Tucker
Ella texted that I was invited down to the cabaret on Saturday night. At least I’d get to see Nico dance. Cal was driving down with Tesh and her girlfriend Alisa. I got the last space in the car. Summer wasn’t going anyway, but if she were, no way would she cram herself in a car with Tesh and Alisa.
I half paid attention to the conversation: Tesh obsessing about whether they should run for leadership of our LGBTQIA+ group when Cal’s term ended. Mostly I worried about Nico. Ella had had dinner with Nico but she didn’t say anything about it. The lack of detail was frightening—like she didn’t have anything good to say.
We pulled into the parking lot of the Noodle with enough time to use the bathroom and buy tickets. The long performance room had a stage at one end and rows of theater seating—mismatched castoffs from old movie theaters. There was a sound booth in the back on a raised platform and space to stand around it.
Everyone else from Freytag went to sit with Ella and Shen, as close to the front as they could get. I found a seat in the back. The distance and my new hair color would hide me.
As my eyes adjusted to the diffuse light, my brain un-adjusted to the people I saw. Two tall women in dresses passed up the center aisle. As they moved by me, I figured they were drag queens, then that they were trans women, then that they were cis women dressed as drag queens, or trans women dressed as drag queens, and around in that loop of gender guessing again. I wanted an “off” switch. I thought that I was cooler than this, but every person I saw triggered an attempt to understand their gender, their body.
The announcer hopped onto the stage, opened the show and quickly made way for the first act. A trio of masculine-appearing people bounced and spilled onto the stage. One was tall, two stout. They danced and lip synced to a song I didn’t know, stripping off their jackets so they were in sleeveless T-shirts, suspenders, men’s trousers and heavy boots. They all had facial hair. On two of them it was hard to tell if it was makeup or hormones. The handlebar mustache on the third was hopefully fake.
Handlebar Mustache looked like a drag king to me, but the other two could have been trans men. They could’ve been cis men with wide hips. My brain kept switching its opinions.
My attractions shifted too. The tall one with the mustache was hot. She? They? My mind thought of her as a woman and I corrected myself to the neutral because I didn’t know what gender they identified as. They had broad shoulders but also broad hips. I could imagine wanting to kiss that person, even with the mustache on. But the other two, even the one whose hips were wider than the tall dancer, seemed male to me. No interest there.
The three guys finished their song and bounded cheerfully off stage. The next performer came out from behind the curtains already singing, or lip syncing, to the music. She looked like a Disney princess with a long gown and a curtain of auburn hair half covering her face. After a minute of singing on stage, she descended the front steps and walked into the central aisle of the audience.
In fast, fluid moves, she unzipped the dress and stepped out of it. The wig came off, dropped onto the pile of the dress.
The performer, still singing, was now a slender boy in a tank top and bike shorts, with slicked-back brown hair. He turned back toward the stage and climbed onto it without breaking his lip syncing.
He brushed a hand through his hair, spiking it up in a faux hawk women’s style, pulled off the shorts to reveal panties, and stripped out of the tank top to a strapless bra—back to female. She was beautiful in either form, I thought, because of the way her personality came through all the changes, the emotion of the performance, the courage it took to keep stripping off appearances. And she was again completely convincing as a woman even though a moment ago in the tank with the slicked back hair he’d looked male.
“Beautiful,” someone whispered next to me. A very tall, strikingly attractive woman had slipped into the empty chair on my left.
The performer took off the bra and the panties. Under this they were wearing what looked like black electrical tape, though I hoped it wasn’t that, over their nipples and crotch. They had no breasts, but they seemed not to have male genitals either. They pulled out a makeup removing wipe from thin air as far as I could tell, and rubbed it furiously across their face, removing most of the makeup and smearing what was left in a colorful blur across their fine features. They’d stripped down to the bare essence of human. I couldn’t see this person as male or female.
I grinned. If I could see neither in this performer, I should definitely be able to see both in Nico. I held on to that idea through the next few acts: a belly dancer, a burlesque group, and a comedian/poet.
Then Nico came out. Yo wore dark gray pants that fit closely in the thighs but loose at the ankle with a tight, black T-shirt. It was the least colorful I’d ever seen Nico. It reminded me of the Battlestar tank top and of breasts. I ached to run to Nico and apologize again and again until yo heard me.
Nico danced modern with flares of ballet and hip hop. Yo leapt and landed, held sculpted poses with yos body, spun, rippled, flashed across the stage. I watched the powerful quad muscles bunching in Nico’s legs, strong shoulders and arms—thick enough to be male but not so heavy as to be outside of the realm of an athletic woman. The “package” in the front of yos pants could have been real or fake or some combination of both. I could see Nico as all genders. The physicality of Nico’s performance throbbed in my gut like a drum.
The dance was about constraint and freedom. Nico lunged and spun, fell forward and caught yoself at the floor, crawled painfully, climbed agonizingly up to yos feet and then leapt, spun and flashed across the stage again. Nico said more to me than I’d ever heard in words before—about wonder and life and gender and the crazy things people do. About what it was like to be more than most people would ever understand.
The whole time, on the bare wall behind the stage, a projector showed images of people. First naked bodies, medical photographs with graphs behind them, eyes covered with a black line.
The woman beside me sucked in a breath and whispered, “Oh, Nico.”
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Victims,” she said.
The medical photos changed to black and white and color images of people. Most of them were clearly presenting male or female but a few weren’t so easy to pigeonhole.
The woman pointed and whispered, “She had her clit removed because doctors thought it was too big and would make her lesbian; now she can’t have orgasms. He had his penis ‘corrected’ so he could pee standing up. The infections nearly killed him and he still has to sit to pee. He was raised as a girl after his micropenis was removed; he killed himself. She was beaten by her father every day for being a ‘freak’ instead of the son he thought he should’ve had.”
I was shaking. I wanted to get up and run, toward Nico or out into the parking lot, both. I wanted to put my body over Nico’s, so the people who’d done these things could never touch yo.
The images shifted again. This time showing groups of people laughing together.
The woman’s whisper was less pained. “Kathoey people of Thailand,” she said. “Two-spirit people in Canada, hijira in India.”
The last image was an official document. I had to puzzle it out: lines of blue and black writing, a photograph of Nico, a signature. A passport. The line indicating “sex” said “X.”
I turned half toward the woman and she said, “Australia. They’re one of the few countries that includes X as an official sex or gender.”
Nico stood in the center of the stage, under the X.
The music held, rose, faded. Nico bowed.
The audience was on its feet instantly, the room ringing with applause and cheers.
As Nico left the stage, I slipped out of my seat and through the short hallway to the doors outside. In the heavy night air, leaning against the side of the building, I closed my eyes. I wanted to see Nico over and over, nothing else. But I saw everything: the medical photos, the people whose lives had been irreparably damaged when they were babies, the cultures that had more space than mine for gender, the X glowing on the screen above Nico’s beautiful face.
* * *
Cal texted me that the performance space was being set up for a party. Come back, I want to dance, he said.
I wanted to talk to Nico so much. And I didn’t know what to say. I could hang near Cal and let Nico decide if yo wanted to talk to me.
The front part of the audience area was fixed seating, but the folding chairs that made up the back six rows had been picked up, leaving space for dancing. I found Cal amid the moving bodies. We danced as the crowd thinned. I was getting thirsty and too sweaty.
In another song, Cal had worn himself out. “Come on,” he said. I followed him across the hall to the coffee shop. He got a cold water and handed me one.
Ella and Shen sat at a table with Tesh and waved us over. Tesh was glowing. I sat in their shadow, sipping water. Nico appeared in the doorway, beaming and radiant, one arm around the waist of a tall, pretty person with big hoop earrings and a slouchy hat.
Ella hopped up and hugged Nico. I sat and burned with jealousy. Nico had no trouble attracting people—was this my replacement? Had I already spent too long figuring out my apology?
Nico glanced at me, did a hard double-take and stared.
“Tucker? Hair? What happened?”
I braced myself and said, “It’s, um, for a cosplay project.”
Nico cocked yos head, “Who?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“What con are you wearing it to?”
“Haven’t decided yet.”
I was cuttingly aware of everyone staring at us. I didn’t know what to say. If we were alone…oh screw it.
“I’m sorry,” I told Nico. “So sorry for what I said. I’d like to talk sometime if you want.”
“Yeah,” Nico said, but non-serious, already looking away. Yo addressed the group, “Everyone, this is Kaj.” And then went around introducing everyone.
“My pronouns are she/her,” Kaj said brightly. She pulled up a chair and sat near Ella while Nico went to the counter to order, like the gallant boyfriend.
Were we all supposed to say our pronouns?
Tesh pointed around the table as if we did this everyday, “She, he, they, he, she…and Alisa’s dancing but she’s also she.” I was grateful for that. It made us seem cool, but it also hurt my head. Or maybe that was from seeing Nico bouncy and boyish with this lanky, fashionable girl.
The group discussed all the awesomeness of Nico’s performance as yo returned with two mugs of cocoa and a plate of cookies. I spaced out, trying get my insides to feel less like I’d swallowed a handful of nails.
I came back into the conversation when I heard Cal say, “I keep getting stuck on the dating thing. I get that in the day-to-day, if we’re friends, it’s none of my business. But we’re some pretty hot people here and I like to know who’s got my favorite kind of junk in case Kendrick dumps my butt.”
“He wouldn’t,” Ella said.
Cal shook his head. “I don’t know, he said his momma doesn’t give a damn if he’s gay, but she doesn’t like him dating a white guy.”
“You can get to know someone without needing to know what their genitals look like,” Tesh said.
“Is that fair to me and my hypothetical person?” Cal countered. “Wouldn’t you be disappointed if you and I spent some evenings flirting and then it turns out there’s some deal breaker? Isn’t it worse if we’ve got a vibe going and then I’m all, ‘oh honey, I don’t roll that way?’”
“That could be anything,” Ella said. “That’s what dating is, finding out if you’ve got deal-breakers. It could be that one person smokes or hates cats or loves cats, and you can’t handle that. Why are private parts any different?”
“It’s the treacherous transsexual narrative,” I grumbled. “It’s bullshit. It’s just because people are afraid they’re being turned queer.”
“Or straight,” Nico said.
“Yeah,” I agreed, face burning, staring at my hands under the table.
Into the awkward silence, Shen said, “I think if I am attracted to a person, she is a woman.”
“Huh?” Cal asked.
“I’m a straight man, thus attracted to women. Therefore if I’m attracted, she is a woman. What I mean is, the body isn’t what breaks a deal. If a person is not being woman in some way, I won’t have enough attraction for it to go anywhere. I trust my attractions.”
“But what if you saw someone you thought was super hot and they turned out to be a guy?” Cal asked. “Wouldn’t you think you might be a little queer?”
“I can find a man hot,” Shen said. “But you mean what if I’m shopping, let’s say, and I meet a kathoey woman and she is very beautiful, do I stop being a straight man? I don’t think so. What I’m attracted to in her is her womanliness even if she has parts of her body that people would call male.”
“Kathoey?” Tesh asked.
“Thailand’s third gender,” Nico said. “Also, seriously, girls can have dicks. People need to get over that. And guys can be guys without them. Dicks are not automatic maleness.”
“Then how do we even know who’s male or female?” Cal asked.
“Genetics?” Shen suggested.
“Nope.” Ella rested her hand on his arm. “There’s XXY and all sort of genotypes. That’s not a reliable measure. And when you consider all the intersex variations, the size of your gametes doesn’t work either.”
I didn’t know what the heck a gamete was, but I figured that was similar to the picking-by-genitals method. What if you couldn’t find male or female in the body? Where was it?
From what I’d read, science wasn’t doing so well at finding it in the brain either. There were slight differences if you looked at huge populations, but they had so much overlap that if you gave the smartest scientist in the world a brain, they couldn’t tell you definitively if it was male or female.
“Maybe it’s what they say,” I suggested.
“Who?” Cal asked.
“Each person. That’s the only definition I can think of that works: a woman is a person who says they’re a woman, a man is person who says they’re a man, and so on.”
Everyone was quiet. Ella played with Shen’s sleeve. He was trying not to grin too foolishly at her. Nico’s foot tapped in time to the music from the other room. Kaj broke off a piece of cookie and slipped it between her glossy lips.
Tesh said, “I can’t find a hole in that.”
Cal leaned forward, thick forearms on the table. “So if I see someone across the room, I go up and ask ‘Hey, hotness, what’s your preferred pronoun?’ and whatever they say that’s what they are? And then I know if I can hit on them or not?”
“Sounds like it works,” Kaj said.
Cal turned to Nico. “Hey hotness, what’s your preferred pronoun?”
Nico laughed. “It’s yo and yos.”
“And so I remain confused,” Cal said.
“But you weren’t hitting on me,” Nico told him. “You’re not actually into me.”
“You got me. The only person I find hot at this table is Shen.”
Shen smiled and muttered, “Thanks.”
“See, your sexuality is safe,” Ella said. “Shen’s ‘trust your attractions’ theory is standing up to the test. And you keep your bear paws off my man.”
I watched Nico slide out of yos seat to get water. Did that mean that being as attracted to Nico as I was, automatically Nico counted as woman enough to keep my lesbian status? Could it be that simple?