About my Passport, which for now has an F on it
I recently crossed a decade, more or less coinciding with my thirties, of transitioning in earnest and didn’t mark the day. Actually I knew, but I’m always shy to tell people what day it was. I haven’t been in a great mood about it.
I wanted to speak a bit to how the documentation issue is playing out for me. My situation strikes me as neither unique nor universal, but I feel I have to walk on eggshells around anything resembling categorization of trans people. So I’ll just speak about myself.
To put it bluntly, I am not a person who was ever going to be “outed” by my driver’s license. I am outed by everything about me. I am ten years in. I did everything. But that is simply how it is. What is closer to the truth is that how you treat trans women is how you will treat me, which is not to say that all trans women are treated the same, but that this hyphenated category is always present in my interactions. It’s that or worse.
I think it’s very possible to be trans and to be treated otherwise, for example to “pass,” to be granted a non-hyphenated form of womanhood in which one’s trans status is either not noticed or forgotten. And I think it is possible to not be granted even this hyphenated and very incomplete form of recognition, to be seen as a free rider on a moment of social change, or a fake, or as someone who might be heading that way but hasn’t left yet. All of this stuff is potentially quite nasty, and it makes sense to me that a simplified identity tends to be advanced as a political line.
A few years ago I was on the train and harassed by a woman who at one point pointed at me and said “she’s a man!” It was a little bit rattling, but afterwards, I thought. Hm. Well. What about that first word? This was someone who had reacted to me as a woman-type-person, but as a despised enemy subtype. I felt the same way later that year when I was raped by a stranger. That I easily come across as a feminine person, but perhaps also as one that is beneath dignity and deserving of violence and punishment and is a threat. That was the year I changed my name. Trips to the court-house, the social security office, letters from psychs on my behalf, the whole nine.
And things got better for me, though not really because of my documents. In truth hardly anyone asks for them. But sure, it seems on the balance better to have papers that match. Perhaps it’s more important that the papers match each other than that they match me. I am often reminded in any case that no matter what the situation is regarding trans people and documents, in the best of times, half of trans people won’t have matching documents simply because they haven’t gotten around to it. And some more won’t have matching documents because they might genuinely not want them. And I think that a system which fails (or attacks) them fails me, and vice versa.
But the more basic change has been that somehow, I entered a stage of life in which people more or less see what I’m trying to do and where I can, I put myself with people who can recognize and respect that. In spite of what you see on the news, that is more and more people. And while I am sometimes stung by how partial or revocable this recognition is in certain areas of life, I feel I can count on people’s kindness, their solidarity, and in many cases their instincts. Because, you know, I am not asking people to believe a falsehood, or not to believe their eyes. Rather my hope, which is often realized, is that people who recognize facts and see what they see, could be committed to a bit of openness in the area of gender, rather than immediately drawing very harsh or prejudicial conclusions.
What you can see from this is that my concept of transition is extremely social. It occurred to me recently that this is part of why I was a trans writer—for me that identity has been practically coextensive with being a trans person. I live in a space somewhere between showing and telling, and have to do both. This is why I seemed always to be speaking or intervening in a conversation, and why I was so attached to the existence of that conversation. And why I find it so despair-inducing when that cultural conversation ceases to function, for me or in the world generally. Some of the substance of my life seems to be at hazard. I think this might go a good way to explaining why I am at times an extremely tough critic and at other times a bit of an uncritical booster or rationalizer. Apologies if I ever gave you one when I needed the other.
I had some occasion to think about this recently when I was using my trans passport in Albania and Turkey, far from the cultures I had known. These are not famously trans-friendly places. And I think one could say also, they were not places where I was confident that I could resolve a dispute in my favor or in favor of walking away. So I operated extremely conservatively, even as I think the reality is that local norms tend to be applied more to locals, while touristically coded foreigners tend to be granted a certain amount of license. There were a few tense moments, but overall I felt pretty safe. To break it down to bathrooms, when I felt androgynous I used the gents, and when I felt I was presenting feminine I used single occupancy facilities or I left. Capisce? I’m not sure what’s actually possible, but I wasn’t up for finding out.
I found that the question that came up for me in Turkey, where I was for about a month, was this one: where do you need to show up as your whole self? The answer to that I’ve generally given is: everywhere, with a few allowances to be like water. And what is it like to be like water? For the duration of this conversation, which is a short one, likely to be our last, we’ll just go with whatever you seem to be perceiving about me.
But water erodes. I recall a time, very early in my transition, when someone was talking to me who genuinely couldn’t see it. Couldn’t see any of it. And bored in any case, I let it go on. That person turned out to be a friend of a friend! Days later, I saw her again, and she asked, “why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t have wanted to misgender you.” I might have answered truthfully, “I was waiting for you to leave.” But that seemed cruel. I don’t remember what I said, nothing so nasty. And I resolved to live with more integrity, since here it had made me too evaluative. I wouldn’t after all see being bored by a person as cause to cut them out of your life or regard them as utterly unworthy of knowing you or incapable of having a different conversation with you than the first. Yet I had in effect made these rather horrible judgments of a kind stranger. I didn’t want to do that anymore and like to think that I mostly haven’t.
One can also say it erodes in other ways. For example, I could picture a life in which I say something like: my true friends understand me, my partner understands me, my friends from the computer understand me. But in my life, not so much. I tie my hair back for safety. I become that guy that likes rock and roll. The friends of Rick Derringer society. Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo, baby. 1974, let’s GO! After a while, you look in the mirror. Who are you?
Or think of makeup. When I haven’t worn it for a while, any amount feels excessive. And when I’m using it a little, it feels as natural as combing my hair. It’s possible to lose your nerve for all kinds of things. Say, when was the last time I wore a dress? Of course it’s true that most of the women I know, trans or not, wear jeans and t-shirts and other unobtrusive gender-neutral kit. And I’m glad to live in that world. But what about this feeling of having lost our nerve. I think it happens all the time.
Memory of visiting a Bosnian nightclub in Chicago in my twenties and turning to a friend to say “I didn’t know Bosnian women were all so tall.” My friend replied, “look at the shoes.” I think that’s the only room I’ve been in before or since where the majority of women wore heels. Never owned a pair myself.
I think it’s easier to approach the questions of integrity and erosion in moments of life that seem a bit imaginary or a bit temporary. If I fail to stand up for my gender in Albania, so much the worse for me in Albania, but I don’t necessarily take that experience home. I get to start over. If I fail to stand up for my gender at home, it raises the question of betraying one’s truth so much that it becomes untrue. It’s all–too–possible to do that. And then one begins to think things like “if I can change this for my convenience, why not also a bit more for the convenience of the people around me.” Perhaps the most convenient thing for all involved is not to be there, or not to be me.
One can see how the slippery slope regress of it all can be a bit of a barrier to thought. We can fall fast into panic or despair or self-compromise to the point of incoherent passivity. And then it occurs to me that my stance as an often tough intellectual type has always been to make the case for mixed feelings as thinkable, as survivable, as not requiring such brittle defences. I do think that. But am I living proof? If you walk a path that risks despair, only to immediately fall into it, you’re not exactly making the case for what you’re doing. And I think that’s where I was for a lot of last year. Walking by the cliffs and immediately off of them. I learned something from that. Which is that approaching these questions requires self-possession which I don’t always have. And which my friends don’t always have. And there are all kinds of ways to lose it. Thankfully, writing is asynchronous.
Perhaps that’s enough for now. Raising the decade glass to all of you who’ve bothered to read this far. Hope to catch you sometime when it’s possible to talk, and that you won’t card me.
Yours,
Wile E. Coyote