Goodbye To All That? To What?

At this time last year, I was less than three months away from my surgery.  As you might expect, I was, in some ways, saying "good-bye" to being a man--even though for all intents and purposes, I had not lived as one for several years.  I had a very clear sense that  not just a phase, but a life I had once lived, was about to "become history," as people liked to say during my youth.  


I was excited though, surprisingly, not very nervous.  (When Marci Bowers called my mother just after my surgery, she remarked on how calm I was.)  In one way I was almost overprepared, as I had been going to support groups and therapy, and had lived full-time as a woman for almost six years.  But, at the same time, I had no idea of what to expect.  I recall that various women I knew--and I-- compared that time to the later stages of a pregnancy, for I was about to "give birth to myself."


Now more than nine months have passed since my surgery and I can't help but to think that some change or another is going to happen in my life.  I'm not sure of what it might be, but I get the sense that it will be major, or at least relatively so.  


I have talked about my job and workplace.  Perhaps one or both will change.  Sometimes I wish I had started a new job after my surgery,  but I realize that being in the place in which I'd worked the previous four years was probably good for me:  I'm not sure that making another major change at that time in my life would have been beneficial.  It's was probably good, in terms of my physical healing as well as my emotional state, that I didn't have to adjust to yet another transition.  


However, in one of my life's more perverse ironies, some of the people with whom I used to share lunch, and sometimes confidences, feel like strangers to me now.  I suppose that might have happened anyway; after all, most friendships (at least in my own life and those of people I know) have lifespans of their own.  Some simply stop working after a certain amount of time, or after whatever the friends had in common is no longer, for whatever reasons, a part of the relationship.   Or one friend simply "outgrows" the other:  I first  noticed that the only time I revisited my high school after I graduated. 


Julian, an adjunct instructor who's about ten years older than I am, even said--without my asking or prompting--that I have "outgrown" a lot of the people at the college, and possibly the college itself.  He became an instructor after technology rendered obsolete the business he used to own.  Like me, he earned a Master of Fine Arts, which is supposed to be a "terminal" degree.  However, he (also like me) doesn't want to pursue a PhD, for a variety of reasons, some of which are like mine.   Somehow I think he's outgrown more than a few people and situations along the way.


I'm thinking now of Belle, who was in charge of the office of academic advisement when I was an advisor.  She left, she said, because the college in which I work is a place where "people go to die."  I'm coming to see what she meant, and why she's urged me to get out of that college.  


Making a major change in your life can make a stagnant, stultifying place even more so.  I guess that's the lesson I'm supposed to learn from my current experience.


Then again, the change might not be in my workplace or job.  Could it be in my love life?  Or will I get my book published?   Or will it be something else wonderful or terrible or both?  I guess I'll find out in the coming months.

Learning The Laws Of Their Languages

Today I did something I normally try not to do:  I went to the post office on a Saturday.  The line was about as long as I expected it to be and, after spending about fifteen minutes on it (actually a bit less than I expected), I was served by the rudest employee in the post office.  At least he was efficient.


As I stood on the queue, a man waited in front of me.  He was rather sexy, in an unshaven, rough-hewn, fatigues-and-field jacket sort of way.  He was also as fidgety as a kid waiting for a meal in a restaurant.  Everything, it seemed, annoyed him--especially customers who spent more than five seconds with a postal clerk.  In a way, I could understand his reactions:  After all, who wants to spend more time than is absolutely necessary to mail a package, especially on Saturday?  He seemed particularly exasperated when an older woman who was indecisive and didn't speak Queens English, much less The Queen's English and spent an inordinate amount of time at one of the windows, which held up those of us who were waiting on line.


He groaned and looked around him for sympathy.  "I don't believe this," he growled.


"Yeah.  Does she have anything better to do with her life?"


"Does she have a life?" he wondered.


Then, for the next few minutes, as the line snaked us toward the clerks' windows, he grumbled and let out sighs.  Finally, he said, "I'm sorry if I seem a little jumpy."


"Oh, that's quite all right," I nearly whispered, with a trace of a simper.


"But I'm not normally like this."  Somehow I knew that he didn't think I believed him.  Not that it mattered, really.  


"I've been really, really jumpy."


"We all have times like that," I tried to reassure him.


"Well, I've been like this for a month now, ever since I stopped smoking."


"Congratulations!  Whatever you're going through now will be worth it."


"I know," he said.  "I feel better already."


"And you'll feel even better...and save a bunch of money."


"Those are the reasons why I quit," he explained. "But it's really tough."


"Yes, people don't realize how addictive nicotine is," I assured him.


"Thank you for understanding."


"Oh, it's no problem.  I lived with someone who was withdrawing from nicotine, so I understand."


"You are very kind."


"No, just..."


"NEXT!"  The clerk called him to the window.  He mailed his package and left as I was walking up to the next available window.  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him leaving; he waved to me.


Ever since I started my transition, I've had more and more encounters with strangers who revealed one thing or another to me, or who hugged me or cried on my shoulder.  I always wonder what they're seeing in me.  


I think that man knew that I found him attractive.  And the young woman who did my nails last week must have known that I was, shall we say, persuadable.  I'm certainly not upset that he talked to me or that she propped her head on my shoulder, any more than either of them seemed to mind the attention I was giving them.  But, even though I can "read" their intentions and desires, I still feel as if I'm learning how to act around people who share moments with me the way they did.  It seems that the rules for these encounters are somehow different from the ones that governed the interactions I used to have.  


Give me another fifty years and I'll figure it all out.

When Was The Past?

I must admit:  Today I didn't do much besides my laundry and cleaning.  It seems that I spend more and more of my days off recovering from work.  I went to bed and woke up late, and it started to the day's intermittent rain began not long after I had my cup of tea.  So I didn't have much incentive to go out, especially since Bruce was too sick to do lunch, as we had planned.


I don't know whether it has to do with  my gender change, or simply getting older (or sober)--or, for that matter, whether it has to do with anything at all--but "back in the day" Bruce and I would drink together.  Now we do lunch.  If you want to take that as a dissertation topic, be my guest. All I know is that one of the reasons why we're still friends is that we were able to make that transition from drinking buddies to friends who share lunch.


Lately I find myself thinking more and more about my previous expereinces, rather than merely my past.  What is the difference between them?  It seems that I don't learn much from the past.  Then again, most people don't, or so it seems.  On the other hand, experiences (as opposed to Experience with a capital E) are really the only teachers we have.  Or so it seems to me.


The past is always a sort of grab bag or potpourri.  There are some treasures in it, but there are also things that lose their relevance and usefulness.  Those things might outlive their obsolescence, but only because someone holds on to, and perpetuates, them--sometimes unconsciously.  I know I've done plenty of that.


Some of those things that lose their pertinence are the reactions to, or other ways of coping with,  things we may have experienced at one time but do not not encounter now.  I think now of so much of the anger I used to carry with me.  It helped me to survive, among other things, sexual molestation and attacks.  I may very well not be alive now were it not for the rage that roiled in me for so long.


But what happens when all you have are survival skills and you're in a situation when your survival is more certain but all you have are those survival mechanisms and responses?    That sounds like a script for becoming one of those perpetually angry people you run into sometimes.  I guess that's how manipulative people become manipulative, too.   Some of those people may have grown up in--much as it pains me to use this term--dysfunctional homes or other situations.  


In other words, they are living in their pasts.  And, for them, the present is nothing but an endless repetition of the past.  They have never learned any new ways of responding to new people and situations. Instead, they yell and throw tantrums because they came from homes where everybody did that and therefore learned no other way of getting what they want.  Or they knew they could get what they wanted by sneaking around people, and they think that nobody means what he or she says; when someone says "no," there's always a way around it.  I've had more than a few students who were like that:  They didn't believe that a professor would actually drop them from his or her class, or that they would fail, for not attending classes and doing assignments.


What people in situations very often don't realize is that whoever called their bluff or wouldn't negotiate with them may actually have something to offer that they want and could never have found in their pasts.  I think now of a time when I was upset with a class full of freshmen.  They had been a good group of young people until the day we had a library information session.  The librarian who conducted the session has rubbed more than a few people the wrong way, so I could understand why they didn't like the way she talked to them.  However, I pointed out, that is no reason to be disrespectful. 


When I paused one wide-eyed young woman exclaimed, "Wow!  You weren't yelling at us. You didn't raise your voice at all."


At that moment, I would have loved to have known what her home life or previous schooling were like.  What was interesting was that after that day, she regularly came to talk to me about situations she'd encountered in the college, her boyfriend and any number of other dilemmas a young person faces. Along the way, I could see her becoming more confident about herself.


I get the feeling that I'm going through a similar process myself.  That's one reason why I think of a change in workplace scenery.  I realize that I'm in a place where I react to dysfunction rather than respond to appeals to reason and sensibility as well as sensitivity.  That's not how I want to spend my life.  I now realize that, for me,  living in the past in such a way is not a cause of, or recipe for, depression:  It is depression.  Trust me on that one:  By every clinical and medical definition, I was depressed for the majority of my life before I started my transition.


And the remedy for that is not to live in this moment, or any that will follow, as if it were the past.  In a way, I can't, anyway, because when I think about it, that past wasn't really mine.  Only my experiences were.  It seems that a good part of living involves knowing which ones are useful.  And the ones that aren't have to be gotten rid of like those undergarments I no longer had use for after my surgery.

Riding Home

I rode to work again today.  I must be regaining my form, or  something, because men were slowing down their cars as they passed me.  Three different guys complimented my legs.  And a woman in a BMW said she liked my skirt.


All right.  I'm making small steps toward one of my goals:  that of becoming the best and most stylish cyclist in the world. Both are terribly subjective judgments, I know.  But just about everything I do is based on, or evaluated by, subjective judgment.  What would my life be like if more of it were measurable in ways that could be rendered into statistics?


Let's see:  I rode about ten miles to work and another nine to get home--on my 1968 Raleigh Sports women's bike.  It's a 21 inch frame on 26 inch wheels, with three speeds in a Sturmey Archer rear hub.  My skirt--I won't tell you what size it is!  Now I'll be merely factual:  It's a skirt made up of three tiers of a crepe polyester material that's covered with a pretty interloc print in shades of purple/magenta, coral/peach, brown and a shade that's somewhere between cream and gray.  The bottom of each tier is ruffled. When I wear it, as I did today, with my deep pink jewel-neck top and purple overshirt with three-quarter sleeves, people say that I look as if I'd lost weight.    But that's not the only reason I wear that outfit.


I left work at 6:46 this evening.  I took a slightly shorter route than I did in going to work because I wanted to get home before it got dark--or rained.  I did feel a couple of drops as I pedalled from Jackson Heights into Woodside, about a mile from my place.  The drops turned into a sprinkle by the time I crossed underneath the Amtrak line near Northern Bouleard, then stopped just before I crossed underneath the elevated tracks for the "N" and "W" lines.   On the other side of those tracks--on 31st Street and Broadway in Astoria--is Parisi's Bakery, where I bought a small "twist" loaf.   It's only three blocks from my apartment, so I was no longer worried about getting caught in the rain.


The ride home gave me an odd sense of deja vu that had nothing to do with my familiarity with the route.  Rather, I found myself recalling rides in which I'd dodged, or remained one or two steps ahead of, rain. I've done plenty of those in coastal areas in which I've lived, and I've also done them on the multiday (and multiweek) bike trips I've taken in France and other places.


Now I shudder (or, on occasion, laugh) when I recall how much time I spent "playing chicken" with, or simply dodging, one thing or another.  In those days, I was running from, even when I was going home, wherever and whatever happened to me along the way.  


Tonight, at least I made it home, even if I had been finishing something that someone else started on a bike that I didn't have last year.  Even though the fit still isn't perfect, it felt just fine.

It's Not Because You're A ....

I didn't ride my bike yesterday:  I didn't have enough time to get to the doctor after finishing work.  The sad thing is that I almost didn't make the appointment because I almost didn't get out of work at the time I'm supposed to.


And I fully expect that someone went looking for me long after my appointed hours, didn't find me and will make--or has already made--a complaint about me.  Then my department chair, the provost or the legal compliance officer will give me a lecture, if not a dressing-down.  And the fact that I've stayed until nearly midnight on days when my commitments ended at 4 pm will be conveniently forgotten.

Heaven forbid that I should leave workplace when I'm done with whatever work I had to do, whether or not said work was in my job description.

I work all those hours and go well above all expectations explicit and implicit expectations, yet I make less than a bus driver.  And people from whom one normally believe an account of current weather conditions suddenly have more credibility than the Pope once had among Catholics when they make a complaint about me.  The powers-that-be insist that it has nothing to do with my being transgender.  Uh-huh, and Hemingway accidentally shot himself while cleaning his gun.


Is it any wonder that I'm always tired, or seem to be?  Wait a minute:  I didn't feel as tired after riding as I do now.  And, after pedalling there and bike, I don't have the kind of anger I've been expressing.  Could it be that I'm having "withdrawal" symptoms--from missing one day of riding after riding two days in a row? 

On the other hand, a lot of other profs and employees at the college feel the way I feel--or so they've told me, without my prompting or asking.   So maybe it really isn't about being trans, after all.  It's great to know that I'm in such an egalitarian place.

Two In a Row, Nine Months Later.

Today I did something I haven't done since June:  I rode my bike to work for the second consecutive day.


When I was parking my bike, Vanessa, a former student of mine, was sitting by a window in the college's day care center.  "I'm so happy to see you on your bike again!" she cooed.  A girl who looked to be three or four years old said, Lady on bike!"


Yesterday was cool but very bright:  The sort of early spring day that's like an Easter Sunday one might remember from very early childhood and to which, if one is very fortunate, he or she will return in dreams.  About a dozen or so years ago, my mother made an album for me.  On a couple of pages are photos of visits to grandparents and great-aunts and uncles on Easter Sundays past.  Whenever I look at them, I can practically taste the cool, crisp air and feel the sunshine.  


The skies thickened with clouds and threatened rain  and early afternoon.  Although I saw a few people with umbrellae during my lunch break, the sidewalks, paths and streets were all as dry as they were yesterday. 


And I made it to the college on my bike!    Now I'm even more tired than I was yesterday.    But I couldn't be happier, at least about the fact that I made it back...just in time to fall asleep!

How Many Degrees of Separation?

Today I went for a ride with Barbara and Sue, my sometime riding buddies.  I first started riding with them during my second year of living as Justine.  I met them, ironically enough, through the now ex-wife of  a guy with whom I used to ride "back in the day."


Funny how "back in the day" is--in terms of my own life, not to mention the greater continuum of time--not so long ago, really.  About ten years ago I was riding with Sheldon and a few of  his friends on some days, and on others I was riding with Mark, the husband of Carolyn, who introduced me to Barbara and Sue.  A few months ago, I learned, Carolyn left Mark because of another woman.  And Carolyn is the reason why Mark's first ex-wife left him.


All right:  I'm not going to write an expose on the secret lives of cyclists or some such thing.  Mark and a few other men I know give lie to a rumor that circulates every ten years or so:  that cycling causes male impotency.     If anything, it makes real men out of would-be men.  I know:  After all, as they say, it takes a real man to be a tranny.  Or, at least, it takes balls to be a woman.


Anyway...Barbara, Sue toand I rode from the Brooklyn Bridge Plaza out to the Canarsie Pier, by way of Ozone Park.  Yes, that way is not "as the crow flies."  But none of us were crows the last time I looked.


The Canarsie Pier itself offers quite the panoramic view of Jamaica Bay as it opens out to the ocean to the east and toward Breezy Point, Coney Island and Sandy Hook, New Jersey to the west and southwest.  You can forget that you're in Brooklyn, or any other part of New York City when you're on the pier--and looking toward the water.  Only a few hundred yards in back of the pier is the Belt Parkway and, on the other side of it, Rockaway Parkway and the neighborhood for which the pier is named.  And, near the entrance to the pier is one of those buildings that really looks like an oversized gazebo and is found on boardwalks.  Hot dog stands and such usually operate from such edifices, but the one on Canarsie Pier looks as if it's been vacant for about ten years.    At least I don't go to the pier for the architecture.


I sent Barbara and Sue on their way from the pier.  Actually, Barbara had to go to some family function and Sue had her business to take care of, and I didn't want to keep them. Plus, I wanted to spend some time on the pier, to which I used to ride at least a couple dozen times a year but hadn't seen since well before my surgery.


The first time I went to the pier was about twenty-five years ago.  I rode there with Mike and Gregory, with whom I worked at American Youth Hostels.  Gregory had lived in Canarsie all of his life and could recall when truck farms near the pier supplied stores and restaurants in the city.  He also took me on the one and only sea kayak ride I've ever experienced.  It's something I'd do again; I haven't only because I haven't had a friend or even riding buddy who has a kayak and access to a launch since I lost touch with Gregory.


As for Mike...I wonder whether or not he's alive.  I hadn't thought about him or Gregory for a long time until now.  Gregory was about ten years older than me; Mike was about my parents' age.  The last time I saw him, he was not much older than I am now. Last I heard--about ten years ago--he was on dialysis.  I heard about it from Holly, who worked with us in those days and whom I didn't see for about fifteen years until I bumped into her in a bookstore on the Upper West Side.  I have absolutely no idea of where she is now.  


I once introduced her to Morris, whom I met while working at AYH.  After they split up, Holly declared herself to be a lesbian.  Of course, there is absolutely no cause-and-effect relationship there! Still, I have made no attempt to be a matchmaker since then.  


It's really odd to think about those times.  I did a lot of things I enjoyed, and I did them with people whose company I enjoyed.  But I was still dreadfully unhappy.   It got to a point that I would warn people who wanted to develop friendships or other kinds of relationships with me that no matter what they did, they couldn't make me happy, so they shouldn't even try.  


I will probably never see any of those people again.  It's probably just as well:  Resuming friendships, much less love relationships, after a long hiatus has never worked for me.   I guess people never can do things they did "back in the day."  Or, at least, they can't do those things in the same way, with the same people as they did the first time around.  Then again, they may not want to.  I wouldn't, simply because of the price that my past extracted from me--and, sometimes, from the people who were involved in it.  


After I sent Barbara and Sue on their way, I sat on a wooden bench on Canarsie Pier, among fathers and sons who cast hooks and lines or cages with chicken necks inside them, and among the young lovers and old reminiscers.  None of them know me now; none knew me "back in the day."  I am happy for that.

Nine Months: A Season of Change

Three days ago, on Wednesday, it had been nine months since my surgery.  I am thinking now about when I was nine months from my surgery, back in October of 2008.  Funny, how that seems so long ago.  What's even weirder is that somehow I know I haven't changed much, if at all, except in my body.  But it seems that much, if not everything, is changing around me.

In one sense, that's literally true:  I'm living in a different place now.  It's not at all far from where I had been living, but it feels very different.  The block on which I had been living was definitely more blue-collar--although, ironically enough, the Noguchi Museum was on one end of it and Socrates Sculpture Park was less than another block away.  And the light was very different:  The combination of small brick and slate houses and apartment buildings along with the factories and workshops--some active--on the adjacent streets that parallel the river gave the light a quality that could seem as spacious as those lofts but as defined as the spaces between the sharp edges of the steel exteriors of some of the buildings that contained those lofts.  On a rainy or misty day, the light--an almost steely gray--could soften the edges of those buildings and make the horns of tugboats seem like serene echoes of the currents those boats plied while imposing a silence, like that of a Sunday during wartime, over the streets.  

Here, on the other hand, the light is more of a constant stream, like the traffic along the street on which I live during rush hour.  And if the street on which I lived had order, this one has more organization:  It's lined with townhouses, with apartment buildings near each end.  Around the corner is Broadway, along which I shop for food and household items, order and pick up Chinese, Mexican, Middle Eastern or Japanese meals, get my nails done and have my shoes cleaned and repaired.  Two blocks down Broadway is the subway; along Broadway is a bus that connects this street with the one on which I used to live as well as with two other subway lines and a few other neighborhoods.   Every morning, one can see the streams of teenagers headed in one direction--toward Long Island City High School, which is just a block and a half from the Socrates Sculputre Park.  And one will see another stream of people, mostly young, but some of whom are around my age, headed in the other direction--toward the subways and their jobs.  Most of them aren't dressed for blue-collar jobs:  Some are in suits, or at least white or light shirts or blouses, dark bottoms and dressy shoes, while others are in the sorts of outfits one associates with "creative" young people.  

In some odd way, this street and the ones nearby remind me a bit of the Paris neighborhood in which I lived.  I think it has something to do with the scale of the buildings and streets, and of the kinds of people I see coming and going.

But there has been more than a change in scenery during the past few months.  I've also noticed that people are relating to me--for better and worse--in ways that I hadn't expected.  As an example, James and I spent a good bit of time walking through the Village and Chelsea a couple of nights ago.  Our urban soujourn was interrupted every couple of blocks with spontaneous hugs.  He and I met several years ago.  I have always liked him, but I can honestly say that I've really gotten to know him just recently.  What I am seeing in him is--I hate to use this term, as it's been rendered so banal--an intensely spiritual but completely non-religious person.  In other words, he's turning out to be the sort of person with whom I can have a real conversation about things that matter.

When I first met him, he was just starting to transition into life as a man after living for more than thirty years as the partner of a woman who died almost two years ago.  He says he was one of a dying breed:  a "stone butch."  I must admit, I admire stone butches, although I cannot imagine myself as the lover of one, much less as one myself.  


I guess being a man now disqualifies him from being a stone butch.  But there's another reason why the label may no longer fit:  I think he wanted whatever my hug could offer him.  I certainly didn't mind that:  Being the good stone butch, he certainly gave me pleasure when he embraced me.  I just hope he enjoyed it as much as I did, if that's what he wants.


Yesterday, when I went to see Dr. Tran, a new employee at Callen Lorde rode the elevator with me.  I didn't even know her name, but she embraced me as the cab arrived at Dr. Tran's office.  Should I ask what that was about?  


After my appointment, I rode down to Bicycle Habitat.  There, I placed an order for a wheel that Hal will build for me.  As I usually do, I spent some time there catching up with Josh, Sheldon, Pancho and the other employees there.  On my way out, I exchanged "good-night"s with them and Charlie, the owner.  As I was leaving, he picked himself up and hugged me.  


I've known him for about twenty-five years.  That's the first time he's done that.  While he's always been friendly to me, he never seemed to be particularly affectionate, at least not in physical ways.  So the unselfconscious suppleness of his embrace surprised me a little bit.  Well, now I know of at least one thing his wife likes about him!


And then, just a little while ago, I went to Hannah and Her Sisters for a manicure as well as my first pedicure of the season.  Tonight, Annie, who doesn't speak much English, did my manicure as Karen did my pedicure. While filing the nails on my left hand, Annie propped her head against my shoulder.  And, as she worked, I noticed that she was holding on to my hand a bit longer than she usually does.  Later, as I sat with my toes and fingers in the nail dryers, she rubbed her hands on my forearms and, again, propped her head on my shoulders.  And, finally, as I got up to leave, she hugged me.


She said something to Hannah, which she translated:  "You are a really sweet person."


Hmm... Spring really is in the air, isn't it?  It certainly is a time of change!

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?

In The Flesh

On a warm, almost summer-like day, I am reminded of two things:  a.) Men are horny--I mean really horny--and b.) I have gained weight.


How are those two facts related?  Well, not by cause-and-effect, unless you or I are willing to believe that troubles with an ex led me to eat more than I otherwise might've.  That may well be, but it's even more true that I have been sedentary for such long periods of time during the past few months.  Just after my surgery, I didn't have much of an appetite and, actually, I was taking some fairly long walks. But as I got busier and the weather got colder, grayer and wetter, I did less of that.  And, after taking a few short bike rides (half an hour or less) in November, I did no riding until a few weeks ago. In the meantime, my appetite returned and there were dinners, parties and such.  


And so it happened that near the end of the day, I was sitting on a bench in a particularly lovely spot in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.  My Raleigh three-speed stood guard, keeping its stiff upper lip as I read student essays while basking in the sun.  Across a pedestrian path from me, cherry blossoms in ever-so-slightly-varying stages of bloom opened between me and the Unisphere.  As day descended into evening, the whites grew more satiny, like moonlight, and the pinks glowed more deeply as the sun began to set and the horizon behind the veil of blooms and the grids of the Unisphere filled with a radiance turned into itself as yellow rays turned orange, then red and finally to an almost lilac hue before paling the violet curtain that spread across the sky.


But the men who walked by weren't noticing anything I just described.  I mean, what kind of priorities do they have when they can totally miss such a scene and look at some fat middle aged woman who's reading papers through what the ex used to refer to as my "librarian's glasses"?    And, in crossing her legs, said woman could  only have revealed how pale and ungainly they've become.  


You mean to tell me they'd really rather look at her than at the beauty of a warm early evening early in the spring?  Well, I guess they need variety, right?  


Then again, I have often wondered how many men actually prefer those anorexic models they see in the media? Years ago, a former co-worker who was about the same age as I am now said that after her post-menopausal weight gain, she got--without trying to get-- more attention from men than she'd ever had before. Now, nobody would have said this woman was fat, or even overweight.  But she looked like she'd actually eaten within the previous few weeks.  So I'm guessing that she was rather skinny, if not exceedingly so, when she was younger.


Anyway, I wondered why she was getting so much more attention than she'd gotten when she was younger.  She was an interesting, intelligent woman, and I would have said that she was attractive, even sexy, because she had her own sense of style, as opposed to mere fashion.  But she had her own theory as to why men were looking at her:  "Well, if you believe that men are dogs, it makes sense.  All dogs like at least a little meat on their bones."


I guess that means I was a dog, and still am one.  Extremely thin people, of any gender or sexual orientation, never appealed to me.  In fact, at least a couple of women (and men!) with whom I  was involved could have been described as Renaissance or Pre-Raphaelite, if not Rubens-esque.


So why am I so worried about being fat?  Well, I don't want the health risks that go along with it.  Still, it's ironic that I am upset about my weight gain--and am beginning to harbor dreams of having a more feminine version of the athletic body I once had--when I was, if I do say so myself, rather tolerant of such things in other people.  Then again, I've always been attracted to people with dark or darkish hair but pride myself on my rather loosely-defined blondeness.  


You might call me a hypocrite.  I just don't see the point of being with someone who's just like me.  So does that mean that if I get skinny again, I'm going to date someone who's the "before" photo in a Jenny Craig commercial?

A Season Turning, Again

Tomorrow I go back to work, at the college.  It's been a while since I've read about Einstein's Theory of Relativity.  But I don't recall that it explained why time goes so quickly during holidays and vacations!


Yet it seems that so much time has passed.  In part, that's because the season almost literally changed from the time Spring Recess began until the time it ended.  The early part of the week was chilly and rainy; today was very much a spring day.  Actually, it would have seemed later in the spring had it not been for the trees that are just beginning to open buds.   It's as if they want and need to open themselves to the sunshine and the new warmth.  But it is difficult:  the dampness and cold and darkness have stiffened them--or, perhaps, made them simply reluctant and reticent, in the way of someone whose whose eyes are opening to the light they yearn for yet still feel the sting of the cold, like an old wound that's still fresh.


Trees like the ones I saw today inspired me--almost twenty years ago!--to write the following:


Magnolia

Buds throb red. Cold raindrops cling to bare branches after the first April storm. My fingertips swelling, my body pulses: the center of this old wound, still fresh. Still, I don’t pull off my gloves-- There are no leaves opening from this tree.

Each of the next couple of days will be progressively warmer, or so the forecasters say.  Then rain and chilly winds will return, and the weather will feel like early spring again by next weekend.  But, ironically, the leaves will be fuller, and there will be more of them.

Easter And New Beginnings

Today was even more beautiful, and a bit warmer, than yesterday.  I was tempted to go on another bike ride.  However, I am still not at the point of riding on consecutive days--or, at least, riding on the day after taking a ride of more than two hours or so.


It's not that I felt tired.  Rather, today I've  felt a bit  sore around my new organs, as I did after the ride I took a couple of weeks ago.  Today I didn't feel quite as sore and, in fact, as I'm writing, I don't feel it at all.  Still, I don't want to take any chances.  I don't want this girl to be interrupted!


Actually, I took a very short ride to Astoria Park, where young people as well as families who were just coming from church basked in the sun.  The study in contrasts was interesting:  the young hipsters or wannabes, who included a young woman whose arms were covered with tatoos, alongside little girls and their mothers in frilly pastel dresses and little boys who wore smaller versions of their fathers' suits.  


Later in the afternoon I went to Millie's house for dinner.  Her daughter, Lisa, has a new boyfriend.  (It's kind of strange to call someone someone's boyfriend or girlfriend when he or she is old enough to have kids who have boyfriends and girlfriends.  Neither Lisa nor the boyfriend have kids, though.)  Actually, they've been together for a few months, but this is the first time I've seen him at a family function. Stephanie, Millie's other daughter, was also there with her kids.  One of them is certainly old enough to have a boyfriend or girlfriend but doesn't seem interested.  She's very smart and attractive, so her lack of interest isn't a way of pre-empting  a lack of interest from others.  I think that she realizes, on some level, that most of the boys around her age that she sees every day are not on her level of awareness and are therefore not worth her time.  


It's hard for me to believe that when I first met her, she was just starting the third grade and her brother wasn't even in school yet.  It's odd--and a little sad--to see a friend's kid grow up in ways that I didn't have the opportunity to see in my nephews and nieces grow.  


Speaking of people whom you've seen growing:  Millie's friend, Cahterine, was also there.  She and Millie have known each other since they were four years old!  They have never lived more than a neighborhood or two apart from each other, and it's hard to imagine that they ever would.  


Most years, they've celebrated Easter together.  And that they did today as well.    Just as they probably won't live in different cities, let alone states or countries, it's hard to see that they would ever spend Easter away from each other.  


Sometimes I wish my life would have permitted me the opportunity to have such long-term friendships, just as I also wish, sometimes, that I could have lived my whole life as female. However, it seems that Easter is about rebirths or other new beginnings.  Sometimes they're scary because they're new and I judge myself for, in essence, starting my life in middle age.  On the other hand, new beginnings are also exhilarating.  And that is what this season is about, or at least symbolizes.

Healing In The Mist

I climbed the arc of the bridge from the Queens "mainland" to the Rockaway Peninsula, a long strip of land wide enough for only two roads that run its length.  One skirts the bay; the other, the ocean. Between them is an elevated railway that's part of the city's tranist system.


However, I could see none of it from the arc of that bridge.  I know it's all there only because I've cycled there so many times before.  


Sunshine accented the thin, wispy clouds that streaked the sky as I left my apartment for my ride.  But as I rode closer to the bridge, clouds gathered and thickened until the sky was overcast and the air filled with cold mist.  I've spent enough time around seashores to know that, in spite of the dense sky, there was no danger of rain.  The air and sky often grow gray--actually, almost silvery--by the ocean, especially at this time of year.


By the time I reached Rockaway Beach, a spring day had turned almost wintry.  That's not unusual at this time of year, because even though the temperature reached 68 F (20 C) today near my apartment, the ocean temperature is still less than 40F (5C).  That difference in temperatures was, of course, the cause of that mist that braced my skin.  


For the past eight months, I've been keeping myself warm and have swaddled myself in soft, cushiony layers.  That, I am told, is normal after surgery, even in the summer.  And of course we are now just emerging from winter. 


Still, I enjoyed feeling the cold mist against my face.  I didn't even mind when it grew denser and became a fog thick enough that I could just barely see the railings, let alone the sand or the ocean, as I pedalled along the Rockaway Beach boardwalk, or that I could only see a couple of cars from the Wonder Wheel when I was asecending a ramp only a block away from it.  


And I didn't mind that everything had turned gray, for it was a silvery, if not steely, hue.  It was actually very pretty, especially when I could see ocean at Coney Island well enough so that I could see the white of foam dissolving into the silvery mist as the tide spilled onto the beach and rolled back into the sea.  


The cold, gray and mist felt like a sort of healing.  It may have had to do with the way it all felt against my skin:   astringent, but not stinging, much less painful.  It was as if something was leaving my body, and spirit and a kind of serenity, if not joy, was taking its place.  


True healing is not all sunshine and rainbows and puppies and kittens.  (And, yes, those are a few of my favorite things:  No apologies to Julie Andrews, or John Coltrane!)  It is uncomfortable at first but, once it's underway, bracing.  And it opens as it cleanses; thus, one has to be willing to be opened in order to be healed.  At least that's been true in my own life.


And my gender transition has been about healing myself from a number of things, including the scars from the sexual abuse I experienced as well as the ways in which I internalized, and expressed, the hate that was part of my life.


After those things, it's almost odd to say that I was healing from my surgery, as that was part of my healing.  

Amanda Gonzalez-Andujar: More Thoughts About About A Transgender Woman's Murder

It was utterly gorgeous yesterday: the sort of fine early spring day one envisions during the dreariest winter hours.  So, of course, I went for a bike ride in the afternoon.  Almost all I could think about was Amanda, a.k.a. Edelbuerto, Gonzalez-Andujar.


It turns out that she lived and died only two blocks from the office of the Times-Newsweekly, the local newspaper for which I wrote.   Her apartment is also only two blocks, in another direction, from where Martin lives.  So, of course, I was thinking about him when I wasn't thinking about Amanda.


Perhaps the fact that it's Passover is influencing the way I'm seeing them.  As I pedalled the serpentine roads of Randall's Island, I saw a group of men whose long black coats covered all except the collars and top buttons of their white shirts.  Their wives--at least,that is what the women in wigs and long, loose-fitting dresses seemed to be--were serving various kinds of food and selling handicrafts that, I guess, they made.  I was tempted to stop and check it out, but even if I weren't unwelcome, I would certainly garner more attention than I would've wanted.


In other words, I couldn't have "gone stealth."  They can't do that, either, in any place save perhaps their own communities.  (Even in some of those places, such as Crown Heights, they stand out among their neighbors.)  That is why Jews are always under surveillance and suspicion and, as Jacobo Timerman and Primo Levi have written, they can't help but to think that any crime or misdemeanor committed against them is motivated by their identities.


And, of course, such is the case for any transgender who's the victim of any sort of violence, or who receives any kind of negative treatment other people aren't getting.  As an example, when I had a false accusation made against me at work, I couldn't help but to think that it had something to do with my gender identity--and, specifically, that I recently had my surgery.  


When you raise the probability of such motivations as a possibility, you're accused of being paranoid, if you're lucky, and psychotic if you aren't.  Some will even tell you that the fact that you entertain such thoughts--or that you are what you are and express it as you do--brings the ill treatment upon you. The latter, in other words, is a way of "blaming the victim" and of excusing the perpetrators of any responsibility for their own behavior.


I was reminded of what I've just described when I saw and heard some of the comments and reactions to the news accounts of Amanda's murder.  To be fair, there were a number of commenters who pointed out that no one deserves to die the way she did, or by the motivations of her killer.  A few said that the killing shouldn't be treated as a hate crime or even that hate crime laws are unnecessary because the authorities should treat the case as the brutal killing that it is.  My inner libertarian agrees with that position, but as a transgender woman, I cannot support it wholeheartedly.  Still, it is better than some of the other comments I read.  The more polite ones said that she "deceived" some man or, as one put it, "He was expecting a taco and found a sausage instead."  (Aside from the imagery, it is somewhat amusing in that it may be the first time I've read a bigoted comment that was pro-Mexican, however obliquely.)


Worse still were the ones who referred to Amanda as male, but worst of all were the ones were the ones that would have made "Dude looks like a lady" seem enlightened.  Such remarks reek of the sort of violence that was committed against Amanda, and too many other trans women.  They sound like they came from the sorts of guys who show what a dangerous combination alcohol and testosterone can be. (I'm not man-bashing:  My body has been filled with that caustic concoction, and under its influence, I did things I'm not proud of!)  Plus, they reveal the insecurities such people have about their own sexuality, if not their gender identity.


And that is what I and every other transgender woman fear.  In addition to the ostracism and suspicion we incur and the prospect of violence that underlies so much in our lives, we know that we are prone to some of the most particularly gruesome sorts of attacks.  It seems that every murdered transgender woman of whom I am aware was killed in a way that left grizzled police officers, detectives and coroners saying that it was the most grisly, or one of the most grisly, crimes they'd ever seen. Amanda was strangled and stabbed.  Gwen Araujo was strangled, beaten, hog-tied and buried in a shallow grave.  (I still can't read about it without crying.) Eda Yildirm's head and sexual organs were chopped off and thrown in a dumpster.  I could go on--but you get the picture.  All you have to do is type "transgender murder" in Google, click on to just about any link you find, and you will see some of the most horrendous kinds of killing you've ever heard of.


The standard explanation for such brutality is that nothing makes people more insecure than having their notions about their sexuality challenged--or, at least, to feel that their notions about their identities and proclivities have been questioned.  It makes sense:  After all, the most phobic people are the ones who know, deep down, that they are what they hate.  Are we shocked when we learn that some homophobic preacher was patronizing teenaged boys or when some segregationist reveals, on his deathbed, that he was the "love child" of his father and housemaid? How surprised would you be to know that, as a teenager, I committed a gay-bashing?


But I think that the challenge to one's notions of one's identity and sexuality are the nucleus, so to speak.  The atom is one's place in the social and economic hierarchies.  Why is it that gay-bashings and murders of trans people are so often committed by young men who seem to have few prospect in life?  They are the ones who have no chance of going to college or getting the kinds of jobs their fathers (if, indeed, their fathers are in the picture) have or had.  They feel that others--immigrants, queers or others whom they might see only at a distance--are getting all the breaks and resentment.  If alcohol and testosterone is a combustible mixture, almost nothing will ignite it more quickly or reliably than the resentment and rage such young men feel. 


That spark can also come from the friction between the pressure a young man feels to fit into one role or another and his feelings of inadequacy or unsuitability for that role. That is how I would explain the way I was as a teenager, anyway.


And, when rage and insecurities seek a target, what's better than someone who "won't be missed?"  That is to say:  who would make a better punching bag than someone who's despised more than anyone else--by society at large as well as by the ones who actually deliver the blows, the shots, the slashes?


While every human being is responsible for his or her actions, the terrible thing  is that most of those young men don't realize just how duped, how "had," they are.  The fact that they are committing such terrible violence shows that they have never had the opportunity to think through their own assumptions, most of which were passed on to them.  The night I kicked a gay man in the stomach while he was writhing on the ground, I was trying to redeem myself as a "real man" in the eyes of my co-conspirators.  And we were all, wittingly or not, acting out of assumptions about ourselves and our genders that were so inculcated within us that we didn't even know that it was possible, much less permissible or sustainable, to question such notions.


All of those notions govern what we, as transgenders, fear--and what we all have to live with.  Some of the people who knew Amanda are, I'm sure, saying that she's "in a better place now."  I hope that's true.