for all the boys and girls I never was

[rm]

Because my hearing is weird, speech can sometimes be a bit muddy for me, especially if I'm tired or distracted. I can hear you, but I can't tell what you're saying, and while I can and often do rely on reading lips, I can't do it with everyone or all accents. Which means sometimes, I just have no goddamn idea what you're saying, and because I'm an idiot, in a lot of cases, I'll just smile and nod.

Back in late 2000 when I had first started working at the dungeon, I got a client in who was interested in a cross dressing session. I was making small-talk, trying to close the sale as it were (pick me! pick me!) and he asked me something, and I had no idea what he said. So I smiled. And I nodded. And he picked me.

It turns out he had asked me if I was trans. Specifically if I were male-to-female. And I, in my sloppiness had said yes. And now he had paid $180 for a hour of my time where all I was going to do was put lipstick and a wig on him and he was going to talk to me about the life he was sure he'd never have, so what on earth was I going to do? Tell him I hadn't heard him correctly? Tell him I had lied?

Hell no.

He told me I had nice breasts. Asked about hormones. About my family. I lied about my parents, my age, a brother, a life on the West coast, talked about how it's not really running way when you're seventeen and it's all nice and civil and agreed upon and cold. Told him about jobs I'd worked. About struggling in university. About being a writer. Told him I had a boyfriend. Told him I was lucky to be slight, to be frail. Told him I was happy.

Watched him, at least into his 50s, hope.

And after he was gone put $70 of his fee into my own pocket for engaging in the lie.

I'll tell you this, I felt proud. My first session, and I walked back into that dressing room fanning myself with the tip and told the other girls. Because while I wanted to weep, wasn't I just the best little con-artist ever?

Their response was that I was ugly.

I have a lot of odd privilege in my life. Not the obvious stuff that comes with being pale or skinny, but the stranger stuff. The privileges of being born female. And I don't mean lifeboats and free drinks either, folks. I mean, rather, that by popular conception female sexuality is passive enough (and let me tell you, that _outrages_ me) that I can dress up like a man and be reasonably sure I won't get the snot beaten out of me. Or worse.

Of course, that's not always true. Coming back from the last Dances of Vice we road the train, and one of our group, a girl, had gone to talk with a bunch of guys who were flirting with her pretty outrageously. She was pretty drunk, and, without going into details, we were concerned for her as well as over the amount of attention the men we're hollering in our general direction too.

I can't tell you how much I wanted to just walk over there and grab her and bring her back to us. And if I'd been dressed like a woman, I'd have done it in a heartbeat. But I wasn't. I was in drag, and it was good drag too, but subway lights are bright and there was no way on earth I was going to walk over to these men, dressed as a man, and take a woman away from them. The layers of likely perceived emasculation involved in the gesture were too vast for me, who can defend herself very well, thank you, to feel remotely safe doing that. Which was a goddamn shame.

Because I am a woman, I have the (mis)fortune of being able to write off so much of what I do as play, as the bad habits of a single-sex education, or a life in the theater, or the once seemingly necessary skill of titillating men. I'm not, at the end of the day, trans because nothing in my life has much to do with from there to here and everything to do with being all these strange places at once.

But I have to tell you, stories like this, you can't convince me they aren't relevant to me, that they aren't somehow also a death in my tribe: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jul/30/arrest-made-greeley-transgender-slaying/

ginmar writes about it eloquently here. To which I must add, deliver me from this world where we can be, are expect to be, defiled by desire.

Melissa McEwan also speaks powerfully here.

Comments

[fuyukodachi.livejournal.com]

That is where I used to live.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Jesus fucking Christ. I am so glad you're not there for so many reasons.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

What she said!

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I made an unfunnybusiness post about this and added a link to your post because I think it is very cool. I hope that is OK. Let me know if you want me to remove the link for any reason.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Nope, perfectly fine. Thanks for letting me know (the number one source of drama from outsiders in this journal has always been trans issues for reasons I'm not clear on, so knowing it might be coming it always good to know).

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

People at unfunnybusiness are usually open minded and ready to be set straight if they are clueless about other people. Many of them are feminists or queer or supportive of the GLBT community. They are generally cool about people being different and ready to be pissed off at people who are hateful and violent against people who are different. I would never post a link to your LJ in a community if I thought the people would come to harrass you.

OT: "Because my hearing is weird"

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I didn't know this.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

In the midst of an exceptionally liberal city and a haven for trans people, surrounded by my dear friends and elective family, easily 1/4 of whom are trans, it's easy for me to imagine that such horrors are a thing of the past, until I read stories like this, and remember that murders and attacks like this happen every day in the nation that I live in.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

Gods above, that's so sad. The stupid, it burns. He tried to cover up any evidence of his presence in her apartment but then took her PT Cruiser?

Days like these, I wish I had a gun. Then I remember I don't own a gun because I would shoot people and go to jail. But still.

The number one source of drama from outsiders in this journa. Elsewhere, also.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Elsewhere, also. It pushes all the Crazypants buttons, somehow.

Re: OT: "Because my hearing is weird"

[rm.livejournal.com]

I don't talk about it, because it's not actually an impairment. My hearing range is much broader than it should be and hasn't diminished much with age. I hear a lot of noise all the time, and it can obscure speech for me, especially in crowded environments.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I know. I just know that links have distribution vectors, and I like to be braced, although I'm getting better at only writing things like this before I go away from keys for days!

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I'm so envious of everyone going to Terminus. I'm not sure why I thought being an unemployed full time writer was a good idea anymore. :/

Re: OT: ''Because my hearing is weird"

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Oh, so just literally weird.
I'm the opposite, I can follow a conversation across even a very large noisy room. Someone mentioned me by name across a crowded convention room (You should talk to [My name]about that...,)so I walked over and said 'Yes?' "My God,[My name], you have ears like...a bat!
No, I can just sot out the voice of someone I know from all the other conversations in the room.
(I learned the identity of another candidates 'spy' once, simply because I was having lunch in the same noisy restaurant were they were discussing it.)
Is it me, or do individual oddities tend to cluster, rather.

Re: OT: ''Because my hearing is weird"

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

*No,I can just sort out

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

I remember reading that article, and being so incredibly mad.

That's about all I can think of to say.

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

That is horrifying.

I am glad there were no stupid statements from authorities piled onto the awfulness. I was braced for that.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Oh. I assumed there would be, and was avoiding dealing with it.
Because the generalised stupidity of Authority encourages the individual stupidity of thugs like that.

[alabastard.livejournal.com]

As a man who was nearly totally androgynous for most of his young adulthood due to an early childhood mutilation and extremely delayed puberty, I had to learn the hard way to fight and defend myself, over and over. As androgynous as I was, I never looked female enough to be anything but a threat to them. Male and female privilege, it does all depend on perspective, I don't talk about this much, but the feelings run deep, and I am altogether thrilled that in my 40s I actually no longer look like the eternal boy.

[kaifoxx.livejournal.com]

:(

It SHOULD be prosecuted as a Hate-Crime, and I hope it is.

This sux. I hate dehumanization in all it's forms.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Audio processing disorder, or "You all sound like Charlie Brown's mom - mwah mah mwah ma ma mwah". I have it too, and while I can manage likewise with lip reading, hearing the emotional tones and faking it, telephones and bad audio are a trial, and it's worse when I'm tired.

Just because we aren't typically transgendered or don't fit in the gender boxes doesn't mean we aren't a little trans.

And anyway, last I saw statistics, 1 in 3 hate crimes against queer or transgendered folks? Are actually committed against *straight* or "normal" folks. The idiots can't tell by looking. Or, if they don't like what they see, it doesn't matter.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

One third? Holy crap! I imagined it was high, but I had no idea how high.
I've been using this as an argument in favour of hate crime legislation, for years, with some success, but, Ye Gad, that brings it to a whole new level of persuasiveness.
Any links handy for those stats?

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Sorry, no.

A decade or so ago, I was working for Anything That Moves (national bisexual magazine) at the time of Matthew Shepard's death. I wrote a piece containing those approximate statistics, and I had gotten those statistics from a then-recent report from Community United Against Violence (http://www.cuav.org/) which had been intended to support hate-crimes legislation.

Sadly, the ATM archive site is broken these days; our own archive of that editorial/open letter is available at http://atm.silmemar.org/ish18/hate-runs-rampant.html. Internal links there may fail as well.

Sadly, nothing much has changed about the world to make that editorial no longer relevant.

[idunn.livejournal.com]

Their response was that I was ugly.

Wow. How thoughtful.

I'm surprised by the horrified reaction that seems to be going on, according to the article. I was seriously expecting people to either be agreeing with the murderer when referring to the victim as an It, or blaming the victim altogether (aka "Why didn't 'she' tell him right away that 'she' was transgender?"). I've heard that last bit on more than one occasion and have to wonder why another party is entitled to know something personal like that from the get-go instead of respecting a person just because, you know, they're a person, regardless of what's below the belt.

[dejla.livejournal.com]

Their response was that I was ugly.

Well, that response was pretty ugly in itself. You made the customer happy; you gave him hope. That was what you were supposed to do.

And this news item--my God, what an absolute bastard. First, he murders her. Then he steals from her. Yeah, he should have everything in the book thrown at him. Especially for his stupid reasoning. She wanted to be female. That is her right to decide, not his. I hate people like that.

[ginmar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, he was so transpanicked that he took her car and her wallet and went on a spending spree. Now that's trauma! Poor, poor guy.

Gah.

Straight guys do this all the time with gays and transpeople. They claim they were panicked but they make off with the car and the wallet and then some dumb jury is sympathetic to them and gives them a reduced sentence. CAn't have straight guys doubted, you know.

Re: OT: "Because my hearing is weird"

[natf.livejournal.com]

I am the same.

[gement.livejournal.com]

A tangent, which I have been meaning to mention.

Their response was that I was ugly.

I keep hearing this from you: that other people have said it, that you grew up believing it, sometimes just the faintest hint that you may still buy into the belief that you either are or were visually unattractive. I know the childhood programming can run deep, no matter how much evidence to the contrary. I know our current culture can be a little bizarre about women who actually have chins and noses instead of looking like Victorian dollies.

Which is my preface to saying:

The first time I read that you thought you were ugly, I just about fell over with shock. I'm not talking about "the beauty inside" here, or "for those of us who think genderfuck looks sexy." I'm talking about the stunning, striking, utterly gorgeous way you look as a woman smiling in sunshine, as a woman vamped up for photos, as a man in vintage drag. Every way I've ever seen you look is glorious.

(Obviously you get to pick the most flattering photographs, but still. You've shown a pretty amazing range of looks.)

If you were to hit on me in any of the guises I've ever seen... I'd be so there. So utterly there.

So since it came up again, and I've been meaning to say it... I continue to be shocked and stunned that anyone has ever called you ugly.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Since I am on a borrowed machine and this deserves more response that I've currently got time or brain for -- thank you. Truly. More later.

[raaven.livejournal.com]

What I find really sad is that I read the article and heaved a sigh of relief, thinking "At least the journalist persistently referred to her as a female throughout".

It's a horrible, horrible place we're living in, some days.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Complete agreement. I know society is fucked up some good, but, rm, you are a very flattering representation of humanity.
And I am so not talking about inner beauty here. I mean, who is that stranger on the other side of the auditorium? Wow. Try not to stare, boy.
I know it's not important. But it is also true.