Reading At The Doctor's Office

Today I went to my doctor for a follow-up.  His office is across the street from a high school.  


I'm thinking now of one of the first times I went there.  I had not yet begun to take hormones or to live full-time as a woman, though I was wearing a skirt and heels that day.  Well, I left the doctor's office around 2:30 on a Friday afternoon--which was, of course, when the students were leaving school for the weekend. Ok, i thought, here comes my first real-life test.


A throng of teenagers was walking toward me.  I simply walked straight ahead, without agression although with some trepidation.  The advancing wall of kids parted in front of me like the Red Sea did for Charlton Heston/Moses in The Ten Commandments.  I felt myself relax and my body motions becoming more fluid.  Some of the kids said "hello;" a couple even said "good afternoon."  I nodded with a smile and waved.


"Who is she?" one of the kids asked.

"I think she teaches here."


"Really?  What?"


"I think she's English."


He meant, of course, that I teach, not am, English.  His reply amazed me, and scared me a bit:  I wondered whether I had a sign on me that I didn't know about.  


And there I was, worried about being "read" as a man.  Well, I guess they read me as something.  I can only hope they read their books so well.

Getting Out: Anonymity In Chelsea

Another gorgeous spring day when I couldn't ride and all I could do was read a bunch of papers.  So what's a girl to do?


Well, between papers, I did some saddle shopping.  It's scary to have to start over again, trying a whole bunch of different saddles.  Well, I hope I don't have to do that.  I'm looking at the ones with the cutouts:  what are sometimes called the "donut" saddles.  They're what Dr. Ronica recommends.  I want something that fits, but I don't want hideous graphics, either.  That was one nice thing about the Brooks saddles:  They always looked good.


It seemed like everyone in New York was riding bikes today.  Everyone except me, that is.


I took some time off (for good behavior?) to run an errand.  I sold two of my Brooks saddles on eBay and I promised the guys who bought them that I'd ship them tomorrow.  This semester, I've had some time late Monday afternoons when there weren't department or college meetings.  But then I remembered that tomorrow I have an appointment with the ophthalmologist after work.  So, I decided to go to the main post office in Manhattan to mail those saddles.  


That post office is the only one I know of that's open on Sundays.  Besides, it's a beautiful building, and it's right across Eighth Avenue from Penn Station and Madison Square Garden.   All you have to do is walk in any direction from it to find something to amuse, annoy, shock, entertain or endanger you.  


So I strolled down Eighth Avenue toward, then past, the Fashion Institute of Technology.  I taught there one semester--a geological age ago, it seems.  While there, I dated another part-time faculty member who was divorced and about a decade older than me.  Back in those days, I was the "before" photo:  a triangular torso and a shock of a beard along my jawline and chin.  I really fit in!


Anyway, one day, she and I went to an exhibit that was held at FIT.  I forget what, exactly, the theme was, but I recall seeing dresses from 200 years ago or thereabouts in France and England.  I pointed to one.  "That one's beautiful," I exclaimed.  Catching myself, I intoned, "I'd be interested to know how they made it."


"No," Lea said.  "You want to wear it."


That was the only time that my gender identity ever figured, in any way, into any of our conversations.  But, it seemed that it was rearing its head any time I entered or left the campus.  You see, it's near the end of Chelsea.  Because I was in such good shape in those days, I had at least one man approach me for sex any time I walked that stretch of Eighth Avenue.  


And, when I first started to venture out "as" Justine, some guy would hit on me.  Some of those men took me for a drag queen, if not a very glamorous one.  (Wearing lots of glitter never appealed to me.)  I don't think they were the sorts of guys who liked transsexual women:  It's been my experience that such men usually aren't gay.   The guys who were hitting on me in those days thought I was one of them.  I might've spent the night with one or two of them, but in those days I wouldn't simply because I didn't want to see myself as anything but a heterosexual male--albeit one who knew that A-line didn't refer to a segment of the New York City transit system.  


Today I walked down that way for no particular reason except that it's pleasant on a day like today.  (Then again, what isn't?)  I practically brushed elbows with dozens of gay men who were coming as I was going, or vice versa, depending on your point of view.  


Not one of them paid me any mind--at least not that I noticed.  What's really ironic, though, is that it didn't upset me.  At other times, I fret when I think I'm not being noticed, at least a little.  Lots of us go through that when we know we're aging and we don't look the way we once did.  Then again, I don't have a memory of myself as young and pretty.  I wasn't really good-looking as a man; whatever attractiveness I had came from my physical conditioning.


So...I walked down eight city blocks and not one man paid attention to me.  Funny, how that, in other circumstances, could be a source of sadness for me or other women.  Or it could cause us to feel relieved, especially if the streets were in a rougher neighborhood or the guys were drunk.  But today I experienced what may be the ultimate irony:  I walked by hundreds of men, and they walked by me without giving me a second glance, or even noticing me in the first place---and I took it as an affirmation of my womanhood.  Who'd've guessed that I could go to Chelsea to be sexually anonymous?!

St. Vincent's Hospital: What Will They Do Now?

Last night I was really, really tired.  I am now, too.  But at least I don't have an early morning class tomorrow, as I did today.


So what did I do yesterday?  I rode to work, then to Chelsea (right across the street from the Fashion Institute of Technology, to be exact) for a meeting with SAGE and representatives from a few other organizations that provide services to transgendered people.  Those reps numbered about a dozen; I was meeting five of them for the first time.  The others included a couple of people I hadn't seen in some time and who didn't know I'd had my surgery.


Dwayne, the very first person to whom I came out, was also there.  So was James, who participated in the workshop I did last month but whom I hadn't seen for at least three or four years before that.  In fact, the last time I saw him before the workshop, he was a she--a "butch," to be precise--who was assigned the name "Jane" along with the "F" on his birth certificate.  Some--including James himself--might argue that he hasn't changed that much.  From what I saw, I'd agree, and mean it as a compliment.  He's still smart and sensitive--and tough yet vulnerable.  He even looks more or less as he did before:  as one of those men in late middle age or early in his "golden years" who's handsome, not in a pretty-boy sort of way, but in the way of someone whose face and eyes are entirely his own and as unique as the way he sees through those eyes.


I wonder how he sees me through those eyes.  In some ways. we're opposites.   First, and most obvious, is that he's FTM while I'm MTF.  Also, while he was living as a "butch," I was living, for all intents and purposes, as a straight man, even though I was, as some might say, a "switch hitter."  


We had supper in a Mexican restaurant in the  Village.  Afterward, I walked with him back to his apartment on the far western part of Chelsea.  Along the way, we passed St. Vincent's Hospital, which is in the process of closing.  Tomorrow ambulances will no longer bring any but psychiatric patients to the emergency room; all of the inpatient services will end in the middle of the month.  


Three ambulances were waiting in front of the hospital.  Their drivers looked shell-shocked.  They didn't look like they were new to the job:  I'm sure they've seen some terrible things.  The same is probably true for the two nurses we saw propped on the edge of the building.  They were on a break of some sort, but they--understandably--didn't look relaxed.  I leaned toward the more petite of the two and said, "I'm really sorry for what's happening to you guys."


"Thank you."  A tear dripped down her gaunt cheek.


"It's nice to know people like you care," said the other.


"Yes," James replied.  "You've been there for us."


The more petite nurse, who looked to be about my age, recognized James.  "You were here not too long ago."  James nodded.


"Where are you going to go after this?" the other, who had darker hair, wondered.


"Where are a lot of people going to go?" James sighed.


I would bet that at least half of the people in that meeting James and I attended had used, at some time or another, St.Vincent's.  Dwayne said it was the "go to" hospital when he was coming out as a teenager during the early '60's.  "You went out, you knew you were going to get beat up," he told me once.  "And you knew you were going to end up in St. Vincent's."


Most other hospitals wouldn't have treated Dwayne, James or any number of other people.  They were too poor or queer or something else for some of the other hospitals, and they didn't have insurance for any number of reasons.  In Dwayne's and James's cases, it had to do with the fact that they were too busy surviving to get a job that offered insurance, or one doing anything that would make them enough money to buy a policy.  They both left their home as teenagers to escape from the sexual and other kinds of abuse they experienced.  That is also the case of Clarence, another trans man I know.  All of them lived on the streets for long periods of time.  James and Clarence came to New York with no money, no friends and no credentials, educational or otherwise.  In fact, Clarence told me once, he couldn't read when he got off the bus in the Port Authority Terminal.


We talked about that, among other things, at the meeting in which James and I participated.  Among LGBT people--the T's in particular--it seems that there are extremes in education.  We have disproportionate numbers of people with advanced degrees, but we also have many people who didn't finish high school and even some, like Terrence when he first came to New York, are illiterate.  And we also have quite a few people who have learning disabilities of one sort or another.


It's hard not to think that some of those learning disabilities and educational deficiencies have at least something to do with the violence too many of us experience.  I know too many other LGBT people who stopped attending school because they were getting beat up or even were experiencing sexual violence.  


A good number of those people have used St. Vincent's.  Where will they go now?  What will James, Clarence and Dwayne do?


What would I do?