by Nick Krieger
Driving down a deserted side street, Jack kept one hand on the wheel and used the other to unlatch the silver skeleton buckle on his belt. He untucked his white undershirt from his jeans. “Sorry,” he said in my direction.
Uncertain whether Jack was referring to the prospective peep show or his loss of driving control as the car wobbled across the whole street, I pushed myself forward between the seats. “Oh, it’s fine,” I said. “I want to see.”
Jack slowed down the car, tapped the steering wheel once with his palm to keep us from veering off into the line of parked cars, and then lifted his ass to scootch down his jeans. Ignoring the road, the three of us focused on the same spot as if searching for gold. We found only a pale upper thigh with thick black hair. “You won’t have as much hair as me,” Jack said to Greg. “I’m a Russian Jew.”
I too was part Russian Jew, other parts Ukrainian, Polish, and uncertain other hair-producing Eastern European countries. I blamed my genealogy for the dog names the boys in elementary school had taunted me with, the leg-shaving intervention by my bunkmates at sleepaway camp, and the brow waxing my first girlfriend demanded to shape the thick strips over my eyes. I clipped my seatbelt back across my lap and stared out the window. The thought of being a hairy man with back felt, ear whiskers, and butt fuzz made me queasy.
Using the back of his hand, Greg stroked Jack’s bristly cheek. “You really are a hairy beast,” he said.
“Aww, thanks, man,” Jack said, tilting his head away with a coquettish smile.
Inside the restaurant, we found a table surrounded by couples, tourists, families with young children, and, closest to us, a group of fraternity boys who hadn’t learned the rule that Greek lettering should not be visible on more than one article of clothing. Our waitress’s tits approached us, shooting out of owl eyes. The rest of her body, clad in orange lycra running shorts that provided less coverage than my underwear, followed. Even her bunchy white leggings stretched over fake-tan panty hose couldn’t make me smile. The play on the archetypal cheerleader was too close to reality to be funny.
After our waitress took our orders, Greg brought up his fear that the T-fueled sex drive would consume him.
“It’ll get bad,” Jack said. “You just have to find time to whack it.”
“What if I ogle bodies all the time?” Greg said. “That’s not me.”
Off to the side of us, our waitress clipped our order ticket to a caliper and shot it down a string to the kitchen. Her tits jiggled long after the ticket was gone. Neither of my companions noticed.
“I objectify guys, but not girls,” Jack said.
They slipped into a discussion about hooking up with men after starting testosterone, a somewhat common outcome. In Jack’s case, he said his attraction to men had to do with his increased horniness, but also his newfound ability to act on his interest once others saw him as a man.
As Jack schooled Greg on hooking up with men, both cisgender and transgender, I was blown away by his experiences, that he would fuck a man in a gay sex club, using but not disclosing his strap-on. His confidence was riveting, his sexuality fascinating. He dated the whole panorama of genders, he said; pansexual was the word he used. There was even space for me within the vast genderscape of his interests. I imagined that Jack, who once had a female body like mine, could lift the hood on this hybrid, see that inside I ran on a bit of something else.
Listening to Jack speak so boldly, I could tell he was one of those special charismatically self-assured people that others would make an exception to be with—older women dating below their age cutoff, cis guys sleeping with their first trans guy, dykes discovering their interest in men. I was certainly ready to revise my rules of attraction for him, or maybe Jack, sexy even with orange-tinted grease on his face, sparked what I already knew: I liked men.
As I watched the two of them become absorbed in the pile of wings, my entire sexual history suddenly started coming together in my head. Despite my prior efforts to fit in with my A-gays, I wasn’t exclusively interested in women like they were. Screw Tori, Stephanie, and all the rest of them who said, “Give it a rest, you big dyke,” every time I spoke of a crush on a dude. No wonder I liked to give guys head—that was the only way to act on my desire while distracting all attention away from my body. The problem was my body. I had the self-image of a guy—flat chest, no hips, muscles, a dick. But inside Hooters, there was nothing I wanted less than to be grouped together with the whole lot of them.
In front of me a display advertised a glossy pinup calendar for customers to purchase for the soldiers in Iraq. I imagined it, too, was part of the campy aesthetic, a throwback to World War II and Vietnam soldiers with postcards of naked chicks as their sole source of female contact. The thought of guys killing each other and turning to Hooters girls as jerk-off fodder reinforced stereotypes that made me sicker than the wings. I stopped even picking at my food and counted down the minutes until I could get out of there.
After lunch, Jack offered to drive me back to work. We left Greg at the Wharf and continued on the path alongside a strip of urban sand pretending to be a beach. Walking in silence, the inequality of the day’s exchange weighed on me. Having kept quiet, attempting and pretty much failing to be an objective reporter, my need to connect overcame me. “You know how I’m writing about trans issues,” I said. My eyes followed the swim lanes, ropes extending out into the frigid waters only brave souls dared to enter. “Well, some of my interest is personal.”
Jack twisted his head up. “I know. It always is.”
I fought the urge to return his smile, hoping to hide my crush. I focused on the choppy white caps of the ocean, the outcropping of stone rising into the island of Alcatraz. “How did you make the decision to transition?” I asked. “At such a young age?”
As we climbed the short hill to his car, he told me about his teenage years, the whirlwind tour of sexual identities—bisexual, then dyke, then queer. He’d been a queer youth activist, and at a leadership training retreat, both the presence of a trans kid and a lesson on the difference between sex and gender (or biology and cultural sense of self, as they are often defined) triggered him. “I knew I wasn’t a woman. I didn’t know what I was, but I knew I wasn’t a woman.” He turned his key in the passenger door. “I was scared to death.”
I felt my own fear rising as he spoke, too similar was my own self-realization. For as much as I tried to believe I could want a flat chest without also wanting to live as a man, that top surgery and hormones were separate decisions with extremely different physical, social, medical, and financial impacts, what if they were more closely linked than I thought? What if on the other side of not woman there was only one other option: man? What if the rest of the panorama were just words, the middle ground a place most people couldn’t see?
Jack drove down the main thoroughfare of Van Ness, the only street in the city that reminded me of a suburban strip mall with its chain stores, chain restaurants, and a multiplex movie theater. The traffic was thick, start and stop every few lights. Jack continued to talk, explaining that he eventually grew tired of the “mindfuck” of seeing his female body in the mirror. Instinct drove his decision to physically transition and hindsight solidified his certainty.
Then Jack recounted an anecdote from his childhood as if it had been told hundreds of times, as if it were legend. As a five-year-old girl, Jack had run around the playground at school shouting, “I’m a boy, I’m a boy.” Another kid, trying to be helpful, told him that he could have a “sex-change operation” when he grew up. So, later that afternoon, over Doritos and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, Jack said to his social worker parents, “Guess what I’m going to do when I grow up? I’m going to have a sex-change operation.”
He shared this story like it was his origin tale—it seemed like every trans person had one—evidence that he always knew he was a man. “You can’t escape who you are,”
Jack said as he switched lanes and sped through a yellow light.
I racked my brain, ransacking my childhood in search of a moment when I’d claimed myself as a boy, only to be shut down and told never to mention it again. Maybe I’d been too scared to make such a grand statement to my parents. By the time I was twelve, I was already so afraid of my father that instead of telling him I wanted to stop competing in tennis, I pretended to attend my lessons for almost a year, sometimes waiting out the last ten minutes in our apartment building’s laundry room so as not to arrive home early and arouse suspicion.
I followed my past through my teenage years and tried to remember if I was unhappy, fundamentally so. The answer was no. I hated dresses and wearing girly clothes, and having some type of adolescent sexual awakening beyond blow jobs in bathrooms would’ve been nice, but I enjoyed high school as much as anyone. To the best of my recollections, being a girl wasn’t anything I’d ever questioned for nearly thirty years.
I expected to feel relief. If the proof that a person was transgender came in the form of the long-sustained narrative, the history of always knowing, then I was in the clear. I wouldn’t have to worry about knives, needles, discrimination, ostracism, acne, losing my job, friends, family, none of it. Yeah, I felt much better about myself when I was binding and packing, but I hadn’t been fighting my whole life against some Great Truth. I should have felt relief.
Our car lurched as we stopped short at a red light, and I jerked forward. My seatbelt dug into my chest. “Sorry about that,” Jack said.
At Market Street, I suggested I take public transportation the rest of the way rather than have him drive into the heart of downtown. It would be quicker, easier, less painful for us both. In the Mid-Market abyss, a stretch that served mostly as a link between heavily populated areas, he pulled over. “Not everyone gets up and faces their fears every day. I do. And I’m stronger because of it,” Jack said, just before I jumped out of the car. I slammed the door shut, but his words stayed with me.
“I lied to skip work and went to Hooters today,” I blurted out the second Jess walked into the kitchen.
Lately, our hellos moved so quickly from binding discussions to sir/ma’am moments to gossip about the transitional decisions of others that the “hello” no longer seemed necessary.
“Have you ever been to Hooters with Greg?” I asked. “He claims the wings are to die for. I don’t even eat wings.” I took a big bite of my sautéed kale, tofu, and rice.
“There are plenty of other places to eat hot wings.” Jess pulled a burrito out of a brown paper bag and placed it on a plate. He threw his jacket and beanie on the living room chair before hopping up onto the corner of the tiled counter.
Immediately after my conversation with Zippy, I’d made the switch to male pronouns for Jess. I asked his permission, aware that my use of language could push him too far into man land, but I also told him that when I saw him, it felt right to refer to him as “he.” With that one comment, his entire marble facade cracked into pure pride, and I felt the satisfaction of finally recognizing what he needed and trumping the rules that had once stood in my way to offer it to him.
“Would you ever go to Hooters?” I moved the olive oil and salt to the edge of the wooden table next to the stove and sat down.
“No.” He crunched on a chip.
“Not even with trans guys?” I asked. “They flirted and gayed out the whole time, spent the entire meal objectifying men, talking about how much easier it is to mess around with dudes once you start passing. Isn’t there a ‘get out of PC jail free’ card for trans-fagging it up in Hooters?”
“Nope.” Jess crunched on another chip. “We all choose what we support by where we spend our money. And I will never support Hooters.”
I put my bowl down and ran my hand over the finished surface of the table that Jess had spent a week sanding and refinishing in the basement. The work had given him tiny calluses on his hands that we called manjuries, a word used sarcastically to refer to any injury sustained doing a “man’s work.”
“I just don’t get it,” Jess said. “How do you give up woman to become man and then go to Hooters?”
I considered the irony of Jack holding the one-year anniversary of his top surgery there, taking a commemorative photo with a couple waitresses. “The more I read, the more I hear . . .” I started. “I don’t think those guys, I don’t think any trans guy ever considered himself a woman.”
“Look, I thought I was a boy as a child, too,” Jess said. “But it’s too easy to say, ‘I’ve always been this way, I’m always going to be this way, so I’m going to transition.’ There has to be something new. And maybe this is the old-school lesbian feminist in me, but I feel a responsibility to support the sisterhood, to not assume the privileges that are denied to women.” Jess’s voice rose before he stopped and shook his head. “You know how I feel about male privilege. Do you really want to hear me go off?”
I shook my head no. It’s not that I didn’t agree with Jess, but more and more his rant made me defensive, as if he was attacking the part of me that felt connected to men. “Look, I will never go to Hooters again,” I said. “But that doesn’t change the fact that there’s not one thing about me or my body that I consider of or relating to woman.” I started to kick my legs underneath me in frustration, pumping as if on a swing. “Not one itty-bitty minor thing. When I interact with a girl, I consider it a purely heterosexual interaction. And,” I added, rising on the power of finally owning my attraction to dudes, “when I think about men, it’s in the gay way!”
“I get it,” Jess said. “My interactions with girls are heterosexual, too. But I don’t want to be a heterosexual man.”
“And I get that,” I said. But there was no greater conundrum. How could he, how could I, truly embody heterosexual relationships with women and not take on at least some of the traits associated with men? And then what, I’d be seen as part of the group responsible for breastaurants? “I’m starting to get lost,” I said. “I have no idea what’s right and wrong anymore.” I grasped on to the only thing I was starting to be sure about. “When I think of myself physically,” I said, “I am a man.”
“Me, too,” he said. “But politically, I am a woman.”
“What does that mean?” I begged.
He jumped off the counter. “It means fighting for equality of the sexes. Equal pay. Equal space. Equal everything. Across the board, women make less money than men. Do you watch the news? In politics, men kiss women on the cheek and shake the hands of the other men. It’s demeaning.” Jess took a sip of his water. I kept my mouth shut. “I face sexism every single day in my office,” he continued. “My entire life I’ve watched and experienced women taking the back seat to men. This has defined me. What would it say to young girls growing up now if I walked away and said I’m not here to help?”
I was speechless, awed by his gift for persuasive articulation and admiring of the role model he aspired to be. I finally understood that for Jess one of the greatest battles of his life was for the progress of women, and being recognized as one, even if he didn’t feel like one, kept him active in the fight. I might’ve asked if he could make his political statement in other ways, like boycotting Hooters, rather than using his very body, except there was no point in continuing our friendly sparring. That was my own internal question. I was shadowboxing with myself.
The cat hopped up onto the footrest in the living room, crumpling the newspaper. “Oh yeah, Roscoe,” Jess turned on his cat voice. “You gonna read the paper? Is that what you’re going to do tonight?”
“He’s gonna hang out with me,” I said. “Someone’s gotta do it.”
“Oh yeah, Roscoe, you gonna hang out with auntie-uncle tonight?”
Jess looked directly at me and dropped his voice a few octaves to human range. “Hey, do you want to just be uncle?”
I nodded
. “Yeah. I do.”
Roscoe unfurled himself, more lion than cat, and licked one of his paws. Just thinking of myself as uncle made me like Roscoe a tiny bit more. Maybe I’d even let him into my room sometime.
“I’m sorry,” Jess said. “I should’ve asked sooner.”
“It’s okay,” I said. It was only then, when the focus of gendered language fell upon me, that I realized my hold on biology-pronoun agreement was more than a reliance on unbreakable rules. There was so much at stake. For Jess, it was the inescapable patriarchal history of our culture, the sexism still alive and rampant, and for me it was my social ties to women, developed through a lifetime of sports. I may not have missed my A-gays, nor my days on the soccer field with them, but dropping the “auntie” part distanced me even more from them, pushed me further into the unknown. To let go and take that step, I had to bring my longstanding connection to women with me, as well as Jess’s speech on equality, keeping a firm grip on my own incipient sense of responsibility. And so I did become an “uncle” to Roscoe, unable to resist the term that sounded most perfect for me. “You know, it hadn’t occurred to me the ‘uncle’ thing would feel so right until you said it.”
Jess smiled that cockeyed grin of his. “Did we just have a gender moment?”
Thinking about our queering of the Hallmark moment, my own smile spread. I’d been treating gender as a foundation, moments piled on top of each other to create a base, a solid, unshakeable truth about who I was, when I could’ve just as easily considered these moments independently, as fleeting connections. For Jess and me, gender wasn’t static. I could be “she” at work and “uncle” to the cat and Jess could be a politically identified woman whom I referred to as “he.” “Yeah, I think we just did,” I said.
Later that night, I added a high school photo of my own to the refrigerator, next to Monster’s senior picture and Bec’s prom picture, and the newest one of Jess wearing a white off-the-shoulder dress and holding a bouquet of roses. In my picture, I’m wearing a floral skirt and a baggy peach-colored silk shirt that resembles a T-shirt, as all my dress-up clothes did, my long brown hair flowing over my shoulders. With my facial expression, I’m cheerfully flipping the camera the bird, as if to say, “Come on, what are you looking at?” I may not have been unhappy, or maybe I was just happy enough, but the way I felt back then didn’t matter; my history didn’t define me forever, nor was it laid to rest in some girly graveyard. As I stuck the magnet to my photo, I recognized the young woman in the picture, felt her life inside of me, and knew it would remain there, wherever I went.