and wherefores of transgender, an “anomaly” disparaged more than recorded throughout history. So I plowed on through my narrative to the tune of sideways glances, guffaws, and outright snorts. The prof was impressed with an amused smile. I’ve no idea what grade I got, but who cares? It was just another dumb-as-fuck self-deprecation to drive home the reality that I wasn’t… I couldn’t be… it wasn’t conceivably possible in any way for me to feel the way I did, to experience life as someone who wasn’t exactly what everyone could plainly see she was.

Would it have helped if I insisted my pronouns were he/him? Maybe… might have gotten me kicked out of school sooner. I hated college; I was lost in pre-med. I’d only signed up for it because nursing school was all girl—now, really, what had I been thinking? Hadn’t I learned my lesson in my three-weeks-and-two days non-boy military career?—and I had to either go to school or find yet another job that I would leave in six-to-eight weeks.

So I did the only logical thing I could: I took a shorthand class so I could join the ranks of all-girl steno pools at the State Department.

Hey, I’m no fair-weather denier! I was gonna figure out how to be girl if I had to twist myself into a pretzel!

News flash: I failed.

Next scene: 1985, a dimly lit psychologist’s office, I don’t remember where. Married seven years, two-year-old daughter, heartbroken over my lost drumming career. Had come downstairs at 4:00 am to find my husband in tears because his affair was over. He was afraid I would leave him. Made me call my mother to say I wouldn’t move back to her house.

Then made me listen to the fucking beautiful song he’d written for his fucking lost love and got furious when I didn’t put aside my emotions to appreciate the fucking musicality and soulfulness of the tune.

Not the happiest day of my life.

Sidebar: I hadn’t known about the affair, but I’d had a middle-of-the-night Cassandra moment weeks earlier in which I saw it, plain as day, and just as promptly dismissed it. I hadn’t yet realized—or maybe just didn’t want to accept—that my Cassandra visions are always spot on.

I’d known without question, for example, that my grandmother was dead the moment my mother walked in the door from visiting her. Mom didn’t know—she’d come home for dinner, planning to return to the nursing home first thing in the morning. Then the phone rang. Grandma had died two minutes after Mom left. Gee, thanks, Cassandra.

My husband was dozing, my mother-in-law not drinking a cup of lousy hospital coffee, and my teenage brother-in-law staring into space as we all took a much-needed break from our death watch at my father-in-law’s bedside. Suddenly, I had to jump up and hustle down the hall to his room, I had no idea why. I got there just in time to see the nurse finish euthanizing him. Just in the nick of time, Cassandra.

By the way, I told no one what I’d seen. The nurse and I silently agreed it was the most merciful thing to do. So I waited a beat or two as we blinked at each other, then went to tell everyone Dad had finally passed.

My grandfather had reluctantly moved into our house after Grandma died. His relationship with his youngest daughter, my mother, was… shall we say… strained. The day he left to visit his middle daughter in the Midwest, I woke up in the middle of the night knowing he’d gone there to die. And he did, a few days later, sitting on the privy with a belly full of chocolate ice cream—just the way he always wanted to go. Good for you, Grandpa. My first crappy thought? “Glad I don’t have clean that mess up.”

Cassandra, the ultimate two-sided coin: curse and blessing.

Anyway, I spent a typically irrational fifty-minute first session with whatever-her-name-the-psychologist-was the day after my husband’s confirmation of my Cassandra intuition. I assume I cried and ranted; what else does one do in a therapist’s office at a time like that? The single thing I recall was saying, “If I were a man, I’d be gay,” just before she walked me out to her reception desk.

“You just think that because you’re just obsessed with men,” she replied.

But I saw her add the word “neurosis” to my chart. Mighta been neurotic. Doesn’t matter, I got the message: better stop trying to be honest with people, especially those in the medical field. For all I knew, they might actually keep permanent records.

Spoiler alert: they didn’t.

Last scene: 2020. I’d joined an LGBTQ 55+ support group, having finally given myself permission—now that my mother was dead and buried—to come out to myself as queer. It’d hardly been news to anyone around me. I’d actually come out in a novel decades earlier but hadn’t realized what I’d done, much like that great jazz tune (title forgotten) written by that young kid (name lost) who didn’t realize he’d composed a classic.

We were pandemic Zooming when one of the new guys whose name I didn’t catch mentioned that he’d just come across one of his younger-day videos on Pornhub. I knew little about porn. I’d seen a grainy plain-wrapped film with a bunch of other twenty-something guys who didn’t know I wasn’t girl and likely thought their crude commentary would make me blush or run from the room crying. It didn’t, and the boringly girl-centric ‘70s porno didn’t make me want for more.

My second porn exposure was a slightly less stupid but equally girl-centric film that my daughter and I kept watching because it kept rotating on some channel late at night—

No. I wasn’t a good mother. I had few if any maternal instincts and too many what’s-the-harm ones. Okay? Motherhood was one long dumb-as-fuck experience for me and my little girl. So yeah, we watched porn together. I knew I had a limited number of years with her from the get-go. Cassandra foretold our estrangement when my daughter was three.

My husband used to watch porn on his computer, theoretically sent to him by a fellow musician. I knew the guy—fit his character perfectly. I also doubted my husband would have gone looking for it himself. That wasn’t his style… and the rest of what there is to say about that is best left for another day.

But since I was, trapped in the house like everyone else and somewhat physically incapacitated to boot—owing to the multiple falls and the CheezeWhiz incident, another not-right-now topic—so I navigated to pornhub.com, then clicked gay porn. And OMG, I was home.

That was me. Okay, it wasn’t me because I still didn’t/don’t have a penis, but it was me because it was all that I’d ever fantasized. It felt good. It felt right. I’d found my people. It was the beginning of me possibly, maybe, kinda, sorta being me.

I started watching every gay-themed movie I could find—and lemme tell ya, the pickin’s were damn slim compared to SAG-AFTRA fare. I’d already seen the original La Cage Aux Faux (with subtitles) when it first aired in the late 1970s, and, of course, I could quote its Americanized version, The Birdcage. I’d watched Torch Song Trilogy half a dozen times, enjoyed The Ritz, sat through My Beautiful Laundromat, sniffled through the original The Boys in the Band, and growled at the end of Coffee Date (with Wilson Cruz when he was young, young, young).

But now I discovered 4th Man Out and 10 Year Plan, Gayby, What Happens Next, Ideal Home, Mambo Italiano, and Rob Williams’ Shared Rooms, Role/Play, Long Term Relationship, Make the Yuletide Gay, and Happiness Adjacent. Between Hulu, Tubi, Amazon Prime, and handful of other channels, I found foreign gay films, explicit gay films, inscrutable gay films—As I Am could be more contrived, but I’m not sure how—and many, many others from all over the world. Some of the award-winners bored me to tears. Some of the religious fight-backs were slow, preachy, and heavy-handed, but enlightening nonetheless.

And they all made sense to me. Their romances felt more real than any boy-girl drama or rom-com I’d ever loved. Their sex scenes worked—even the ones where the actors were obviously non-gay. I’d found a virtual home in movies I could never dream of being part of—still have a pussy, not a penis—but at least the characters and stories were right.

Now, I’m too old to medically transition and have lived too long bouncing between girl/non-girl, boy/non-boy to pretend that’s not what I am. But a word to those who hold queer people in contempt, who believe we don’t deserve the right to be who we are:

You’re wrong. You’re just wrong. How I wish science had then what it has now, and I could have altered my outside to match my inside the way young people can today. So they can live as their authentic selves. So they can fit in. So they have a surcease from the confusion, the self-loathing, the irrationality of being two people yet neither completely either.

So they don’t have to spend their entire lives as lying, hiding, denying turtles like me.