One of the earliest clues Natalie was transgender was her admission to me how uncomfortable she was in men’s bathrooms.  At the time she was presenting as a man, so why would using a urinal bother her? “It doesn’t feel right to use a urinal,” she’d say. “I wait for an empty stall,” she’d say.  “It’s hard to explain,” she’d say.

Bathrooms are a problem for transgender people, sometimes even before they begin to transition. 

A student once told me she was confronted in the girl’s bathroom by a femme who thought my student was a boy. The femme told her she had no right to be in the girls’ bathroom. My student came to my office and told me how humiliated and demeaned she felt. Where was she supposed to go?  I told her she was supposed to go wherever the hell there was a toilet.

I wear men’s shoes sometimes, and occasionally wear wingtips to work.  Once while wearing wingtips and using the restroom at work, a woman waited for me to come out of the stall. She was mildly surprised and relieved that I am indeed a woman.  “I was certain a man was in here,” she said. What would she have done if I were a man? Or a trans woman? Why was she waiting for me, a stranger, in a public restroom? What is stranger: my wingtips or this woman’s need to wait and confront me when I was simply taking a pee?

The first time I ever used a gender-neutral bathroom was in some punk bar in St. Louis. I don’t remember the name of the bar, but I remember being both frightened and exhilarated to share a public restroom with men. The experience turned out to be anti-climactic.  The only drama was when I had to ask a dude and a chick to stop snorting blow off the bathroom sink long enough to allow me to wash my hands. 

The second time I used a gender-neutral bathroom was at a gay bar. The third, fourth, fifteenth, and 200 hundredth times I have used gender neutral bathrooms are a forgettable blur. They’re no big deal. Not really. 

So why the bathroom hysteria by the conservatives? Why all the fear mongering? The people who have the most to fear are trans and gender nonconforming people. Where are they supposed to go when they need to go? And why do people think it’s okay to “police” a public restroom? 

When I was in college, a creepy classmate asked me on a date, and when I said no, the creep harassed me all the way down the halls. To escape him, I ducked into the women’s bathroom. He followed me in. No amount of signage stops a creep from being a creep. I reported the creep to the authorities but my complaint got zero attention or traction. It was the same year one of my female classmates was stalked by a different college classmate creep. The school authorities didn’t help her either. Where were the conservervative “protectors” of women and restrooms then?

In March 2020, the same semester everything shut down because of the pandemic, one of my transmasculine students was writing a proposal asking the college to add more gender-neutral bathrooms on campus.  My student told me he had to race across campus to the Student Center to use the only bathroom designed for him, people like him, trans people. “It’s really the handicapped bathroom,” he said.  “It’s gender neutral, though, so that’s where we go.”  I wondered why he couldn’t just use the men’s bathrooms.  He looked at me like I was from a different planet.  “Look at me,” he said.  “I don’t want to have to fight,” he said.  “I just want to take a piss in peace.”  The pandemic upended his proposal.  I’m not sure he sent it to the powers-that-be. If he did, I’m not sure if he received a response.  Did his proposal get any attention?  Did it get any traction? 

Where does someone go when they’re told there is no place for them to go?

Journal

July 2, 2020

She’s chosen a name, or part of one anyway.  Natalie.  “I like the nickname Nat,” she said.

Every day my vision of Ross blurs into the past and Natalie comes into focus.  She has wigs now.  A friend gave her more clothes.  She’s learning to put on make-up and soften her voice.

It’s odd watching my husband morph into my wife.  The pandemic has chained us together, so I have no choice but to watch as Ross blooms into Natalie Grace. 

I spend the summer teaching and now that I work from home, I have the luxury of watching the flowers in my gardens bloom and fade and new flowers bloom in their place.  I have the luxury of watching my husband bloom, too.  My husband.  My was-band. My husband left me.

Someone on a family and friends of transgender people Facebook group used the term wasband, and it stuck in my head.  Right now, that’s what she is.  My wasband, not yet my wife.

I think, “Ross never really existed.  He never really was a him.”   Reality isn’t always what we perceive it to be.

I probably would have never married a transwoman.  But now I am married to a transwoman.

Nat researches sex reassignment options while I teach creative writing and early American Literature.  I complete the unbearably cult-like “Quality Matters” online training bullshit and bitch and complain about how insane the training is, how crazy Trump and his Trumpsters are, how fucking criminal the police are for killing at will without cause and how some “Karen” got her foot in the door of higher education and convinced some numbskull administrator that “Quality Matters” – which is only  a fucking rubric, really – would transform education!  A fucking rubric. 

The world is full of fucking idiots.

Smash the patriarchy and their god damn Karens!

Transgender Quality Matters Haiku

Ross to Natalie

And smash the patriarchy!

Draw outside the lines!

When I was about 13 or 14 years old, I read an article about David Bowie that claimed he was bisexual. I was curious (now we might call this bi-curious, ha!), and so I researched what being bisexual was all about. By research, I mean I asked my brother, who is 13 years older and was, at that time, heavily involved in counterculture stuff. He was coming out of his Glam phase at this point and it was my brother who turned me on to Bowie in the first place. So, he explained to me that there’s a spectrum and most people don’t fall on the extreme ends of the spectrum, which would mean most people are bisexual, which means it’s no big deal. This was around 1978 and my brother’s attitude would have been considered very far outside of the norm of the time.

I decided I, too, was bisexual. I liked girls. I liked boys. And that is where I stayed for years and years and years. Then, in my early 50s, my students taught me a new term: Pansexual. I didn’t understand what pansexual meant, or how it is any different than bisexual, because I hadn’t really contemplated gender as a spectrum yet. As a matter of fact, I considered gender bullshit, a social construct designed to keep women from attaining success and men from being house dads.

When my spouse came out as trans, I was forced to think about the language my students had been writing about and telling me about. I had to consider the language in a much deeper way than I had before, because I am still very much in love with my spouse, and she is transitioning from male to female and is shattering the binary for me and I need the language to describe how I feel, and there it is: Pan. I’m pansexual. I don’t give a shit what gender someone is. I love the person.

I considered gender bullshit, a social construct designed to keep women from attaining success

Journal

June 6, 2020

Today, my spouse and I shopped online for skirts.  I told her I’d buy her a skirt for our 8-year anniversary (which I had totally forgotten about until she reminded me).  One would think it would be uncomfortable for me to help my husband (wasband?) pick out a skirt for her gradual transition into her fully authentic femme self, but it wasn’t.  I actually found it fun to clothes shop with my best friend.

Yesterday, I had her try on some of my older smaller sized dresses so we could gauge her dress size.  I taught her how pull the dress over her head instead of stepping into it like a pair of jeans.  She has a lot to learn about being a woman.

I’m adjusting well, I think.  I’m coming to terms with the fact my spouse is really a woman trapped in a man’s body.   

She seems much happier as a woman.  She’s more open, expansive.  There’s a spark in her eyes.  A bounce in her step. 

Although she still walks like a man. 

What does a man walk like?

What does it mean to walk like a woman?

I’ve always thought my next partner, if I had another partner, would be a woman.  I’ve been saying I want a wife for 30 years now.  I’ve even asked women friends to marry me.  As a joke.  Or a compliment.  Or some weird expression of what I really truly desired.

Will I have that desire now?

The universe is a funny trickster.  The universe’s tricks are why we say, “Be careful what you wish for.”

• 

• 

Ross had been bugging me for a week, “When are you going to be finished with your online teaching certification?”

I was completing my training in my brief “time off” between the spring 2020 semester, which had been upended by Covid-19, and a summer session, in which I would be teaching two courses, – online – one course which I hadn’t taught since the 1990s.  I had to complete the provisional certification before I could teach online in the summer, so I couldn’t stop, nor did I have the “spoons” for anything beyond what was directly in front of me, which at this point in time was a computer screen.

My sister was also calling me multiple times a day from the Memory Care Center.  Her dementia was worsening, and she was in a panic.  Why wasn’t the family visiting her?  Why had her daughter abandoned her? Why wouldn’t I come and rescue her?  A daily barrage of whys? And whens?  I was barely hanging on to my emotional and psychological center. 

“When are you going to finish your training?” Ross asked again while I was preparing potatoes for dinner. I held up my knife, annoyed, and said “What do you want? Tell me now.”

Ross was trembling, terror darting from his lovely blue eyes. “I’m not asking for a divorce. And I didn’t cheat on you.” His earnestness, his pleading only made me angry.

I gripped the knife. My heart raced. I didn’t think I could handle another thing; I felt as if I would break at any moment. Would I become like the women on the crime reality show Snapped? Would I end up on the kitchen floor in the fetal position finally lost to trauma and betrayal? What was Ross going to tell me and how was I going to react?

“I want to see a therapist,” he said.

Not bad.  No cause for alarm.  Yet.  “Why?” I asked.

“I think I’m a woman,” he said. He looked at me for something, anything.

I wasn’t surprised, but I was shocked that she finally figured herself out. I cut another slice of potato. Her news didn’t send me into a rage, nor did it knock me to the floor in a panic. Instead, I said something insensitive and stupid.  Not Snapped material, but certainly worthy of an apology.  I said, “Why the fuck would anyone want to be a woman?”

Later, after an awkward dinner, we talked.  What would the neighbors think? How do we break this to our friends and family? How much money was all of this going to take? What sort of woman would she become? Would she decide she needs to start fresh? Would I still be attracted to her? Should we move or stay put? Who could we reach out to for advice? We would need counseling, but with whom? 

She confessed that she first suspected she was trans when she felt lumps on her chest (which we later discovered were caused by mono). At the time, before the mononucleosis diagnosis, she was afraid she might have cancer and she had thought, “I guess I am going to die a man.” At this moment, in a state of heightened fear, she knew that she could no longer hide herself from herself or from me or from the greater world.

She said she couldn’t play “hide and seek” any longer.

I had suspected as much for years. I had even told her, before we were married, that I’d still love him even if he were, in fact, her. Telling him this only enraged him, which told me all I needed to know.

So, when she finally came out to me, and to herself, I wasn’t surprised. I was relieved. But mostly, I desperately wanted, I needed, time to pause, think, and breathe.