The emails roll in and there is a lesbian magazine that wants to know what I have to say to all the women out there, the formerly lesbian females whose girlfriends have morphed a slow and deliberate morph, whose relationships are now something altogether different. Are now something that makes them feels vaguely—no, acutely—uncomfortable when they take it inside a queer bar. When they nuzzle like they always would, unthinking, and there’s a dyke in the corner staring a little—no, she’s glaring. And suddenly our girl, the former lesbian, pulls back from her now-boyfriend, afraid she’s being disrespectful, taking up space in a gay bar. But she’s not straight. Is she? Now on the streets when they hold hands or kiss nobody gives a shit. In front of the scariest dudes, passing by strip bars, the throng of men ignore them. They don’t care. The girl thinks, If we were queer they’d have said something. Might have even done something. Never mind that for years she has held hands with girls, kissed them on sidewalks, in defiance of or oblivious to the danger, and nothing ever happened. Now, inside the queer bar, she will feel guilty for the woman’s glares upon her, and on the streets, she will feel guilty for the lack of glares and this will be her world. For a while.
The dyke in the corner of the bar does look pissed as she takes a swig from her beer and leaves her seat, swings by the couple on the way to the pool table. This stranger has become something larger, everything has become larger since the transition commenced. Everything has become tender, become symbolic. Clearly this woman, this dyke, hates them, would throw them from the bar if she could. Instead she channels all her irritation into her pool game, every sunken ball a smack. Our girl wants to grab this woman. She’s seen her before, hasn’t she? I mean, they’ve both been coming here for years, to this queer bar, surely they’ve been shoulder to shoulder on weekend nights when the place gets packed. Surely they’ve shifted their weight back and forth beside each other, in line for the bathroom, pressed up against the wall by the crowds of females, maybe they’d turned to one another—What are they doing in there, fucking? Shooting up? Talking on their cell phone? Maybe just a grimace of shared discomfort, dancing a similar jig on the wood floor, the dyke in her work boots and our girl in her heels, in her patched-up sneakers, in her tall boots, or her sandals. The dyke looks a little familiar, with her hair damaged from years of bleaching, crusty up around her ears, on her forehead, her crinkled, handsome face. Maybe, our girl thinks, she could run up to the woman, could meet her at the bathroom when she goes to piss. She could say, It’s not what you think. He’s—he used to be like us. He’s trans.
Our girl bites her lip. Her boyfriend’s hand grips her thigh—why’d she just pull away from him? Her energy has totally shifted. She feels gone, preoccupied. He could ask her why but decides not to. He decides to pull away too. To entertain himself with his thoughts. Like how much he hates this bar, to start. Why was he even there? He knows what straight men look like in a queer bar. They look stupid. They’re closet fags or they’re looking for a lesbian to shove their girlfriend at. They smile too much, at everyone. They’re like dogs. Just dying for someone, some gay person, to come up and place a friendly hand on their shoulder and say, It’s all right, pal. It’s okay that you’re here. Thanks for stopping by. The boyfriend keeps his eyes on the floor. Careful not to look at the pool table, the only action in the place, where the balls clack and roll and there’s that woman who was looking at them funny. She stabs the orbs with her stick, chewing the side of her cheek like there’s a wad of tobacco stuffed behind her teeth.
Back to our girl. She thinks the bar dyke thinks she’s stupid. The way dykes always think straight girls are stupid—sort of lost, weak maybe, playing it safe, unimaginative at the very least. At the very least we should feel sort of bad for them, be ready to move in when the boyfriend becomes an asshole, when his ego flares up and he hits her or maybe just humiliates her in public. She watches the dyke strut around the pool table. Maybe once she would have thought she was hot. I mean, she was hot. Maybe once she would’ve cared, would have been moved by that. Our girl thinks her posture is a little smug. She sinks the ball, stands up straight, chest out, tits poking up against her T-shirt like armor. Cocky.
So, am I supposed to go to a straight bar? she thinks. She imagines pulling the dyke aside, confronting her. Cornering her in the back, by the pay phone, What, I don’t belong here now? She imagines going to a straight bar. Which one would she go to? There were so many. She’d have to figure out the kind of straight they were, she and her boyfriend. Aesthetically speaking. What other kind of straight people did they want to be around? She thinks about it. Thinks she doesn’t really want to be around a lot of straight people. Feels bad about it. She knows her boyfriend wants to be near other guys like him—straight guys. But inside a straight bar, he’d be just as quiet. They both know this. He’s not going to make any friends. People don’t really make friends in bars, they go there to meet the friends they’ve already got. Maybe they should just forget the whole bar thing. They can have a glass of wine at home if they want. They barely drink anyway. Her boyfriend turns to her and says, “Want to go?” Their glasses have long been empty, soggy cuts of citrus slumped along the bottom. They put on their coats. They go home and have a fight. The boyfriend hadn’t wanted to go there in the first place. Had done it for her. Is pissed she wanted to tell the dyke, that stranger, that he is trans. What difference would it make? It shouldn’t make any difference. Any difference it makes would be in her head. The thought of them, his girlfriend and the dyke, standing in the corner talking about him. Like they know him. He seizes up with anger like an overheated car. He sputters and freezes. She doesn’t get it.
She’s crying, our girl. She doesn’t get it. She’s in the middle of something large that she doesn’t understand. She wishes she could levitate, rise up, hover above this thing, her relationship. The lesbian magazine thinks I can help this girl. Thinks I know something that can give her direction, comfort. I tell her, “Girl, no one will understand you.” Your dyke friends will not understand you. They will allow your boyfriend in but only if you all agree he is special, he is the best boy, some sort of elfin, fairy, magic boy, the boy who was once a girl. They will let him in only if you all agree that this marks him: his former girl-ness, the thing he hates. Some will approve of your boyfriend’s maleness because he passes, and he will be the exception when they say ignorant things about other trans people. Some will tell you about how they like trans men but they just don’t like trans women. Because they’re still male. But then doesn’t that make your boyfriend still female? Well exactly. That’s why he’s okay, that’s why he’s in. Have some fights with your friends. Or don’t, just walk around with a stone in your stomach. Feel your feelings, like the Buddhists tell you. Feel how similar it feels to when you were young and your family said racist things about the Puerto Ricans who lived in your city. Feel how similar it feels to when you were in high school and boys talked about beating up faggots. What’s the feeling? You feel afraid. You will feel afraid a lot. It’s okay, girl. It’s okay, not everyone is like this but the ones who are will exhaust you, will break your heart, will not understand why you take it all so personally.
Your boyfriend? He’s busy. He’s figuring out how to be alive, how to talk and walk—he’s staring at himself in the mirror more than he’s looking at you. He’s learning how not to ask the men he works with their astrological signs. He’s learning not to like bunnies so much. He’s learning how to lie to other guys about his history, because telling people he’s spent the past eight years doing lesbian activism doesn’t make sense. When you don’t understand him he lashes out. He doesn’t understand him, either. That’s the point. He’s mad because you always tell him nobody meant to hurt his feelings. You tell him people are ignorant and just don’t know. He hates it when you say these things. It’s as if you’re on their side. He wants you to hate them—the ones who say inappropriate things about trans bodies, the ones who call him his old name when referring to the past. He’ll say, “Why are you always defending them?” And the girl will shut up. She didn’t know that was what she was doing. She was trying to make all the bad feelings go away. The knot, the one in her stomach. A dense, nautical tangle. “Why can’t you say, ‘What an asshole, what a jerk’? Why can’t you just say it for a minute?” But they’re her friends. The girl wants to believe that everyone is good, that they just need time to get it right. The girl understands this is a luxury, this attitude. If they were chipping away at her like this, would she be so kind? But the girl is exhausted. I tell the girl: Prepare to be exhausted. And lonely. Your boyfriend is exhausted too, and probably does not want to hear about your strain, probably cannot bear it. You will wonder if it is worth it. You will wonder what it would be like if there wasn’t all of this. You will feel guilty for your thoughts. Your thoughts of leaving him to it. It’s his and you would leave him to it, you would go off and do other things and maybe you would never have to ponder such problems again. How in the subway you said, “Never again.” You said it with a smile but it hurt, you knew it would and you didn’t care, just for a minute, you really didn’t. You were crying, you were a deserter. Magazines would stop asking you for advice to give to girls like you. Girls you cannot help at all because you are too busy sitting on your back stoop in the mist, smoking cigarettes, in pain. You remember a friend whose butch girlfriend was having gender issues. The friend said, “I’m going to go out with a straight guy next. A white, heterosexual man, not trans. I don’t want to be with someone more oppressed than I am.” You were shocked by her comment, but now you understand. It is a guilty understanding.
At night the couple wind themselves together. They sink into their lousy bed and twine all the parts soft enough to bend. Her nose is in the boy’s hair, her face pressed into his scalp, all the sour-sweet smells. Soon she’ll have to move. She can’t breathe, her arm will fall asleep beneath his weight, but she will stay there until the discomfort is too great. She hopes that the morning will be different. That they learned something from the fighting and that tomorrow will be easier. A good day. These are the hard times, the girl thinks as her limbs grow heavy. These are the times they will look back on. They will measure their progress and know they are happy. They will be grateful to each other, for having come to bed each night, for surrounding the other with their body. The girl is optimistic. These are the hard times. In the future, they will name the moment and be glad it has passed.
From TransForming Community,
a 2005 National Queer Arts Festival performance.