Just Girls

by Rachel Gold

  “I can ask people to come to her defense because she was willing to come out to protect me,” I said and I realized what it meant as I said it.

  “That could work,” Mom said.

  “I have to come out.”

  Her eyebrows quirked up and she brushed her hair back behind her ear while she watched me, waiting for me to keep talking.

  “If I’m going to ask a bunch of people who don’t know Tucker to come to her defense, they should know she was hurt protecting me. Plus it’ll take the pressure off her. You know as soon as I come out, that’s going to be the big deal.”

  It had happened often enough in my high school—the minute the word “transsexual” came up in conversation, all the other topics were swept off the table.

  “Sweetie, think about this,” Mom said.

  I was thinking about it. The cogwheels whirred so fast they blurred into each other.

  Was it stupid to come out at a school where some of the students and at least one professor were clearly anti-trans? Of course. But it meant that as soon as I did, all eyes would be on me. I didn’t want to be the center of attention, but if I was, I could use that attention to help Tucker. And if she was willing to come out for me, I couldn’t do any less for her.

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked Mom. “If it gets really bad, I can just transfer to OSU. Tucker’s family doesn’t have money. She could barely afford school and I’m afraid if she drops out she’s going to see it as a huge waste and maybe not try another school. I know you’ll make sure I get a degree. Tucker doesn’t have that.”

  “And you have a group of people who will look out for you and Tucker?” she asked.

  “I have an army,” I said.

  * * *

  My next stop was my sister Amy’s room. Technically now it was just the guest room, but I still thought of it as hers. Her boyfriend was downstairs with Dad and Tucker watching sports on TV and she was trying to decide if there was anything else in the closet full of her stuff that she should take back to school with her.

  I shut the door behind me and sat on the bed. “Can I talk to you about sex?” I asked.

  She flashed me a lopsided grin like Dad’s. “You didn’t want the ‘sexual mores from around the world’ chat from Mom again?”

  On the scale of sisters, Amy was pretty cool. She didn’t hit the top of the scale only because we ended up having nothing in common. She was tall and aristocratic-looking with an interest in world economics and international trade. I was short and with the right eye makeup could look like an anime cartoon of myself, and other than allowing me to buy cool stuff, I didn’t really care about money. But she’d handled the part where her brother turned into her sister with reasonable grace. She started out worried that the kids in her high school would tease her about it and ended up concerned that I was turning out prettier than her. Actually I’d always been prettier than her, it’s just no one felt comfortable remarking on it when they saw me as a boy.

  “I think I’ve memorized that chat,” I said. “But I’d prefer talking to someone who might actually remember the first time they had sex.”

  “You’re thinking about having sex with Shen!” she blurted.

  She’d already heard all about him the first night we were both home. In the past few days, I had showed her a ridiculous number of pictures of him, especially my favorite where he’s wearing a bright turquoise knit wool cap and a scarf with about eight colors in it and smiling more with his eyes than with his mouth.

  “Not right away,” I said. “It’s only been like a month, but I have started to wonder what it would be like and, you know, if it’s going to be okay.”

  “Well, the first time can hurt,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the same for you.”

  “Probably worse,” I admitted.

  She turned so that she faced me completely and really looked at me. Her eyes had the same dark, open quality as Dad’s when a problem got his attention.

  “You have to take it really slow, and I mean really, like six times slower than you think slow means. And he probably won’t last that long anyway, so get ready to try to have sex a few times before you manage it. My first time mainly felt awkward, lots of fumbling and I kept worrying because it didn’t feel good, just uncomfortable. But he liked it okay.”

  “It got better, right? Even with the hurting and all.”

  She laughed and sat down on the bed next to me. “Oh yeah, it got a lot better. He and I talked about it a bunch and did it again when I’d relaxed and it was completely different. But what’s great about it isn’t the intercourse only, it’s the whole thing. You know there’s a lot of stuff you can do that isn’t just intercourse, right?”

  “It does seem like the big deal part,” I admitted.

  “That might be because people don’t know any better,” she said. “They see the whole tab A into slot B mechanism and figure that’s about it, but it really isn’t.”

  I took a deep breath and gave voice to my underlying fear, “What if I can’t have regular sex?”

  “First off,” she said, “there’s no such thing as regular sex.”

  “I’m pretty sure there is.”

  “Do you want me to go get Mom to tell you how many different human cultural views on sex there are?” she asked.

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “Secondly, lots of women are worried that they’re not doing it right or they’re not going to be able to orgasm or whatever. Having good sex is about communication more than the parts. If you care about him and he feels the same way, you just try stuff until you find what you both like.”

  “Try stuff?”

  “Trust me,” she said. “Have you told him you were built in a lab?”

  “No, that didn’t come up.”

  She gave me a hug. “Well, I hope when it does that he’s really cool about it. You’ll probably turn out to be his best ever ’cause it’s better when you have to talk about sex stuff anyway.”

  I rolled my eyes at her and watched her go back to sorting through her closet. I didn’t want to have to talk to Shen about sex. I wanted it to be like it was in movies where it all just flowed smoothly and everyone seemed to be having a really good time doing tab A into slot B. But with Tucker we had talked and that hadn’t felt weird at all. Maybe I could do this…when I was ready. Someday. Maybe.

  * * *

  The hardest part of my whole plan to come out and rally support for Tucker, in my mind at least, was telling Shen. I thought about it all Sunday morning and during the bus ride back to campus. I wanted to tell him before anyone else so that he had time to absorb it and to react.

  I texted him from the bus and asked if he’d come over to my room that evening. He replied that he was so sick of Johnny he was moving his bed into one of the study cubicles of the library, but once he finished that, he’d be right over.

  I had leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner that I brought back with me, so we ate those in my room while telling silly stories from our holiday events. He’d spent the weekend with Johnny’s family, which apparently drove Johnny crazy because Shen spoke fluent Mandarin with Johnny’s parents the whole time and Johnny couldn’t follow most of it.

  “I was actually saying what a clever student he is,” Shen said. “But he thought I was making a dog out of him.”

  “Dogging him?” I offered.

  “Yes, that. He’s very funny because I offer to teach him Mandarin about every month. He says he only wants to learn the insults and pickup lines.”

  “I want to learn the pickup lines,” I said.

  “One Chinese boy isn’t enough?”

  “It’s so I can pick you up over and over again,” I said.

  “Then I will most absolutely teach you.”

  When we finished eating, I sat in the middle of the bed cross-legged against the wall and told him, “I have something serious to talk about.”

  He nodded. “About Tucker?”

  “No, about me.” I breat
hed in quickly before he could say anything and went on. “I want to share something with you about me that’s very…oh heck, I don’t know how to start this.”

  “At the start?” he suggested.

  “I’m a girl who was born with the body of a boy,” I said in a rush. “I felt like a girl but the wires got crossed or whatever and I had this body that didn’t match that. I started transitioning when I was eleven and now I’m completely female, but I thought you should know.”

  I looked at him and down at my lap and at him again. His face was tipped down. He said, “I am ashamed.”

  Tears came to my eyes but he held up a hand and continued. “Ashamed that I gave you the idea that I would be upset about this.”

  It seemed to take an eon for the words to get through my ears and into my brain. And then I had to play them back a few times just to make sure I understood what he’d said. That wasn’t the direction I’d expected at all.

  “Oh,” I managed to say. “You didn’t. It’s just Americans are so weird about it and I thought Chinese culture was pretty conservative.” I was so surprised that I went back to rambling, or at least it felt like I was.

  “China is bigger than America,” he said. “There is no one way we are. I come from the south, near Thailand. I spent vacations in Thailand and I have friends who are kathoey. They’re wonderful people.”

  “Kathoey” was a Thai word that could refer generally to transgender women, very effeminate gay men who lived as women, and sometimes to transsexual women, though as I understood it they had other words for that too. It could be loosely translated as “girlie-boy” or “lady-boy.” I wasn’t sure if Shen thought I belonged in that category too now or if he was just saying that he had transgender friends so he wasn’t totally ignorant about the subject. I thought I’d better clarify.

  “I’m not a lady-boy,” I said. “I’m a woman.”

  “I know that, but why are you making it so clear for me? Will I be making medical decisions for you?” His eyes sparkled with humor. “Ah no, I see, we must have this talk because you’ve decided you will have sex with me. Now this is the best conversation ever.”

  I punched him in the shoulder. He chuckled.

  “I’m not ready for sex,” I said.

  “I was teasing. It’s too soon. I like this dating and spending time. It’s only that when I’m with my Thai friends, with kathoeys, it’s always ‘Hey, what do you have down there?’ from strangers. I find it distasteful. I don’t want to be one of those people.”

  I lunged across the bed and hugged him hard. He smelled like warm cedar, sunlight, and black pepper. I nuzzled the side of his neck and that turned into a kiss. He pulled me further into his lap and we made out for a while until I had to push him away so I could catch my breath.

  “I really like you,” I told him, leaning against his chest with his arm around my back and my arms around his waist.

  “Same,” he said.

  “I wanted to tell you that because it’s part of who I am and I want you to be able to get to know me completely—but also because I think I’m going to have to come out to a bunch of people soon.”

  “Oh?”

  I moved off his lap and back onto the bed as I told him my plan and asked for his help in setting it up. When I finished, he said, “You are more clever even than Johnny.”

  “Not bad for a girl,” I quipped.

  He rolled his eyes at me. “You know I didn’t say that.”

  “Sorry, I’m too used to it, or maybe I’m not used to it enough. It’s very strange sometimes. I lived as a boy until I was fourteen because my parents thought it would be safer. And sometimes it’s really weird to go from one to the other.”

  “I can’t imagine it,” he said.

  “I used to compete in the Central Ohio Science Fair every year. They had it in the late fall and when I was a junior, after I was able to start living as a girl all the time, I was at this science fair with my project and one of the judges came up to me and looked at my project and asked, ‘Is your brother here this year?’”

  “You don’t have a brother,” Shen said and then he got it. “Oh, he thinks you are the sister to the boy he met last year.”

  “Exactly. I didn’t know what to say, but before I had to say anything, he went on talking about how great my brother’s project was and how much promise it had for solar energy use in the future and would I please convey that to my brother because he really hoped this promising young man would continue in the field of science.”

  “No,” Shen said in disbelief.

  “Absolutely. So I said this project was the continuation of my brother’s work and what did he think. He said the ideas were all great but there were some obvious flaws in the execution, but I should keep up the good work.”

  “But you were the same person.”

  “Not to him. Suddenly I was just a pretty girl trying to do something obviously too hard for her instead of a promising young man. It was the same work, though, and it was really good. I took third place for it and I didn’t even place the year before, but that was probably because all the Chinese kids graduated.”

  “Assuredly,” he said. “Ah wait, is this all a distraction to keep me out of the science fair?”

  Grinning at him, I said “Assuredly.” I held out my hand and, when he took it, dragged him over to my part of the bed and kissed him with all the distracting power I could muster.

  * * *

  I set the Monday night meeting in the Student Union because I figured we’d get twenty or thirty students and that’s a lot for any common room. But when I got there, the big room was packed with people. My first impulse was to turn and run, but Shen came up and took my hand.

  “We sent the invitation to our list and some members forwarded it,” he said. “That’s okay, right?”

  “It’s great.” My voice squeaked with anxiety.

  “Some are from other schools. Will we still have roles for them?” he asked.

  “We can make them up.”

  Johnny came up next to Shen. “Hey, this is a crazy turnout. You want me to warm them up for you?”

  “Would you? I’d love that.”

  He winked and bounded up onto the raised divider between the seating area and the serving area.

  “Hey! Hey!” he shouted a few times until a general silence fell over the room. “I’m Johnny Han, welcome to the biggest, baddest real-world game ever played in the state of Ohio and maybe the world. I think you all saw the email, but if you’re here for some other reason you can either stay and join in or go eat on the second floor ’cause we’re taking over this place. Right?”

  The crowd gave a terrifyingly loud cheer.

  “Now we called this game Kind 2 B Cruel because we’re just not that creative. How many of you played our Cruel 2 B Kind game earlier this year or the one last year?”

  A bunch of hands went up.

  “Great, I need you to forget all those rules. This is nothing like that.”

  They all laughed.

  “For those of you who didn’t see it, I’m going to read the invitation and then introduce you to your Game Mastermind.”

  He pulled a folded paper out of the back pocket of his jeans and opened it. He was great at this; no one in the room made a sound. A few of them shifted but all eyes stayed focused on him.

  “Kind 2 B Cruel is a multiday, multilocation game of fierce protection and protest,” he read loudly. “We have a student who has been attacked more than once by other students and teachers for standing up for the rights of transsexual students. Now the Student Conduct Committee is not paying attention to her complaints and failing to protect her on our campus. If you choose to play, you will be divided into teams with specific missions to protect this student and raise awareness of the rights of transsexual women to be treated fairly—plus a number of other women’s rights issues. If you’re not cool with feminism or trans rights, you’re encouraged not to play. Please, no trolls or haters.”

  Joh
nny added that last bit. Trolls were members of online communities who came into games just to rile up the people trying to play. As he read that part, I saw a group of kids at a table to the side get up and walk toward the door. A few other people saw them go and were emboldened to follow: two got up by themselves and another whole table stood up and went toward the nearest door.

  About ten people total walked out. I didn’t know how to feel about that. I was glad they didn’t stay and heckle or act shitty, but at the same time it hurt see them go. They were willing to come out for a social justice game, but not one that was about transsexual women.

  “We clear?” Johnny yelled.

  “Clear!” the crowd shouted.

  “Then let me present your Game Mastermind, Ella Ramsey!”

  I was afraid that if I tried to bound up onto the platform the way Johnny had, I’d fall and land right on my head, so I walked up slowly and let him give me a hand up.

  “Hi everyone,” I said and saw people in the back making the thumbs-up “more volume” gesture.

  “Hi everyone!” I yelled and braced myself for having to come out at top volume. “Let me tell you what’s been happening.” I pointed to where Tucker was standing, leaning against one of the big room’s pillars. “That’s Tucker. At the start of the school year she heard some girls being mean about a new transsexual student at the school. Tucker thought it was unfair for this student to show up and immediately be the focus of a witch hunt of harassment—so she told them she was the transsexual student.”

  Every head in the room turned toward Tucker.

  “The thing is, she’s not trans,” I yelled and the heads turned back toward me. “But once she said that she was, she started getting shit from other students and a TA. She got her dorm door spray-painted, she was beat up and threatened, got a crappy grade from a class that she did good work for, and more. All that because she was willing to stand up for a scared, vulnerable transsexual woman student.”