Tucker
The days after getting jumped outside the gym seemed to Tucker like one long chorus of: “Holy [noun of your choice], what happened to your face?”
The most common answer she gave was, “Two guys tried to beat me up for being trans and I pepper sprayed the shit out of them.”
The trip to the health center confirmed that she hadn’t fractured anything in her cheek or shoulder, and she didn’t have a concussion. The school had discovered the guys who’d attacked her about ten minutes after she called the incident in. They were still on the ground outside the gym when a passing coach found them coughing and whimpering. Long story short, the two of them weren’t going to Freytag anymore. Pat didn’t dispute the charge that he’d shoved Tucker up against the wall, only said that it was necessary because she was creeping around to look at his girlfriend. That didn’t fare well as an excuse.
The administration told Tucker she could take a few days off classes if she wanted, but she liked her classes and said that wouldn’t be necessary. They also offered a few sessions of counseling but she couldn’t imagine trying to tell a well-meaning stranger the whole story about saying she was a trans woman when she wasn’t and then being harassed like she was one.
The anger was the hard part. It came over her unexpectedly, randomly, and she wanted to punch someone over and over until bones broke. On Tuesday she started shaking in her Women’s & Gender Studies class and had to step out into the hall and gulp air until she no longer felt electric currents traveling from her jaw down to her fists.
She needed to move and to work out the rage in her blood so she took Cal up on his offer of going to the gym to work out together on Wednesday and she didn’t try to change in the locker room. Cal was over six feet and easily two hundred pounds. No one came near them in the weight room or when Cal lamely stretched while Tucker ran.
Taking Cal with her meant that she had to listen to him complain about not having a boyfriend, but for once it was comforting. Some part of her knew she was avoiding thinking about Monday night. Her shoulder still hurt and she cut her run short because of it. The jarring motion of her steps on the track turned the dull ache into a painful throb. At least Lindy was being super attentive, bringing her dinner every night and suggesting movies they could watch to keep her mind off it.
When she showed up for Women’s & Gender Studies on Thursday, they had a guest lecturer. The TAs had arranged to have two of the smaller recitation groups meet at the same time, and Vivien was the one introducing the guest speaker. Tucker watched Vivien walk up to the front of the room with small, precise steps, but when she got up to the front, her hand gestures were loose and expressive. What was it like with her and Summer? Was she delicate like her stride, or passionate like her hands? Tucker made herself focus on Vivien’s words.
“Some of you may have already heard that a female student was attacked while walking across campus last week,” Vivien said.
Tucker straightened up in her seat and glared around the room, but no one looked in her direction, not even Vivien. Her hands clenched around the sides of the desk and from his seat next to her, Cal put a hand over hers and gave her a quick squeeze. She pulled her hands away before anyone could see the interaction.
The info posted by Summer online had only said that a woman was assaulted by two men as part of a hate crime, nothing that would identify who or where. And the administration said they’d keep Tucker’s identity private.
Vivien continued, “This is Selima Page from the Sexual Assault Response Network of Central Ohio,” Vivien said. “She’s here to talk to us about feminism and women’s safety.”
Selima was a heavy woman who carried her weight easily. She reminded Tucker of a darker-skinned, less exhausted version of her mother.
“How many of you think that the feminist movement is a thing of the past and that women and men are now roughly equal?” she asked. About half the hands in the room went up.
“All right,” she went on. “Let’s do a little exercise.” She drew a line in chalk down the middle of the board and stood on the right side of it. “I’d like the men in the class to tell me all the things you do to ensure your personal safety.”
A few hands went up.
“I lock my door,” one guy said.
“I never leave the gay bar alone.” That came from Cal and got a general chuckle from the class.
Selima dutifully wrote both on the board. “Okay, what else?”
The room was silent.
“Anyone?”
“I don’t leave my iPod out in my car where someone can see it,” one guy offered.
“Personal safety,” Selima reminded them. She waited another half minute and then stepped to the left side of the line. “Women in the class, what do you do to ensure your personal safety?”
“I get my key out and carry it pointing out from my fist if I’m walking alone at night,” one woman said.
“If I see a strange man coming, I usually cross the street,” another said.
“I carry pepper spray,” Tucker added to the list.
“I don’t wear a short skirt if I’m going to a dance by myself.”
“If I see a group of men coming toward me, I step into an open store.”
“I get out my cell phone and pretend I’m on a call.”
“My mom and I got a pit bull for the house because we live alone.”
“I always tell my roommate when I’m going to be back so she knows to look for me if I don’t.”
“I took self-defense classes.”
The answers went on until the entire side of the board was full.
“Well, hell,” one of the guys in the class said. “That sucks.”
“And that’s why we still need feminism,” Selima said. “Because too many people believe they can have access to women’s bodies wherever and whenever they want, politically or personally. All too often, no matter what women do to prepare themselves, they’re not ready for the violence that comes at them from our culture and sometimes from their loved ones. We need to change our culture so that it doesn’t teach men that it’s an option to attack women.”
Tucker thought she should say something about how the attack wasn’t just about men and women and sexism but was also transphobic. But in order to say that, she’d have to reveal that she was the one attacked and she didn’t want to.
When she came out as a lesbian in high school, she didn’t give a shit how anyone reacted. A few times kids called her a dyke and she marched down the hall after them and demanded they meet her face-to-face and tell her what was their problem. They always backed off.
Why was this different? Was it because she wasn’t really trans or was she more afraid of being harassed for being trans than for being lesbian? Or maybe it was simply the fact that she’d already been attacked and hurt because of this and she was afraid of provoking another attack.
When class was over and most of the students gone, she went up to Vivien and Selima at the front of the room. Cal followed her.
“The attack was about transphobia,” Tucker said. “It wasn’t just about a couple of guys attacking a woman walking alone.”
“What?” Vivien exclaimed.
“I wasn’t attacked because I was a woman, I was attacked for being openly transsexual,” Tucker said. The words felt thick in her mouth, but she voiced them clearly enough.
Neither Vivien nor Selima knew who had been attacked and she watched the realization change their expressions. Vivien’s went from intense to alarmed, her face shading a paler white, and Selima’s broader features narrowed from curious to troubled.
“Oh honey, how are you doing?” Selima asked. “Have you talked to someone about this?”
“I’m okay. Pepper spray really helps with the whole trauma thing.”
That got a smile from Selima. She was a honey-eyed woman with her black hair pulled back in a thick braid.
“It helps,” Selima said. “But you still need to reach out, get support.”
“My friends are helping a lot,” Tucker told her, but she thought she might need to cast a wider circle. Her friends here didn’t understand the anti-trans aspect of the attack. Like Vivien, most of them reacted to it like she’d been attacked because she was lesbian or because she was a cisgender woman out alone after dark.
“People keep thinking the attack was anti-woman, not anti-trans,” Tucker added.
“Transphobia is still based in sexism,” Selima said. She picked up her notes and started to sort through them, but her purse got in the way. She held it out to Cal, “Would you be a dear and hold this for me while I get myself organized?”
He took the tasseled and frilled white leather bag and held it carefully a few inches away from his body.
Selima’s lips parted in a grin. “Sweetheart, you’re perfect. See, it’s dangerous in our culture for a man to even associate himself with the trappings of femininity. To keep sexism in place, you have to keep men and women clearly separate. Transsexualism is a huge threat to that.”
She retrieved her purse from Cal and said, “Thank you, dear.” Pulling a card out of its front pocket, she offered it to Tucker. “I’ve got to get back to my office but if you need anything at all, call me. You look like you have good friends here, but please never think you have to go through something like that on your own.”
Tucker took the card and watched her bustle out through the door.
“Lindy told me you were attacked for being an out lesbian,” Vivien said.
That bothered Tucker for two reasons: that Lindy and Vivien were talking about her and because Lindy knew the information she was disseminating was wrong.
“I think the guys were confused about why they were supposed to be upset,” Tucker said. “I heard some of the girls saying a lot of anti-trans stuff so I came out to them as a trans woman just to confront them, and then they got all crazy in the locker room and this girl told her boyfriend something that got him really riled even though I didn’t do anything and…”
Tucker trailed off. She’d been about to say “I’m not even really a trans woman” but the expression on Vivien’s face had changed so much in the past few seconds that she had to stop and look at her again. Vivien’s eyes went from open to narrow and cold, and she glanced up and down Tucker’s body the same way the women in the Union had: breasts, check; genitals? Dubious.
“Perhaps you shouldn’t have been in the women’s locker room,” Vivien said.
“Are you serious?”
“Women have a right to women-only space.”
“I am a woman,” Tucker said.
Vivien picked up her bag and walked out of the room.
“Whoa,” Cal said. “What the fuck was that about?”
Tucker shook her head. She didn’t trust herself to talk without yelling or crying.
She went back to her dorm room with a pain burning in her throat and called Claire once she was safely locked in. It went to voice mail and she realized she couldn’t leave a message without it sounding like she was crying, because she was. She ended the call.
Tucker had met Emily and Claire when she and Lindy drove up to Madison, Wisconsin, to attend the world’s leading feminist science fiction convention last spring. She hadn’t even known there were feminist sci fi conventions, but it seemed like a really cool place to be and Lindy got a grant to present her paper there. A moderate fan of the new Battlestar Galactica, after Lindy made her watch all of it, and Firefly, courtesy of Cal who had a huge crush on Nathan Fillion, she felt a little out of place in the more hardcore fan events but was immediately drawn to all the panels about feminism and gender.
While Lindy sat schmoozing other academic types in the bar on Friday night, Tucker went to some of the readings, including one by Emily Hesse from her recently released semi-autobiographical novel, Being Emily. Tucker bought a copy of her book and read most of it that night. Once she started, she didn’t want to put it down; she’d never understood before what it would be like growing up in a body that wasn’t your gender. Lindy came back late enough and drunk enough that she just let Tucker go on reading.
The next afternoon, she saw Emily in the hotel lobby. Her curly brown hair was in a longer bob than her author photo, but she had the same long, high-cheeked face and warm eyes. She was also an inch taller than Tucker, which Tucker loved, even though in the book she’d read how Emily wasn’t that happy about being a tall girl. Tucker thought tall girls were the best.
“I really liked your book,” Tucker told her and immediately felt like a dork.
Emily grinned. “Thank you. Claire helped a lot with the words part of it. Have you met her?”
The diminutive woman with long hair dyed black and thick, dark eyeliner held out her hand as Emily introduced her.
“I’m Tucker,” she said. “I came up with my girlfriend. She did the paper on ‘Treacherous Women Tropes in Battlestar Galactica.’ I didn’t realize…there was just a lot that I never thought about before I read Emily’s book. Like what it must really be like to grow up in a body that doesn’t match how you see yourself.”
“Most people don’t,” Claire said. “Come sit with us.”
They headed into the restaurant/coffee shop section of the hotel and by the time they got to a table, Emily and Claire had acquired four more people who all wanted to talk to them. Tucker ended up squeezed into a booth with Claire next to her.
“I really liked what you said last night about how important it is to fight for femininity, not just for women’s rights,” Tucker told Claire. Now that she’d been introduced, she remembered the extended comment Claire had offered from the audience after Emily’s reading the night before. “I never thought about it that way. I try hard to keep people from seeing me as girlie and I guess I did always think that femininity was weaker.”
“Just like people used to think of women as weaker,” Claire said.
“Yeah, that was really wild to see the parallel.”
“You came out young, didn’t you?” Claire asked.
“How can you tell?”
Claire laughed. “Because you’re already out, you’ve got a girlfriend and you look like you’re still in college.”
“High school,” Tucker said. “I graduate next month.”
“I rest my case.”
“I don’t so much feel that I came out as I just never realized there was another option for me. I never got why the other girls gave a damn about boys. When Emily came out to you, was it like it is in the book?”
Claire shook her head but she was smiling so the gesture came across as only half-negative. She ate a french fry from one of the plates the table was sharing and pushed the plate closer to Tucker.
“Everything took longer in real life than it takes you to read it,” she said. “I think it reads like I just got cool about transsexualism really fast, but it seemed like it was forever in my mind. Particularly wondering what it meant about me.”
“And you two are still together,” Tucker said, gesturing across the table toward Emily.
“We’re working on being together again,” Claire explained. “I saw some other people the last few years, but I like Emily best. I think I needed to be able to choose her again as Emily, not as Christopher.”
“That’s so cool.”
“Hey, what are you doing after this?” Claire asked.
Tucker shrugged. She wasn’t into all the academic panels and hadn’t seen anything else that caught her attention on the schedule.
“There’s a Mystic Warlords of Ka’a tournament in the gaming rooms, want to swing by with us?”
“What is it?”
“It’s a made-up game from a TV series that someone made a real game from and they’re testing their prototype. I’m not into the card game scene normally, but I’m a freak for anything real that originated as joke in another context.”
“I’m in,” Tucker said.
From there it was natural to swap contact info and book recommendations. They stayed in touch online. And then Claire was awesome about answering the million more questions Tucker had about trans women after she attended the Columbus Pride festival that June.
She felt stupid asking the questions, but she would have felt worse if she hadn’t asked them. Small town Ohio wasn’t a place where she ran into trans women, as far as she knew, and all she’d seen was the bit parts on TV where trans women were trotted out for a laugh or beat up to provide drama in a crime show. There was something about Emily that she really wanted to understand. The night after she met her, she spent a long time staring at herself in the bathroom mirror in the hotel room she and Lindy shared.
She and Emily were about the same height. Tucker might be an inch shorter, but her shoulders were wider because she liked to swim and her bones were thicker than Emily’s. Between the two of them, Tucker was the one most likely to be seen as male, and she liked it that way. She enjoyed that when she was working at Shipley’s Hardware, strangers were as likely to call her “sir” as “miss.” Not that she wanted to be a guy, but she liked it as a neighborhood she could visit.
She hadn’t thought about how hard it was to go the other way. She had to dress pretty butch before anyone gave her shit about it, and then it was usually one of her sisters who complained. But understanding how hard it had been for Emily to come out and all the secrecy she’d gone through showed Tucker how tough it was to transition or even just to make a day trip from the vast continent of male over to female.
When she heard stories of women in other countries being oppressed by a brutal regime, she just wanted to go over and get all of them and bring them back to the US and help them have good lives. She felt the same way about the women like Emily who were trapped in maleness. Although she couldn’t say exactly what it was, she felt there was something important about those women, not unlike her growing up lesbian. Every kind of woman should have a shot at a great life—and men too; but she didn’t worry as much about them.
The cell phone sitting on her dorm room desk rang and Tucker stared at it for a moment before her brain clicked to the present and she realized Claire was calling her back.
“Hey, are you okay?” Claire asked as soon as she answered. “You didn’t leave a message.”
“Things are kind of fucked up,” Tucker said. Her voice was still rough from crying and she had to clear her throat before she could continue. “I got attacked by these guys—”
“Just now? Did you call nine-one-one?”
“Monday night.”
“Oh sweetie, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I had pepper spray and everyone’s being really great about it except…” She paused and took a long inhale. She hoped this didn’t sound stupid. “They came after me for being a trans woman.”
“Okay?”
“It’s a crazy story,” she told Claire.
“Those are my favorites,” Claire said, so Tucker started with the girls in the Union and told her the whole thing.
“…and then today in my Gender Studies class, it was like nobody got what really happened and when I told the TA she blamed me. She said maybe I shouldn’t have been in the women’s locker room because it was women-only space. It was insane.”
“Oh sweetie,” Claire said again and there was a long pause on the other end of the line. Finally she said, “Are you writing all this down?”
“To document it?”
“Yes, but also just to process it and to remember it. And it will help if you need to take legal action. But right now I want to make sure you’re really safe. Are you?”
“Yeah, I’m just pissed. Cal’s been walking me around campus and Ella bandaged me up really well.”
“Ella…she’s your cute roommate?”
“Yeah.”
Tucker was glad Claire couldn’t see her blushing. She’d sent a few long and complimentary texts to Claire about Ella right after she got the offer to move in and they included a lot of description about how Ella was really pretty, but not like stupid Barbie pretty, just beautiful and with an inner strength. Yeah, she’d gone over the top with the Ella texts.
“Tucker, you realize you didn’t mention Lindy.”
“She’s been really stressed out about her next presentation, but she brings me dinner and stuff. She’s trying, she’s just not always paying attention. Anyway, the guys who attacked me got thrown out of school.”
“Maybe you should come out as cis,” Claire suggested. “You’ll be safer if people know you’re not trans.”
“I was going to tell Vivien, the TA, but then she got so shitty about it. And what if it was really true? The only way she’s going to learn is to have to deal with a trans student, or at least one she thinks is. There’s still a girl here who is, you know. What if she’s in that same class?”
“Just take care of yourself. You sound spread thin emotionally. If Lindy isn’t taking care of you, make sure you have other support around you. And call me more.”
“Okay,” Tucker said. “Thanks a bunch. Give Emily a hug for me.”
Claire would be graduating from the University of Iowa that spring and planned to move back to the Twin Cities where she hoped to get a job at a local literary journal. She wanted a few years out of school before she thought about going for a graduate degree and this put her near Emily, who still had another year and a half at the U of M due to the year she took after community college to work full-time and complete her transition.
Tucker went to the top of her dresser and found her copy of Emily’s book. She wanted to share it with Ella. By the way Ella reacted to Tucker’s story about coming out as trans, she thought that Ella would like it. She had trouble reading Ella’s reactions sometimes. She seemed to be pretty up on trans issues but not very political. Or maybe she was just shy about discussing her politics. Tucker wished she knew how to draw her out more. Maybe the book would be the thing.
She knocked on Ella’s door. Holding her phone, she thought about texting her and asking her when she was coming back to the room. She wanted to talk to her more than anyone else on campus right now and the thought scared her. Claire was right, it was weird that she listed Ella as one of the most supportive people around her rather than Lindy.
There was something to Ella’s soft, inquisitive way of listening to her; it gave her the impression that Ella knew a lot more than she let on. She hadn’t freaked out when Tucker showed up bruised and bleeding at her door. She hadn’t pestered her with a million questions or turned it into a “who’s been more victimized by life” contest like Lindy did.
Tucker wanted to stay in her room and wait until Ella came back, but already there were two texts from Lindy asking what she wanted for dinner. She sighed and went back to her desk to put the books she was reading into her backpack.