When Natalie came out to me, we scoured YouTube and the internet for examples of couples who survived a partner’s transition.  It wasn’t easy finding role models as most of the literature and videos told stories of divorces and family splits and trauma drama.  I was worried my plan to stick with the marriage was going to blow up in my face.

Positive stories are out there.   They’re just not as prevalent as the negative stories. This seems to be true of most narratives.  We humans tend to gravitate to the negative. 

In most situations, I try to find the light, which isn’t simply a matter of changing perspectives. People who simplify and infantilize positivity do the benefits of positivity a grave disservice. Finding the light, sincerely and truly finding the light, is often more stressful and strenuous than staying put in the darkness.  It isn’t a journey for the fearful.  It certainly helps makes life easier when others who have already found the light can show us the way, can be our guides.

The search for guidance on how to hold our marriage together through the transition was often disheartening.  I joined a few Facebook groups designed specifically for family members of transgender people, but many of the posts in these groups were full of self-pity, sorrow, grief, and bitterness.  Although I did eventually go through a grieving period, having lost my husband, I felt the negative posts in these groups tended to be more self-centered than enlightened or empathetic.  I didn’t need to hear/read the drone of shocked and bitter cis-people.  I couldn’t relate to their anger at their transitioning family member, and I found the self-pity unbearable. 

Fortunately, I wasn’t alone in my perspective and a small group of us broke off into a smaller, new Facebook group with the intention of being positive and supportive of our transitioning family members.  The new group is helpful.  People like me are looking for guidance, and ask questions designed to help them be supportive loved ones.  We ask questions such as “How do I help my spouse when they’re feeling dysphoric?” or “How long should we expect it to take before the hormone therapy starts working?”  There are even sweeter questions such as “Do you have any ideas for how I can make my wife more comfortable after her surgery?” or “Do you have any ideas for a coming out party?”

If you search long enough on the internet, you will probably eventually find what you’re looking for.

We found the YouTube channel of a Canadian couple who memorialized the male to female transition and the stability of the marriage in the process via video “fireside chats.” We were grateful to this couple for showing us we could indeed keep our marriage intact.  I homed in on the cisgender wife’s advice to other cisgender spouses and took mental notes when she discussed the awkwardness of transition, how difficult the early stages are, but how the payoff of a more committed marriage makes all the awkwardness and difficulty worth it.

I read a book by Jennifer Finney Boylan, a trans woman English lit professor and writer, whose own marriage survived her transition.  Her book was a mixed bag because at the time of publication, Boylan’s cisgender wife was on the fence about her level of dedication to the marriage.  The good news is Boylan’s wife decided to stick it out and they’re still happily married. 

Now that Natalie has been transitioning for over a year – she came out in May 2020 and started hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in August 2020 – we’re both starting to feel more at ease.  Each day the memory of my husband fades and the excitement of being married to a woman increases.  There’s honey in sapphic love, and I love me some honey.  Life seems gentler now that there is less testosterone in our home. 

When Natalie first started living full-time as a woman on December 31, 2020 – almost a year exactly to the time I am writing this blog entry – I was afraid.  I was terrified.  We had no idea how the world was going to respond to her or to us.  And, honestly, I’m still afraid a lot of the time.  When we have repairmen at the house, or when we’re out and about in the world, I worry that someone is going to fly off the handle and hurt Natalie or me.  My hyper vigilance is more hyper and more vigilant than ever.   I worry about restrooms and dressing rooms and assholes.

But it hasn’t been too bad.  Natalie’s first shopping trip as a woman was in January 2021 and the worse thing that happened was some woman tried to talk us into to removing our masks, because, you know, some people are delusional and think Covid-19 is an elaborate global hoax.  But her intrusion on us had nothing to do with Natalie’s tran-ness and everything to do with her taking offense to our Covid-19 offensive.

I think the biggest reason people are less anti-trans than they once were is because we have more and more representation in the media now.  We have the gorgeous and charming Laverne Cox.  We have the uber-talented Wachowski sisters of Matrix fame.  We have television shows such as Pose, Sense 8, and Transparent.  We have documentaries such as Disclosure. And recently, trans folx have added a Jeopardy champion to our relatively new list of trans representation — Who is Amy Schneider?  Go Amy!  

This representation is a crucial element of building acceptance of transgender people among the cisgender crowd.  It certainly makes life a little easier for Natalie and for me as her spouse.  

Even legally changing her name wasn’t as awful and painful as it once was for transgender people. Natalie became legally Natalie in March 2021, a few months short of one year since she first came out to me.

Thankfully, brave trailblazers existed!  Thankfully, Gen Z are done with the bullshit of shaming people for being their essential selves, and this is creating a kinder more inclusive world.  Thankfully, somewhere out there are people who, like me, like Natalie, simply want to live in peace and with love, and are willing to show us all the way.

In 1981, I dated an older boy named Doug, whom I met at Royals Stadium, where we both worked as ushers (to be precise, because I was a “lady,” I was called an “usherette”).  I was 16 and Doug was 19.

When I first met Doug, I thought he was Black. People often mistook Doug for Black or Puerto Rican. He had mocha skin and a big black 70s afro.  

Out of all the ushers, he was probably the most popular with the usherettes.  This is because before and after games he’d roller skate around the tunnel where the stadium employees and baseball players entered the stadium. He was damn foxy on those roller skates, doing his fancy little tricks, skating backwards, spinning, criss-crossing, and soaring past us like hurricane winds.  Suffice it to say, I was one of many of the usherettes who flirted with Doug. 

After I started flirting with him, I did a little digging and discovered his sister and I went to school together.  His sister, who was considered one of the coolest girls in school, looked very much like her brother, only she had white skin and her hair wasn’t as black or as kinky.  She didn’t talk about her brother much, but once he and I started dating, she was friendlier to me in the hallways at school.

Doug looked like Juan Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter and this, more than the roller skating, is why I was attracted to him.  I had had a huge crush on Juan Epstein, who reminded me of Harpo Marx, whom I also had a huge crush on. 

Doug was often mistaken for a Black guy, and I suspect there was Black ancestor somewhere in his DNA, but where we lived, in Raytown, Missouri, it was better to cling to the story your “blood” was pure white.  Doug’s sister pretended she didn’t have a brother, and Doug’s parents treated him like dog shit, and because Doug was a generally nice guy, I suspect familial snubbing was because Doug looked Black.  My family was much kinder to Doug than Doug’s family was, so he ended up hanging around my house a lot.  Even when I wasn’t there. Even after we broke up.

I probably would have dated Doug longer than I did if Doug had been as cool with my androgyny as I was with his blackness.  But he wasn’t. 

At the end of baseball season, we went on a date to one of those school parking lot fall carnivals. Doug and I had just finished blowing our money on a ring toss game, where Doug won me a little stuffed toy skunk.  We were walking away from the game, the carnie was already yelling at his next marks,  and we were laughing about how the skunk wasn’t worth what we paid to win it, when a group of youngish men surrounded us, blocked us, stopped us in our tracks.

“Faggots!” one of the men spat.

It was a moonless dark night, the game aisle we were in was lit with patches of carnival light from the booths. The gang of men happened to stop us in the one strong puddle of light coming from a light pole.  Because we were essentially in a spotlight, I wasn’t too scared. There were people in every direction, people shooting water at balloons, people throwing balls at milk bottles, people slamming hammers on the strongman machine.  We were safe-ish. 

One of the men, his nose red with cold and booze, leaned into my face and snarled, “Fucking cock sucking gay boy.” 

Doug turned to look at me, and at first, I thought Doug was going to protect me. I was vulnerable standing in the spot of light, zipped up tight in my hoodie, bundled against the chilly autumn air, the drunk dude leaning into my face. I wanted Doug to protect me.

Doug wasn’t planning on protecting me, though.  He was sizing me up. He glared at my short hair, my make-up-less face, my lack of jewelry, my hoodie hat up over my ears, my boy jeans, my high tops.

Doug looked up from my feet and looked me in the eyes. It was a hard look. His brown eyes were black.  He was angry. At me! — not the men who were tormenting us.  Doug lunged at me, practically ripping my hoodie as he yanked my zipper down.  He flung my hoodie wide open, causing me to drop the toy skunk on the dirty asphalt.  He exposed me, pointed to my unharnessed nipples beneath my Conan the Barbarian t-shirt and exclaimed, “She’s a woman! She’s a girl! I ain’t no fucking faggot!”

I was mortified. Dizzy.

The men looked at each other, back at me, and one said, “Nice tits.”  Then they walked away, leaving us standing there in a singular spot of light, in an aisle of carnival games.

Now it was my turn to be angry.  “Why the fuck did you rip my hoodie open like that?” I zipped myself back up. 

Doug picked the toy skunk up and brushed it off. “You look too much like a dude,” he said as he handed me my pitiful prize.  “I can’t walk around holding your hand in public when you look that. It ain’t safe.”  He started walking away from me.

I stood frozen in the light.  “Why do you care what other people think?” I screamed at his back.

He stopped.  Turned and calmly asked,  “Are you coming?”  It was a practical question.

“For now,” I said as I followed behind him, dragging my feet while finding my emotional footing. 

How could I be with someone who was ashamed of me? Ashamed of himself?  In that moment, I followed him because I needed him to guide me safely through the lecherous carnies and drunk and drugged troublemakers back to the safety of his car and to my home, where he’d probably sleep on my parents’ couch again. But I had decided that our relationship was going to end.

After I broke up with him – which is a dramatic story full of Doug’s threats of self-harm and weeping  and neighbors coming out on their porches to witness the commotion as Doug jumped full bodied on the hood of my car and yelled, “You can’t leave me!” as I tried to drive away – my parents let him move in with us.  Doug moved his dog, Wiley, in with us, too.  It was unsettling to have my unhinged ex-boyfriend sleeping in our living room, his dog in our backyard.

I packed a bag and went to my secret girlfriend’s house.  

Yes, after I broke up with Doug, one of my good friends became my secret girlfriend.  I didn’t want her to be a secret girlfriend; I wanted her to simply be my girlfriend. But she wasn’t having it.  Now, I realize she was ashamed.  Now, I realize I have a pattern of being with people who are ashamed of who they are, but back then, I was still a child; I didn’t yet understand how relationship choices tend to follow patterns, or how our choices reflect what we think of ourselves.

I stayed at my secret girlfriend’s house for three days.  I stayed until her parents asked point blank when our little pajama party was going to end.  

I called my parents and bluffed. I informed them I wasn’t coming home until Doug left. My parents liked Doug, but they loved me, so, after confirming I was sure, “You’re sure you don’t want Doug as a boyfriend?” they asked him to move out. They let him keep Wiley in our fenced yard, though, which meant Doug wasn’t completely out of my life until about a month later when Doug’s parents let him move back in with them.

Doug’s parents were always kicking him out and letting him move back in. It seemed to be a “Desiree’s Baby” type situation. Doug’s parents were uncomfortable with having Doug’s blackness so close to them.  Just as Doug was uncomfortable with my queerness being so close to him that night at the carnival.    

By hiding our essential selves, we were all playing a rigged game, and our pitiful prizes were worth much less than what we paid for them.  And we paid a lot. We paid in broken relationships and we paid in our dignity. We paid with our silence and our shame.

I often chide my students for assuming too much knowledge on the part of their reader.  Don’t be an egocentric writer, I will tell them.  Explain yourself, I say.  Give context.  And yet, I find I am failing to give context in this blog as I have had a few readers tell me privately they are confused about certain terms I am using.

Also, on Facebook, an old graduate school friend of mine went on an inebriated transphobic rant about “cisnet” (she’s confusing it with fishnets, I’m sure), and he/she/they, and was slurring her typing with indignity about people changing language for the transgenders.  Okay, woman, slow your roll. 

That’s what I probably should have said to her. Slow your roll.  Calm the fuck down.  Think about what you’re typing there, fellow ENGLISH major. I didn’t say any of these things because I was furious. I love far too many transgender people, have had far too many transgender students, have read far too many stories about violence and discrimination against transgender people to tolerate this fishnet cishet woman any longer.   I unfriended her.  Then, I wrote my own Facebook rant about bigots and how they need to take their trash talking to the curb. 

Why did I unfriend this old grad school friend so quickly instead of trying to educate her, help her see the other side of things?  Because listen, if someone loves English, language, and literature so much they pursue it all the way to graduate school, then they have no excuse for not understanding that language is constantly changing, that language is organic, that language is a tool for describing our world, not a calcified piece of wood buried beneath layers.  She knows what she’s saying.

Language is constantly changing; language is organic; language is a tool for describing our world, not a calcified piece of wood buried beneath layers. 

I do want to clarify a couple of her “misunderstandings” with language.  She claimed she didn’t know what cisnet is or why we even need the concept of cisnet.

First.  It’s cishet, not cisnet, or fishnet.  Cisgender.  Heterosexual. 

Cisgender:  On the same side.  Comfortable with the gender you were “assigned” at birth.  Intersex people are often “assigned” a sex (a.k.a. gender) at birth, so I’m guessing this is where the language of “assigned at birth” originates.  Wait.  Okay.  Now I have to define other words, right?

Intersex: Someone born with the sex organs of male and female.  Yes, there are many intersex people among us.  And sometimes, intersex people don’t even know they’re intersex (for various reasons) and sometimes it’s not necessarily the sex organs that make a person intersex — it could be their chromosomal make-up — but whatever the case, it is actually possible you could be intersex and not know it.  I did a Google search and it looks like 1.7% of people are intersex.

Assigned at birth:  This is the gender of the baby that the doctor announces to the momma and the other parents and guardians and whoever else is in or near the birthing room related to the baby.  We’ve all it heard it.  It’s a boy!  It’s a girl!   The doctor (or whoever signs the birth certificate) is assigning a gender at birth.  The trans community uses the abbreviation: AMAB or AFAB.  This means “assigned male at birth” or “assigned female at birth.”  I was assigned female at birth, and I’m okay with that, so that means I am…

Cisgender

Sort of.  I’m what is called “gender nonconforming” or “gender fluid” or “queer” (because I’m different, see). Tallie keeps telling me I can fall under the trans umbrella because I am “across from” my assigned gender. 

But, I tell her, I’m not across from, because I’m fine with being a woman, I just don’t buy what “the man” is telling me about how I am supposed to dress and act.   I’m not digging the gender expression that my assigned “sex” is supposed to dig.

I have assumed for years that the “trans” in transgender, or the old-school term – transexual, meant “transition.”  Tallie claims “trans” means “across from” and this is why nonbinary or genderqueerfluidbadassmotherfuckers also fall under the trans umbrella.

Tallie’s oldest kid is trans, and they explained this same thing to me over a year ago, yet here I am, almost ready to calcify, not being able to brighten up my neuropathways with some new knowledge.  I’ll come around.  Probably.  No doubt.

Just as I think you, my dear reader, are coming around – although, I’ll bet you were here all along. 

So.  What other words need to be explained? 

My former grad school friend was babbling on about her annoyance with he/she/they.

He/she/they are pronouns.  We use them to refer to people when we don’t want to use their names.  Language would suck without pronouns.  Think about this sentence:  Mary is driving Mary back to Mary’s house because Mary forgot Mary’s wallet, and Mary needs it for Mary’s night out with the girls, girls also named Mary.

We need fucking pronouns!

But, sometimes people are uncomfortable with the gender assumptions that go along with pronouns.   I’ve been pissed about pronouns for eons.  Seriously.  For all of English language’s existence, the dominant pronoun has been male.  The default has been he.  Fuck that shit!  Look.  Even I do it.  Look how I listed the pronouns.  Yeah, skip back a couple paragraphs.  You see that?  I wrote HE/she/they.  Why didn’t I write SHE/he/they?  Or, THEY/she/he?   Default.  Male.  It’s insidious.

We need pronouns, so why would anyone complain about using accurate pronouns?  Do they want to make the language even more complicated than it is? 

Did you notice how, in the previous sentence, I used the “plural” pronoun “they” to refer to one person?  Do you see how natural that is?

What the hell is so hard about using “they” for someone who doesn’t identify with the gender expression of male or female.  We genderqueercoolassmotherfuckers may not like being tied down to one of those boring-ass male or female genders.  We like to keep our options open.

And, let me tell you something else.  If a transgender woman tells you to use her/she, you better use her/she, because otherwise you’re a rude jerk.  What makes your nearly calcified perspective of the world more valid than another person’s dignity?

The same goes for calling a transgender man by his pronouns, too. 

Transgender woman: A person who was assigned male at birth (AMAB), but whose entire being is female, who can’t “force” herself to be male, though she’s probably tried damn hard to, and who has been told by almost every living human around her that her sense of herself is wrong.

Transgender man:  A person who was assigned female at birth (AFAB), but whose entire being wants to barbeque and scratch his balls.  Sorry, guys.  Women are more complex, and you know it.

Anyway, I’m done schooling the old grad school friend of mine who is no longer my friend.  She’s not reading this blog anyway, so I’m really not schooling her.  Reading this would probably make her calcified brain explode, and not in a good new nueropathways kind of way, either.

Let’s move on.  One of my actual friends, who I’ve known a lot longer than that English major poser, is genuinely curious and wants to learn, and she asked me to explain the difference between gender and sex.

Gender: Expression.  How the person presents to the world.

Sex: I like sex!  But seriously. Give people their privacy.  Jeez.  Why do we always want to know about what goes on in people’s bedrooms?  So what if I’m bisexual? So what if she’s a lesbian?  Who cares if he’s gay? I don’t care. Let’s give it up for the polyamorous folx! Don’t leave out the asexuals. Wait. They want to be left out. And where my demisexuals at? None of my frigging business. And none of yours.

I must admit, I am curious about other people’s sex lives, because I like sex! (I mean, really. I wrote an entire book about a cishet chick who can’t keep her hands to herself.) And so do you. And that’s why you want to know what goes on in other people’s bedrooms. Pervert!

Gender is what we show the world.  Gender is a construct, but a construct deeply rooted in our sense of self, and therefore not one that can be forced on people.

A person’s sexual attractions have nothing to do with their gender expression, but rather with their gender preference in a partner.  When two cisgender people like each other, and these two cisgender people only have sex with people of the opposite gender, they are considered heterosexual.

Cisgender + Heterosexual = Cishet.  

Simple enough.  

Why do we shorten language like this? We live in the age of Twitter and texting and sliding into DMs. And I’m sure the same people who complain about needing to “learn” new language because of the “Wokes” are quick to learn texting shortcuts. We use shortened language because our tools demand it.  Twitter, chatrooms, texting et al have compressed our language into miniature sausages. LOL.  

DMs.  Cishet. 

Them/They

You bet.

There you have it.  A short, simple lesson on the fluidity of both language and gender.

Yours,

A nonbinary, yet strangely still cis, bisexual – but more accurately now that I am with a transwoman, pansexual — genderqueerandfabulous woman.

In 2020, the year of Coronavirus, the shelter-in-place and come out of the closet year, I tried to keep a journal.  I wrote about the sudden nightmare of not knowing, the unseen, the virus.  I wrote about my sister’s dementia, my own fears of losing my faculties, the difficulty of distance and old hurts.  I wrote about my spouse coming out as trans, her new path toward womanhood, the change in our relationship, our dynamics, the dizzying unsettling nature of her new (really old) nature.  I tried to write about myself, too.  I tried.  I worked on short stories.  I wrote short essays on the divine nature outside my house, an attempt to think like the New England transcendentalists, or Taoists from the East, or the pagans, an attempt to take note of the world beyond the humans. An attempt to make meaning out of the chaos. But by October 2020, I was tired.   

I couldn’t stand being in my head any longer.  I couldn’t stand my own stink.

This is why journal entries on this blog from last year ceased at September 2020.  I had ceased writing all together.  

It wasn’t until I took up writing this blog that I returned to the pen (the keyboard?) in order to express all the chattering that is my monkey mind.

My last blog entry dropped the bombshell about how my adolescence was bookmarked by a gang rape.  That’s heavy stuff for you readers, I know.  But imagine how heavy it was for me, and how heavy it is for all of us who have suffered sex abuse.

This morning I saw a report about a National Hockey League (NHL) player who had been raped by one of the league’s administrator dudes.  The hockey player’s last name was Beach, like mine, so I watched as Beach talked about how hard it was for him to make the rape public, but how necessary it is to tell your story, and how telling your story may help other people heal.   I hope telling my story helps at least one person.

This blog.

This blog is about identity.  My wife’s transition has inspired me to reexamine myself. I’ve called myself a tomboy, prided myself on my androgyny, rebuffed gender roles, and liked to “wear the pants” in my relationships. I’ve been harassed by police, bullied by drunks in bars and people in churches, I’ve been spat on and threatened for not playing by their rules. I’ve been called a bulldyke bitch, a ballbuster, a plow, a lesbo. Until recently, though, I hadn’t considered my gender bending anything but a defiance of gender roles all together. But Natalie’s transition is forcing me to acknowledge that there are indeed different genders, we’re not all game playing man or woman, and that I fall into another camp. It’s not that gender doesn’t exist, it is that I am nonbinary (the language reminds me of my first husband, who introduced me to computers and taught me how ones and zeros contained multitudes). And now that there’s a name for the type of person I have always been but had no words for, I can find my tribe and not feel so alone among my cisgender friends.

I am who I am and have always been but had no words for. 

Now there are words for everything!  Until we realize we aren’t finished naming yet.

I tried to commit suicide when I was 12 years old.  I swallowed an entire bottle of aspirin, wrote a note, and laid down on my bed to wait for death. 

Instead of dying, I threw up on my bedroom floor.

I realize now how young I was and how abnormal it is for a 12-year-old to try to commit suicide, but at the time, I was living in tsunami of unbearable emotional and psychological pain.

Instead of attempting suicide again, I learned how to tame the tsunami with booze, drugs, and sex.   At twelve, I started smoking pot, drinking Boone’s Farm, Mad Dog, Southern Comfort, and Schnapps.  I also started popping pills.  Anything anyone put in the palm of my hand ended up in my system.  I did LSD, too.  Lots of it.

The reason I swallowed a bottle of aspirin and later became the poster child for childhood addiction is because I was alone, ostracized, frightened.  A few weeks before my 12^th birthday, the night before Mother’s Day, I was manipulated, drugged, gang-raped, and dumped in a ditch. My parents, fundamentalist Christians with not a high school diploma between them, found me battered, bruised, delirious, and terrified and decided to take me to church to have “hands laid” on me.  I was told I was possessed by the devil.

The folks at school weren’t much better.  The adults treated me like an annoying curiosity, not quite prepared to ask about the bruises but not quite prepared to give me the benefit of the doubt.  The kids at school either didn’t believe me when I explained the bruises, or, if they did believe me, labeled me a slut.  So, I was possessed, a liar, and a slut.  Of course, I wanted to die.

Living in that state of extreme aloneness was a form of torture.  It felt like what I imagine solitary confinement feels like.  It’s a helpless feeling.  And I couldn’t shake it.  I tried talking to people about what happened to me, and I did have some sympathetic friends, but my family pretended nothing happened, the adults at school stopped considering me a bright kid and started seeing me as one of the “troubled” kids, and it seemed the only people who wanted anything to do with me were the criminal types I met in my neighborhood.  They took me under their wing.  They showed me the ropes.  But that story is for another time.

This story is about being alone.  This story is about what it feels like when a person is left adrift. This story is about how a little girl who eventually, through time and lots of counseling and reading and work, grew stronger and fierce and pondered why why why and finally came to the conclusion that what people want most in all the world is a feeling of community.  People want to be heard.  People want to belong.

I never felt like I belonged anywhere.  No matter what group of friends I was hanging with, or what institution or company I worked for, or what neighborhood I lived in, I have felt on the outside.  Part of this is because of my unusual past.  But mostly, I feel like this because I’m a bisexual gender nonconforming woman raised in a time, the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll” 70s, when people were dismissive of bisexuality and the language for gender fluid or trans people didn’t yet exist, so we didn’t exist.  Only rock stars were given the freedom to gender bend, and then only the most subversive of the rock stars.  Homosexuality was still hidden, even the rock stars hid it.  Movie stars hid it.  Everyone was hiding.  If the most famous and powerful people couldn’t come out in to the light, how was I supposed to?

My first taste of aloneness was after I was gang-raped, but that taste of aloneness lasted for most of my adult life.  The only thing that kept me from being swallowed up by the aloneness was my early hallucinations on “acid.”  When I did LSD as a kid, I thought I saw God.  I thought I saw connections.  I thought I saw a web of energy that connected all creatures, animals, plants, people, rocks.  No. No.  I’m sure I saw that web.  And the fact that we are all connected kept me from feeling completely alone.  I’ve held on to that sensation of connection all these years.  The memory of that hallucination has kept me alive.  Knowing that I’m only a small part of a greater whole calms me, because even though I may or may not be outwardly accepted by my family, neighbors, peers, colleagues, and friends, I know that we are all connected, like it or not.

Yet, we act as though we are separate, and this separateness is the cause of our demise.   Not until we see how we are all connected will we begin to heal, will we stop hurting ourselves and our planet.  When I was 12 years old, I felt so alone, so ostracized, I couldn’t see a future for myself.   When I started tripping on LSD, I saw something that no amount of words or poetry or philosophy or psychology could have explained to me, and this something triggered a survival instinct in me. 

Not until we see how we are all connected will we being to heal.

When I finally weaned myself off the booze and drugs and looked around the world with clarity, I continued to see the divine connectedness in all of us, and I started paying closer attention to the world outside of my pain and the pain we humans inflict upon ourselves, and I started watching the birds, and the trees, and plants, and the seasons and seeing, even while not tripping, the connections, the interdependency, how fungus helps the trees grow, how birds and bees pollinate the plants, how the apex predator’s slaughter hurts us all, how we humans fight over resources that are more abundant than we’ve been brainwashed to admit, and how a little girl can be shamed for being naïve and brutalized, because we can’t seem to admit even today, even with #MeToo and #Time’sUp, that we create our own evil here on earth, we create our own devils, we create them from our insistence on being disconnected, our arrogance, our insistence that we alone are in control. 

Journal

September 19, 2020

I’m an anxious person, who — like many anxious people — present as chill, relaxed, easy going.   I am highly vigilant.  I double check everything: locked doors, ovens, the air in my car tires, the cat, the dog, the spots on my legs, my email, the weather, the news. 

I’m afraid of heights, bridges, cars (even though I love to travel), dogs (even though I love dogs).  I’m afraid of getting mugged if I go out at night (even though I used to go out at night almost every night).  I’m afraid of being conned. 

And now my spouse’s transitioning scares me.  I’m not afraid of her.  I love her.  I feel confident the docs at the trans center are giving her the best care. 

I’m afraid for her.

I’m afraid of other people and what they may do to her.  I’m afraid a Trump-loving idiot is going to beat my wife to death.  I’m afraid the country is going to be taken over by Trump and the radical fundamentalist Christians who are going to round up feminists like me, and trans people like Natalie, and all people on the LGBTQ spectrum, and Black Lives Matter people, and investigative journalists, and any other number of people who don’t toe the line and put us in prisons similar to the ICE prisons that are currently holding our immigrant neighbors.  Are we next?  Will we soon have gulags? Am I paranoid? Is my fear justified? 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg died yesterday. The Supreme Court will soon be packed against us. I’m afraid of America.

I sometimes wonder why Natalie can’t simply be gender fluid, not full-on transitioning transgender queer, and leave it at that.  Why can’t she be like me, I think, until I remember this is exactly what cisgender people think when they witness their cousins, siblings, old friends, children, spouses come out of the gender queer closet in all their gender queer glory.  We all want to know: Why can’t they be like me?  Why won’t they be like me?  Why do they insist on not being like me?

I get it.  Many people, especially other cisgender women, have wondered out loud to me why I can’t be like them.  They’ve tried to convince me to embrace the full pageantry of womanhood.  When I was a teenager, my female friends loved coaxing me into make-up sessions.  They’d paint my face with foundation and rouge and eye shadow and lipstick, and they’d pile on the cosmetics until I couldn’t breathe and while they’d coo “You’re so beautiful!”  “You’re a fox!” “You should wear make-up all the time!” I would scrunch up my face and force a smile and try my damnedest not to, in a fit of frustrated anger, knock over the table piled high with mascara and dirty make-up implements . I would usually feel like crying and wouldn’t be happy until the make-up was completely washed off.  Was it my Pentecostal upbringing?  Was it my radical feminism?  What was it?  What was it?  Why did I react so strongly to a mundane teenage girls’ game of grown up?

Now that no one bothers me anymore — my skin is no longer taut, so what’s the point? — I know why.  As Natalie transitions it becomes clearer and clearer why. At first Natalie asked for make-up advice and I had nothing to give her.  Now she gives me advice, and I try to listen, and I force a smile, and I suddenly find myself back in my teenage years, in my friends’ bedrooms in front of make-up mirrors and this time, because I understand myself better, I don’t feel the urge to cry. I know why I used to want to cry, though, and it’s because my friends wanted me to be like them, and I couldn’t because I wasn’t.  And now that I’m old-age transparent, I get why I used to often feel out of place and sick to my stomach when placed in a situation where I was supposed to be not me.  

I get Natalie, too, when I stop long enough to think about it. When I stop looking at the world through my own lens but consider hers.   And when I think about it like that I stop thinking, why can’t she just be gender fluid like me?

Transitioning isn’t easy for a middle-aged queer.

Being middle-aged is easier for people like me who aren’t invested in looks or gender, who don’t care about passing, because I don’t have to, because I am already just fine with the me that I am.  

Transitioning male to female (mtf) at middle-age means struggling with whiskers, broad shoulders, male pattern baldness, and fully developed man brows.  It means shifting from one adult life to a completely new life mid-stream. 

For all of us, cisgender and trans, the ability to maintain, attain, retain physical beauty fades with time, so for transgender people, the compulsion to change has to be stronger than the need to pass without notice.  The need to be who you are in public – the same you you’ve always been in secret – surpasses the need to be pretty, or even the need to be seen.

Natalie looks at pictures of younger transgender people who have had the benefit of hormone blockers, who probably have had the support of their family and friends early on, who have had the benefit of science and some sprinkling of legal protections, and who can easily get the information they need to explain themselves by searching the web with their thumbs.

The younger a person transitions, the more passable they seem to be, and I see the longing and frustration in Natalie’s eyes when she looks at the pictures of transgender folx who are Gen Zs and Millennials. They’re not clockable.  They pass. The young MTF girls are soft, supple.  I can almost hear Natalie saying over and over like a mantra, “Why did I wait? Why did I wait? Why did I wait?” But she isn’t saying anything.  The pain in her face gives her away.

I try to remind her, “Because you had little choice, because you didn’t know, because it wasn’t time” while I tease her and playfully spank her ass and kiss her and let her know that she is lovely and the love of my life, and I’m glad she’s not like me, or like anyone else I’ve ever been with, woman or man, and that love doesn’t give two cents about gender or taut skin.

I didn’t wear deodorant for over a year, during the first few waves of the pandemic.

My sister used to insist I wear deodorant, shave my legs, conform back when I was in my 20s and rebellious and tired of bullshit gender constraints and corporatism dictating how I should act and think.  My sister insisted.  She bought me a brand of super strong deodorant, “So you don’t have to apply it every day.”  My sister insisted.  She bought me fancy shmancy pink razors that bent to the shape of my lithe legs.  My sister insisted I conform and no amount of argument would change her mind.  She would shove product at me like the labels and marketing devices would fix me, or at least hide the smelliest, stinkiest part of me.

My sister conformed.  She ate what the television told her to.  She drank diet soda, ordered pizza, bought frozen foods, went to fast food places for fun, and a great night out meant a visit to a national chain restaurant.  My sister’s rebellion showed itself in chain smoking and spending splurges.  “I’m not going to play the poor game,” she’d respond whenever I challenged her about spending too much, about bankruptcy, about borrowing from family, about paying her utility bills first.  I loaned her money to pay her light bill and she didn’t pay me back for three years.

My sister conformed.  The true American consumer.

She fancied herself a “good girl.”  She was a pastor’s wife.  She followed the rules set down for her as a woman, as a wife, as a mother. 

By the time of the pandemic, her pastor husband had already passed away.  He had prostate cancer that had spread throughout his body by the time it was spotted.  He spent the last year of his life under the care of my sister who was slowly losing her grip of time and space. By the time her husband died, she was already far in to early on-set dementia.  By the time of the pandemic, her daughter had placed her in a memory care residence.  Even if my sister had had all her faculties, she wouldn’t have known that I stopped wearing deodorant again.  Had she known, she would have tried to guilt me into applying stink pretty to my pits.  But what would it have mattered if no one but me and my spouse was going to smell me? 

What is the point even during non-pandemic times? Deodorant exists simply to please the senses of other people, most often strangers.  Is it better to please the senses than care that deodorant introduces chemicals to the skin, the skin near lymph nodes, that deodorant keeps the body from shedding toxins? 

Once, while living and working on an organic farm in Ramona, California, I overheard the farmer and his son discussing deodorant and how horrible it is and how people still use it, and I held my head in shame, caught between the nagging voice of my sister “People don’t want to smell you!” and the voices of wholesome organic farmers who were closer to sharing my own world view than my sister ever would.  I was sure the farmer and his son were talking about me.  They must have seen my deodorant, the same brand my sister had insisted upon years earlier, in the bathroom medicine cabinet in the guest house where I was staying temporarily after finding a mouse in my trailer.

My sister dreamed of living on a farm, but I don’t think she would have enjoyed the organic farm; she would not have enjoyed living so close to the earth, being dirty, collecting eggs covered in bird shit, hosing down the giant compost bins every morning. The farm was far from shopping malls and big box stores.

By the time of the pandemic, my sister couldn’t manage her own affairs, couldn’t be trusted with a debit or credit card, couldn’t be alone with internet access.

One thing the pandemic has demonstrated to us all, and I mean the global “us all,” is that much of what we think we have to have and have to do is both unnecessary and destructive.  When humans shut down, the planet began to heal.  When we stayed put, we had time to hear our own thoughts.  Busy-ness couldn’t interfere, and folks began to have epiphanies.  As we slowed to a halt we could see the systemic cracks, the institutional concrete and steel, crumbling.  The bullet trains stopped in the buckling tunnels of our own making, and there we were stuck inside.

As we slowed to a halt, we could see the systemic cracks, the institutional concrete and steel crumbling.

My sister, consumer of cigarettes, fast food, and biblical myth, didn’t have an opportunity expand her awareness or, conversely, have a chance to tell me I stink, because her mind was gone by the time the pandemic arrived. 

In the state’s rush to open back up again!, my sister’s memory care home became infected with Covid-19 and found its way to my sister’s lungs, and took control of her body, and none of us could be there with her in her locked room, isolated, quarantined, afraid.  She stopped breathing while suffocating in a nightmare of aloneness and confusion.

Now that I’m vaccinated against Covid-19, I’ve gone back into the world with groups of people up close, and reluctantly I have once again applied deodorant, the same brand my sister insisted I wear way back when in the 80s, when I was young enough to believe I could successfully buck the system, a system set up to disguise and disinfect anything that doesn’t conform and consume and play nicely.  

Now, in my 50s, I do play nicely.  I play along to get along because I’ve grown tired of fighting.

My sister’s early on-set dementia, though, scared me.  Scares me.  Demonstrates to me that going along to get along can inflame the soul, the lungs, the brain, and no amount of conformity can stop you from feeling dead inside.

When I was in first grade, the principle announced over the intercom that girls no longer had to wear dresses to school.  I jumped out of my seat and starting dancing in circles and hollering and pumping my arms in the air.  I got into trouble, which was unusual for me at that time, but I didn’t care.

I didn’t wear a dress to school again until high school.  I clearly remember the day I decided to be girly at school because, although I was a popular kid, I was teased for wearing a dress.  The kids sang “Lola” at me all day long, particularly the following two stanzas of the song:

1. Well, I’m not dumb but I can’t understand
   Why she walked like a woman but talked like a man
   Oh my Lola
   La-la-la-la Lola
   La-la-la-la Lola
2. Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
   It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola
   La-la-la-la Lola

In retrospect, the teasing and taunting was inside out and made no sense. At the time I was mortified and didn’t wear a dress again for years. I was bullied for dressing like a girl, even though I was a girl.  Most of the people who tormented me that day were the bullies who beat up the gays, taunted the lesbians, and had a trans person dared share space with any of them would have been killed.  And yet, there they were, bullying me because I wore a dress.  I was a girl, yes, but they wanted me to fit what they expected me to be, what they had learned to accept was me, a boyish girl.  Not a lesbian.  Not a trans person.  And damn it, I had better not deviate.

After college I landed a corporate job as a copywriter for an in-house marketing and advertising department.  It was the late 80s.  One day about a month after I started working there, the creative director, my boss, called me into his office to have a talk.

My boss, Jim, seemed uncomfortable in his chair, his desk a buffer between the two of us. “The higher ups want me to talk to you about the way you dress.  I don’t have a problem with it, but the big guys have taken notice of you.  They want you to dress more…ummm…I don’t know how to say this. Umm…professional.”  He shifted in his chair.

“What exactly does more professional mean?” I asked.  My heart was beating hard in my chest and I’m sure my cheeks were reddening.  I wore nice slacks, button up shirts, and suit jackets to work.  I was professional.  I knew what Jim meant, though, and I wanted to hear him say it out loud.

“Could you wear dresses to work? And maybe some make-up?”  Jim tried making eye contact but he couldn’t maintain it.  He was embarrassed.

“Let me ask you something, Jim,” I said as calmly as I could.  “Has this company been sued for sexism?”

Jim’s face lit up.  “Why, yes.  As a matter of fact, we’re being sued now.  The women in sales have a lawsuit because they were asked to wear their skirts a certain length, just above the knees I think.”

I leaned forward and placed by elbows on Jim’s desk.  “Okay then, tell the big guys once that lawsuit is settled, I am more than willing to listen to their complaints about the way I dress.”

Jim smiled.  “Agreed,” he said, and I never heard another word about it.

Journal

August 5, 2020

Natalie wishes there were shortcuts in her transition.  She’s just coming out of the awkward “man in drag” phase. Her hair is getting longer. She’s starting to almost pass, but she’s still clockable.  Her shoulders are broad. She still has face stubble. Her bald spot is almost gone, though.

I wish there were shortcuts, too, shortcuts that cost less money and skipped all the pain of puberty (emotionally, my grown-ass spouse is basically now a 14-year-old girl), the awkwardness of clockability, and the confusion that rattles around in my mind daily.  Who is this new person in my bed? Why does she look so much like my mother? Did I marry my friggin’ mother? Lord help me!

“Did I marry my friggin’ mother? Lord help me!”

I wish there were a shortcut to the happy ending, an ending where Natalie and I present as a quirky old lesbian couple.  A couple of eccentric artist women who tend to flowers and sit on the deck playing music and smoking weed.  I wish there were a shortcut to a world that is more accepting of people like Natalie, the transfemme sweetheart troubador, and more accepting of people like me, the weirdo bisexual gender queer writing professor who harbors strange ideas about peace and love and acceptance.

Ten Questions People Now Ask Me:

1. Don’t you like penises?
2. Is he going to cut off his penis?
3. Is she having surgery?
4. Is she going to like men now?
5. Does this make you a lesbian?
6. How are YOU doing?
7. Are you worried about violence?
8. Does she need clothes?
9. Is there anything I can do?
10. What are Natalie’s pronouns?